Coverly opened the door and said to the Negress he had seen on the green: “Merry Christmas. I’m Coverly Wapshot. We’re very happy to have you here.” “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,” she said while from a portable radio she carried a chorus of hundreds sang “Adeste Fideles.” “There are seven steps,” Coverly said, “and then one more into the house.” The woman took his arm with the trust of custom and helplessness and lifted her face to the brilliance of the sky. “I can see a little light,” she said. “Just a little. It must be bright out there.” “Yes, it is,” said Coverly. “Five, six, seven.” “
There were eight in all. The men wore stocking caps that seemed to have been pulled down over their ears with impatience and severity by the hands of some attendant who was anxious to get off and enjoy his own Christmas dinner. When Coverly and Betsey had got them all seated in the parlor Coverly looked around for the wisdom of Honora’s choice and thought that these eight blind guests would know most about the raw material of human kindness. Waiting for unseen strangers to help them through the traffic, judging the gentle from the self-righteous by a touch, suffering the indifference of those who so fear conspicuousness that they would not help the helpless, counting on kindness at every turn, they seemed to bring with them a landscape whose darkness exceeded in intensity the brilliance of that day. A blow had been leveled at their sight but this seemed not to be an infirmity but a heightened insight, as if aboriginal man had been blind and this was some part of an ancient, human condition; and they brought with them into the parlor the mysteries of the night. They seemed to be advocates for those in pain; for the taste of misery as fulsome as rapture, for the losers, the goners, the flops, for those who dream in terms of missed things—planes, trains, boats and opportunities—who see on waking the empty tamarc, the empty waiting room, the water in the empty slip, rank as Love’s Tunnel when the ship is sailed; for all those who fear death. They sat there quietly, patiently, shyly, until Maggie came to the door and said: “Dinner is served and if you don’t come and get it now everything will be cold.” One by one they led the blind down the brightness of the hall into the dining room.
So that is all and now it is time to go. It is autumn here in St. Botolphs where I have been living and how swiftly the season comes on! At dawn I hear the sound of geese, this thrilling cranky noise, hoarse as the whistling of the old B & M freights. I put the dinghy into the shed and take up the tennis court tapes. The light has lost its summery components and is penetrating and clear; the sky seems to have receded without any loss of brilliance. Traffic at the airports is heavy and my nomadic people have got into their slacks and hair-curlers and are on the move once more. The sense of life as a migration seems to have reached even into this provincial backwater. Mrs. Bretaigne has hung a blue-plastic swimming pool out on her clothesline to dry. A lady in Travertine has found a corpse in her mint bed. In the burial ground where Honora and Leander lie, there is a carpet of green, drawn like a smile over the tumultuous conversion to dust. I pack my bags and go for a last swim in the river. I love this water and its shores; love it absurdly as if I could marry the view and take it home to bed with me. The whistle on the table-silver factory blows at four and the herring gulls in the blue sky sound like demented laying hens.
