The Wishings’ dance was an annual affair. As Mrs. Wishing kept explaining, they gave it each year before the rugs were put down. There was a three-piece orchestra, a fine dinner, with glazed salmon, boeuf en daube, a dark flowery claret and a bar for drinks. By quarter after ten, Melissa felt bored and would have asked Moses to take her home, but he was in another room. Lovely and high-spirited, she was seldom bored. Watching the dancers, she thought of poor Mrs. Lockhart, who was being forced out of this society. On the other hand, she knew how easy, how mistaken it was to assume that the exceptions—the drunkard and the lewd—penetrate, through their excesses, the carapace of immortal society. Did Mrs. Lockhart know more about mankind than she, Melissa? Who did have the power of penetration? Was it the priest who saw how their hands trembled when they reached for the chalice, the doctor who had seen them stripped of their clothing, or the psychiatrist who had seen them stripped of their obdurate pride, and who was now dancing with a fat woman in a red dress? And what was penetration worth? What did it matter that the drunken and unhappy woman in the corner dreamed frequently that she was being chased through a grove of trees by a score of naked lyric poets? Melissa was bored, and she thought her dancing neighbors were bored, too. Loneliness was one thing, and she knew herself how sweet it could make lights and company seem, but boredom was something else, and why, in this most prosperous and equitable world, should everyone seem so bored and disappointed?
Melissa went to the bathroom. The Wishings’ house was large and she lost her way. She stepped by mistake into a dark bedroom. The moment she entered the room another woman, who must have been waiting, embraced her, groaning with ardor. Then realizing her mistake she said: “I’m terribly sorry,” and went out the door. Melissa saw only that she had dark hair and full skirts. She stood in the dark room for a moment, trying, with no success at all, to fit this encounter somewhere into the distant noise of dance music. It could only mean that two of her neighbors, two housewives, had fallen in love and had planned a rendezvous in the middle of the Wishings’ dance. But who could it have been? None of her neighbors seemed possible. It must have been someone from out of town; someone from the wicked world beyond Proxmire Manor. She stepped into the lighted hallway and found her way to where she had been going in the first place and all she seemed able to do was to forget the encounter. It had not happened.
She asked Bumps Trigger to get her a drink, and he brought her back a glass of dark bourbon. She felt a profound nostalgia, a longing for some emotional island or peninsula that she had not even discerned in her dreams. She seemed to know something about its character—it was not a paradise—but its elevating possibilities of emotional richness and freedom stirred her. It was the stupendous feeling that one could do much better than this; that the reality was not Mrs. Wishing’s dance; that the world was not divided into rigid parliaments of good and evil but was ruled by the absolute authority and range of her desire.
She began to dance then, and danced until three, when the band stopped playing. Her feelings had changed from boredom to a ruthless greed for pleasure. She did not ever want the party to stop, and stayed until dawn, when she then yielded to Moses’ attentions. Moses was a very attentive husband. He was attentive in boathouses and leaky canoes, on beaches and mossy banks, in motels, hotels, guest rooms, sofas, and day beds. The house rang nightly with his happy cries of abandon but within this lather of love there were rigid canons of decency and some forms of sexual commerce seemed to him shocking and distasteful. In the light of day (excepting Saturdays, Sundays and holidays) his standards of decency were exacting. He would smash any man in the nose who told a dirty story in mixed company and once spanked his little son for saying damn. He was the sort of paterfamilias who inspires sympathy for the libertine. Nightly he romanced Melissa, nightly he climbed confidently into bed, while the poor libertine enjoys no such security. He—love’s wanderer—must write letters, spend his income on flowers and jewelry, squire women to restaurants and theaters and listen to interminable reminiscences—How Mean My Sister Was To Me and The Night the Cat Died. He must apply his intelligence and his manual dexterity to the nearly labyrinthine complications of women’s clothing. He must anticipate problems of geography, caprices of taste, jealous husbands, suspicious cooks, all for a few hours’, sometimes a few moments’, stolen sweetness. He is denied the pleasures of friendship, he is a suspicious character to the police, and it is sometimes difficult for him to find employment, while the world smiles gently on that hairy brute, his married neighbor. This volcanic area that Moses shared with Melissa was immense, but it was the only one. They agreed on almost nothing else. They drank different brands of whisky, read different books and papers. Outside the dark circle of love they seemed almost like strangers, and glimpsing Melissa down a long dinner table he had once wondered who was that pretty woman with light hair. That this boisterousness, this attentiveness, was not entirely spontaneous was revealed to Melissa one morning when she opened a drawer in the hall table and found a series of clipped memos dated for a month or six weeks and titled: “Drink Score.” The entries ran: “12 noon 3 martinis. 3:20 1 pickmeup. 5:36 to 6:40 3 bourbons on train. 4 bourbons before dinner. 1 pint moselle. 2 whiskies after.” The entries didn’t vary much from day to day. She put them back into the drawer. It was something else to be forgotten.
Chapter VI
Incredible as it may seem, Honora Wapshot had never paid an income tax. Judge Beasely, who was nominally in charge of her affairs, assumed that she was cognizant of the tax laws and had never questioned her on the subject. Her oversight, her criminal negligence, might have been explained by her age. She may have felt herself too old to begin something new such as paying taxes or she may have felt that she would die before she was apprehended. Now and then the thought of her dereliction would waveringly cross her mind and she would suffer a fleeting pang of guilt, but, as she saw it, one of the privileges of age was a high degree of irresponsibility. In any case, she had never paid a tax and thus, one evening, a man named Norman Johnson got off the same train that had brought Coverly to St. Botolphs the night he saw his father’s ghost.
Mr. Jowett guessed from his clothing that he was a salesman and directed him to the Viaduct House. Mabel Moulton, who had been running the hotel since her father’s stroke, led him up the stairs to a room on the second floor back. “It isn’t much,” she explained, “but it’s all we have.” She left him alone to amplify her observation. The single window looked out across the river to the table-silver factory. In the corner there was a pitcher and a basin for washing. He saw a chamber pot under the bed. These primitive arrangements disturbed him. Imagine using a chamber pot at a time when men freely explored space! But did astronauts use chamber pots? Motormen’s helpers? What did they use? He dropped this subject to sniff the air of the room but the Viaduct House was a very old hotel and forgiveness was all you could bring to its odors. He hung both the suit he wore and the one in his bag in the closet. The collection of tin coat-racks there chimed the half-hour when he touched them. This ghostly music startled him and then the stillness of the place rushed in. There were footsteps in the room overhead. A man’s? A woman’s? The heels were hard but the step was heavy and he guessed they belonged to a man. But what was he doing? First the stranger walked from the window to the closet. Then he walked from the closet to the bed. Then he walked from the bed to the washstand and then from the washstand back to the window. His step was brisk, quick and urgent, but his comings and goings were senseless. Was he packing, was he dressing, was he shaving or was he, as Johnson knew from his own experience, simply moving aimlessly around an empty place, wondering what it was that he had forgotten?