The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [136]
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
So, coming back to give him a boat, his sons heard the words said for those who are drowned at sea. Moses and Coverly drove down from New York without their wives and arrived in the village late on the day of the service. Sarah did not cry until she saw her sons, and held out her arms to be kissed, but the manners and the language of the village helped to sustain her. “It was a very long association,” she said. They sat in the parlor and drank some whisky where Honora joined them, kissed the boys and had a drink herself. “I think you make a great mistake to have the service at the church,” she told Sarah. “All his friends are dead. There will be no one there but us. It would be better to have it here. And another thing. He wanted Prospero’s speech said over his grave. I think you boys had getter go to the church and speak with the rector. Ask him if we can’t have the service in the little chapel and tell him about the speech.”
The boys drove over to Christ Church and were let into an office where the rector was trying to work an adding machine. He seemed impatient at the little help Divine Providence gave him in practical matters. He refused Honora’s requests gently and firmly. The chapel was being painted and could not be used and he could not approve introducing Shakespeare into a holy service. Honora was disappointed to hear about the chapel. This anxiety about the empty church was the form her grief seemed to take.
She looked old and bewildered that day, her face haggard and leonine. She got some shears and went into the fields to cut flowers for Leander—loosestrife, cornflowers, buttercups and daises. She worried about the empty church all through lunch. Going up the church steps she took Coverly’s arm—she clutched it as if she was tired or frail—and when the doors were opened and she saw a crowd she stopped short on the threshold and asked in a loud voice, “What are all these people doing here? Who are all these people?”
They were the butcher, the baker, the boy who sold him newspapers and the driver of the Travertine bus. Bentley and Spinet were there, the librarian, the fire chief, the fish warden, the waitress from Grimes’ bakery, the ticket seller from the movie theater in Travertine, the man who ran the merry-go-round in Nangasakit, the postmaster, the milkman, the stationmaster and the old man who filed saws and the one who repaired clocks. All the pews were taken and people were standing at the back. Christ Church had not seen such a crowd since Easter.
Honora raised her voice once during the service when the rector began to read from St. John. “Oh no,” she said loudly. “We’ve always had Corinthians.” The rector changed his place and there seemed to be no discourtesy in this interruption for it was her way and in a sense the way of the family and this was the funeral of a Wapshot. The cemetery adjoined Christ Church and they walked behind Leander, two by two, up the hill to the family lot in that stupefaction of grief with which we follow our dead to their graves. When the prayers were finished and the rector had shut his book Honora gave Coverly a push. “Say the words, Coverly. Say what he wanted.” Then Coverly went to the edge of his father’s grave and although he was crying he spoke clearly. “Our revels now are ended,” he said. “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
After the service the boys kissed their mother good-by and promised to return soon. It would be the first trip they made and Coverly did return, on the Fourth of July, with Betsey and his son, William, to see the parade. Sarah closed her floating gift shop long enough to appear on the Woman