by John Cheever
Dingey was nephew of Jim Graves, prop of old River House on waterfront. Honest gambler. Big chested. 5’11”. 200 lbs. Dark hair. River House bar very popular. Good liquor or so I was told. Ten cents per drink. Hard stuff. You got the bottle. Customers poured their own. Some lager. Cool lager. Some stock ale. Also native product. Barkham’s rum. Made here for many years. No cocktails; mixed drinks served. Uncle Jim Graves never walked. Rode in hacks or barouches. Pair of horses. Never singles. Always one or more companions with him. Quiet. Much dignity. Wore good-sized diamond stud in necktie on boiled stiff shirt front. Also large ruby ring with stone inside hand. Always had big roll but never vulgar display. Clothes of excellent quality in style of those days. Prince Albert coat and some double-breasted vests with cutaway. Hair a bit long according to today’s fashions. Mustache. Not walrus. Silk hat. Cards. Faro. Stud poker. Wheel. Sweatboard. No dice used as craps. Went with Uncle Jim and Dingey when of age to fancy house on Chardon Street, next door to sulphur, brimstone, deep-water Baptist Church. Whore with up-country accent. Lowell girl. Big thighs. Breath smelled of violets. Could hear the singing in the church. Uncle Jim ordered champagne by the basket. Well liked everywhere. Big shot. Big wagers. Big drinks. Never lost his head or legs. Never noisy. Died broke. Third-floor room of River House. Spare room. Cold. Went to see him. Forsaken by all. Like Timon. All fair-weather friends scattered. Not bitter. Gentleman to the end. Skin of ice in water pitcher. Shy flakes of snow falling.
On last summer of youth spent in valley J. G. Blaine, Presidential candidate, came to dinner. Sunday. Cousin Juliana visiting. Poor relation. Carried ivory ruler in apron pocket and gave writer cut on wrist when whistled on Sunday, went up stairs two at a time, said “awful” for “good.” “Awful nice pudding.” Crack! Porgies schooling in river then. Mackerel sharks—fourteen, fifteen feet long—chased porgies up to town dock in middle of afternoon. Big excitement. Ran up river bank to village. Water foaming white. Mysteries of the deep. Grand thunderstorm came down from the hills. Fierce rain. Stood under apple tree. Grand sunset after. Sharks went downriver with tide. Beautiful hour. Skies all fiery. Stagecoach horns and train whistles. (Trains running then regularly.) Church bells ringing. Everybody and his grandmother out to see departure of sharks. Walked home in twilight. Wished for gold watch and chain on evening star. Venus? House ablaze with light. Carriages. Remembered Mr. Blaine for dinner. Late. Afraid of Juliana’s ruler.
Front hall lamp lighted first time in two years. Moth millers all around lamp. Hall carpet seldom walked on. Felt coarse under bare feet. Barefooted most of summer. Five or six lamps burning in parlor. Grand illumination for those times. Splendid company. Mr. Blaine. Heavy man. Mother in garnet dress, later made into curtains. Something wrong. Juliana in best black dress, gold beads, lace cap, etc., squatted on floor. Big cigar in left hand. Speaking gibberish. Writer got upstairs without being seen. Troubled in spirit. Attic bedroom smelled of trunks, also swordfish spur. Would send you into the street on rainy weather. Made water in pot. No bathrooms at all. Washed in rain water collected in large tubs at back of house. Much troubled by spectacle of Juliana. Later voices on driveway. Men talking; lighting carriage lamps. Dogs barking for miles upriver.
In morning asked Bedelia. Hired girl. Never ask parents. Children seen, not heard. Very solemn, Bedelia. “Miss Juliana’s a famous seer. She talks with the dead through the spirit of an Indian. Last night she talked with Mr. Blaine’s mother and the little Hardwich boy who was drowned in the river.” Never understood pious old lady talking with the dead. Can’t think clearly about it now. Watched all day for Juliana. Didn’t appear for noon meal. Tired out from talking with the dead. Showed up for supper. Same uniform. Black dress. Gray hair in little curls. Lace cap. Said grace in loud voice. “Dear Lord we thank Thee for these Thy blessings.” Ate with good appetite. Always smelled like pantry, Juliana did. Cinnamony smell. Savory, sage and other spices. Not unpleasant. Watched for signs of seer, but saw only strict old lady. Dewlaps. Poor relation.
One more Indian. Joe Thrum. Lived on hoopskirts of town. Painted face orange. Smelly hut. Wore silk shirt. Big brass rings in ears. Dirty. Ate rats or so writer believed. Last of savages. Hate Indians, even in Wild West show. Great-great-grandfather killed by same at Fort Duquesne. Poor Yankee! How far from home. Strange water. Strange trees. Led into clearing at edge of water stark naked at 4 P.M. Commenced fire-torture. 8 P.M., still living. Cried most piteously. Hate Indians, Chinamen, most foreigners. Keep coal in bathtub. Eat garlic. Trail smell of Polish earth, Italian earth, Russian earth, strange earth everywhere. Change everything. Ruin everything.
This was the first chapter of Leander’s autobiography or confession, a project that kept him occupied after the Topaze was put up the year his sons went away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
You come, as Moses did, at nine in the evening to Washington, a strange city. You wait your turn to leave the coach, carrying a suitcase, and walk up the platform to the waiting room. Here you put down your suitcase and crane your neck, wondering what the architect had up his sleeve. There are gods above you in a dim light and, unless there are some private arrangements, the floor where you stand has been trod by presidents and kings. You follow the crowds and the sounds of a fountain out of this twilight into the night. You put down your suitcase again and gape. On your left is the Capitol building, flooded with light. You have seen this so often on medallions and post cards that it seemed incised on your memory only now there is a difference. This is the real thing.
You have eighteen dollars and thirty-seven cents in your pocket. You have not pinned the money to your underwear as your father suggested but you keep feeling for your wallet to make sure that it hasn’t been lifted by a pickpocket. You want a place to stay and, feeling that there will not be one around the Capitol, you start off in the opposite direction. You feel springy and young—your shoes are comfortable and the good, woolen socks you wear were knitted by your dear mother. Your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.
You walk and walk and walk, changing your suitcase from hand to hand. You pass lighted store fronts, monuments, theaters and saloons. You hear dance music and the thunder of tenpins from an upstairs bowling alley and wonder how long it will be before you begin to play a role against this new scene. You will have a job, perhaps in that marble building on your left. You will have a desk, a secretary, a telephone extension, duties, worries, triumphs and promotions. In the meantime you will be a lover. You will meet a girl by that monument on the corner, buy her some dinner in that restaurant across the street and be taken home by her to that apartment in the distance. You will have friends and enjoy them as these two men, swinging down the street in shirt sleeves, are enjoying one another. You may belong to a bowling club that bowls in the alley whose thunder you hear. You will have money to spend and you may buy that raincoat in the store window on your right. You may—who knows?—buy a red convertible like that red convertible that is rounding the corner. You may be a passenger in that airplane, traveling southeast above the trees, and you may even be a father like that thin-haired man, waiting for the traffic light to change, holding a little girl by one hand and a quart of strawberry ice cream in the other. It is only a question of days before the part begins, you think, although it must in fact have begun as soon as you entered the scene with your suitcase.
You walk and walk and come at last to a neighborhood where the atmosphere is countrified and domesticated and where signs hang here and there, advertising board and rooms. You climb some stairs and a gray-haired widow answers the door and asks your business, your name and your former address. She has a vacancy, but she can’t climb the stairs because of a weak heart or some other infirmity and so you climb them alone to the third floor back where there is a pleasant-enough room with a window looking into some back yards. Then you sign a register and hang your best suit in the closet; the suit that you will wear for your interview in the morning.
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nbsp; Or you wake—like Coverly—a country boy in the biggest city in the world. It’s the hour when Leander usually begins his ablutions and the place is a three-dollar furnished room, as small or smaller than the closets of your home. You notice that the walls are painted a baneful green which can’t have been chosen because of its effect on a man’s spirit—this is always discouraging—and so must be chosen because it is cheap. The walls seem to be sweating but when you touch the moisture it is as hard as glue. You get out of bed and look out of your window onto a broad street where trucks are passing, bringing produce up from the markets and railroad yards—a cheerful sight but one that you, coming from a small town in New England, regard with some skepticism, even with compassion, for although you have come here to make your fortune you think of the city as a last resort of those people who lack the fortitude and character necessary to endure the montony of places like St. Botolphs. It is a city, you have been told, where the value of permanence has never been grasped and this, even early in the morning, seems to be a pitiful state of affairs.
In the hallway you find a wash basin where you shave your beard and while you are shaving a stout man joins you and watches critically. “You gotta stretch your skin, sonny,” the stranger says. “Look. Let me show you.” He takes a fold of his skin and pulls it tight. “Like that,” he says. “You gotta stretch it, you gotta stretch your skin.” You thank him for his advice and stretch your lower lip, which is all you have left to shave. “That’s the way to do it,” the stranger says. “That’s the way. If you stretch your skin you’ll have a nice, clean shave. Last you all day.” He takes over the wash basin when you are finished and you go back to your room and dress. Then you climb down the stairs to a street full of shocks and wonders, for in spite of its Philosophical Society your home town was a very small place and you have never seen a high building or a dachshund; you have never seen a man in suede shoes or a woman blow her nose into a piece of Kleenex; you have never seen a parking meter or felt the ground under your feet shaken by a subway, but what you first notice is the fineness of the sky. You have come to feel—you may have been told—that the beauties of heaven centered above your home, and now you are surprised to find, stretched from edge to edge of the dissolute metropolis, a banner or field of the finest blue.
It is early. The air smells of cheap pastry, and the noise of trucking—the clatter of tail gates—is loud and cheerful. You go into a bakery for some breakfast. The waitress smiles at you openly and you think: Perhaps. Maybe. Later. Then you go out onto the street once more and gawk. The noise of traffic has gotten louder and you wonder how people can live in this maelstrom: how can they stand it? A man duckfoots past you wearing a coat that seems to be made out of machine waste and you think how unacceptable such a coat would be in St. Botolphs. People would laugh. In the window of a tenement you see an old man in an undershirt eating something from a paper bag. He seems to be by-passed so pitilessly by life that you feel sad. Then, in crossing the street, you are nearly killed by a truck. Safe on the curb again you wonder about the pace of life in this big city. How do they keep it up? Everywhere you look you see signs of demolition and creation. The mind of the city seems divided about its purpose and its tastes. They are not only destroying good buildings; they are tearing up good streets; and the noise is so loud that if you should shout for help no one would hear you.
You walk. You smell cooking from a Spanish restaurant, new bread, beer slops, roasting coffee beans and the exhaust fumes of a bus. Gaping at a high building you walk straight into a fire hydrant and nearly knock yourself out. You look around, hoping that no one saw your mistake. No one seems to have cared. At the next crossing a young woman, waiting for the light to change, is singing a song about love. Her song can hardly be heard above the noise of traffic, but she doesn’t care. You have never seen a woman singing in the street before and she carries herself so well and seems so happy that you beam at her. The light changes and you miss your chance to cross the street because you are stopped in your tracks by a host of young women who are coming in the opposite direction. They must be going to work but they don’t look anything like the table-silver girls in St. Botolphs. Not a single one of them is under the charge of modesty that burdens the beauties in your New England home. Roses bloom in their cheeks, their hair falls in soft curls, pearls and diamonds sparkle at their wrists and throats and one of them—your head swims—has put a cloth rose into the rich darkness that divides her breasts. You cross the street and nearly get killed again.
You remember then that you must telephone Cousin Mildred who is going to get you a job in the carpet works but when you go into a drugstore you find that all the telephones have dials and you have never used one of these. You think of asking a stranger for help but this request would seem to expose—in a horrible way—your inexperience, your unfitness to live in the city, as if your beginnings in a small place were shameful. You overcome these fears and the stranger you approach is kind and helpful. On the strength of this small kindness the sun seems to shine and you are thrilled by a vision of the brotherhood of man. You call Cousin Mildred but a maid says that she is sleeping. The maid’s voice makes you wonder about the circumstances of your cousin’s life. You notice your rumpled flannel pants and step into a tailor shop to have them pressed. You wait in a humid little fitting room walled with mirrors, and, pantless, the figure you see is inescapably intimate and discouraging. Suppose the city should be bombed at this moment? The tailor hands in your trousers, warm and cozy with steam, and you go out again.
Now you are on a main avenue and you head, instinctively, for the north. You have never seen such crowds and such haste before. They are all late. They are all bent with purpose and the interior discourse that goes on behind their brows seems much more vehement than anything in St. Botolphs. It is so vehement that here and there it erupts into speech. Then ahead of you you see a girl carrying a hat box—a girl so fair, so lovely, so full of grace and yet frowning so deeply as if she doubted her beauty and her usefulness that you want to run after her and give her some money or at least some reassurance. The girl is lost in the crowd. Now you are passing, in the store windows, those generations of plaster ladies who have evolved a seasonal cycle of their own and who have posed at their elegant linen closets and art galleries, their weddings and walks, their cruises and cocktail parties long before you came to town and will be at them long after you are dust.
You follow the crowd north and the thousands of faces seems like a text and a cheerful one. You have never seen such expensiveness and elegance and you think that even Mrs. Theophilus Gates would look seedy in a place like this. At the park you leave the avenue and wander into the zoo. It is like a paradise; greenery and water and innocence in jeopardy, the voices of children and the roaring of lions and in the underpasses obscenities written on the walls. Leaving the park you are surprised at the display of apartment houses and you wonder who can live in them all and you may even mistake the air-conditioning machinery for makeshift iceboxes where people keep a little milk and a quarter of a pound of butter fresh. You wonder if you will ever enter such a building—have tea or supper or some other human intercourse there. A concrete nymph with large breasts and holding a concrete lintel on her head causes you some consternation. You blush. You pass a woman who is sitting on a rock, holding a volume of the Beethoven sonatas in her lap. Your right foot hurts. There is probably a hole in your sock.
North of the park you come into a neighborhood that seems blighted—not persecuted, but only unpopular, as if it suffered acne or bad breath, and it has a bad complexion—colorless and seamed and missing a feature here and there. You eat a sandwich in one of those dark taverns that smells like a pissoir and where the sleepy waitress wears championship tennis sneakers. You climb the stairs of that great eyesore, the Cathedral of St. John The Divine, and say your prayers, although the raw walls of the unfinished basilica remind you of a lonely railroad station. You step from the cathedral into a stick-ball game and in the di
stance someone practices a sliding trombone. You see a woman with a rubber stocking waiting for a bus and in the window of a tenement a girl with yellow bangs.
Now the people are mostly colored and the air rings with jazz. Even the pills and elixirs in the cut-rate drugstore jump to boogie-woogie and on the street someone has written in chalk: JESUS THE CHRIST. HE IS RISEN. An old woman on a camp stool sings from a braille hymnal and when you put a dime into her hands she says, God bless you, God bless you. A door flies open and a woman rushes into the street with a letter in her hand. She stuffs it into a mailbox and her manner is so hurried and passionate that you wonder what son or lover, what money-winning contest or friend she has informed. Across the street you see a handsome Negress in a coat made out of cloth of gold. “Baloney John and Pig-fat’s both dead,” a man says, “and me married five years and still don’t have a stick of furniture. Five years.” “Why you always comparing me to other girls?” a girl asks softly. “Why you always telling me this one and that one is better than me? Sometimes it seems you just take me out to make me miserable, comparing me to this one and that one. Why you always comparing me to other girls?”
Now it is getting dark and you are tired. There is a hole for sure in your sock and a blister on your heel. You decide to go home by subway. You go down some stairs and board a train, trusting that you will end up somewhere near where you began, but you won’t ask directions. The fear of being made ridiculous—a greenhorn—is overpowering. And so, a prisoner of your pride you watch the place names sweep by: Nevins Street, Franklin Avenue, New Lots Avenue.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Writer enterprising although perhaps immodest to say so (Leander wrote). Bought sick calf in spring for two dollars. Nursed. Fatted. Sold in autumn for ten. Sent money to Boston for two-volume encyclopedia. Walked to post office to get same. Barefoot through autumn night. Heart beating. Remember every step of way on bare feet. Sand, thistles. Coarse and silky grass. Oyster shells and soft dirt. Unwrapped books outside of town on river path. Read in fading light. Dusk. Aalborg. Seat of a bishopric. Aardwolf. Aaron. Never forget. Never will forget. Joy of learning. Resolved to read whole encyclopedia. Memorize same. Memorable hour. Fires going out in west. Fires lighted on moon. Loved valley, trees and water. River smelled of damp church. Turn your hair gray. Grand night. Sad homecoming.
