1It would be, Moses thought, a sentimental summer, for they could hear fountains in their room and she made his bed a kind of Venice and who cared about the watery soups and custards that they mostly seemed to get for dinner? Melissa was loving and contented and how could Justina make any of this her province? A few days after the wedding Mrs. Enderby called Moses into her office and said that he would be billed three hundred dollars a month for room and board. He apprehended then that loving a woman who could not move from a particular place might create some problems, but this was only an apprehension and he agreed politely to pay the toll. A few nights later he returned from Bond School and found his wife, for the first time since he had known her, in tears. Justina’s wedding present had arrived. Giacomo had removed their capacious and lumpy marriage bed and replaced it with twin beds—narrow and hard as slate. Melissa stood at the door to her balcony, weeping over this, and it appeared to Moses then that he might have overlooked the depth of the relationship between his golden-skinned wife and that truculent and well-preserved crone, her guardian. He dried her tears and thanked Justina for the beds at dinner. After dinner he and Giacomo put the twin beds back into the storeroom where they had been and returned the old bed. Watching Melissa undress that night (he could see past her shoulder in the moonlight the lawns and the gardens and the plunge) and resisting the thought that these ramparts were real for her, that she should think that the thorns on the roses that surrounded the walls were piercing, he asked if they could leave before autumn and she reminded him that he had promised not to ask this.

2A few mornings later, going to his closet, Moses discovered that all his suits were gone but the soiled seersucker suit he had worn the day before. “Oh, I know what’s happened, darling,” Melissa said. “Justina’s taken your clothes and given them to the church for a rummage sale.” She got out of bed, wearing nothing, and went anxiously to her own closet. “That’s what she’s done. She’s taken my yellow dress and my gray and my blue. I’ll go down to the church and get them back.”

3“You mean she’s taken my clothes for a rummage sale without asking?”

4“Yes, darling. She’s never understood that everything in Clear Haven isn’t hers.”

5“How long has this been going on?”

6“For years.”

7As it happened Melissa was able to buy their clothes back from the church for a few dollars and with this forgotten he was able to take up his sentimental life. Moses had long since forgotten the dislike of Clear Haven that had formed in his mind when he stumbled on the roof and it began to seem to him an excellent place for the first months of his marriage, for even the benches in the garden were supported by women with enormous marble breasts and in the hall his eye fell repeatedly on naked and comely men and women in the pursuit or the glow of love. They were on the needlepoint chairs, they reached for one another from the tops of the massive andirons, they supported the candles for the dinner table and the bowl of the glass from which Justina drank the water for her pills. He seemed to work even the lilies in the garden into his picture of love and when Melissa picked them and carried them in her arms like lumber, their truly mournful perfume falling this way and that, he kicked up his heels with joy. Night after night they drank some whisky in their room, some sherry in the hall, sat through the wretched dinner and then went together down to the plunge, and they were excusing themselves one evening after dinner when Justina said:

8“We’re going to play bridge.”

9“We’re going swimming.” Moses said.

10“The pool lights are broken,” Justina said. “You can’t swim in the dark. I’ll have Giacomo fix the lights tomorrow. Tonight we’ll play bridge.”

11They played bridge until after eleven and, in the company of the old general, the count and Mrs. Enderby, it was a stifling evening. When Moses and Melissa excused themselves on the next night Justina was ready. “The pool lights aren’t fixed yet,” she said, “and I feel like some more bridge.” Playing bridge that night and the night after, Moses felt restless, and it appeared to him to be significant that he was the only one who left Clear Haven; that since his wedding he had not seen a strange or a new face in the house and that, so far as he knew, not even Giacomo ever left the grounds. He complained to Melissa and she said that she would ask some people for drinks on Saturday and she asked Justina’s permission on the next night at dinner. “Of course, of course,” Justina said, “of course you want to have some young people in, but I can’t let you entertain guests until I’ve had the rugs cleaned. I’m having estimates made and they ought to be cleaned in a week or two and you can have your little party.” On Saturday morning Justina announced through Mrs. Enderby that she was tired and would spend the week end in her room, and Melissa, encouraged by Moses, telephoned three couples who lived in the neighborhood and asked them for drinks on Sunday. Late Sunday afternoon Moses laid a fire in the hall and brought the bottles out of their hiding place. Melissa made something to eat and they sat on the only comfortable sofa in the room and waited for their guests.

12It was a rainy afternoon and the rain played on the complicated roofs of the old monument a pleasant air. Melissa turned on a lamp when she heard a car come up the drive and she went down the hall and through the rotunda. Moses heard her voice in the distance, greeting the Trenholmes, and he gave the fire a poke and stood as a couple, who were made by their youthfulness and their pleasant manners to seem innocuous, came into the room. Melissa passed the crackers and when the Howes and the Van Bibbers joined them the vapid music of their voices mingled pleasantly with the sounds of the rain. Then Moses heard from the doorway the horse, strong notes of Justina’s voice.

13“What is the meaning of this, Melissa?”

14“Oh, Justina,” Melissa said gallantly. “I think you know all these people.”

15“I may know them,” Justina said, “but what are they doing here?”

16“I’ve asked them for cocktails,” Melissa said.

17“Well, that’s very inconvenient,” Justina said. “This day of all days. I told Giacomo he could take up the rugs and clean them.”

18“We can go into the winter garden,” Melissa said timidly.

19“How many times have I told you, Melissa, that I don’t want you to take guests into the winter garden?”

20“I’ll call Giacomo,” Moses said to Justina. “Here, let me get you some whisky.”

21Moses gave Justina her whisky and she sat on the sofa and regarded the dumb-struck company with a charming smile. “If you insist on inviting people here, Melissa,” she said, “I wish you ask my advice. If we’re not careful the house will be full of pickpockets and hoboes.” The guests retreated toward the door and Melissa walked them out to the rotunda. When she returned to the hall she sat down in a chair, not beside Moses, but opposite her guardian. Moses had never seen her face so dark.

22The rain had let up. Close to the horizon the heavy clouds had split as if they had been lanced and a liquid brilliance gorged through the cut, spread up the lawn and came through the glass doors, lighting the hall and the old woman’s face. The hundred windows of the house would glitter for miles. Ursuline nuns, bird watchers, motorists and fishermen would admire the illusion of a house bathed in flame. Feeling the light on her face and feeling that it became her, Justina smiled her most narcissistic smile—that patrician gaze that made it seem as if all the world were hung with minors. “I only do this because I love you so, Melissa,” she said, and she worked her fingers loaded with diamonds, emeralds and glass in the light that was fading.

23Then the stillness of a trout pool seemed to settle over the room. Justina seemed to make a lure of false promises and Melissa to watch her shadow as it fell through the water to the sand, trying to find in her guardian’s larcenous words some truth. Justina’s face gleamed with rouge and her eyebrows shone with black dye and it seemed to Moses that somewhere in the maquillage must be the image of an old woman. Her face would be seamed, her clothes would be black, her voice would be cracked and she would knit blankets and sweaters for her grandchildren, take in her roses before the frost and speak mostly of friends and relations who had departed this life.

24“This house is a great burden,” Justina said, “and I have no one to help me bear it. I would love to give it all to you, Melissa, but I know that if you should predecease Moses he would sell it to the first bidder.”

25“I promise not to,” Moses said cheerfully.

26“Oh, I wish I could be sure,” she sighed. Then she rose, still beaming, and went to her ward. “But don’t let there be any hard feeling between us, sweet love, even if I have broken up your little party. I warned you about the rugs, but you’ve never had much sense. I’ve always been able to wrap you around my fingers.”

27“I won’t have this, Justina,” Moses said.

28“Keep out of this, Moses.”

29“Melissa is my wife.”

30“You’re not her first husband and you won’t be her last and she’s had a hundred lovers.”

31“You’re wicked, Justina.”

32“I’m wicked, as you say, and I’m rude and I’m boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr. Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.” Then she turned to him again her best smile and he saw for once how truly powerful this old dancing mistress had been in her heyday and how she was like an old Rhine princess, an exile from the abandoned duchies of upper Fifth Avenue and the dusty kingdoms of Riverside Drive. Then she bent and kissed Melissa and removed herself gracefully from the room.

33Melissa’s lips were drawn as if to check her tears. Moses went to her eagerly, thinking that he could take her out of the atmosphere of breakage that the old woman had left in the room, but when he put his hands on her shoulders she twisted out of his reach.

34“Would you like another drink?”

35“Yes.”

36He put some whisky and ice in her glass.

37“Shall we go up?”

38“All right.”

39She walked ahead of him; she didn’t want him at her side. The encounter had damaged her grace and she sighed as she walked. She held her whisky glass in both hands before her like a grail. She seemed to emanate weariness and pain. It was her charming custom to undress where she could be seen but this evening she went instead to the bathroom and slammed the door. When she returned she was wearing a drab gray dress that Moses had never seen before. It was shapeless and very old; he could tell because there were moth holes in it. A row of steel buttons, pressed to look like ships in full sail, ran from the tight neck to the sagging hem, and the shape of her waist and her breasts was lost in the folds of gray cloth. She sat at the dressing table and removed her earrings, her bracelets and pearls, and began to brush the curl out of her hair.

40Now Moses knew that women can take many forms; that it is in their power in the convulsions of love to take the shape of any beast or beauty on land or sea—fire, caves, the sweetness of haying weather—and to let break upon the mind, like light on water, its most brilliant imagery, and it did not dismay him that this gift for metamorphosis could be used to further all kinds of venal and petty schemes for self-aggrandizement. Moses had learned that it was wise to keep in mind the guises most often taken by the women he loved so that when a warmhearted woman appeared suddenly, for some reason of her own, to have become a spinster he would be prepared and in not much danger of losing the hopefulness that sustained his patience, for while women could metamorphose themselves at will he found that they could not sustain these impersonations for long and that if he could endure, patiently, a disguise or distemper or false modesty, it would soon wear thin. Now he watched the changes that had come over his golden-skinned wife, trying to discover what it was that she represented.

41She represented chastity—an infelicitous and implacable chastity. She represented an unhappy spinster. She glanced scornfully at where he had let his clothes drop to the floor, averting her eyes at the same time from where he stood in his skin. “I wish you would learn to pick up your things, Moses,” she said in a singsong voice that he didn’t recognize at all. It had in it the forced sweetness of a lonely and a patient woman, forced by a reduction of circumstances to take care of a dirty boy. When she had done what she could to take the softness out of her hair she stood and moved in little steps toward the door.

42“I’m going down.”

43“If you’ll wait a minute, darling.”

44“I think if I go down now I might be able to help. After all, the poor servants have a great deal to do.” Her smile was pure hypocrisy. She drifted out of the room.

45Moses’ determination to see through this clumsy disguise put him into a position that verged on foolishness and while he dressed his lined face shone with false cheer. She would have exhausted the part by midnight, he thought, so his yearning would have to wait until then; but there it was, a sense of fullness and strength that seemed to increase in the lamplight. When he went down to the hall he noticed that the bottles he had foolishly left there had been appropriated by Justina and that he would never see them again. He had a glass of bad sherry and a peanut. Melissa was among the lemon trees, twisting off the dead leaves. Even as she did this she seemed to sigh. She was a poor relation now, a shadowy figure, not meant to play a large part in life but philosophically resigned to small things. When she had finished cleaning up the lemon trees she took an ash tray off the table and emptied it—conspicuously—into the fire. When the chimes rang she pushed the general’s chair to the door, first tucking the blanket tenderly around his legs, and at the table she picked at her food and talked about the dog-and-cat hospital.

46They played bridge until ten, when Melissa yawned daintily and said that she was tired. Moses excused himself and was disheartened to see with what small steps she preceded him down the hall. At the stairs he put his arm around her waist—he had to feel for it in the folds of her drab dress—and kissed her cheek. She did not try to move out of his arm. Up in their room when he closed the door, shutting out the rest of the house, he watched to see what she would do. She went to a chair and picked up a circular sent from a dry-cleaning firm in the village and began to read this. Moses lifted the paper lightly out of her hands and kissed her. “All right,” she said.

47He took off his clothes, jubilantly, thinking that in another minute she would be in his arms, but she went instead to her dressing table, tipped many pins out of a small gold box, separated a strand of hair with her fingers, coiled it, laid it flat against her skull and pinned it there. He hoped that she would make only a few curls and he looked at the clock, wondering if it would be ten or fifteen minutes. He liked her hair to be full and he watched with a feeling of foreboding as she took strand after strand, coiled it and laid it flat with a pin against her skull. This did not delay or alter his hopefulness or lessen his need, and trying to distract himself he opened a magazine and looked at some advertisements, but with the kingdom of love so soon to be his the pictures had no meaning. When the hair over her brow was all secured to her skull she started on the sides and he saw that he had a considerable wait ahead of him. He sat up, swung his feet onto the floor and lighted a cigarette. The sense of fullness and strength in his groin was at its apex, and cold baths, long walks in the rain, humorous cartoons and glasses of milk would not help him—she had begun to pin up the hair at the back of her neck—when the feeling of fullness changed subtly to a feeling of anguish that spread from his loins deep into his bowels. He put out his cigarette, drew on some pajama pants and wandered out onto the balcony. He heard her close the bathroom door. Then, with a sigh of real misery, he heard her start to run the water for a bath.

48It never took Melissa less than three quarters of an hour to bathe. Moses could often wait cheerfully for her, but his feelings that night were painful. He remained on the balcony, picking out by name the stars that he knew and smoking. When, three quarters of an hour later, he heard her pull the plug in the tub he returned to the room and stretched out, his yearning rising to new summits of purity and happiness, on the bed. From the bathroom he could hear the clink of bottles on glass and the opening and closing of drawers. Then she opened the bathroom door and came out—not naked but dressed in a full, heavy nightgown and busily running a piece of dental floss between her teeth. “Oh, Melissa,” he said.

49“I doubt that you love me,” she said. It was the thin, dispassionate voice of the spinster and it reminded him of thin things: smoke and dust. “I sometimes think you don’t love me at all,” she said, “and of course you put much too much emphasis on sex, oh much too much. The trouble is that you don’t have enough to think about. I mean you’re really not interested in business. Most men are intensely interested in their business. J. P. used to be so tired when he came home from work that he could hardly eat his dinner. Most men are too tired to think about love every morning and every afternoon and every night. They’re tired and anxious and they lead normal lives. You don’t like your job and so you think about sex all the time. I don’t suppose it’s because you’re really depraved. It’s just because you’re idle.”

50He heard the squeaking of chalk. His bower was replaced with the atmosphere of a schoolroom and his roses seemed to wither. In the glass he saw her pretty face—opaque and wanton—formed to express passion and sweetness, and thinking of her capabilities he wondered why she had put them down. That he presented difficulties—the flights and crash landings of a sentimental disposition—that he sometimes broke wind and picked his teeth with a kitchen match, that he was neither brilliant nor beautiful belonged in the picture—but he did not understand. He did not understand, picking back over her words, what right she had to make the love that kept his mind open, and that made even the leaking of a rain gutter seem musical, a creation of pure idleness.

51“But I love you,” he said hopefully.

52“Some men bring work home from the office,” she said. “Most men do. Most of the men that I know.” Her voice seemed to dry as he listened to it, to lose its deeper notes as her feelings narrowed. “And most men in business,” she went on thinly, “have to do a lot of traveling. They’re away from their wives a lot of the time. They have other outlets than sex. Most healthy men do. They play squash.”

53“I play squash.”

54“You’ve never played squash since I’ve known you.”

55“I used to play.”

56“Of course,” she said, “if it’s absolutely necessary for you to make love to me I’ll do it, but I think that you ought to understand that it’s not as crucial as you make it.”

57“You’ve talked yourself out of a fuck,” he said bleakly.

58“Oh, you’re so hateful and egotistical,” she said, swinging her head around. “Your thinking is so crude and mean. You only want to hurt me.”

59“I wanted to love you,” he said. “The thought of it has made me cheerful all day. When I ask you tenderly you go to your dressing table and stuff your head with pieces of metal. I felt loving,” he said sadly. “Now I feel angry and violent.”

60“And I suppose all your bad feelings are directed towards me?” she asked. “I’ve told you before that I can’t be all the things you want. I can’t be wife, child and mother all at once. It’s too much to ask.”

61“I don’t want you to be my mother and my child,” he said hoarsely. “I have a mother and I will have children. I won’t lack those things. I want you to be my wife and you stuff your head with pins.”

62“I thought we had agreed before,” she said, “that I can’t give you everything you want. . . . ”

63“I have no stomach for talk,” he said. He took off his pajamas and dressed and went out. He walked down the driveway and took the back road to the village of Scaddonville. It was four miles and when he got there and found the streets dark he turned back on a lane that went through the woods where the mildness of a summer night seemed at last to replace his vexation. Dogs in distant houses heard his footsteps and went on barking long after he had passed. The trees moved a little in the wind and the stars were so numerous and clear that the arbitrary lines that form the Pleiades and Cassiopeia in her chair seemed nearly visible. There seemed to be some indestructible good health in a dark path on a summer night—it was a place and a season where it was impossible to cherish bad feeling. In the distance he saw the dark towers of Clear Haven and he returned up the driveway and went to bed. Melissa was asleep and she was asleep when he left in the morning.

64Melissa was not in their room when he returned in the evening and looking around him hopefully for some change in her mood he saw that their room had been given a thorough cleaning. This in itself might have been a good sign but he saw that she had taken the perfume bottles off her dressing table and thrown out all the flowers. He washed and put on a soft coat and went down. D’Alba was in the hall, sitting in the golden throne, reading a Mickey Mouse comic and smoking a big cigar. His taste in comics was genuine but Moses suspected that the rest of the picture was a pose—a nod toward J. P. ’s tradition of near-illiterate merchant princes. D’Alba said that Melissa was in the laundry. This was a surprise. She had never gone near the laundry since Moses knew her. He went down that shabby hall that cut away from the rest of the house like a backstage alley and down the dirty wooden stairs into the basements. Melissa was in the laundry, stuffing sheets into a washing machine. Her golden hair was dark with steam. She didn’t reply when Moses spoke to her and when he touched her she said, “Leave me alone.”

65She said that the bedding in the house had not been washed for months. The maids kept drawing from the linen closets and she had found the laundry chute full of sheets. Moses knew enough not to suggest that she send the sheets to a laundry. He could sense that cleanliness was not her purpose. She had successfully discredited her beauty. She must have found the dress she was wearing in a broom closet and her golden-skinned arms were red with hot water. Her hair was stringy and her mouth was set in an expression of extreme distaste. He loved her passionately and when he saw all of this his face fell.

66Other than the dark brown photograph of her mother, sitting in a carved chair, holding a dozen roses head down, he did not know her family. The parents, the aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters to whom we can sometimes trace a change of character were unknown to him and if she was overtaken now by the shadow of some aunt it was an aunt he had never seen. Watching her stuff sheets into the washing machine he wished briefly, for once, that her status had not been that of an orphan. Her energies seemed penitential and he would let it go at that. He had not fallen in love with her because of her gift with arithmetic, because of her cleanliness, her reasonable mind or any other human excellence. It was because he perceived in her some extraordinary inner comeliness or grace that satisfied his needs. “Don’t you have anything to do but sit there?” she asked sorely. He said yes, yes, and went up the stairs.

67Justina met him in the hall with great cordiality. Her eyes were wide and her voice was an excited whisper when she asked if Melissa was in the laundry. “Perhaps we should have told you before you married,” she said, “but you know that Melissa has been very, very—” the word she wanted was too crude and she settled for a modulation—“she has never been very tractable. Come,” she said to Moses, “come and have a drink. D’Alba has some whisky, I think. We need something more than sherry tonight.” The picture she evoked was cozy and although Moses felt the naked edge of her mischievousness he had nothing better to do than walk in the garden and stare at the roses. He went down the hall at her side. D’Alba produced a bottle of whisky from underneath the throne and they all had a drink. “Is she having a breakdown?” D’Alba asked. They were halfway through the soup when Melissa appeared, wearing her broom-closet dress. When she came to the table Moses stood but she did not look in his direction and she did not speak during the meal. After dinner Moses asked if she would like to take a walk but Melissa said that she had to hang out the sheets.

68Justina met Moses at the door the next night with a long and an excited face and said that Melissa was ill. “Indisposed perhaps would be a better word,” she said. She asked Moses to have a drink with her and D’Alba but he said that he would go up and see Melissa. “She’s not in your room,” Justina said. “She’s moved to one of the other bedrooms. I don’t know which one. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.” Moses looked first into their bedroom to make sure she was not there and then went down the hall, calling her name loudly, but there was no reply. He tried the door of the room next to theirs and looked into a room with a canopied bed but at some time in the past a large piece of the ceiling had fallen and fragments of plaster hung from this cavity. The curtains were drawn and the damps of the room were sepulchral—ghostly he would have said if he had not had such a great scorn for ghosts. The next door that he opened led into an unused bathroom—the tub was filled with newspapers tied into bundles—and the room was lighted luridly by a stained-glass window, and the next door that he opened led into a storeroom where brass bedsteads and rocking chairs, oak mantelpieces and sewing machines, mahogany chiffoniers with rueful lines and other pieces of respectable and by-passed furniture were stacked up to the ceiling, antedating, he guessed, Justina’s first glimpse of Italy. The room smelled of bats. The next door opened into an attic where there was a water tank as big as the plunge and there was an aeolian harp attached to the next door that he opened and asthmatic and airy as the music was it made his flesh rough when it began to ring as it would have been roughened by the hissing of an adder. This door led to the tower stairs and he climbed them up and up to a large raftered room with lancet windows and no furniture and over the mantelpiece this motto in gold: LOOK AWAY FROM THE BODY INTO TRUTH AND LIGHT. He ran down the tower stairs and had opened the door of a nursery—Melissa’s, he guessed—and another bedroom with a fallen ceiling before the foolish music of the aeolian harp had died away. Then with so much stale air in his nose and his lungs he opened a window and stuck his head out into the summer twilight where he could hear, way below him, the sounds of dinner. Then he opened a door into a room that was clean and light and where Melissa, when she saw him, buried her face in the pillows and cried when he touched her, “Leave me alone, leave me alone.”

69Her invalidism, like her chasteness, seemed to be an imposture, and he reminded himself to be patient, but sitting at a window, watching the lawns darken, he felt very forlorn at having a wife who had promised so much and who now refused to discuss with him the weather, the banking business or the time of day. He waited there until dark and then went down the stairs. He had missed his dinner but a light was still burning in the kitchen, where a plump old Irishwoman, who was mopping the drainboards, cooked him some supper and set it on a table by the stove. “I guess you’re having trouble with your sweetheart,” she said kindly. “Well, I was married myself to poor Mr. Reilly for fourteen years and there’s nothing I don’t know about the ups and downs of love. He was a little man, Mr. Reilly was,” she said, “and when we was living out in Toledo everybody used to say he was runty. He never weighed over a hundred and twenty-five pounds and look at me.” She sat down in a chair opposite Moses. “Of course I wasn’t so heavy in those days but towards the end I would have made three of him. He was one of those men who always look like a little boy. I mean the way he carried his head and all. Even now, just looking out of the train window sometimes in a strange city I see one of these little men and it reminds me of Mr. Reilly. He was a menopause baby. His mother was past fifty when he was born. Why, after we was married sometimes we’d go into a bar for a beer and the barkeep wouldn’t serve him, thinking he was a boy. Of course as he got old his face got lined and towards the end he looked like a dried-up little boy, but he was very loving.

70“He never seemed to be able to get enough of it,” she said. “When I remember him that’s the way I remember him—that sad look on his face that meant he was loving. He always wanted his piece and he was lovely—lovely things he’d say to me while he caressed and unbuttoned me. He liked a piece in the morning. Then he’d comb his hair on the left side, button up his britches and go off to a good day’s work in the foundry, so cheerful and cocky. In Toledo he was coming home for his dinner in the middle of the day and he liked a piece then and he couldn’t go to sleep without his piece. He couldn’t sleep. If I woke him up in the middle of the night to tell him I heard burglars downstairs there was no use my talking. The night Mabel Ransome’s house burned down and I stayed up watching the fire until two in the morning he never listened to what I said. When thunderstorms woke him at night or the north wind in winter he’d always wake up in a very loving mood.

71“But I didn’t always feel like loving,” she said sadly. “Heartburn or gas would get me down and then I had to be very careful with him. I had to choose me words. Once I refused him without thinking. Once when he commenced to gentle me I spoke roughly to him. Forget about it for a little while Charlie, I says. Helen Sturmer tells me her husband don’t do it but once a month. Why don’t you try to be like him? Well, it was like the end of the world. You should have seed the way his face got dark. It was terrible to behold. The very blood in his veins got dark. I never seed him so crossed in my whole life. Well, he went out of the house then. Come suppertime he isn’t home. I went to bed expecting him to come in but when I wakes up the bed is empty. Four nights I wait for him to come home but he don’t show up. Finally I put this advertisement in the paper. This was when we was living in Albany. Please come home Charlie. That’s all I say. It cost me two-fifty. Well, I put the advertisement in on Friday night and on Saturday morning I hear his key in the lock. Up the stairs he comes all smiles with this big bunch of roses and one idea in his mind. Well it’s only ten o’clock in the morning and my house-work isn’t half done. The breakfast dishes are in the sink and the bed isn’t made. It’s very hard for a woman to be loving before her work is done but even with the dust all over the tables I knew my lot.

72“Sometimes it was a hardship for me,” she said. “It kept me from ever broadening my mind. There’s lots of important things he kept me from seeing, like after the war when the parade went right by our windows with Marshal Foch and all. I looked forward to that parade but I never got to see it. He was on top of me when Lindbergh flewed the Atlantic and when that English king, whatever his name was, put down his crown for love and made a speech about it over the radio I never heard a word of it. But when I remember him now that’s the way I remember him—that sad look on his face that meant he was loving. He never seemed to be able to get enough of it and now, God bless the poor man, he’s lying in a cold, cold grave.”

73It was not until Saturday that Melissa came down, and, asking her to walk with him after dinner, Moses noticed how she hesitated at the door to the terrace as if she apprehended that the summer night might end her imposture. Then she joined him but she kept a meaningful distance between them. He suggested that they go down through the garden, hoping that the smell of roses and the sound of fountains would prevail, but she continued to keep a protective distance between them although when they left the garden she took a path through some pine woods that he had not seen before and that ended in a plot that turned out to be the animal cemetery. Here were a dozen headstones, overgrown with weeds, and Moses followed Melissa, reading the inscriptions:

74Here lie the bones and feathers of an amiable bird, A cold December twilight saw his fall. ✏ His voice, raised in sweet song, was never heard, ✏ Because the bird was very small.

75Here lie the bones of Sylvia Rabbit. ✏ She was sat on by Melissa Scaddon on June 17th And died of contusions.

76Here lie the bones of Theseus the Whippet.

77Here lie the bones of Prince the Collie, ✏ He will be missed by One and All.

78Here lie the bones of Hannibal.

79Here lie the bones of Napoleon

80Here lie the bones of Lorna, the kitchen cat.

81The lot exhaled the power of a family, Moses thought, and the glee they took in their own nonsense, and looking from the headstones to Melissa’s face he saw hopefully that her expression seemed to be softened by the foolish graveyard, but he decided to take his time and followed her out of the lot down a path to the barns and greenhouses when they both stopped to hear the loud, musical singing of some night bird. It sounded in the distance, on the early dark, with the brilliance of a knife, and Melissa was captivated. “You know J. P. wanted to have nightingales,” she said. “He imported hundreds and hundreds of nightingales from England. He had a special nightingale keeper and a nightingale house. When we came back from England the first thing we did on the boat after breakfast was to go down into the hold and feed mealy worms to the nightingales. They all died. . . .”

82Then looking past her, to the roof of the barn where the night bird seemed to be perched, Moses saw that it was not a bird at all; it was the plaintive song of a rusty ventilator as it turned on the night wind; and feeling that this discovery might change the sentimental mood that the twilight, the graveyard and the song promised he led her hurriedly into the old greenhouse and made a bed of his clothing on the floor. Much later that night, when they had returned to the house, and Moses, his bones feeling light and clean with love, was waiting for sleep he had every reason to wonder if she had not transformed herself into something else.

83This suspicion was renewed the next night when he stepped into their room and found her on the bed wearing a single stocking and reading a love story she had borrowed from one of the maids and when he kissed her and joined her where she lay her breath smelled, not unpleasantly, of candy. But on the next night, walking across the lawns from the station, Moses was reminded of those noisome details in her past that Justina liked to dwell on. She was on the terrace with Jacopo, one of the young gardeners. She was cutting Jacopo’s hair. Even at a distance the sight made Moses uneasy and sad, for the insatiableness that he adored left the possibilities of inconstancy open and he conceived for Jacopo a hatred that was murderous. Lewd and comely and laughing while she snipped and combed his hair, he seemed to Moses to be one of those figures who stand outside the brightly lighted centers of our consciousness and defeat our love of candor and our confidence in the sweetness of life, but Melissa sent Jacopo away when Moses joined them and displayed her affection for Moses brilliantly in greeting him and he did not worry about the gardener or anything else until, a few nights later, walking down the hall, he heard laughter from their bedroom and found Melissa and a stranger drinking whisky on the balcony. This was Ray Badger.

84Now the dubiousness of visiting a former wife did not, Moses supposed, concern him. His rival, if Badger was still a rival, had a hard-finish suit, a cast in one eye and patent-leather hair. He meant to be charming, when Moses joined them, but the memories he shared with Melissa—he had fed the nightingales—were confined to the past at Clear Haven and Moses was kept out of the conversation. Melissa had seldom mentioned Badger and if she had been unhappy with him it did not show that evening. She was delighted with his company and his recollections—delighted and sad, for when he had left them she spoke sentimentally to Moses about her former husband. “He’s just like an eighteen-year-old boy,” she said. “He’s always done what other people wanted him to do and now, at thirty-five, he’s just realized that he never expressed himself. I feel so sorry for him. . . . ” Moses reserved judgment on Badger and found at dinner that Justina was his advocate. She did not speak to her guest and seemed to be in a deeply emotional state. She announced that she was selling all her paintings to the Metropolitan Museum. A curator was coming for lunch the next day to appraise them. “There is no one I can trust to keep my things together,” she said. “I can’t trust any of you.”

85Badger gave Moses a cigar after dinner and they went together out onto the terrace. “I suppose you wonder why I’ve come back,” Badger said, “and I may as well explain myself. I’m in the toy business. I don’t know whether you knew that or not, and I’ve just had an unusually lucky piece of business. I’ve got the patent on a penny bank—it’s a plastic reproduction of an old iron bank—and Woolworth’s given me an order for sixty thousand. I have a confirmation for the order in New York. I’ve invested twenty-five thousand of my own in the thing, but right now I’ve got a chance to pick up a patent on a toy gun and I’ll sell my interest in the bank for fifteen thousand. I was wondering who to sell it to and I thought of you and Melissa—I read about your marriage in the paper—and I thought I’d come out here and give you the first chance. On the Woolworth order alone you’ll double your investment and you can count on another sixty thousand from the stationery stores. If you could get over to the Waldorf late tomorrow afternoon for a drink I’ll show you the patent and the design and the correspondence from Woolworth.”

86“I wouldn’t be interested,” Moses said.

87“You mean you don’t want to make any money? Oh, Melissa will be very disappointed.”

88“You haven’t talked this over with Melissa.”

89“Well, not really, but I know that she’ll be very disappointed.”

90“I haven’t fifteen thousand dollars,” Moses said.

91“You mean to tell me that you don’t have fifteen thousand dollars?”

92“That’s right,” Moses said.

93“Oh,” Badger said. “What about the general? Do you know if he’s worth anything?”

94“I don’t know,” Moses said. He followed Badger back into the hall and saw him give the old man a cigar and push his wheel chair out onto the terrace. When Moses repeated the conversation to Melissa it did not change her sentimental feelings for Badger. “Of course he’s not in the toy business,” she said. “He’s never really been in any business at all. He just tries to get along and I feel so sorry for him.”