This 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.
Now 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.”
Badger 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.”
“I wouldn’t be interested,” Moses said.
“You mean you don’t want to make any money? Oh, Melissa will be very disappointed.”
“You haven’t talked this over with Melissa.”
“Well, not really, but I know that she’ll be very disappointed.”
“I haven’t fifteen thousand dollars,” Moses said.
“You mean to tell me that you don’t have fifteen thousand dollars?”
“That’s right,” Moses said.
“Oh,” Badger said. “What about the general? Do you know if he’s worth anything?”
“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.”
The fact that Justina was parting with her art treasures because she knew no one trustworthy made the next day both elegiac and exciting.
Mr. Dewitt, the curator, was due at one and it happened to be Moses who let him into the rotunda. He was a slight man who wore a brown felt hat that was so many sizes too small for him that he looked like Boob McNutt. Moses wondered if he hadn’t picked out the wrong hat at a cocktail party. His face was slender and deeply lined—he tipped his head a little as if his baggy eyes were nearsighted—and the length and triangularity of his nose were extraordinary. This thin and angular organ seemed elegant and lewd—a vice, a penance, a gift of the devil’s—and reinforced a general impression of elegance and lewdness. He must have been fifty—the bags under his eyes couldn’t have been formed in a shorter time—but he carried himself gracefully and spoke with a little impediment as if a hair had gotten onto his tongue. “Not pork, not pork!” he exclaimed, sniffing the stale air of the rotunda. “I’m simply pasted together.” When Moses assured him that they would have chicken he put on some horn-rimmed glasses and, looking around the rotunda, noticed the big panel at the left of the stairs. “What a charming forgery,” he cried. “Of course I think the Mexicans make the most charming forgeries, but this is delightful. It was made in Zurich. There was a factory there in the early nineteen hundreds that turned them out by the carload. The interesting thing is their lavish use of carmine. None of the originals are nearly as brilliant.” Then some smell in the rotunda turned his mind back to the thought of lunch. “You’re sure it isn’t pork?” he asked again. “My tummy is a wreck.” Moses reassured him and they went down the long hall to where Justina was waiting for them. She was triumphantly gracious and sounded all those rich notes of requited social ambition that made her voice seem to carry up into the hills and down to the shadow of the valleys.
Mr. Dewitt clasped his hands when he saw all the pictures in the hall but Moses wondered why his smile should be so fleeting. He carried his cocktail over to the big Titian.
“Astonishing, astonishing, perfectly astonishing,” Mr. Dewitt said.
“We found that Titian in a ruined palace in Venice,” Justina said. “A gentleman at the hotel—an Englishman, I recall—knew about it and showed us the way. It was like a detective story. The painting belonged to a very old countess and had been in her family for generations. I don’t clearly recall what we paid her but if you will get the catalogue, Niki?”
D’Alba got the catalogue and leafed through it. “Sixty-five thousand,” he said.
“We found the Gozzoli in another hovel. It was Mr. Scaddon’s favorite painting. We found it through the assistance of another stranger. I believe we met him on a train. The painting was so dirty and so covered with cobwebs when we first saw it and hung in such a dark room that Mr. Scaddon decided against it but we later realized that we could not be too particular and in the morning we changed our minds.”