1Leander did not understand why Theophilus Gates would not lend him enough money to have the bow of the Topaze repaired while he would loan Sarah all the money she wanted to turn the old launch into a floating gift shop. That is what happened. The day after her vision Sarah went to the bank and the day after that the carpenters came and began to repair the wharf. The salesmen began to arrive—three and four a day—and Sarah began to stock the Topaze, spending money, as she said herself, like an inebriated sailor. Her happiness or rapture was genuine although it was hard to see why she should find such joy in a gross of china dogs with flowers painted on their backs, their paws shaped in such a way that they could hold cigarettes. There may have been some vengefulness in her enthusiasm—some deep means of expressing her feelings about the independence and the sainthood of her sex. She had never been so happy. She had signs painted: VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND, and posted at all the roads leading into the village. She planned to open the Topaze with a gala tea and a sale of Italian pottery. Hundreds of invitations were printed and mailed.

2Leander made a nuisance of himself. He broke wind in the parlor and urinated against an apple tree in full view of the boats on the river and the salesmen of Italian pottery. He claimed to be aging swiftly and pointed out how loudly his bones creaked when he stooped to pick a thread off a carpet. Tears streamed capriciously from his eyes whenever he heard a horse race on the radio. He still shaved and bathed each morning, but he smelled more like Neptune than ever and clumps of hair grew out of his ears and nostrils before he could remember to clip them. His neckties were stained with food and cigarette ash, and yet, when the night winds woke him and he lay in bed and traced their course around the dark compass, he still remembered what it was to feel young and strong. Deluded by this thread of cold air he would rise in his bed thinking passionately of boats, trains and deep-breasted women, or of some image—a wet pavement plastered with yellow elm leaves—that seemed to represent requital and strength. I will climb the mountain, he thought. I will kill the tiger! I will crush the serpent with my heel! But the fresh winds died with the morning dusk. There was a pain in his kidney. He could not get back to sleep and he would limp and cough through another day. His sons did not write him.

3On the day before the Topaze opened as a gift shop, Leander paid a call on Honora. They sat in her parlor.

4“Would you like some whisky?” Honora asked.

5“Yes, please,” Leander said.

6“There isn’t any,” Honora said. “Have a cookie.”

7Leander glanced down at the plate of cookies and saw they were covered with ants. “I’m afraid ants have gotten into your cookies, Honora,” he said.

8“That’s ridiculous,” Honora said. “I know you have ants at the farm, but I’ve never had ants in this house.” She picked up a cookie and ate it, ants and all.

9“Are you going to Sarah’s tea?” Leander asked.

10“I don’t have time to spend in gift shops,” Honora said. “I’m taking piano lessons.”

11“I thought you were taking painting lessons,” Leander said.

12“Painting!” Honora said scornfully. “Why I gave up my painting in the spring. The Hammers were in some financial difficulty so I bought their piano from them and now Mrs. Hammer comes and gives me a lesson twice a week. It’s very easy.”

13“Perhaps it runs in the family.” Leander said. “Remember Justina?”

14“Justina who?” Honora asked.

15“Justina Molesworth,” Leander said.

16“Why, of course I remember Justina.” Honora said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

17“I meant that she played the piano in the five and ten,” Leander said.

18“Well, I have no intention of playing the piano in the five and ten,” Honora said. “Feel that refreshing breeze,” she said.

19“Yes,” Leander said. (There was no breeze at all.)

20“Sit in the other chair,” she said.

21“I’m quite comfortable here, thank you,” Leander said.

22“Sit in the other chair,” Honora said. “I’ve just had it reupholstered. Although,” she said as Leander obediently changed from one chair to the other, “you won’t be able to see out of the window from there and perhaps you were better off where you were.”

23Leander smiled, remembering that to talk with her, even when she was a young woman, had made him feel bludgeoned. He wondered what her reasons were. Lorenzo had written somewhere in his journal that if you met the devil you should cut him in two and go between the pieces. It would describe Honora’s manner although he wondered if it wasn’t the fear of death that had determined her crabwise progress through life. It could have been that by side-stepping those things that, through their force—love, incontinence and peace of mind—throw into our faces the facts of our mortality she might have uncovered the mystery of a spirited old age.

24“Will you do me a favor, Honora?” he asked.

25“I won’t go to Sarah’s tea if that’s what you want,” she said. “I’ve told you I have a music lesson.”

26“It isn’t that,” Leander said. “It’s something else. When I die I want Prospero’s speech said over my grave.”

27“What speech is that?” Honora asked.

28“Our revels now are ended,” Leander said, rising from has chair. “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.” He declaimed, and his declamatory style was modeled partly on the Shakespearians of his youth, partly on the bombast and singsong of prize-ring announcements and partly on the style of the vanished horsecar and trolley-car conductors who had made an incantation of the place names along their routes. His voice soared and he illustrated the poetry with some very literal gestures. “… and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” He dropped his hands. His voice fell. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Then he said good-by and went.

29Early the next morning Leander saw that there would be no sanctuary or peace for him in the farm that day. The stir of a large ladies’ party—magnified by the sale of Italian pottery—was inescapable. He decided to visit his friend Grimes, who was living in an old people’s home in West Chillum. It was a trip he had planned to make for years. He walked into St. Botolphs after breakfast and caught the bus to West Chillum there. It was on the other side of Chillum that the bus driver told him they had reached the Twilight Home and Leander got off. The place from the road looked to him like one of the New England academies. There was a granite wall, set with sharp pieces of stone to keep vagrants from resting. The drive was shaded with elms, and the buildings it served were made of red brick along architectural lines that, whatever had been intended when they were built, now seemed very gloomy. Along the driveway Leander saw old men hoeing the gutters. He entered the central building and went to an office, where a woman asked what he wanted.

30“I want to see Mr. Grimes.”

31“Visitors aren’t allowed on weekdays,” the woman said.

32“I’ve just come all the way from St. Botolphs,” Leander said.

33“He’s in the north dormitory,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone I said you could go in. Go up those stairs.”

34Leander walked down the hall and up some broad wooden stairs. The dormitory was a large room with a double row of iron beds down each side of a center aisle. Old men were lying on fewer than half the beds. Leander recognized his old friend and went over to the bed where he was lying.

35“Grimes,” he said.

36“Who is it?” The old man opened his eyes.

37“Leander. Leander Wapshot.”

38“Oh Leander,” Grimes cried and the tears streamed down his cheeks. “Leander, old sport. You’re the first friend to come and see me since Christmas.” He embraced Leander. “You don’t know what it’s like for me to see a friendly face. You don’t know what it’s like.”

39“Well, I thought I’d pay you a little call,” Leander said. “I meant to come a long time ago. Somebody told me you had a pool table out here so I thought I’d come out and play you a little pool.”

40“We have a pool table,” Grimes said. “Come on, come on, I’ll show you the pool table.” He seized Leander’s arm and led him out of the dormitory. “We’ve got all kinds of recreation,” he said excitedly. “At Christmas they sent us a lot of gramophone records. We have gardens. We get plenty of fresh air and exercise. We work in the gardens. Don’t you want to see the gardens?”

41“Anything you say, Grimes,” Leander said unwillingly. He did not want to see the gardens or much more of the Twilight Home. If he could sit quietly for an hour somewhere and talk with Grimes he would feel repaid for the trip.

42“We grow all our own vegetables,” Grimes said. “We have fresh vegetables right out of the garden. I’ll show you the garden first. Then we’ll play a little pool. The pool table isn’t in very good shape. I’ll show you the gardens. Come on. Come on.”

43They left the central buildings by a back door and crossed to the gardens. They looked to Leander like the rigid and depressing produce gardens of a reformatory. “See,” Grimes said. “Peas. Carrots. Beets. Spinach. We’ll have corn soon. We sell corn. We may grow some of the corn you eat at your table, Leander.” He had led Leander into a field of corn that was just beginning to silk. “We have to be quiet now,” he said in a whisper. They went through the corn to the edge of the garden and climbed a stone wall marked with a No Trespassing sign and went into some scrub woods. They came in a minute to a clearing where there was a shallow trench dug in the clay.

44“See it?” Grimes whispered. “See it? Not everybody knows about it. That’s potter’s field. That’s where they bury us. These two men got sick last month. Charlie Dobbs and Henry Fosse. They both died one night. I had an idea what they were doing then but I wanted to make sure. I came out here that morning and I hid in the woods. Sure enough, about ten o’clock this fat fellow comes along with a wheelbarrow. He’s got Charlie Dobbs and Henry Fosse in it. Stark naked. Dumped on top of one another. Upside down. They didn’t like each other, Leander. They never even spoke to one another. But he buried them together. Oh, I couldn’t look. I couldn’t watch it. I’ve never felt right after that. If I die in the night they’ll dump me naked into a hole side by side with somebody I never knew. Go back and tell them, Leander. Tell them at the newspapers. You were always a good talker. Go back and tell them.…”

45“Yes, yes,” Leander said. He was backing through the woods, away from the clearing and his hysterical friend. They climbed the stone wall and walked through the corn patch. Grimes gripped Leander’s arm. “Go back and tell them, tell them at the newspapers. Save me, Leander. Save me.…”

46“Yes, I will, Grimes, yes, I will.”

47Side by side the old men returned through the garden and Leander said good-by to Grimes in front of the central building. Then he went down the driveway, obliged to struggle to give the impression that he was not hurried. He was relieved when he got outside the gates. It was a long time before the bus came along and when one did appear he shouted, “Hello there. Stop stop, stop for me.”

48He could not help Grimes; he could not, he realized when the bus approached S t. Botolphs and he saw a sign, VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND, help himself. He hoped that the tea party would be over but when he approached the farm he found many cars parked on the lawn and the sides of the driveway. He swung wide around the house and went in at the back door and up the stairs to his room. It was late then and from his window he could see the Topaze—the twinkling of candles—and hear the voices of ladies drinking tea. The sight made him feel that he was being made ridiculous; that a public spectacle was being made of his mistakes and his misfortune s. He remembered his father then with tenderness and fear as if he had dreaded, all along, some end like Aaron’ s. He guessed the ladies would talk about him and he only had to listen at the window to hear. “He drove her onto Gull Rock in broad daylight,” Mr s. Gates said as she went down the path to the wharf. “Theophilus thinks he was drunk.”

49What a tender thing, then, is a man. How, for all his crotch-hitching and swagger, a whisper can turn his soul into a cinder. The taste of alum in the rind of a grape, the smell of the sea, the heat of the spring sun, berries bitter and sweet, a grain of sand in his teeth—all of that which he meant by life seemed taken away from him. Where were the serene twilights of his old age? He would have liked to pluck out his eyes. Watching the candlelight on his ship—he had brought her home through gales and tempests—he felt ghostly and emasculated. Then he went to his bureau drawer and took from under the dried rose and the wreath of hair his loaded pistol. He went to the window. The fires of the day were burning out like a conflagration in some industrial city and above the barn cupola he saw the evening star, as sweet and round as a human tear. He fired his pistol out of the window and then fell down on the floor.

50He had underestimated the noise of teacups and ladies’ voices and no one on the Topaze heard the shot—only Lulu, who was in the kitchen, getting some hot water. She climbed the back stairs and hurried down the hall to his room and screamed when she opened the door. When he heard her voice Leander got to his knees. “Oh, Lulu, Lulu, you weren’t the one I wanted to hurt. I didn’t mean you. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

51“Are you all right, Leander? Are you hurt?”

52“I’m foolish,” Leander said.

53“Oh, poor Leander,” Lulu said, helping him to his feet. “Poor soul. I told her she shouldn’t have done it. I told her in the kitchen many times that it would hurt your feelings, but she wouldn’t listen.”

54“I only want to be esteemed,” Leander said.

55“Poor soul,” Lulu said. “You poor soul.”

56“You won’t tell anyone what you saw,” Leander said.

57“No.”

58“You promise me.”

59“I promise.”

60“Swear that you won’t tell anyone what you saw.”

61“I swear.”

62“Swear on the Bible. Let me find the Bible. Where’s my Bible? Where’s my old Bible?” Then he searched the room wildly, lifting up and putting down books and papers and throwing open drawers and looking into book shelves and chests, but he couldn’t find the Bible. There was a little American flag stuck into the mirror above his bureau and he took this and held it out to Lulu. “Swear on the flag, Lulu, swear on the American flag that you won’t tell anyone what you saw.”

63“I swear.”

64“I only want to be esteemed.”