1Moses’ work in Washington was highly secret—so secret that it can’t be discussed here. He was put to work the day after he arrived—a reflection perhaps of Mr. Boynton’s indebtedness to Honora or a recognition of Moses’ suitability, for with his plain and handsome face and his descendance from a man who had been offered a decoration by General Washington, he fitted into the scene well enough. He was not smooth—the Wapshots never were—and compared to Mr. Boynton he sometimes felt like a man who eats his peas off a knife. His boss was a man who seemed to have been conceived in the atmosphere of career diplomacy. His clothes, his manners, his speech and habits of thought all seemed so prescribed, so intricately connected to one another that they suggested a system of conduct. It was not, Moses guessed, a system evolved at any of the eastern colleges and may have been formed in some foreign-service school. Its rules were never shown to Moses, so he could not abide by them, but he knew that rules must underlie this sartorial and intellectual diffidence.

2Moses was happy at the boardinghouse that he had picked by chance, and found it tenanted mostly by people of his own age: the sons and daughters of mayors and other politicians; the progeny of respectable ward heelers who were in Washington, like himself, as the result of some indebtedness. He did not spend much time at the boardinghouse for he found that much of his social, athletic and spiritual life was ordained by the agency where he worked. This included playing volleyball, taking communion and going to parties at the X Embassy and the Z Legation. He was up to all of this although he was not allowed to drink more than three cocktails at any party and was careful not to make eyes at any woman who was in government service or on the diplomatic list, for security regulations had clapped a lid on the natural concupiscence of a city with a large floating population. On the autumn week ends he sometimes drove with Mr. Boynton to Clark County, where they went riding and sometimes stayed for dinner with Mr. Boynton’s friends. Moses could stay on a horse, but this was not his favorite sport. It was a chance to see the countryside and the disappointing southern autumn with its fireflies and brumes, all of which stirred in him a longing for the brilliance of autumn at West Farm. Mr. Boynton’s friends were hospitable people who lived in splendid houses and who, without exception, had made or inherited their money from some distant source such as mouthwash, airplane engines or beer; but it was not in Moses to sit on some broad terrace and observe that the bills for this charming picture had been footed by some dead brewer; and as for brewing he had never drunk such good bourbon in his life. It was true that, having come from a small place where a man’s knowledge of his neighbors was intimate and thorough, Moses sometimes experienced the blues of uprootedness. His knowledge of his companions was no better than the knowledge travelers have of one another and he knew, by then, enough of the city to know that, waiting for a bus in the morning, the swarthy man with a beard and a turban might be an Indian prince in good standing or he might be a rooming-house eccentric. This theatrical atmosphere of impermanence—this latitude for imposture—impressed him one evening at an embassy concert. He was alone and had gone, at the intermission, out onto the steps of the building to get some air. As he pushed open the doors he noticed three old women on the steps. One was so fat, one so thin and haggard and one had such a foolish countenance that they looked like a representation of human folly. Their evening clothes reminded him of the raggle-taggle elegance of children on Halloween. They had shawls and fans and mantillas and brilliants and their shoes seemed to be killing them. When Moses opened the door they slipped into the embassy—the fat one, the thin one and the fool—so warry, so frightened and in such attitudes of wrongdoing that Moses watched. As soon as they got inside the building they fanned out and each of them seized a concert program that had been left on a chair or fallen to the floor. By this time a guard saw them and as soon as they were discovered they headed for the door and fled, but they were not disappointed, Moses noticed. The purpose of their expedition had been to get a program and they limped happily down the driveway in their finery. You wouldn’t see anything like that in St. Botolphs.

3The man who had the room next to Moses in the boardinghouse was the son of a politician from somewhere in the West. He was competent and personable and an ideal of thrift and continence. He did not smoke or drink and saved every penny of his salary toward the purchase of half a saddle horse that was stabled in Virginia. He had been in Washington for two years and he invited Moses into his room one night and showed him a chart or graph on which he had recorded his social progress. He had been to dinner in Georgetown eighteen times. His hosts were all listed and graded according to their importance in the government. He had been to the Pan-American Union four times: to the X Embassy three times: to the B Embassy one time (a garden party) and to the White House one time (a press reception). You wouldn’t find anything like that in St. Botolphs.

4The intense and general concern with loyalty at the time when Moses arrived in Washington had made it possible for men and women to be discharged and disgraced on the evidence of a breath of scandal. Old-timers like to talk about the past when even the girls in the Library of Congress—even the archivists—could be booked for a clandestine week end at Virginia Beach, but these days were gone or at least in suspense for government servants. Public drunkenness was unforgivable and promiscuity was death. Private industry went its own way and a friend of Moses’ who was in the meat-packing industry once made him this proposition: “I’ve got four dirty girls coming up from the shirt factory in Baltimore Saturday and I’m going to take them out to my cabin in Maryland. How about it? Just you and me and the four of them. They’re pigs but they’re not bad looking.” Moses said no thanks—he would have said so anyhow—but he envied the meat packer his liberty. This new morality was often on his mind and by thinking about it long enough he was able to make some dim but legitimate connection between lechery and espionage, but this understanding did nothing to lessen this particular loneliness. He even wrote to Rosalie, asking her to visit him for a week end, but she never answered. The government was full of comely women but they all avoided the dark.

5Feeling lonely one night and having nothing better to do he went out for a walk. He headed for the center of town and went into the lobby of the Mayflower to buy a package of cigarettes and to look around at a place that, for all its intended elegance, only reminded him of the vastness of his native land. Moses loved the lobby of the Mayflower. A convention was meeting and red-necked and self-respecting men from country towns were gathering in the lobby. Listening to them talk made him feel closer to St. Botolphs. Then he left the Mayflower and walked deeper into the city, and hearing music and being on a fool’s errand he stepped into a place called the Marine Room and looked around. There were a band and dance floor and a girl singing. Sitting alone at a table was a blonde woman who seemed pretty at that distance and who looked as if she didn’t work for the government. Moses took the table beside her and ordered a whisky. She did not see him at first because she was looking at herself in a mirror on the wall. She was turning her head, first one way and then another, raising her chin and taking the tips of her fingers and pushing her face into the firm lines that it must have had five or six years ago. When she had finished examining herself Moses asked if he could join her and buy her a drink. She was friendly—a little flurried—but pleased. “Well, it would be very nice to have your company,” she said, “but the only reason I’m here is because Chucky Ewing, the band leader, is my husband and when I don’t have anything better to do I just come down here and kill time.” Moses joined her and bought her a drink and after a few farewell looks at herself in the minor she began to talk about her past. “I used to vocalize with the band myself,” she said, “but most of my training is operatic. I’ve sung in night clubs all over the world. Paris. London. New York …” She spoke, not with a lisp, but with an articulation that seemed childish. Her hair was pretty and her skin was white but this was mostly powder. Moses guessed that it would have been five or six years since she could be called beautiful but since she seemed determined to cling to what she had been he was ready to string along. “Of course, I’m really not a professional entertainer,” she went on. “I went to finishing school and my family nearly died when I started entertaining. They’re very stuffy. Old family and all that sort of thing. Cliff dwellers.” Then the band broke and her husband joined them and was introduced to Moses and sat down.

6“What’s the score, honey?” he asked his wife.

7“There’s a table in the corner drinking champagne,” she said, “and the six gentlemen by the bandstand are drinking rye and water. They’ve each had four. There’re two tables of Scotch and five tables of bourbon and some beer drinkers over on the other side of the bandstand.” She counted the tables off on her fingers, still speaking in a very dainty voice. “Don’t worry,” she told her husband. “You’ll gross three hundred.”

8“Where’s the convention?” he said. “There’s a convention.”

9“I know,” she said. “Sheets and pillowcases. Don’t worry.”

10“You got any hot garbage?” he asked a waiter who had come over to their table.

11“Yes sir, yes sir,” the waiter said. “I’ve got some delicious hot garbage. I can give you coffee grounds with a little sausage grease or how about some nice lemon rinds and sawdust?”

12“That sounds good,” the band leader said. “Make it lemon rinds and sawdust.” He had seemed anxious and unhappy when he came to the table but this leg-pulling with the waiter cheered him up. “You got any dishwater?” he asked.

13“We got all kinds of dishwater,” the waiter said. “We got greasy dishwater and we got dishwater with stuff floating around in it and we got moth balls and wet newspaper.”

14“Well, give me a little wet newspaper with my sawdust,” the band leader said, “and a glass of greasy dishwater.” Then he turned to his wife. “You going home?”

15“I believe that I will,” she said daintily.

16“Okay, okay,” he said. “If the convention shows I’ll be late. Nice to have met you.” He nodded to Moses and went back to the bandstand, where the other players had begun to stray in from the alley.

17“Can I take you home?” Moses asked.

18“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “We just have a little apartment in the neighborhood and I usually walk but I don’t think there’d be any harm in you walking me home.”

19“Go?”

20She got a coat from the hat-check girl and talked with the hat-check girl about a four-year-old child who was lost in the woods of Wisconsin. The child’s name was Pamela and she had been gone four days. Extensive search parties had been organized and the two women speculated with deep anxiety on whether or not little Pamla had died of exposure and starvation. When this conversation ended, Beatrice—which was her name—started down the hall, but the hat-check girl called her back and gave her a paper bag. “It’s two lipsticks and some bobby pins,” she said. Beatrice explained that the hat-check girl kept an eye on the ladies’ room and gave Beatrice whatever was left there. She seemed ashamed of the arrangement, but she recuperated in a second and took Moses’ arm.

21Their place was near the Marine Room—a second-story bedroom dominated by a large cardboard wardrobe that seemed on the verge or in the process of collapse. She struggled to open one of its warped doors and exposed a magpie wardrobe—maybe a hundred dresses of all kinds. She went into the bathroom and returned, wearing a kind of mandarin coat with a dragon embroidered up the back out of threads that felt thorny to Moses’ hands. She yielded easily but when it was over she sobbed a little in the dark and asked, “Oh dear, what have we done?” Her voice was as dainty as ever. “Nobody ever likes me except in this way,” she said, “but I think it’s because I was brought up so strictly. I was brought up by this governess. Her name was Clancy. Oh, she was so strict. I was never allowed to play with other children.…” Moses dressed, kissed her good night and got out of the building without being seen.