Justina sat by the fire, drinking sherry. She was, by Leander’s reckoning, about seventy-five then, but her hair and her eyebrows were ink black and her face, framed in spit curls, was heavily rouged. Her eyes were glassy and shrewd. Her hair was raised off her forehead in a high construction, plainly old-fashioned and reminding Moses of the false front on the Cartwright Block in St. Botolphs. It was the same period. But she reminded him mostly of what she had been—a foxy old dancing mistress.
She greeted Moses with marked disinterest but this was not surprising in a woman whose distrust of men was even more outspoken than Cousin Honora’s. Her dress was rich and simple and her imperious and hoarse voice ranged over a complete octave of requited social ambitions. “The Count D’Alba, General Burgoyne and Mrs. Enderby,” she said, introducing Moses to the others in the room. The count was a tall, dark-skinned man with cavernous and hairy nostrils. The general was an old man in a wheel chair. Mrs. Enderby wore a pince-nez, the lozenge-shaped lenses of which hung so limply from the bridge of her nose that they gave her a very dropsical look. Her fingers were stained with ink. Melissa and Moses went to some chairs by the fire but these were so outrageously proportioned that Moses had to boost himself up and found, when he was seated, that his legs did not reach the floor. A maid passed him a glass of sherry and a dish in which there were a few old peanuts. The sherry was not fit to drink and when he tasted it Melissa smiled at him and he remembered her accounts of Justina’s parsimony and wished he had brought some whisky in his suitcase. Then a maid stood in a distant doorway and rang some chimes and they went down a hall into a room that was lighted with candles.
The dinner was a cup of soup, a boiled potato, a scrap of fish and some kind of custard, and the conversation, that was meant to move at Justina’s dictates, suffered from the fact that she seemed either tired, absent-minded or annoyed by Moses’ arrival. When the general spoke to her about the illness of a friend she expressed her fixed idea about the perfidiousness of men. It was her opinion that the husband of her friend was responsible for the illness. Unmarried women—she said—were much healthier than wives. When the meal was finished they returned to the hall. Moses was still hungry and he hoped that there was some breakdown in the kitchen arrangements and that if he did live at Clear Haven he would not be expected to get along on such meager fare. Justina played backgammon with the general and the count sat down at the piano and started a medley of that lachrymose music that is played for cocktails and that is so limpid in its amorousness, so supine and wistful in its statement of passion that it will offend the ears of a man in love. Suddenly all the lights went out.
“The main fuse is gone again,” Justina said, rolling her dice in the firelight.
“Can I fix it?” Moses asked, anxious to make a good impression.
“I don’t know,” Justina said. “There are plenty of fuses.”
Melissa lighted a candle and Moses followed her down a hall. They could hear a babble of voices from the kitchen where the servants were striking matches and looking for candles. She opened a door into a further corridor and started down a steep flight of worn, wooden stairs into a cellar that smelled of earth. They found the fuse box and Moses changed the old fuse for a new one, although he noticed that the wiring was in some cases bare or carelessly patched with friction tape. Melissa blew out her candle and they returned to the hall, where the count had resumed his forlorn music and where the general hitched his wheel chair up to Moses and led him to a glass case near the fireplace where there were some moldy academic robes that the late Mr. Scaddon had worn when he was given an honorary degree from Princeton.
It pleased Moses to think that the palace and the hall stood four square on the five-and-ten-cent stores of his youth with their appetizing and depraved odors. His most vivid memories were of the girls—the girl with acne at the cosmetic counter, the fullbusted girl selling hardware, the indolent girl in the candy department, the demure beauty selling oilcloth and the straw-haired town whore on probation among the wind-up toys—and if there was no visible connection between these memories and the hall at Clear Haven the practical connection was inarguable. Moses noticed that when the general spoke of J. P. Scaddon he avoided the phrase “five-and-ten-cent store” and spoke only of merchandising. “He was a great merchant,” the general said, “an exceptional man, a distinguished man—even his enemies would admit that. For the forty years that he was president of the firm his days were scheduled from eight in the morning until sometimes after midnight. When I say that he was distinguished I mean that he was distinguished by his energies, his powers of judgment, his courage and imagination. He possessed all these things to an unusual degree. He was never involved in any shady deals and the merchandising world as we see it today owes something to his imagination, his intelligence and his fine sense of honor. He had, of course, a payroll that employed over a million people. When he opened stores in Venezuela and Belgium and India his intention was not to make himself or his stockholders any richer, but to raise the standard of living generally....”
Moses listened to what the general said but the thought that he would lay Melissa had given to that day such stubborn light and joy that it was an effort to keep his ardor from turning to impatience while he listened to this praise of the late millionaire. She was beautiful and it was that degree of beauty that fills even the grocery boy and the garage mechanic with solemn thoughts. The strong, dark-golden color of her hair, her shoulder bones and gorge and the eyes that appeared black at that distance had over Moses such a power that, as he watched her, desire seemed to darken and gild her figure like the cumulative coats of varnish on an old painting, and he would have been gratified if some slight hurt had befallen her, for that deep sense of involvement we experience when we see a lovely woman—or even a woman with nothing left to her but the loveliness of intent—trip on the iron steps of a train carriage or on a curbing of the street—or when, on a rainy day, we see the paper bag in which she is carrying her groceries home split and rain down around her feet and into the puddles on the sidewalk oranges, bunches of celery, loaves of bread, cold cuts wrapped in cellophane—that deep sense of involvement that can be explained by injury and loss was present with Moses with no explanation. He had half risen from his chair when the old lady snapped:
“Bedtime!”
He had underestimated the power of desire to draw his features and he was caught. From under her dyed eyebrows Justina looked at him hatefully. “I’m going to ask you to take the general to his room,” she said. “Your room is just down the hall so there won’t be any inconvenience. Melissa’s room is on the other side of the house”—she said this triumphantly and made a gesture to emphasize the distance—”and it’s not convenient for her to take the general up. …”
The stamp of desire on his face had betrayed him once and he did not want to be betrayed by disappointment or anger and he smiled broadly—he positively beamed—but he wondered how, in the labyrinth of rooms, he would ever find his way to her bed. He could not go around knocking on all the doors nor could he open them on screaming maids or the figure of Mrs. Enderby taking off her beads. He might stir up a hornet’s nest of servants”even the Count D’Alba—and precipitate a scandal that would end with his expulsion from Clear Haven. Melissa was smiling so sweetly that he thought she must have a plan and she kissed him decorously and whispered, “Over the roof.” Then she spoke for the benefit of the others. “I’ll see you in the morning, Moses. Pleasant dreams.”