He ran down the back stairs and across the rotunda and took the old elevator to the bedrooms on the other side of the house. Badger’s door was shut but when he knocked no one answered. When he opened the door and stepped in the first thing he heard was the loud noise of rain from the balcony. There was no sign of Badger in the room. Moses went out onto the balcony and swung up onto the roof and sure enough, about a hundred yards away from him and moving very cautiously, bent at the waist and sweeping the air around his feet with his hands like a swimmer (he must have been tripped up by the old radio wire), was Badger. Moses called his name. Badger began to run.
He seemed to know the way; he steered clear of the airshaft anyhow. He ran toward the pyramidal roof that the chapel made and then turned right and ran along the pitched slate roof of the hall. Moses came around the other side but Badger retreated and got back onto the straightaway and began running toward D’Alba’s lighted dormer. Halfway across the flat roof Moses outstripped him and clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“It isn’t what you think,” Badger said. Then Moses hit him and down Badger went on his bum and he must have sat on a nail because he let out such a hoarse, loud roar of pain that the count stuck his head out of a window.
“Who’s there, who’s there?”
“It’s Badger and me,” Moses said.
“If Justina hears about this she’ll be wild,” the count said. “She doesn’t like people to walk on the roofs. It makes leaks. And what in the world are you doing?”
“I’m on my way to bed,” Moses said.
“Oh, I wish you’d give a civil answer to a sensible question once in a while,” the count said. “I’m terribly, terribly tired of your sense of humor and so is Justina. It’s a terrible comedown for her to have people like you in the house after having spent her life in the highest society including royalty, and she told me herself …” The voice got fainter as Moses continued along the ledge to above Melissa’s balcony, his feelings blasted with anger. Then he sat on the roof with his feet in the rain gutter for half an hour, composing an obscene indictment of her intractableness and seeming to release this into the night until the stony rage in his gut diminished. Then, realizing that if he was to find any usable truth in the situation, he would have to find it in himself, he swung down onto the balcony, undressed and got into bed where Melissa was asleep.
But Moses had wronged Badger. There had not been a lecherous thought in his head when he started over the roofs. He had been very drunk. But there was some magnanimity in the man—a trace of the raw material of human excellence—or at least enough scope in his emotions to set the scene for a conflict, and when he woke early the next morning he reproached himself for his drunkenness and his crazy schemes. He could see the world out of his window then all blue and gold and round as a bull’s eye but all the sapphire-colored lights in heaven merely chilled Badger’s spirit and excited in him a desire to retire into some dark, badly ventilated place. The world, in the partial lights of early morning, appeared to him as hypocritical and offensive as the smile of a door-to-door salesman. Nothing was true, thought Badger; nothing was what it appeared to be, and the enormity of this deception—the subtlety with which the color of the sky deepened as he dressed—angered him. He got down through the rotunda without meeting anyone—not even a rat—and telephoned Giacomo, although it was not six o’clock, and Giacomo drove him to the station.
The early train was a local and all the passengers were night-shift workmen, returning home. Looking into their tired and dirty faces Badger felt a longing for what he thought to be their humble ways. If he had been brought up simply his life would have had more meaning and value, the better parts of his disposition would have been given a chance to develop and he would not have wasted his gifts. Shaken with drink and self-reproach, he felt it was plain that morning that he had wasted them beyond any chance of their renewal, and images of his earlier life—a high-spirited and handsome boy, bringing in the terrace furniture before a thunderstorm—rose up to reinforce his self-condemnation. Then at the nadir of his depression light seemed to strike into Badger’s mind, for it was the force of his imagination rebelling against utter despair, to raise white things in his head—cities or archways at least of marble—signs of prosperity, triumph and splendor.
Then whole palladia seemed to mushroom beneath Badger’s patent-leather hair, the cities and villas of a younger world, and he made the trip into the city in a hopeful mood. But sitting over his first cup of coffee in the hole-in-the-wall where he lived Badger saw that his marble white civilizations were helpless before invaders. These snowy, high-arched constructions of principle, morality and faith—these palaces and memorials—were overrun with hordes of war-whooping, half-naked men, dressed in the stinking skins of beasts. In they rode at the north gate and as Badger sat huddled over his cup, he saw one by one his temples and palaces go. Out the south gate rode the barbarians, leaving poor Badger without even the consolation of a ruin; leaving him with a nothingness and with his essence, which was never much better than the perfume of a wood violet gone.
“Mamma e Papa Confettiere arrivan’ domani sera,” Giacomo said. He was screwing light bulbs once more into the long string of fixtures that were hung in the trees of the driveway. Melissa met Moses sweetly at the door as she had done on his first night there and told him that some old friends of Justina’s were arriving on the next night. Mrs. Enderby was in the office, telephoning invitations, and D’Alba was running around the hall in an apron, giving orders to a dozen maids that Moses had never seen before. The place was upside down. Doors were thrown open onto bat-smelling parlors and Giacomo took the bed pillows out of the broken windows in the winter garden where palm trees and rose bushes were being unloaded from trucks. There was no place to sit down and they had sandwiches and drinks in the hall where the Scaddonville Symphony Orchestra (eight ladies) undressed the harp of its cracked mackintosh and tuned their instruments. Then the glee of the old upside-down palace on the eve of a party reminded Moses of West Farm, as if this house, like the other, lay deep in their consciousness—even in the dreams of the fly-by-night maids, who exhumed and burnished the old rooms as if they were improving their wisdom. Bats were found in the big basement kitchens and two of the maids came screaming up the stairs with dish towels over their heads but this small incident discouraged no one and only seemed to heighten the antic atmosphere, for who, these days, was rich enough to have bats in their kitchen? The big chests in the cellar were filled with beef and wine and flowers and all the fountains played in the gardens and water poured out of the green-mouthed lions in the plunge and a thousand lights or more burned in the house and the driveway was beaded with lights like a country fair and lights burned here and there in the garden, forlorn and unshaded like the lights in rooming-house hallways and with all the doors and windows open at ten or eleven and the night air suddenly cold and a thin moon in the sky over the broadest lawns Moses was reminded of some wartime place, some poignance of furlough and leave-takings, headlines and good-by dances in beery ports like Norfolk and San Francisco where the dark ships waited in the roads for the lovers in their beds and none of it might ever happen again.
And who were Mamma and Papa Confettiere? They were the Belamontes, Luigi and Paula, the last of the haut monde of the prezzo unico botteghe. She was the daughter of a Calabrian farmer and Luigi was spawned in the back of a Roman barbershop that smelled of violets and old hair, but at the age of eighteen he had saved enough money to stock a prezzo unico store. He was the Woolworth, he was the Kress, he was the J. P. Scaddon of Italy and had made himself into a millionaire with villas in the south and castles in the north by the time that he was thirty. He had retired in his fifties and for the last twenty years had motored around Italy with his wife in a Daimler, throwing hard candies out of the windows of their car to the children in the street.