Page 50 of The Stories of John Cheever

  But her reputation in Rome was not improved by this incident. Someone said that she had turned a starving child away from her door, that her avarice was pathological. She was smuggling her paintings into England and amassing a fortune there. She was selling the jewels. Noble Roman property owners are expected to be sharp, but stories of unusual dishonesty were fabricated and circulated about Donna Carla, It was also said that she was losing her looks. She was growing old. People disputed about her age. She was twenty-eight. She was thirty-two. She was thirty-six. She was thirty-eight. And she was still a familiar figure on the Lungo-Tevere, as grave and lovely as ever, with her shining hair and her half smile. But what was the truth? What would a German prince, a suitor with a leaky palace, find if he went there for tea?

  PRINCE BERNSTRASSER-FALCONBERG went under the massive arch at five one Sunday afternoon, into a garden where there were some tangerine trees and a fountain. He was a man of forty-five, with three illegitimate children, and with a jolly mistress waiting for him at the Grand Hotel. Looking up at the walls of the palace, he could not help thinking of all the good Donna Carla’s wealth would do. He would pay his debts. He would buy a bathtub for his old mother. He would fix the roof. An old porter in yellow livery let him in, and Luigi opened a second pair of double doors, into a hall with a marble staircase. Donna Carla was waiting here in the dusk. “Awfully nice of you to come,” she said, in English. “Frightfully gloomy, isn’t it?” The fragile English music of her voice echoed lightly off the stones. The hall was gloomy, he could see, but this was only half the truth, and the Prince sensed at once that he was not supposed to notice that it was also stupendous. The young woman seemed to be appealing to him for some understanding of her embarrassment, of her dilemma at having to greet him in such surroundings, and of her wish to pretend that this was some quite ordinary hall, where two friends might meet on a Sunday afternoon. She gave him her hand, and apologized for her parents’ absence, saying that they were unwell. (This was not quite the truth; Winifred-Mae had a cold, but the old Duke had gone off to a double feature.) The Prince was pleased to see that she was attractive, that she had on a velvet dress and some perfume. He wondered about her age, and saw that her face, that close, seemed quite pale and drawn.

  “We have quite a walk ahead of us,” she said. “Shall we begin? The salottino, the only room where one can sit down, is at the other end of the palace, but one can’t use the back door, because then one makes a brutta figura…” They stepped from the hall into the cavernous picture gallery. The room was dimly lighted, its hundreds of chairs covered with chamois. The Prince wondered if he should mention the paintings, and tried to take his cue from the Duchess. She seemed to be waiting, but was she waiting for him to join her or waiting for a display of his sensibilities? He took a chance and stopped in front of a Bronzino and praised it. “He looks rather better now that he’s been cleaned,” she said. The Prince moved from the Bronzino to a Tintoretto. “I say,” she said, “shall we go on to someplace more comfortable?”

  The next gallery was tapestries, and her one concession to these was to murmur, “Spanish. A frightful care. Moths and all that sort of thing.” When the Prince stopped to admire the contents of a cabinet, she joined him and explained the objects, and he caught for the first time a note of ambivalence in her apparent wish to be taken for a simple woman who lived in a flat. “Carved lapis lazuli,” she said. “The vase in the center is supposed to be the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world.” Then, as if she sensed and regretted this weakening of her position, she asked, as they stepped into the next room, “Did you ever see so much rubbish?”

  Here were the cradles of popes, the crimson sedan chairs of cardinals, the bread-and-butter presents of emperors, kings, and grand dukes piled up to the ceiling, and the Prince was confused by her embarrassment. What tack should he take? Her behavior was not what one would expect of an heiress, but was it, after all, so queer, so unreasonable? What strange attitudes might one not be forced into, saddled with a mile or more of paintings, burdened with the bulky evidence of four consecutive centuries of wealth and power? She might, playing in these icy rooms as a girl, have discovered in herself a considerable disinclination to live in a monument. In any event, she would have had to make a choice, for if she took this treasure seriously, it would mean living moment by moment with the past, as the rest of us live with our appetites and thirsts, and who would want to do that?

  Their destination was a dark parlor. The Prince watched her stoop down to the baseboard and plug in a feeble lamp.

  “I keep all the lamps unplugged, because the servants sometimes forget, and electricity is frightfully expensive in Rome. There we are!” she exclaimed, straightening up and gesturing hospitably to a sofa from which the worn velvet hung in rags. Above this was a portrait by Titian of the first Malvolio-Pommodori pope. “I make my tea on a spirit lamp, because in the time it takes the man to bring tea from the kitchen the water gets quite cold.”

  They sat waiting for the kettle to boil. She handed him his tea and smiled, and he was touched, although he didn’t know why. But there seemed about this charming woman, as there was about so much that he admired in Rome, the threat of obsolescence. Her pallor was a little faded. Her nose was a little sharp. Her grace, her accent were close to excessive. She was not yet the kind of woman who carries her left hand adrift in midair, the little finger extended, as vulgar people are supposed to hold a teacup; her airs and graces were not yet mistaken, and through them the Prince thought he felt the beating of a healthy and decent heart. But he felt, at the same time, that her days ended inexorably in the damps of a lonely bed, and that much more of this life would transform her into that kind of wasted virgin whose musical voice has upon men the force of complete sexual discouragement.

  “My mother regrets that she was unable to come to Rome,” the Prince said, “but she asked me to express to you her hope that you will someday visit us in our country.”

  “How nice,” Donna Carla said. “And please thank your mother. I don’t believe we’ve ever met, but I do recall your cousins Otto and Friedrich, when they were in school here, and please remember me to them when you return.

  “You should visit my country, Donna Carla.”

  “Oh, I would adore to, but I can’t leave Rome, as things stand now. There is so much to do. There are the twenty shops downstairs and the flats overhead. Drains are forever bursting, and the pigeons nest in the tiles; I have to go to Tuscany for the harvests. There’s never a minute.”

  “We have much in common, Donna Carla.”

  “Yes?”

  “Painting. I love painting. It is the love of my life.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I would love to live as you do, in a great house where one finds—how can I say it?—the true luminousness of art.”

  “Would you really? I can’t say that I like it much myself. Oh, I can see the virtues in a pretty picture of a vase of flowers, but there’s nothing like that here. Everywhere I look I see bloody crucifixions, nakedness, and cruelty.” She drew her shawl closer. “I really don’t like it.”

  “You know why I am here, Donna Carla?”

  “Quite.”

  “I come from a good family. I am not young, but I am strong. I…”

  “Quite,” she said. “Will you have some more tea.”

  “Thank you.” Her smile, when she passed him his cup, was an open appeal to keep the conversation general, and he thought of his old mother, the Princess, taking her bath in a pail. But there was some persuasiveness, some triumphant intelligence in her smile that also made him feel, with shame, the stupidity and rudeness of his quest. Why should she want to buy his mother a bathtub? Why should she want to fix his roof? Why had he been told everything about the Duchess but the fact that she was sensible? He could see her point. Indeed, he could see more. He saw how idle the gossip had been. This “swindler,” this “miser,” this “shoplifter” was no more than a pleasant woman who used her head. He knew th
e kind of suitors who had preceded him—more often than not with a mistress waiting at the hotel—and why shouldn’t they have excited her suspicions? He knew the brilliant society she had neglected; he knew its grim card parties, its elegant and malicious dinners, its tedium, not relieved in any way by butlers in livery and torchlit gardens. How sensible of her to have stayed home. She was a sensible woman—much too sensible to be interested in him—and what lay at the heart of the mystery was her brains. No one would have expected to find blooming in ancient Rome this flower of common sense.

  He talked with her for twenty minutes. Then she rang for Luigi and asked him to show the Prince to the door.

  IT CAME WITH a crash, the old Duke’s death. Reading Joseph Conrad in the salottino one night, he got up to get an ashtray and fell down dead. His cigarette burned in the carpet long after his heart had stopped beating. Luigi found him. Winifred-Mae was hysterical. A cardinal with acolytes rushed to the palace, but it was too late. The Duke was buried in the great Renaissance tomb, surrounded by ruined gardens, on the Appia Antica, and half the aristocracy of Europe went into mourning. Winifred-Mae was shattered. She planned to return to England, but, having packed her bags, she found she was too ill to travel. She drank gin for her indigestion. She railed at the servants, she railed at Donna Carla for not having married, and then, after three months of being a widow, she died.

  Every day for thirty days after her mother’s death, Donna Carla left the palace in the morning for early Mass and then went out to the family tomb. Sometimes she drove. Sometimes she took a bus. Her mourning veil was so heavy that her features could hardly be seen. She went rain or shine, said her prayers, and was seen wandering in the garden in a thunderstorm. It made one sad to see her on the Lungo-Tevere; there seemed to be such finality to her black clothes. It made everyone sad—the beggars and the women who sold chestnuts. She had loved her parents too well. Something had gone wrong. Now she would spend the rest of her life—how easy this was to imagine—between the palace and the tomb. But at the end of thirty days Donna Carla went to her father-confessor and asked to see His Holiness. A few days later, she went to the Vatican. She did not go bowling through the Piazza San Pietro in a hired limousine, wiping off her lipstick with a piece of Kleenex. She parked her dusty little car near the fountains and went through the gates on foot. She kissed His Holiness’s ring, curtsied gracefully to the floor, and said, “I wish to marry Cecil Smith.”

  Wood smoke, confetti, and the smell of snow and manure spun on the wind on the changeable day when they were married, in Vevaqua. She entered the church as Donna Carla Malvolio-Pommodori, Duchess of Vevaqua-Perdere-Giusti, etc., and came out Mrs. Cecil Smith. She was radiant. They returned to Rome, and she took an office adjoining his, and shared the administration of the estate and the work of distributing her income among convents, hospitals, and the poor. Their first son—Cecil Smith, Jr.—was born a year after their marriage, and a year later they had a daughter, Jocelyn. Donna Carla was cursed in every leaky castle in Europe, but surely shining choirs of angels in heaven will sing of Mrs. Cecil Smith. THE SCARLET MOVING VAN

  Goodbye to the mortal boredom of distributing a skinny chicken to a family of seven and all the other rites of the hill towns. I don’t mean the real hill towns—Assisi or Perugia or Saracinesco, perched on a three-thousand-foot crag, with walls the dispiriting gray of shirt cardboards and mustard lichen blooming on the crooked roofs. The land, in fact, was flat, the houses frame. This was in the eastern United States, and the kind of place where most of us live. It was the unincorporated township of B_______, with a population of perhaps two hundred married couples, all of them with dogs and children, and many of them with servants; it resembled a hill town only in a manner of speaking, in that the ailing, the disheartened, and the poor could not ascend the steep moral path that formed its natural defense, and the moment any of the inhabitants became infected with unhappiness or discontent, they sensed the hopelessness of existing on such a high spiritual altitude, and went to live in the plain. Life was unprecedentedly comfortable and tranquil. B________ was exclusively for the felicitous. The housewives kissed their husbands tenderly in the morning and passionately at nightfall. In nearly every house there were love, graciousness, and high hopes. The schools were excellent, the roads were smooth, the drains and other services were ideal, and one spring evening at dusk an immense scarlet moving van with gold lettering on its sides came up the street and stopped in the front of the Marple house, which had been empty then for three months.

  The gilt and scarlet of the van, bright even in the twilight, was an inspired attempt to disguise the true sorrowfulness of wandering. “We Carry Loads and Part Loads to All Far-Distant Places,” said the gold letters on the sides, and this legend had the effect of a distant train whistle. Martha Folkestone, who lived next door, watched through a window as the portables of her new neighbors were carried across the porch. “That looks like real Chippendale,” she said, “although it’s hard to tell in this light. They have two children. They seem like nice people. Oh, I wish there was something I could bring them to make them feel at home. Do you think they’d like flowers? I suppose we could ask them for a drink. Do you think they’d like a drink? Would you want to go over and ask them if they’d like a drink?”

  Later, when the furniture was all indoors and the van had gone, Charlie Folkestone crossed the lawn between the two houses and introduced himself to Peaches and Gee-Gee. This is what he saw. Peaches was peaches—blond and warm, with a low-cut dress and a luminous front. Gee-Gee had been a handsome man, and perhaps still was, although his yellow curls were thin. His face seemed both angelic and menacing. He had never (Charlie learned later) been a boxer, but his eyes were slightly squinted and his square, handsome forehead had the conformation of layers of scar tissue. You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.

  They would be delighted to have a drink. They would be right over. Peaches wanted to put on some lipstick and say good night to the children, and then they would be right over. They came right over, and what seemed to be an unusually pleasant evening began. The Folkestones had been worried about who their new neighbors would be, and to find a couple as sympathetic as Gee-Gee and Peaches made them very high-spirited. Like everyone else, they loved to express an opinion about their neighbors, and Gee-Gee and Peaches were, naturally, interested. It was the beginning of a friendship, and the Folkestones overlooked their usual concern with time and sobriety. It got late—it was past midnight—and Charlie did not notice how much whiskey was being poured or that Gee-Gee seemed to be getting drunk. Gee-Gee became very quiet—he dropped out of the conversation—and then he suddenly interrupted Martha in a flat, unpleasant drawl.

  “God, but you’re stuffy people,” he said.

  “Oh, no, Gee-Gee!” Peaches said. “Not on our first night!”

  “You’ve had too much to drink, Gee-Gee,” Charlie said.

  “Like hell I have,” said Gee-Gee. He bent over and began to unlace his shoes. “I haven’t had half enough.”

  “Please, Gee-Gee, please,” Peaches said.

  “I have to teach them, honey,” Gee-Gee said. “They’ve got to learn.”

  Then he stood up and, with the cunning and dexterity of a drunk, got out of most of his clothing before anyone could stop him.

  “Get out of here,” Charlie said.

  “The pleasure’s all mine, neighbor,” said Gee-Gee. He kicked over a hammered-brass umbrella stand on his way out the door.

  “Oh, I’m frightfully sorry!” Peaches said, “I feel terribly about this!”

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” Martha said. “He’s probably very tired, and we’ve all had too much to drink.”

  “Oh, no,” Peaches said. “It always happens. Everywhere. We’ve moved eight times in the last eight years, and there’s never been anyone to say goodbye to us. Not a soul. Oh, he
was a beautiful man when I first knew him! You never saw anyone so fine and strong and generous. They called him the Greek God at college. That’s why he’s called Gee-Gee. He was All-America twice, but he was never a money player—he always played straight out of his heart. Everybody loved him. Now it’s all gone, but I tell myself that I once had the love of a good man. I don’t think many women have known that kind of love. Oh, I wish he’d come back. I wish he’d be the way he was. The night before last, when we were packing up the dishes in the old house, he got drunk and I slapped him in the face, and I shouted at him, ‘Come back! Come back! Come back to me, Gee-Gee!’ But he didn’t listen. He didn’t hear me. He doesn’t hear anyone any more—not even the voices of his children. I ask myself every day what I’ve done to be punished so cruelly.”

  “I’m sorry, my dear!” Martha said.

  “You won’t be around to say goodbye when we go,” Peaches said. “We’ll last a year. You wait and see. Some people have tender farewell parties, but even the garbage man in the last place was glad to see us go.” With a grace and resignation that transcended the ruined evening, she began to gather up the clothing that her husband had scattered on the rug. “Each time we move, I think that the change will be good for him,” she said. “When we got here tonight, it all looked so pretty and quiet that I thought he might change. Well, you don’t have to ask us again. You know what it’s like.”

  A FEW DAYS or perhaps a week later, Charlie saw Gee-Gee on the station platform in the morning and saw how completely personable his neighbor was when he was sober. B_______ was not an easy place to conquer, but Gee-Gee seemed already to have won the affectionate respect of his neighbors. Charlie could see, as he watched him standing in the sun among the other commuters, that he would be asked to join everything. Gee-Gee greeted Charlie heartily, and there was no trace of the ugliness he had shown that night. Indeed, it was impossible to believe that this charming and handsome man had been so offensive. In the morning light, and surrounded by new friends, he seemed to challenge the memory. He seemed almost able to transfer the blame onto Charlie.