The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [128]
She said that the bedding in the house had not been washed for months. The maids kept drawing from the linen closets and she had found the laundry chute full of sheets. Moses knew enough not to suggest that she send the sheets to a laundry. He could sense that cleanliness was not her purpose. She had successfully discredited her beauty. She must have found the dress she was wearing in a broom closet and her golden-skinned arms were red with hot water. Her hair was stringy and her mouth was set in an expression of extreme distaste. He loved her passionately and when he saw all of this his face fell.
Other than the dark brown photograph of her mother, sitting in a carved chair, holding a dozen roses head down, he did not know her family. The parents, the aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters to whom we can sometimes trace a change of character were unknown to him and if she was overtaken now by the shadow of some aunt it was an aunt he had never seen. Watching her stuff sheets into the washing machine he wished briefly, for once, that her status had not been that of an orphan. Her energies seemed penitential and he would let it go at that. He had not fallen in love with her because of her gift with arithmetic, because of her cleanliness, her reasonable mind or any other human excellence. It was because he perceived in her some extraordinary inner comeliness or grace that satisfied his needs. “Don’t you have anything to do but sit there?” she asked sorely. He said yes, yes, and went up the stairs.
Justina met him in the hall with great cordiality. Her eyes were wide and her voice was an excited whisper when she asked if Melissa was in the laundry. “Perhaps we should have told you before you married,” she said, “but you know that Melissa has been very, very—” the word she wanted was too crude and she settled for a modulation—“she has never been very tractable. Come,” she said to Moses, “come and have a drink. D’Alba has some whisky, I think. We need something more than sherry tonight.” The picture she evoked was cozy and although Moses felt the naked edge of her mischievousness he had nothing better to do than walk in the garden and stare at the roses. He went down the hall at her side. D’Alba produced a bottle of whisky from underneath the throne and they all had a drink. “Is she having a breakdown?” D’Alba asked. They were halfway through the soup when Melissa appeared, wearing her broom-closet dress. When she came to the table Moses stood but she did not look in his direction and she did not speak during the meal. After dinner Moses asked if she would like to take a walk but Melissa said that she had to hang out the sheets.
Justina met Moses at the door the next night with a long and an excited face and said that Melissa was ill. “Indisposed perhaps would be a better word,” she said. She asked Moses to have a drink with her and D’Alba but he said that he would go up and see Melissa. “She’s not in your room,” Justina said. “She’s moved to one of the other bedrooms. I don’t know which one. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.” Moses looked first into their bedroom to make sure she was not there and then went down the hall, calling her name loudly, but there was no reply. He tried the door of the room next to theirs and looked into a room with a canopied bed but at some time in the past a large piece of the ceiling had fallen and fragments of plaster hung from this cavity. The curtains were drawn and the damps of the room were sepulchral—ghostly he would have said if he had not had such a great scorn for ghosts. The next door that he opened led into an unused bathroom—the tub was filled with newspapers tied into bundles—and the room was lighted