The lot exhaled the power of a family, Moses thought, and the glee they took in their own nonsense, and looking from the headstones to Melissa’s face he saw hopefully that her expression seemed to be softened by the foolish graveyard, but he decided to take his time and followed her out of the lot down a path to the barns and greenhouses when they both stopped to hear the loud, musical singing of some night bird. It sounded in the distance, on the early dark, with the brilliance of a knife, and Melissa was captivated. “You know J. P. wanted to have nightingales,” she said. “He imported hundreds and hundreds of nightingales from England. He had a special nightingale keeper and a nightingale house. When we came back from England the first thing we did on the boat after breakfast was to go down into the hold and feed mealy worms to the nightingales. They all died. . . .”
Then looking past her, to the roof of the barn where the night bird seemed to be perched, Moses saw that it was not a bird at all; it was the plaintive song of a rusty ventilator as it turned on the night wind; and feeling that this discovery might change the sentimental mood that the twilight, the graveyard and the song promised he led her hurriedly into the old greenhouse and made a bed of his clothing on the floor. Much later that night, when they had returned to the house, and Moses, his bones feeling light and clean with love, was waiting for sleep he had every reason to wonder if she had not transformed herself into something else.
This suspicion was renewed the next night when he stepped into their room and found her on the bed wearing a single stocking and reading a love story she had borrowed from one of the maids and when he kissed her and joined her where she lay her breath smelled, not unpleasantly, of candy. But on the next night, walking across the lawns from the station, Moses was reminded of those noisome details in her past that Justina liked to dwell on. She was on the terrace with Jacopo, one of the young gardeners. She was cutting Jacopo’s hair. Even at a distance the sight made Moses uneasy and sad, for the insatiableness that he adored left the possibilities of inconstancy open and he conceived for Jacopo a hatred that was murderous. Lewd and comely and laughing while she snipped and combed his hair, he seemed to Moses to be one of those figures who stand outside the brightly lighted centers of our consciousness and defeat our love of candor and our confidence in the sweetness of life, but Melissa sent Jacopo away when Moses joined them and displayed her affection for Moses brilliantly in greeting him and he did not worry about the gardener or anything else until, a few nights later, walking down the hall, he heard laughter from their bedroom and found Melissa and a stranger drinking whisky on the balcony. This was Ray Badger.
Now the dubiousness of visiting a former wife did not, Moses supposed, concern him. His rival, if Badger was still a rival, had a hard-finish suit, a cast in one eye and patent-leather hair. He meant to be charming, when Moses joined them, but the memories he shared with Melissa—he had fed the nightingales—were confined to the past at Clear Haven and Moses was kept out of the conversation. Melissa had seldom mentioned Badger and if she had been unhappy with him it did not show that evening. She was delighted with his company and his recollections—delighted and sad, for when he had left them she spoke sentimentally to Moses about her former husband. “He’s just like an eighteen-year-old boy,” she said. “He’s always done what other people wanted him to do and now, at thirty-five, he’s just realized that he never expressed himself. I feel so
