The two stories about Honora Wapshot that were most frequently told in the family concerned her alarm clock and her penmanship. These were not told so much as they were performed, each member of the family taking a part, singing an aria so to speak, while everyone joined in on the Grand Finale like some primitive anticipation of the conventions of nineteenth-century Italian opera. The alarm clock incident belonged to the remote past when Lorenzo had been alive. Lorenzo was determined to appear pious and liked to arrive at Christ Church for morning worship at precisely quarter to eleven. Honora, who may have been genuinely pious but who detested appearances, could never find her gloves or her hat and was always tardy. One Sunday morning Lorenzo, in a rage, led his niece by the hand into the drugstore and bought her an alarm clock. So they went to church. Mr. Briam, Mr. Applegate’s predecessor, had started on an interminable sermon about the chains of St. Paul when the alarm clock went off. Since most of the congregation was asleep they were startled and confused. Honora shook the clock and then proceeded to unwrap it but by the time she got through to the box in which it sat the ringing had stopped. Mr. Briam then picked up the chains of St. Paul and the alarm clock, on repeat, began to ring again. This time Honora pretended that it wasn’t her clock. Sweating freely, she sat beside this impious engine while Mr. Briam went on about the significance of chains until the mechanism had unwound. It was an historic Sunday. The tales about her penmanship centered on a morning when she had written to the local coal dealer protesting his prices and then had written to Mr. Potter to share with him his sorrow over the sudden loss of his sainted wife. She got the letters in the wrong envelopes but since Mr. Potter could read nothing of her letter but the signature he was touched by her thoughtfulness and since Mr. Sumner, the coal dealer, was unable to read the letter of condolence he received he mailed it back to Honora. She had been taught Spencerian penmanship but something redoubtable or coarse in her nature was left unexpressed by this style and the conflict between her passions and the tools given to her left her penmanship illegible.
At about this time Coverly received a letter from his old cousin.
Someone more persevering might have broken the letter down word by word and diagnosed its content but Coverly was not this gifted or patient. He was able to decipher a few facts. A holly tree that grew behind her house had been attacked by rust. She wanted Coverly to return to St. Botolphs and have it sprayed. This was followed by an indecipherable paragraph on the Appleton Bank and Trust Company in Boston. Honora had set up trusts for Coverly and his brother and he supposed she was writing of these. The income enabled Coverly to live much more comfortably than he would have been able to on his government salary and he hoped nothing was wrong here. This was followed by a clear sentence stating that Dr. Lemuel Cameron, director of the Talifer site, had once received a scholarship endowed by Lorenzo Wapshot. She closed with her customary observations on the rainfall, the prevailing winds and the tides.
Coverly guessed that her reference to the holly tree meant something very different but he didn’t have the emotional leisure to discover what was at the back of the old woman’s mind. If there was trouble with the Appleton Bank and Trust Company—and his quarterly check was late—there was nothing much he could do. The remark about Dr. Cameron might or might not have been true since Honora often exaggerated Lorenzo’s bounty and had, like any other old woman, a struggle to remember names. The letter arrived at a bad time in his affairs and he forwarded it on to his brother.
Betsey had not rallied from the failure of her cocktail party. She hated Talifer and squarely blamed Coverly for making her live there. She avenged herself by sleeping alone and by not speaking to her husband. She complained loudly to herself about the house, the neighborhood, the kitchen, the weather and the news in the papers. She swore at the mashed potatoes, cursed the pot roast, she damned the pots and pans to hell and spoke obscenely to the frozen apple tarts, but she did not speak to Coverly. Every surface of life—tables, dishes and the body of her husband—seemed to be abrasive facets of a stone that lay in her path. Nothing was right. The sofa hurt her back. She could not sleep in her bed. The lamps were too dim to read by, the knives were too dull to cut butter, the television programs bored her although she watched them faithfully. The greatest of Coverly’s hardships was the breakdown in their sexual relationship. It was the crux, the readiest source of vitality in their marriage, and without this her companionship became painful.
