Page 44 of The Stories of John Cheever

  Streeter knew one thing then: He did not want to die in Rome. He was in excellent health and had no reason to think about death; nevertheless, he was afraid. Back at his flat, he poured some whiskey and water into a glass and stepped out onto his balcony. He watched the night fall and the street lights go on with complete bewilderment at his own feelings. He did not want to die in Rome. The power of this idea could only stem from ignorance and stupidity, he told himself—for what could such a fear represent but the inability to respond to the force of life? He reproached himself with arguments and consoled himself with whiskey, but in the middle of the night he was waked by the noise of a carriage and horses’ hoofs, and again he sweated with fear. The hearse, the horse thief, and the empty mourner’s carriage, he thought, were rattling back, under his balcony. He got up out of bed and went to the window to see, but it was only two empty carriages going back to the stables.

  WHEN UNCLE GEORGE LANDED in Naples, on Tuesday, he was excited and in a good humor. His purpose in coming abroad was twofold—to bring Charlie and Kate home, and to take a vacation, the first in forty-three years. A friend of his in Krasbie who had been to Italy had written an itinerary for him: “Stay at the Royal in Naples. Go to the National Museum. Have a drink in the Galleria Umberto. Eat supper at the California. Good American food. Take the Roncari auto-pullman in the morning for Rome. This goes through two interesting villages and stops at Nero’s villa. In Rome stay at the Excelsior. Make reservations in advance.”

  On Wednesday morning, Uncle George got up early and went down to the hotel dining room. “Orange juice and ham and eggs,” he said to the waiter. The waiter brought him orange juice, coffee, and a roll. “Where’s my ham and eggs?” Uncle George asked, and then realized, when the waiter bowed and smiled, that the man did not understand English. He got out his phrase book, but there was nothing about ham and eggs. “You gotta no hamma?” he asked loudly. “You gotta no eggsa?” The waiter went on smiling and bowing, and Uncle George gave up. He ate the breakfast he hadn’t ordered, gave the waiter a twenty-lira tip, cashed four hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks at the desk, and checked out. All this money in lire made a bump in his suit jacket, and he held his left hand over his wallet as if he had a pain there. Naples, he knew, was full of thieves. He took a cab to the bus station, which was in a square near the Galleria Umberto. It was early in the morning, the light was slanting, and he enjoyed the smell of coffee and bread and the stir of people hurrying along the streets to work. A fine smell of the sea rose up the streets from the bay. He was early and was shown his seat in the bus by a red-faced gentleman who spoke English with a British accent. This was the guide—one of those who, whatever conveyance you take and wherever you go, make travel among the monuments bizarre. Their command of languages is extraordinary, their knowledge of antiquity is impressive, and their love of beauty is passionate, but when they separate themselves from the party for a moment it is to take a pull from a hip flask or to pinch a young pilgrim. They praise the ancient world in four languages, but their clothes are threadbare, their linen is dirty, and their hands tremble with thirst and lechery. While the guide chatted about the weather with Uncle George, the whiskey could already be smelled on his breath. Then the guide left Uncle George to greet the rest of the party, now coming across the square.

  There were about thirty—they moved in a flock, or mass, understandably timid about the strangeness of their surroundings—and they were mostly old women. As they came into the bus, they cackled (as we all will when we grow old), and made the fussy arrangements of elderly travelers. Then, with the guide singing the praises of ancient Naples, they started on their way.

  They first went along the coast. The color of the water reminded Uncle George of postcards he had received from Honolulu, where one of his friends had gone for a vacation. It was green and blue. He had never seen anything like it himself. They passed some resorts only half open and sleepy, where young men sat on rocks in their bathing trunks, waiting patiently for the sun to darken their skins. What did they think about? Uncle George wondered. During all those hours that they sat on rocks, what on earth did they think about? They passed a ramshackle colony of little bathhouses no bigger than privies, and Uncle George remembered—how many years ago—the thrill of undressing in such briny sea chambers as these when he had been taken to the seashore as a boy. As they turned inland, he craned his neck to get a last look at the sea, wondering why it should seem, shining and blue, like something that he remembered in his bones. Then they went into a tunnel and came out in farmland. Uncle George was interested in farming methods and admired the way that vines were trained onto trees. He admired the terracing of the land, and was troubled by the traces of soil erosion that he saw. And he recognized that he was separated only by a pane of glass from a life that was as strange to him as life on the moon.

  The bus, with its glass roof and glass windows, was like a fishbowl, and the sunlight and cloud shadows of the day fell among the travelers. Their way was blocked by a flock of sheep. Sheep surrounded the bus, isolated this little island of elderly Americans, and filled the air with dumb, harsh bleating. Beyond the sheep they saw a girl carrying a water jug on her head. A man lay sound asleep in the grass by the side of the road. A woman sat on a doorstep, suckling a child. Within the dome of glass the old ladies discussed the high price of airplane luggage. “Grace got ringworm in Palermo,” one of them said. “I don’t think she’ll ever be cured.

  The guide pointed out fragments of old Roman road, Roman towers and bridges. There was a castle on a hill—a sight that delighted Uncle George, and no wonder, for there had been castles painted on his supper plate when he was a boy, and the earliest books that had been read to him and that he had been able to read had been illustrated with castles. They had meant everything that was exciting and strange and wonderful in life, and now, by raising his eyes, he could see one against a sky as blue as the sky in his picture books.

  After traveling for an hour or two, they stopped in a village where there were a coffee bar and toilets. Coffee cost one hundred lire a cup, a fact that filled the ladies’ conversation for some time after they had started again. Coffee had been sixty lire at the hotel. Forty at the corner. They took pills and read from their guidebooks, and Uncle George looked out of the windows at this strange country, where the spring flowers and the autumn flowers seemed to grow side by side in the grass. It would be miserable weather in Krasbie, but here everything was in bloom—fruit trees, mimosa—and the pastures were white with flowers and the vegetable gardens already yielding crops.

  They came into a town or city then—an old place with crooked and narrow streets. He didn’t catch the name. The guide explained that there was a festa. The bus driver had to blow his horn continuously to make any progress, and two or three times came to a full stop, the crowd was so dense. The people in the streets looked up at this apparition—this fishbowl of elderly Americans—with such incredulity that Uncle George’s feelings were hurt. He saw a little girl take a crust of bread out of her mouth to stare at him. Women held their children up in the air to see the strangers. Windows were thrown open, bars were emptied, and people pointed at the curious tourists and laughed. Uncle George would have liked to address them, as he so often addresed the Rotary. “Don’t stare,” he wanted to say to them. “We are not so queer and rich and strange. Don’t stare at us.”

  The bus turned down a side street, and there was another stop for coffee and toilets. Most of the travelers scattered to buy postcards. Uncle George, seeing an open church across the street, decided to go inside. The air smelled of spice when he pushed the door open. The stone walls inside were bare—it was like an armory—and only a few candles burned in the chapels at the sides. Then Uncle George heard a loud voice and saw a man kneeling in front of one of the chapels, saying his prayers. He carried on in a way that Uncle George had never seen before. His voice was strong, supplicatory, sometimes angry. His face was wet with tears. He was beseeching the Cross for somethi
ng—an explanation or an indulgence or a life. He waved his hands, he wept, and his voice and his sobs echoed in the barny place. Uncle George went out and got back into his seat on the bus.

  They left the city for the country again, and a little before noon they stopped at the gates to Nero’s villa, bought their tickets, and went in. It was a large ruin, fanciful, and picked clean of everything but its brick supports. The place had been vast and tall, and now the walls and archways of roofless rooms, the butts of towers, stood in a stretch of green pasture, with nothing leading anywhere any more except to nothing, and all the many staircases mounting and turning stopped in midair. Uncle George left the party and wandered happily through these traces of a palace. The atmosphere seemed to him pleasant and tranquil—a little like the feeling in a forest—and he heard a bird singing and the noise of water. The forms of the ruins, all bristling with plants like the hair in an old man’s ears, seemed pleasantly familiar, as if his unremembered dreams had been played out against a scene like this. He found himself then in a place that was darker than the rest. The air was damp, and the senseless brick rooms, opening onto one another, were full of brush. It might have been a dungeon or a guardhouse or a temple where obscene rites were performed, for he was suddenly stirred licentiously by the damp. He turned back, looking for the sun, the water, and the bird, and found a guide standing in his path.

  “You wish to see the special place?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Very special,” the guide said. “For men only. Only for strong men. Such pictures. Very old.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred lire.”

  “All right.” Uncle George took two hundred lire out of his change pocket.

  “Come,” the guide said. “This way.” He walked on briskly—so briskly that Uncle George nearly had to run to keep up with him. He saw the guide go through a narrow opening in the wall, a place where the brick had crumbled, but when Uncle George followed him the guide seemed to have disappeared. It was a trap. He felt an arm around his throat, and his head was thrown back so violently that he couldn’t call for help. He felt a hand lift the wallet out of his pocket—a touch as light as the nibble of a fish on a line—and then he was thrown brutally to the ground. He lay there dazed for a minute or two. When he sat up, he saw that he had been left his empty wallet and his passport.

  Then he roared with anger at the thieves, and hated Italy, with its thieving population of organ grinders and bricklayers. But even during this outburst his anger was not as strong as a feeling of weakness and shame. He was terribly ashamed of himself, and when he picked up his empty wallet and put it in his pocket, he felt as if his heart had been plucked out and broken. Who could he blame? Not the damp ruins. He had asked for something that was by his lights all wrong, and he could only blame himself. The theft might happen every day—some lecherous old fool like him might be picked clean each time the bus stopped. He got to his feet, weary and sick of the old bones that had got him into trouble. He dusted the dirt off his clothes. Then he realized that he might be late. He might have missed the bus and be stranded in the ruins without a cent. He began to walk and run through the rooms, until he came out into a clearing and saw in the distance the flock of old ladies, still clinging to one another.

  The guide came out from behind a wall, and they all got in the bus and started off again.

  Rome was ugly; at least, the outskirts were: trolley cars and cut-rate furniture stores and torn-up streets and the sort of apartment houses that nobody ever really wants to live in. The old ladies began to gather their guidebooks and put on their coats and hats and gloves. Journey’s end is the same everywhere. Then, dressed for their destination, they all sat down again, with their hands folded in their laps, and the bus was still. “Oh, I wish I’d never come,” one old lady said to another. “I just wish I’d never left home.” She was not the only one.

  “Ecco, ecco Rome,” the guide said, and so it was.

  STREETER WENT to Kate’s at seven on Thursday. Assunta let him in, and, for the first time, he walked down the scala without his copy of I Promessi Sposi, and sat down by the fireplace. Charlie came in then. He had on the usual outfit—the tight Levi’s, with cuffs turned up, and a pink shirt. When he moved, he dragged or banged the leather heels of his loafers on the marble floor. He talked about baseball and exercised his owlish laugh, but he didn’t mention Uncle George. Neither did Kate, when she came in, nor did she offer Streeter a drink. She seemed to be in the throes of an emotional storm, with all her powers of decision suspended. They talked about the weather. At one point, Charlie came and stood by his mother, and she took both of his hands in one of hers. Then the doorbell rang, and Kate went down the room to meet her uncle. They embraced very tenderly—the members of a family—and when this was over he said, “I was robbed, Katie. I was robbed yesterday of four hundred dollars. Coming up from Naples on the bus.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said. “Wasn’t there anything you could do, George? Wasn’t there anyone you could speak to?”

  “Speak to, Katie? There hasn’t been anyone I could speak to since I got off the boat. No speaka da English. If you cut off their hands, they wouldn’t be able to say anything. I can afford to lose four hundred dollars—I’m not a poor man—but if I could only have given it to some worthwhile cause.”

  “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You’ve got quite a place here, Katie.”

  “And, Charlie, this is Uncle George.”

  If she had counted on their not getting along, this chance was lost in a second. Charlie forgot his owlish laugh and stood so straight, so in need of what America could do for him that the rapport between the man and the boy was instantaneous, and Kate had to separate them in order to introduce Streeter. Uncle George shook hands with her student and came to a likely but erroneous conclusion.

  “Speaka da English?” he asked.

  “I’m an American,” Streeter said.

  “How long is your sentence?”

  “This is my second year,” Streeter said. “I work at F. R. U. P. C.”

  “It’s an immoral country,” Uncle George said, sitting down in one of the golden chairs. “First they rob me of four hundred dollars, and then, walking around the streets here, all I see is statues of men without any clothes on. Nothing.”

  Kate rang for Assunta, and when the maid came in she ordered whiskey and ice, in very rapid Italian. “It’s just another way of looking at things, Uncle George,” she said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Uncle George said. “It isn’t natural. Not even in locker rooms. There’s very few men who’d choose to parade around a locker room stark naked if a towel was handy. It’s not natural. Everywhere you look. Up on the roofs. At the main traffic intersections. When I was coming over here, I passed through a little garden—playground, I guess you’d say—and right in the middle of it, right in the middle of all these little children, is one of these men without anything on.”

  “Will you have some whiskey?”

  “Yes, please… The boat sails on Saturday, Katie, and I want you and the boy to come home with me.”

  “I don’t want Charlie to leave,” Kate said.

  “He wants to leave—don’t you, Charlie? He wrote me a nice letter. Nicely worded, and he’s got a nice handwriting. That was a nice letter, Charlie. I showed it to the high-school superintendent, and he said you can enter the Krasbie high school whenever you want. And I want you to come, too, Kate. It’s your home, and you’ve only got one. The trouble with you, Katie, is that when you were a kid they used to make fun of you in Krasbie, and you just started running, that’s all, and you never stopped.”

  “If that’s true—and it may be,” she said quickly, “why should I want to go back to a place where I will seem ridiculous.”

  “Oh, Katie, you won’t seem ridiculous. I’ll take care of that.”

  “I want to go home, Mama,” Charlie said. He was sitting on a stool by the fireplace—not so straight-backed any m
ore. “I’m homesick all the time.”

  “How could you possibly be homesick for America?” Her voice was very sharp. “You’ve never seen it. This is your home.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your home is with your mother.”

  “There’s more to it than that, Mama. I feel strange here all the time. Everybody on the street speaking a different language.”

  “You’ve never even tried to learn Italian.”

  “Even if I had, it wouldn’t make any difference. It would still sound strange. I mean, it would still remind me that it wasn’t my language. I just don’t understand the people, Mama. I like them all right, but I just don’t understand them. I never know what they’re going to do next.”

  “Why don’t you try and understand them?”

  “Oh, I do, but I’m no genius, and you don’t understand them, either. I’ve heard you say so, and sometimes you’re homesick, too, I know. I can tell by the way you look.”

  “Homesickness is nothing,” she said angrily. “It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that, Mama. I just mean if I was with people who spoke my language, people who understood me, I’d be more comfortable.”

  “If comfort is all you expect to get out of life, God help you.”

  Then the doorbell rang and Assunta answered it. Kate glanced at her watch and saw that it was five after eight. It was also the first Thursday in the month. Before she could get out an explanation, they had started down the sala, with the old Duke of Rome in the lead, holding some flowers in his left hand. A little behind him was the Duchess, his wife—a tall, willowy, gray-haired woman wearing a lot of jewelry that had been given to the family by Francis I. An assortment of nobles brought up the rear, looking like a country circus, gorgeous and travel-worn. The Duke gave Kate her flowers. They all bowed vaguely to her company and went out through the kitchen, with its smell of gas leaks, to the service door.