Free The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever Page B

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.

CHAPTER VII

    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