Maggie answered the doorbell and led him into the library, where Honora was sitting by the window, picking over a large assortment of fireworks heaped in a washbasket. At the sound of a man’s footsteps she took off her spectacles. She hoped to look younger. She could not see much without her glasses and when Johnson entered the library the indistinctness with which she saw his face made her think that he was a young man with keen appetites, enthusiasms, an open heart. She felt for his very blurred image an impulse of friendship or pity. “Good morning,” she said. “Please sit down. I was just looking over my fireworks. I bought these last year, you know, and I thought I’d have a little party, you know, but it was very dry last July, it didn’t rain for six weeks and the fire chief asked me not to shoot them off. I put them in the coat closet and I completely forgot about them until this morning. I love fireworks,” she said. “I love to read the labels on the packages and imagine what they’ll look like. I
“I’d like to know something about your Uncle Lorenzo,” Johnson said.
“Oh, yes,” Honora said. “Is this about the commemorative plaque?”
“No,” Johnson said. He opened his briefcase.
“Well, a man came last year,” Honora said, “and urged me to have a commemorative plaque made for Lorenzo. At first I thought he represented some committee but then I discovered that he was just a salesman. You’re not a salesman?”
“No,” Johnson said. “I’m from the government.”
“Well, Lorenzo served in the state legislature, you know,” Honora said. “He introduced the child-labor laws. You see, my parents were missionaries. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, would you, but I was born in Polynesia. My parents sent me back here to school but they died before I could return. Lorenzo raised me. He was never an awfully friendly man.” She seemed deeply reflective. “But you might have described him as both my father and mother,” she said with a sigh of obvious discontent.
“This was his house?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Your uncle left you his estate?”
“Yes, he had no other family.”
“I have some correspondence here from the Appleton Bank and Trust Company. They estimate the value of your uncle’s estate at the time of his death to have been about a million dollars. They claim to have paid you an annual income ranging from seventy thousand to a hundred thousand dollars.”
“I don’t know,” Honora said. “I give most of my money away.”
“Have you any proof of this?”
“I don’t keep records,” Honora said.
“Have you ever paid an income tax, Miss Wapshot?”
“Oh, no,” Honora said. “Lorenzo made me promise that I wouldn’t give any of his money to the government.”
“You are in grave trouble, Miss Wapshot.” Then he felt tall and strong, felt the supreme importance of those who bring black tidings. “This will lead to a criminal indictment.”
“Oh, dear,” Honora said.
She had been caught and she knew it; caught like any clumsy thief waving a water pistol at a bank teller. If her knowledge of the tax laws was not much more than a dream, she knew them to be the laws of her country and her time. What she did then was to go to the fireplace and light the pile of shavings, paper and wood that the gardener had laid on the irons. The reason she did this was that fire was for her a sovereign pain-killer. When she was discontented with herself, troubled, bewildered or bored, to light a fire seemed to incinerate her discontents and transform her burdens into smoke. She approached the light and heat of a fire like an aboriginal. The shavings and paper exploded into flame, filling the library with a dry, gaseous heat. Honora stoked the blaze with dry apple wood; felt that once the fire was hot enough she would have burned away her fears of the poor farm and the jail. A log exploded and an ember landed in the basket of fireworks. A Roman candle was the first to go. “Mercy,” Honora said. Purblind without her spectacles, she reached for a vase of flowers to extinguish the Roman candle but her aim was off and she got Johnson square in the face with a pint or so of bitter flower water and a dozen hyacinths. By this time the Roman candle had begun to ejaculate its lumps of colored fire and these ignited something called The Golden Vesuvius. A rocket took off in the direction of the piano and then the lot went up.
