The Stories of John Cheever

  This was some years ago, when the New England highways had not been completed and the trip from New York or Westchester took over four hours. I left quite early in the morning and drove first to Haverhill, where I stopped at Miss Peacock’s School and picked up my niece. I then went on to St. Botolphs, where I found Mother sitting in the hallway in an acolyte’s chair. The chair had a steepled back, topped with a wooden fleur-de-lis. From what rain-damp church had this object been stolen? She wore a coat and her bag was at her feet. “I’m ready,” she said. She must have been ready for a week. She seemed terribly lonely. “Would you like a drink?” she asked. I knew enough not to take this bait. Had I said yes she would have gone into the pantry and returned, smiling sadly, to say: “Your brother has drunk all the whiskey.” So we started back for Westchester. It was a cold, overcast day and I found the drive tiring, although I think fatigue had nothing to do with what followed. I left my niece at my brother’s house in Connecticut and drove on to my place. It was after dark when the trip ended. My wife had made all the preparations that were customary for Mother’s arrival. There was an open fire, a vase of roses on the piano, and tea with anchovy-paste sandwiches. “How lovely to have flowers,” said Mother. “I so love flowers. I can’t live without them. Should I suffer some financial reverses and have to choose between flowers and groceries I believe I would choose flowers.”

  I do not want to give the impression of an elegant old lady because there were lapses in her performance. I bring up, with powerful unwillingness, a fact that was told to me by her sister after Mother’s death. It seems that at one time she applied for a position with the Boston Police Force. She had plenty of money at the time and I have no idea of why she did this. I suppose that she wanted to be a policewoman. I don’t know what branch of the force she planned to join, but I’ve always imagined her in a dark-blue uniform with a ring of keys at her waist and a billy club in her right hand. My grandmother dissuaded her from this course, but the image of a policewoman was some part of the figure she cut, sipping tea by our fire. She meant this evening to be what she called Aristocratic. In this connection she often said, “There must be at least a drop of plebeian blood in the family. How else can one account for your taste in torn and shabby clothing. You’ve always had plenty of clothes but you’ve always chosen rags.”

  I mixed a drink and said how much I had enjoyed seeing my niece.

  “Miss Peacock’s has changed,” Mother said sadly.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve let down the bars.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They’re letting in Jews,” she said. She fired out the last word.

  “Can we change the subject?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why,” she said. “You brought it up.”

  “My wife is Jewish, Mother,” I said. My wife was in the kitchen. “That is not possible,” my mother said. “Her father is Italian.”

  “Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.”

  “Well,” Mother said, “I come from old Massachusetts stock and I’m not ashamed of it although I don’t like being called a Yankee.”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “Your father said that the only good Jew was a dead Jew a though I did think Justice Brandeis charming.”

  “I think it’s going to rain, ” I said. It was one of our staple, conversational switch-offs, used to express anger, hunger, love, and the fear of death. My wife joined us and Mother picked up the routine. “It’s nearly cold enough for snow,” she said. “When you were a boy you used to pray for snow or ice. It depended upon whether you wanted to skate or ski. You were very particular. You would kneel by your bed and loudly ask God to manipulate the elements. You never prayed for anything else. I never once heard you ask for a blessing on your parents. In the summer you didn’t pray at all.”

  The Cabots had two daughters—Geneva and Molly. Geneva was the older and thought to be the more beautiful. Molly was my girl for a year or so. She was a lovely young woman with a sleepy look that was quickly dispelled by a brilliant smile. Her hair was pale brown and held the light. When she was tired or excited sweat formed on her upper lip. In the evenings I would walk to their house and sit with her in the parlor under the most intense surveillance. Mrs. Cabot, of course, regarded sex with utter panic. She watched us from the dining room. From upstairs there were loud and regular thumping sounds. This was Amos Cabot’s rowing machine. We were sometimes allowed to take walks together if we kept to the main streets, and when I was old enough to drive I took her to the dances at the club. I was intensely—morbidly—jealous and when she seemed to be enjoying herself with someone else I would stand in the corner, thinking of suicide. I remember driving her back one night to the house on Shore Road.

  At the turn of the century someone decided that St. Botolphs might have a future as a resort, and five mansions, or follies, were built at the end of Shore Road. The Cabots lived in one of these. All the mansions had towers. These were round with conical roofs, rising a story or so above the rest of the frame buildings. The towers were strikingly unmilitary, and so I suppose they were meant to express romance. What did they contain? Dens, I guess, maid’s rooms, broken furniture, trunks, and they must have been the favorite of hornets. I parked my car in front of the Cabots’ and turned off the lights. The house above us was dark.

  It was long ago, so long ago that the foliage of elm trees was part of the summer night. (It was so long ago that when you wanted to make a left turn you cranked down the car window and pointed in that direction. Otherwise you were not allowed to point. Don’t point, you were told. I can’t imagine why, unless the gesture was thought to be erotic.) The dances—the Assemblies—were formal and I would be wearing a tuxedo handed down from my father to my brother and from my brother to me like some escutcheon or sumptuary torch. I took Molly in my arms. She was completely responsive. I am not a tall man (I am sometimes inclined to stoop), but the conviction that I am loved and loving affects me like a military bracing. Up goes my head. My back is straight. I am six foot seven and sustained by some clamorous emotional uproar. Sometimes my ears ring. It can happen anywhere—in a ginseng house in Seoul, for example—but it happened that night in front of the Cabots’ house on Shore Road. Molly said then that she had to go. Her mother would be watching from a window. She asked me not to come up to the house. I mustn’t have heard. I went with her up the walk and the stairs to the porch, where she tried the door and found it locked. She asked me again to go, but I couldn’t abandon her there, could I? Then a light went on and the door was opened by a dwarf. He was exhaustively misshapen. The head was hydrocephalic, the features were swollen, the legs were thick and cruelly bowed. I thought of the circus. The lovely young woman began to cry. She stepped into the house and closed the door and I was left with the summer night, the elms, the taste of an east wind. After this she avoided me for a week or so and I was told the facts by Maggie, our old cook.

  But more facts first. It was in the summer, and in the summer most of us went to a camp on the Cape run by the headmaster of the St. Botolphs Academy. The months were so feckless, so blue, that I can’t remember them at all. I slept next to a boy named DeVarennes whom I had known all my life. We were together most of the time. We played marbles together, slept together, played together on the same backfield, and once together took a ten-day canoe trip during which we nearly drowned together. My brother claimed that we had begun to look alike. It was the most gratifying and unself-conscious relationship I had known. (He still calls me once or twice a year from San Francisco, where he lives unhappily with his wife and three unmarried daughters. He sounds drunk. “We were happy, weren’t we?” he asks.) One day another boy, a stranger named Wallace, asked if I wanted to swim across the lake. I might claim that I knew nothing about Wallace, and I knew very little, but I did know or sense that he was lonely. It was as conspicuous as—or more conspicuous than—any of his features. He did what was expected of
him. He played ball, made his bed, took sailing lessons, and got his life-saving certificate, but this seemed more like a careful imposture than any sort of participation. He was miserable, he was lonely, and sooner or later, rain or shine, he would say so and, in the act of confession, make an impossible claim on one’s loyalty. One knew all of this but one pretended not to. We got permission from the swimming instructor and swam across the lake. We used a clumsy sidestroke that still seems to me more serviceable than the overhand that is obligatory these days in those swimming pools where I spend most of my time. The sidestroke is Lower Class. I’ve seen it once in a swimming pool, and when I asked who the swimmer was I was told he was the butler. When the ship sinks, when the plane ditches, I will try to reach the life raft with an overhand and drown stylishly, whereas if I had used a Lower-Class sidestroke I would have lived forever.

  We swam the lake, rested in the sun—no confidences—and swam home. When I came up to our cabin DeVarennes took me aside. “Don’t ever let me see you with Wallace again,” he said. I asked why. He told me. “Wallace is Amos Cabot’s bastard. His mother is a whore. They live in one of the tenements across the river.”

  The next day was hot and brilliant and Wallace asked if I wanted to swim the lake again. I said sure, sure and we did. When we came back to camp DeVarennes wouldn’t speak to me. That night a northeaster blew up and it rained for three days. DeVarennes seems to have forgiven me and I don’t recall having crossed the lake with Wallace again. As for the dwarf, Maggie told me he was a son of Mrs. Cabot from an earlier marriage. He worked at the table-silver factory but he went to work early in the morning and didn’t return until after dark. His existence was meant to be kept a secret. This was unusual but not—at the time of which I’m writing—unprecedented. The Trumbulls kept Mrs. Trumbull’s crazy sister hidden in the attic and Uncle Peepee Marshmallow—an exhibitionist—was often hidden for months.

  It was a winter afternoon, an early-winter afternoon. Mrs. Cabot washed her diamonds and hung them out to dry. She then went upstairs to take a nap. She claimed that she had never taken a nap in her life, and the sounder she slept, the more vehement were her claims that she didn’t sleep. This was not so much an eccentricity on her part as it was a crabwise way of presenting the facts that was prevalent in that part of the world. She woke at four and went down to gather her stones. They were gone. She called Geneva, but there was no answer. She got a rake and scored the stubble under the clothesline. There was nothing. She called the police.

  As I say, it was a winter afternoon and the winters there were very cold. We counted for heat—sometimes for survival—on wood fires and large coal-burning furnaces that sometimes got out of hand. A winter night was a threatening fact, and this may have partly accounted for the sentiment with which we watched—in late November and December—the light burn out in the west. (My father’s journals, for example, were full of descriptions of winter twilights, not because he was at all crepuscular but because the coming of the night might mean danger and pain.) Geneva had packed a bag, gathered the diamonds, and taken the last train out of town: the 4:37. How thrilling it must have been. The diamonds were meant to be stolen. They were a flagrant snare and she did what she was meant to do. She took a train to New York that night and sailed three days later for Alexandria on a Cunarder—the S.S. Serapis. She took a boat from Alexandria to Luxor, where, in the space of two months, she joined the Moslem faith and married an Egyptian noble.

  I read about the theft next day in the evening paper. I delivered papers. I had begun my route on foot, moved on to a bicycle, and was assigned, when I was sixteen, to an old Ford truck. I was a truck driver! I hung around the linotype room until the papers were printed and then drove around to the four neighboring villages, tossing out bundles at the doors of the candy and stationery stores. During the World Series a second edition with box scores was brought out, and after dark I would make the trip again to Travertine and the other places along the shore. The roads were dark, there was very little traffic, and leaf burning had not been forbidden, so that the air was tannic, melancholy, and exciting. One can attach a mysterious and inordinate amount of importance to some simple journey, and this second trip with the box scores made me very happy. I dreaded the end of the World Series as one dreads the end of any pleasure, and had I been younger I would have prayed. CABOT JEWELS STOLEN was the headline and the incident was never again mentioned in the paper. It was not mentioned at all in our house, but this was not unusual. When Mr. Abbott hung himself from the pear tree next door this was never mentioned.

  Molly and I took a walk on the beach at Travertine that Sunday afternoon. I was troubled, but Molly’s troubles were much graver. It did not disturb her that Geneva had stolen the diamonds. She only wanted to know what had become of her sister, and she was not to find out for another six weeks. However, something had happened at the house that night. There had been a scene between her parents and her father had left. She described this to me. We were walking barefoot. She was crying. I would like to have forgotten the scene as soon as she finished her description.

  Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts. In the last chapter the ship comes home to port, the children are saved, the miners will be rescued. Is this an infirmity of the genteel or a conviction that there are discernible moral truths? Mr. X defecated in his wife’s top drawer. This is a fact, but I claim that it is not a truth. In describing St. Botolphs I would sooner stay on the West Bank of the river where the houses were white and where the church bells rang, but over the bridge there was the table-silver factory, the tenements (owned by Mrs. Cabot), and the Commercial Hotel. At low tide one could smell the sea gas from the inlets at Travertine. The headlines in the afternoon paper dealt with a trunk murder. The women on the streets were ugly. Even the dummies in the one store window seemed stooped, depressed, and dressed in clothing that neither fitted nor became them. Even the bride in her splendor seemed to have got some bad news. The politics were neofascist, the factory was non-union, the food was unpalatable, and the night wind was bitter. This was a provincial and a traditional world enjoying few of the rewards of smallness and traditionalism, and when I speak of the blessedness of all small places I speak of the West Bank. On the East Bank was the Commercial Hotel, the demesne of Doris, a male prostitute who worked as a supervisor in the factory during the day and hustled the bar at night, exploiting the extraordinary moral lassitude of the place. Everybody knew Doris, and many of the customers had used him at one time or another. There was no scandal and no delight involved. Doris would charge a traveling salesman whatever he could get but he did it with the regulars for nothing. This seems more like tolerance than hapless indifference, the absence of vision, moral stamina, the splendid Ambitiousness of romantic love. On fight night Doris drifts down the bar. Buy him a drink and he’ll put his hand on your arm, your shoulder, your waist, and move a fraction of an inch in his direction and he’ll reach for the cake. The steam fitter buys him a drink, the high-school dropout, the watch repairman. (Once a stranger shouted to the bartender, “Tell that son of a bitch to take his tongue out of my ear “—but he was a stranger.) This is not a transient world, these are not drifters, more than half of these men will never live in any other place, and yet this seems to be the essence of spiritual nomadism. The telephone rings and the bartender beckons to Doris. There’s a customer in room 8. Why would I sooner be on the West Bank where my parents are playing bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Pinkham in the golden light of a great gas chandelier?

  I’ll blame it on the roast, the roast, the Sunday roast bought from a butcher who wore a straw boater with a pheasant wing in the hat band. I suppose the roast entered our house, wrapped in bloody paper, on Thursday or Friday, traveling on the back of a bicycle. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the meat had the detonative force of a land mine that could savage your eyes and your gen
itals but its powers were disproportionate. We sat down to dinner after church. (My brother was living in Omaha so we were only three.) My father would hone the carving knife and make a cut in the meat. My father was very adroit with an ax and a crosscut saw and could bring down a large tree with dispatch, but the Sunday roast was something else. After he had made the first cut my mother would sigh. This was an extraordinary performance, so loud, so profound, that it seemed as if her life were in danger. It seemed as if her very soul might come unhinged and drift out of her open mouth. “Will you never learn, Leander, that lamb must be carved against the grain?” she would ask. Once the battle of the roast had begun the exchanges were so swift, predictable, and tedious that there would be no point in reporting them. After five or six wounding remarks my father would wave the carving knife in the air and shout, “Will you kindly mind your own business, will you kindly shut up?” She would sigh once more and put her hand to her heart. Surely this was her last breath. Then, studying the air above the table, she would say, “Feel that refreshing breeze.”

  There was, of course, seldom a breeze. It could be airless, midwinter, rainy, anything. The remark was one for all seasons. Was it a commendable metaphor for hope, for the serenity of love (which I think she had never experienced), was it nostalgia for some summer evening when, loving and understanding, we sat contentedly on the lawn above the river? Was it no better or no worse than the sort of smile thrown at the evening star by a man who is in utter despair? Was it a prophecy of that generation to come who would be so drilled in evasiveness that they would be denied forever the splendors of a passionate confrontation?