Page 43 of The Stories of John Cheever

  His next teacher was a very plain woman with gray hair and a lavender shawl that she must have knitted herself, it was so full of knots and tangles. She was an excellent teacher for a month, and then one evening she told him that her life was difficult. She waited to be encouraged to tell him her troubles, and when he did not give her any encouragement, she told them to him anyhow. She had been engaged to be married for twenty years, but the mother of her betrothed disapproved of the match and, whenever the subject was raised, would climb up onto the window sill and threaten to jump into the street. Now her betrothed was sick, he would have to be cut open (she gestured) from the neck to the navel, and if he died she would go to her grave a spinster. Her wicked sisters had got pregnant in order to force their marriages—one of them had walked down the aisle eight months gone (more gestures)—but she would rather (with a hitch at her lavender shawl) solicit men in the street than do that. Streeter listened helplessly to her sorrow, as we will listen to most human troubles, having some of our own, but she was still talking when her next student, a Japanese, came in for his lesson, and Streeter had learned no Italian that night. She had not told Streeter all of the story, and she continued it when he came again. The fault might have been his—he should have discouraged her rudely—but now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship. The force he had to cope with was the loneliness that is to be found in any large city, and he invented another trip to Perugia. He had two more teachers, two more trips to Perugia, and then, in the late autumn of his second year in Rome, someone from the Embassy recommended Kate Dresser.

  An American woman who teaches Italian in Rome is unusual, but then all arrangements in Rome are so complicated that lucidity and skepticism give way when we try to follow the description of a scene in court, a lease, a lunch, or anything else. Each fact or detail breeds more questions than it answers, and in the end we lose sight of the truth, as we were meant to do. Here comes Cardinal Micara with the True Finger of Doubting Thomas—that much is clear—but is the man beside us in church asleep or dead, and what are all the elephants doing in the Piazza Venezia?

  The lessons took place at one end of a huge sala, by the fireplace. Streeter spent an hour and sometimes two hours preparing for them. He finished Pinocchio and began to read I Promessi Sposi. After this would come the Divine Comedy. He was as proud as a child of his completed homework, loved to be given tests and dictation, and usually came into Kate’s apartment with a big, foolish smile on his face, he was so pleased with himself. She was a very good teacher. She understood his fatuousness, the worn condition of his middle-aged memory, and his desire to learn. She spoke an Italian that he could almost always understand, and by keeping a wristwatch on the table to mark the period, by sending him bills through the mail, and by never speaking of herself, she conducted the lessons in an atmosphere that was practical and impersonal. He thought she was a good-looking woman—intense, restless, overworked, perhaps, but charming.

  Among the things that Kate Dresser did not tell him, as they sat in this part of the room that she had staked out for herself with a Chinese screen and some rickety gold chairs, was the fact that she was born and raised in the little town of Krasbie, Iowa. Her father and mother were both dead. In a place where almost everybody worked in the chemical-fertilizer factory, her father had happened to be a trolley conductor. When she was growing up, Kate could never bring herself to admit that her father took fares in a trolley car. She could never even admit that he was her father, although she had inherited his most striking physical feature—a nose that turned up so spectacularly at the tip that she was called Roller Coaster and Pug. She had gone from Krasbie to Chicago, from Chicago to New York, where she married a man in the Foreign Service. They lived in Washington and then Tangier. Shortly after the war, they moved to Rome, where her husband died of food poisoning, leaving her with a son and very little money. So she made her home in Rome. The only preparation Krasbie had given her for Italy was the curtain in the little movie theatre where she had spent her Saturday afternoons when she was a girl. Skinny then, dressed no better than most rebellious children and smelling no sweeter, her hair in braids, her pockets full of peanuts and candy and her mouth full of chewing gum, she had put down her quarter every Saturday afternoon, rain or shine, and spread herself out in a seat in the front row. There were shouts of “Roller Coaster!” and “Pug!” from all over the theatre, and, what with the high-heeled shoes (her sister’s) that she sometimes wore and the five-and-tencent-store diamonds on her fingers, it was no wonder that people made fun of her. Boys dropped chewing gum into her hair and shot spitballs at the back of her skinny neck, and, persecuted in body and spirit, she would raise her eyes to the curtain and see a remarkably precise vision of her future. It was painted on canvas, very badly cracked from having been rolled and unrolled so many times—a vision of an Italian garden, with cypress trees, a terrace, a pool and fountain, and a marble balustrade with roses spilling from marble urns. She seemed literally to have risen up from her seat and to have entered the cracked scene, for it was almost exactly like the view from her window into the courtyard of the Palazzo Tarominia, where she lived.

  Now, you might ask why a woman who had so little money was living in the Palazzo Tarominia, and there was a Roman answer. The Baronessa Tramonde—the old Duke of Rome’s sister—lived in the west wing of the palace, in an apartment that had been built for Pope Andros X and that was reached by a great staircase with painted walls and ceilings. It had pleased the Baronessa, before the war, to stand at the head of this staircase and greet her friends and relations, but things had changed. The Baronessa had grown old, and so had her friends; they could no longer climb the stairs. Oh, they tried. They had straggled up to her card parties like a patrol under machine-gun fire, the gentlemen pushing the ladies and sometimes vice versa, and old marchesas and princesses—the cream of Europe—huffing and puffing and sitting down on the steps in utter exhaustion. There was a lift in the other wing of the palace—the wing Kate lived in—but a lift could not be installed in the west wing, because it would ruin the paintings. The only other way to enter the Baronessa’s quarters was to take the lift to Kate’s apartment and walk through it and out a service door that led into the other wing. By giving the Duke of Rome, who also had an apartment in the Palazzo, a kind of eminent domain, Kate had a palace apartment at a low rent. The Duke usually passed through twice a day to visit his sister, and on the first Thursday of every month, at five minutes after eight, a splendid and elderly company would troop through Kate’s rooms to the Baronessa’s card party. Kate did not mind. In fact, when she heard the doorbell ring on Thursdays her heart would begin a grating beat of the deepest excitement. The old Duke always led the procession. His right hand had been chopped off at the wrist by one of Mussolini’s public executioners, and now that the old man’s enemies were dead, he carried the stump proudly. With him would come Don Fernando Marchetti, the Duke of Treno, the Duke and Duchess Ricotto-Sporci, Count Ambro di Albentiis, Count and Countess Fabrizio Daromeo, Princess Urbana Tessoro, Princess Isabella Tessoro, and Federico Cardinal Baldova. They had all distinguished themselves in one way or another. Don Fernando had driven a car from Paris to Peking, via the Gobi Desert. Duke Ricotto-Sporci had broken most of his bones in a steeplechase accident, and the Countess Daromeo had operated an Allied radio station in the middle of Rome during the German Occupation. The old Duke of Rome would present Kate with a little bouquet of flowers, and then he and his friends would file through the kitchen and go out the service door.

  Kate spoke an admirable Italian, and had done some translating and given lessons, and for the past three years she had supported herself and her son by dubbing parts of English dialogue into old Italian movies, which were then shown over British TV. With her cultivated accent, she played mostly dowagers and the like, but there seemed to be plenty of work, and she spent much of her time in a sound studio near the Tiber. With her salary and the money her husband had left her, she
had barely enough to get by on. Her elder sister, in Krasbie, wrote her a long lament two or three times a year: “Oh, you lucky, lucky dog, Kate! Oh, how I envy you being away from all the tiresome, nagging, stupid, petty details of life at home.” Kate Dresser’s life was not lacking in stupid and nagging details, but instead of mentioning such things in her letters, she inflamed her sister’s longing to travel by sending home photographs of herself in gondolas, or cards from Florence, where she always spent Easter with friends.

  STREETER KNEW that under Kate Dresser’s teaching he was making progress with his Italian, and usually when he stepped out of the Palazzo Tarominia into the street after his lesson, he was exhilarated at the thought that in another month—at the end of the season, anyhow—he would understand everything that was going on and being said. But his progress had its ups and downs.

  The beauty of Italy is not easy to come by any longer, if it ever was, but, driving to a villa below Anticoli for a weekend with friends, Streeter saw a country of such detail and loveliness that it could not be described. They had reached the villa early on a rainy night. Nightingales sang in the trees, the double doors of the villa stood open, and in all the rooms there were bowls of roses and olivewood fires. It had seemed, with the servants bowing and bringing in candles and wine, like some gigantic and princely homecoming in a movie, and, going out onto the terrace after dinner to hear the nightingales and see the lights of the hill towns, Streeter felt that he had never been put by dark hills and distant lights into a mood of such tenderness. In the morning, when he stepped out onto his bedroom balcony, he saw a barefoot maid in the garden, picking a rose to put in her hair. Then she began to sing. It was like a flamenco—first guttural and then falsetto—and poor Streeter found his Italian still so limited that he couldn’t understand the words of the song, and this brought him around to the fact that he couldn’t quite understand the landscape, either. His feeling about it was very much what he might have felt about some excellent resort or summer place—a scene where, perhaps as children, we have thrown ourselves into a temporary relationship with beauty and simplicity that will be rudely broken off on Labor Day. It was the evocation of a borrowed, temporary, bittersweet happiness that he rebelled against—but the maid went on singing, and Streeter did not understand a word.

  When Streeter took his lessons at Kate’s, her son, Charlie, usually passed through the sala at least once during the hour. He was a baseball fan, and had a bad complexion and an owlish laugh. He would say hello to Streeter and pass on some sports news from the Rome Daily American. Streeter had a son of his own of about the same age, and was enjoined by the divorce settlement from seeing the boy, and he never looked at Charlie without a pang of longing for his own son. Charlie was fifteen, and one of those American boys you see waiting for the school bus up by the Embassy, dressed in black leather jackets and Levi’s, and with sideburns or duck-tail haircuts, and fielder’s mitts—anything that will stamp them as American. These are the real expatriates. On Saturdays after the movies they go into one of those bars called Harry’s or Larry’s or Jerry’s, where the walls are covered with autographed photographs of unknown electric-guitar players and unknown soubrettes, to eat bacon and eggs and talk baseball and play American records on the jukebox. They are Embassy children, and the children of writers and oil-company and airline employees and divorcées and Fulbright Fellows. Eating bacon and eggs, and listening to the jukebox, they have a sense of being far, far from home that is a much sweeter and headier distillation than their parents ever know. Charlie had spent five years of his life under a ceiling decorated with gold that had been brought from the New World by the first Duke of Rome, and he had seen old marchesas with diamonds as big as acorns slip the cheese parings into their handbags when the lunch was finished. He had ridden in gondolas and played softball on the Palatine. He had seen the Palio at Siena, and had heard the bells of Rome and Florence and Venice and Ravenna and Verona. But it wasn’t about these things that he wrote in a letter to his mother’s Uncle George in Krasbie toward the middle of March. Instead, he asked the old man to take him home and let him be an American boy. The timing was perfect. Uncle George had just retired from the fertilizer factory and had always wanted to bring Kate and her son home. Within two weeks he was on board a ship bound for Naples.

  Streeter, of course, knew nothing of this. But he had suspected that there was some tension between Charlie and his mother. The boy’s hoedown American clothes, the poses he took as a rail splitter, pitcher, and cowboy, and his mother’s very Italianate manners implied room for sizable disagreement, at least, and, going there one Sunday afternoon, Streeter stepped into a quarrel. Assunta, the maid, let him in, but he stopped at the door of the sala when he heard Kate and her son shouting at one another in anger. Streeter could not retreat. Assunta had gone on ahead to say he was there, and all he could do was wait in the vestibule. Kate came out to him then—she was crying—and said, in Italian, that she could not give him a lesson that afternoon. She was sorry. Something had come up, and there had not been time to telephone him. He felt like a fool, confronted with her tears, holding his grammar, his copybook, and I Promessi Sposi under one arm. He said it didn’t matter about the lesson, it was nothing, and could he come on Tuesday? She said yes, yes, would he come on Tuesday—and would he come on Thursday, not for a lesson but to do her a favor? “My father’s brother—my Uncle George—is coming, to try and take Charlie home. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do. But I would appreciate it if there was a man here; I would feel so much better if I weren’t alone. You don’t have to say anything or do anything but sit in a chair and have a drink, but I would feel so much better if I weren’t alone.”

  Streeter agreed to come, and went away then, wondering what kind of a life it was she led if she had to count in an emergency on a stranger like him. With his lesson canceled and nothing else that he had to do, he took a walk up the river as far as the Ministry of the Marine, and then came back through a neighborhood that was neither new nor old nor anything else you could specify. Because it was Sunday afternoon, the houses were mostly shut. The streets were deserted. When he passed anyone, it was usually a family group returning from an excursion to the zoo. There were also a few of those lonely men and women carrying pastry boxes that you see everywhere in the world at dusk on Sunday—unmarried aunts and uncles going out to tea with their relations and bringing a little pastry to sweeten the call. But mostly he was alone, mostly there was no sound but his own footsteps and, in the distance, the iron ringing of iron trolley-car wheels on iron tracks—a lonely sound on Sunday afternoons for many Americans; a lonely one for him, anyhow, and reminding him of some friendless, loveless, galling Sunday in his youth. As he came closer to the city, there were more lights and people—flowers and the noise of talk—and under the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo a whore spoke to him. She was a beautiful young woman, but he told her, in his broken Italian, that he had a friend, and walked on.

  Crossing the Piazza, he saw a man struck by a car. The noise was loud—that surprising loudness of our bones when they are dealt a mortal blow. The driver of the car slipped out of his seat and ran up the Pincian Hill. The victim lay in a heap on the paving, a shabbily dressed man but with a lot of oil in his black, wavy hair, which must have been his pride. A crowd gathered—not solemn at all, although a few women crossed themselves—and everyone began to talk excitedly. The crowd, garrulous, absorbed in its own opinions and indifferent, it seemed, to the dying man, was so thick that when the police came they had to push and struggle to reach the victim. With the words of the whore still in his ears, Streeter wondered why it was that they regarded a human life as something of such dubious value.

  He turned away from the Piazza then, toward the river, and, passing the Tomb of Augustus, he noticed a young man calling to a cat and offering it something to eat. The cat was one of those thousands of millions that live in the ruins of Rome and eat leftover spaghetti, and the man was offering the cat a piece of bread. Then, as t
he cat approached him, the man took a firecracker out of his pocket, put it into the piece of bread, and lit the fuse. He put the bread on the sidewalk, and just as the cat took it the powder exploded. The animal let out a hellish shriek and leaped into the air, its body all twisted, and then it streaked over the wall and was lost in the darkness of Augustus’ Tomb. The man laughed at his trick, and so did several people who had been watching.

  Streeter’s first instinct was to box the man’s ears and teach him not to feed lighted firecrackers to stray cats. But, with such an appreciative audience, this would have amounted to an international incident, and he realized there wasn’t anything he could do. The people who had laughed at the prank were good and kind—most of them affectionate parents. You might have seen them earlier in the day on the Palatine, picking violets.

  Streeter walked on into a dark street and heard at his back the hoofs and trappings of horses—it sounded like cavalry—and stepped aside to let a hearse and a mourner’s carriage pass. The hearse was drawn by two pairs of bays with black plumes. The driver wore funerary livery, with an admiral’s hat, and had the brutish red face of a drunken horse thief. The hearse banged, slammed, and rattled over the stones in such a loose-jointed way that the poor soul it carried must have been in a terrible state of disarrangement, and the mourner’s carriage that followed was empty. The friends of the dead man had probably been too late or had got the wrong date or had forgotten the whole thing, as was so often the case in Rome. Off the hearse and carriage rattled toward the Servian Gate.