The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [124]
“What is the meaning of this, Melissa?”
“Oh, Justina,” Melissa said gallantly. “I think you know all these people.”
“I may know them,” Justina said, “but what are they doing here?”
“I’ve asked them for cocktails,” Melissa said.
“Well, that’s very inconvenient,” Justina said. “This day of all days. I told Giacomo he could take up the rugs and clean them.”
“We can go into the winter garden,” Melissa said timidly.
“How many times have I told you, Melissa, that I don’t want you to take guests into the winter garden?”
“I’ll call Giacomo,” Moses said to Justina. “Here, let me get you some whisky.”
Moses gave Justina her whisky and she sat on the sofa and regarded the dumb-struck company with a charming smile. “If you insist on inviting people here, Melissa,” she said, “I wish you ask my advice. If we’re not careful the house will be full of pickpockets and hoboes.” The guests retreated toward the door and Melissa walked them out to the rotunda. When she returned to the hall she sat down in a chair, not beside Moses, but opposite her guardian. Moses had never seen her face so dark.
The rain had let up. Close to the horizon the heavy clouds had split as if they had been lanced and a liquid brilliance gorged through the cut, spread up the lawn and came through the glass doors, lighting the hall and the old woman’s face. The hundred windows of the house would glitter for miles. Ursuline nuns, bird watchers, motorists and fishermen would admire the illusion of a house bathed in flame. Feeling the light on her face and feeling that it became her, Justina smiled her most narcissistic smile—that patrician gaze that made it seem as if all the world were hung with minors. “I only do this because I love you so, Melissa,” she said, and she worked her fingers loaded with diamonds, emeralds and glass in the light that was fading.
Then the stillness of a trout pool seemed to settle over the room. Justina seemed to make a lure of false promises and Melissa to watch her shadow as it fell through the water to the sand, trying to find in her guardian’s larcenous words some truth. Justina’s face gleamed with rouge and her eyebrows shone with black dye and it seemed to Moses that somewhere in the maquillage must be the image of an old woman. Her face would be seamed, her clothes would be black, her voice would be cracked and she would knit blankets and sweaters for her grandchildren, take in her roses before the frost and speak mostly of friends and relations who had departed this life.
“This house is a great burden,” Justina said, “and I have no one to help me bear it. I would love to give it all to you, Melissa, but I know that if you should predecease Moses he would sell it to the first bidder.”
“I promise not to,” Moses said cheerfully.
“Oh, I wish I could be sure,” she sighed. Then she rose, still beaming, and went to her ward. “But don’t let there be any hard feeling between us, sweet love, even if I have broken up your little party. I warned you about the rugs, but you’ve never had much sense. I’ve always been able to wrap you around my fingers.”
“I won’t have this, Justina,” Moses said.
“Keep out of this, Moses.”
“Melissa is my wife.”
“You’re not her first husband and you won’t be her last and she’s had a hundred lovers.”
“You’re wicked, Justina.”
“I’m wicked, as you say, and I’m rude and I’m boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr. Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.” Then she turned to him again her best smile and he saw for once how truly powerful this old dancing mistress had been in her heyday and how she was like an old Rhine princess, an exile from the abandoned