The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [109]
of veiling, had addressed the four hundred envelopes and come to the dinner table for a week with ink-stained fingers and an ink-spotted blouse, her eyes red from checking Justina’s addresses against a copy of the Social Register that could have been printed no later than 1918. Giacomo mailed the cards with his blessing (“She’sa lovely, Missa Scaddon”) and the cards were delivered to brownstones in the East Fifties that had been transformed from homesteads into showrooms for Italian neckties, art galleries, antique dealers, walk-up apartments and offices of such organizations as the English-Speaking Union and the Svenskameri-kanska Förbundet. Further uptown and further east the invitations were received by the tail-coated doormen of eighteen- and twenty-story apartment buildings where the names of Justina’s friends and peers struck a spark in no one’s memory. Up Fifth Avenue invitations were delivered to more apartment houses as well as to institutes of costume design, slapdash rooming houses, finishing schools and to the offices of the American Irish Historical Society and the Sino-American Amity, Inc. They were exposed to the sootfall among other uncollected mail (old bills from Tiffany and copies of The New Yorker) in houses with boarded-up front doors. They lay on the battered tables of progressive kinder-gartens where children could be heard laughing and weeping and they fell into the anonymous passageways of houses that, built with an open hand, had been remodeled with a tight one and where people cooked their dinners in the morning room and the library. An invitation was received at the Jewish Museum, at the downtown branch of Columbia University, at the French and the Jugoslavian consulates, at the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations, at several fraternity houses, actors’ clubs, bridge clubs, milliners and dressmakers. Further afield invitations were received by the Mother Superiors of the Ursuline Order, the Poor Clares and the Sisters of Mercy. They were received by the overseers of Jesuit schools and retreats, Franciscan Fathers, Cowley Fathers, Paulists and Misericordia Sisters. They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets. When the bells of Saint Michael’s rang that afternoon there were no more than twenty-five people in the body of the church and two of these were rooming-house proprietors who had come out of curiosity. When the time came Moses said the words loudly and with a full heart. After the ceremony most of the guests returned to Clear Haven and danced to the music of a phonograph. Sarah and Leander performed a stately waltz and said good-by. The maids filled the old champagne bottles with cheap sauterne and when the summer dusk had fallen and all the chandeliers were lighted the main fuse blew once more. Giacomo repaired it and Moses went upstairs and entered Melissa’s room by the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The rocket-launching sites at Remsen Park were fifteen miles to the south and this presented a morale problem for there were hundreds or thousands of technicians like Coverly who knew nothing about the beginnings or the ends of their works. The administration met this problem by having public rocket launchings on Saturday afternoons. Transportation was furnished so that whole families could pack their sandwiches and beer and sit in bleachers to hear the noise of doom crack and see a fire that seemed to lick at the vitals of the earth. These firings were not so different from any other kind of picnic, although there were no softball games or band concerts; but there was beer to drink and children strayed and were lost and the jokes the crowd made while they waited for an explosion that was calculated to pierce the earth’s atmosphere were very human. Betsey loved all of this, but it hardly modified her feeling that Remsen Park was