1During the three weeks before their marriage, Moses and Melissa deceived Justina so successfully that it pleased the old lady to watch them say good night to one another at the elevator and she spoke several times at dinner of Melissa’s part of the house as that part of the house that Moses had never seen. Moses’s training as a mountain climber kept him from tiring in his nightly trip over the roofs but one evening, when they had wine with dinner and he was hurried, he tripped over the wire once more and sprawled, full-length, on the slates, cutting his chest. Then, with his skin smarting, a deep physical chagrin took hold of him and he discovered in himself a keen dislike of Clear Haven and all its antics and a determination to prove that the country of love was not bizarre; and he consoled himself with thinking that in a few days he would be able to put a ring on Melissa’s finger and enter her room at the door. She had, for some reason, made him promise not to urge her to leave Clear Haven, but he felt that she would change her mind by autumn.

2On the eve of his wedding Moses walked up from the station, carrying a rented cutaway in a suitcase. On the drive he met Giacomo, who was putting light bulbs into the fixtures along the drive. “She’sa two hundred feefty light bulbs!” Giacomo exclaimed. “She’sa likea Saint’s Day.” It was dusk when the lights gave Clear Haven the cheerful look of a country fair. When Moses took the general up the old man wanted to give him a drink and some advice, but he excused himself and started over the roofs. He was covering the stretch from the chapel to the clock tower when he heard Justina’s voice, quite close to him. She was at D’Alba’s window. “I can’t see anything, Niki,” she said, “without my glasses.”

3“Shhh,” D’Alba said, “he’ll hear you.”

4“I wish I could find my glasses.”

5“Shhhh.”

6“Oh, I can’t believe it, Niki,” Justina said. “I can’t believe that they’d disappoint me.”

7“There he goes, there he goes,” D’Alba said as Moses, who had been crouching in the dark, made for the shelter of the clock tower.

8“Where?”

9“There, there.”

10“Get Mrs. Enderby,” Justina said. “Get Mrs. Enderby and have her call Giacomo and tell him to bring his crow gun.”

11“You’ll kill him, Justina.”

12“Any man who does such a thing deserves to be shot.”

13What Moses felt while he listened to their talk was extreme irritation and impatience, for having started on his quest he did not have the reserve to brook interruptions, or at least interruptions from Justina and the count. He was safe in the shelter of the tower and while he stood there he heard Mrs. Enderby and then Giacomo join the others.

14“She’sa nobody there,” Giacomo said.

15“Well, fire anyway,” Justina said. “If there’s someone there you’ll frighten them. If there isn’t you won’t do any harm.”

16“She’sa no good, Missa Scaddon,” Giacomo said.

17“You fire, Giacomo,” Justina said. “You either fire or hand me that gun.”

18“Wait until I get something to cover my ears,” Mrs. Enderby said. “Wait until …”

19Then there was the ear-clapping blast of Giacomo’s crow gun and Moses heard the shot strike on the roof around him and in the distance the ring of breaking glass.

20“Oh why do I feel so sad?” Justina asked plaintively. “Why do I feel so sad?” D’Alba shut the window and when his lights were turned on and his pink curtains drawn, Moses continued his climb. Melissa ran to him weeping when he swung down onto the balcony of her room. “Oh my darling, I thought they’d shot you,” she cried. “Oh my sweetheart, I thought you were dead.”

21Coverly could not get away from Remsen Park, but Leander and Sarah came to the wedding. They must have left St. Botolphs at dawn. Emmet Cavis drove them in his funeral car. Moses was delighted to see them and proud, for they played out their parts with the wonderful simplicity and grace of country people. As for the invitations to the wedding—Justina had dusted off her old address book, and poor Mrs. Enderby, wearing a hat and a scrap of veiling, had addressed the four hundred envelopes and come to the dinner table for a week with ink-stained fingers and an ink-spotted blouse, her eyes red from checking Justina’s addresses against a copy of the Social Register that could have been printed no later than 1918. Giacomo mailed the cards with his blessing (“She’sa lovely, Missa Scaddon”) and the cards were delivered to brownstones in the East Fifties that had been transformed from homesteads into showrooms for Italian neckties, art galleries, antique dealers, walk-up apartments and offices of such organizations as the English-Speaking Union and the Svenskameri-kanska Förbundet. Further uptown and further east the invitations were received by the tail-coated doormen of eighteen- and twenty-story apartment buildings where the names of Justina’s friends and peers struck a spark in no one’s memory. Up Fifth Avenue invitations were delivered to more apartment houses as well as to institutes of costume design, slapdash rooming houses, finishing schools and to the offices of the American Irish Historical Society and the Sino-American Amity, Inc. They were exposed to the sootfall among other uncollected mail (old bills from Tiffany and copies of The New Yorker) in houses with boarded-up front doors. They lay on the battered tables of progressive kinder-gartens where children could be heard laughing and weeping and they fell into the anonymous passageways of houses that, built with an open hand, had been remodeled with a tight one and where people cooked their dinners in the morning room and the library. An invitation was received at the Jewish Museum, at the downtown branch of Columbia University, at the French and the Jugoslavian consulates, at the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations, at several fraternity houses, actors’ clubs, bridge clubs, milliners and dressmakers. Further afield invitations were received by the Mother Superiors of the Ursuline Order, the Poor Clares and the Sisters of Mercy. They were received by the overseers of Jesuit schools and retreats, Franciscan Fathers, Cowley Fathers, Paulists and Misericordia Sisters. They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets. When the bells of Saint Michael’s rang that afternoon there were no more than twenty-five people in the body of the church and two of these were rooming-house proprietors who had come out of curiosity. When the time came Moses said the words loudly and with a full heart. After the ceremony most of the guests returned to Clear Haven and danced to the music of a phonograph. Sarah and Leander performed a stately waltz and said good-by. The maids filled the old champagne bottles with cheap sauterne and when the summer dusk had fallen and all the chandeliers were lighted the main fuse blew once more. Giacomo repaired it and Moses went upstairs and entered Melissa’s room by the door.