The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [132]
Melissa had dressed and they drank a glass of wine. Moses was standing in the shower when all the lights went out. Then every voice in what had been a hushed place was raised in alarm and dismay and someone who was stuck in the old elevator cage began to pound on the walls. Melissa brought a lighted candle into the bathroom and Moses was pulling on some trousers when the lights went on again. Giacomo was around. They drank another glass of wine on the balcony, watching the cars arrive. Jacopo was directing them to park on the lawns. God knows where Mrs. Enderby had found the guests, but she had found enough for once and the noise of talk, even from the third floor, sounded like the October sea at Travertine.
There must have been a hundred people in the hall when Moses and Melissa went down. D’Alba was at one end and Mrs. Enderby at the other, steering servants toward people with empty glasses, and Justina stood by the fireplace beside an elderly Italian couple, swarthy, egg-shaped, merry and knowing, Moses discovered when he shook hands with them, not a word of English. The dinner was splendid, with three wines and cigars and brandy on the terrace afterward, and then the Scaddonville Symphony Orchestra began to play “A Kiss in the Dark,” and they all went in to dance.
Badger was there, although he had not been invited. He walked up from the station after dinner and hung around the edges of the dance floor, a little drunk. He could not have said why he had come. Then Justina saw him and the corrosive glance she gave him and the fact that she was not wearing any jewelry reminded Badger of his purpose. That evening had for him the savor of a man who finds his destiny and adores it. This was his finest hour. He went upstairs and started once more over those roofs (he could hear the music in the distance) that he had crossed often enough for love himself, but that he crossed now with a much deeper sense of purpose. He headed for Justina’s balcony at the north end of the house and entered that big chamber with its vaulted ceiling and massive bed. (Justina never slept in this; she slept on a little cot behind a screen.) The decision against her jewelry must have been made suddenly for it was all heaped on the cracked and peeling surface of her dressing table. He found a paper bag in her closet—she collected paper and string—and filled this with her valuables. Then, trusting in Divine Providence, he left boldly by the door, went down the stairs, crossed the lawns with the music growing fainter and fainter and caught the 11:17 into the city.
When Badger boarded the train he had no idea of how he would dispose of the jewelry. He may have thought of prying some of the stones out of their settings and selling them. The train was a local—the last—taking back to the city people who had been visiting friends and relations. They all seemed tired; some of them were drunk; and, sweating and sleeping fitfully in the overheated coach, they seemed, to Badger, to share a great commonality of intimacy and weariness. Most of the men had taken off their hats but their hair was matted with the pressure of hat brims. The women wore their finery but they wore it awry and their curls had begun to come undone. Many of them slept with their heads on the shoulders of their men, and the smells—and the looseness of most of the faces he saw—made Badger feel as if the coach was some enormous bed or cradle in which they all lay together in a state of unusual innocence. They shared the discomforts of the coach, they shared a destination and for all their shabbiness and fatigue they seemed to Badger to share some beauty of mind and purpose, and looking at the dyed red head of the woman in front of him he attributed to her the ability to find, a shade below the level of consciousness, an imagery of beauty and grandeur like those great, ruined palladia that rose in Badgers head.
He loved them all—Badger loved them all—and what he had done he had done for them, for they failed only in their inability to help one another and by stealing Justina’s jewelry he had done something to diminish this failure. The red-headed woman in the seat in front moved him with love, with amorousness and with pity, and she touched her curls so often and with such simple vanity that he guessed her hair had just been dyed and this in turn touched him as Badger would have been touched to see a sweet child picking the petals off a daisy. Suddenly the red-headed woman straightened up and asked in a thick voice,