The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  Theresa is dancing. Her hair is still fair—it may be dyed by now—and her arms and her shoulders are still beautiful. The air of sadness, of delicacy, still clings to her. Victor is not on the dance floor. He is in the orangery, where watery drinks are being sold. He pays for four drinks, walks around the edge of the crowded dance floor, and goes through the armory, where a stranger stops to ask him a question. "Why, yes," Victor says courteously, "I do happen to know about it. It's a suit of mail that was made for the coronation of Philip II. Mr. Brownlee had it copied..." He continues along another quarter of a mile of halls and parlors, through the Great Hall, to a small parlor, where Mrs. Brownlee is sitting with some friends. "Here's Vic with our drinks!" she cries. Mrs. Brownlee is an old lady, plucked and painted and with her hair dyed an astonishing shade of pink. Her fingers and her forearms are loaded with rings and bracelets. Her diamond necklace is famous. So, indeed, are most of her jewels—most of them have names. There are the Taphir emeralds, the Bertolotti rubies, and the Demidoff pearls, and, feeling that a look at this miscellany should be included in the price of admission, she has loaded herself unsparingly for the benefit of the Girl Scouts. "Everybody's having a good time, aren't they, Vic?" she asks. "Well, they should be having a good time. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. Sit down, Vic," she says. "Sit down. Give yourself a little rest. I don't know what I'd do without you and Theresa." But Victor doesn't have time to sit down. He has to run the raffle. He goes back through the Great Hall, the Venetian Salon, and the armory, to the ballroom. He climbs onto a chair. There is a flourish of music. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he calls through a megaphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention for a few minutes..." He raffles off a case of Scotch, a case of bourbon, a Waring mixer, and a power lawn mower.

  When the raffle is over and the dancing begins again, he goes out onto the terrace for a breath of air, and we follow him and speak to him there.

  "Victor?"

  "Oh, how nice to see you again," he exclaims. "What in the world are you doing in Pittsburgh?" His hair has grayed along conventionally handsome lines. He must have had some work done on his teeth, because his smile is whiter and more dazzling than ever. The talk is the conversation of acquaintances who have not met for ten or fifteen years—it has been that long—about this and that, then about Theresa, then about Violet. At the mention of Violet, he seems very sad. He sets the megaphone on the stone terrace and leans on its metal rim. He bows his head. "Well, Violet is sixteen now, you know," he says. "She's given me a lot to worry about. She was suspended from school about six weeks ago. Now I've got her into a new school in Connecticut. It took a lot of doing." He sniffs.

  "How long have you been in Pittsburgh, Victor?"

  "Eight years," he says. He swings the megaphone into the air and peers through it at a star. "Nine, actually," he says.

  "What are you doing, Victor?"

  "I'm between jobs now." He lets the megaphone fall.

  "Where are you living, Victor?"

  "Here," he says.

  "I know. But where in Pittsburgh?"

  "Here," he says. He laughs. "We live here. At Salisbury Hall. Here's the head of the dance committee, and if you'll excuse me, I'll make my report on the raffle. It's been very nice to see you again."

  ANYONE—ANYONE, that is, who did not eat peas off a knife—might have been invited to Salisbury Hall when the Mackenzies first went there. They had only just arrived in Pittsburgh, and were living in a hotel. They drove out with some friends for a weekend. There were fourteen or fifteen guests in the party, and Prescott Brownlee, the old lady's eldest son. There was some trouble before dinner. Prescott got drunk at a roadhouse near the estate, and the bartender called Mrs. Brownlee and told her to have him removed before he called the police. The old lady was used to this kind of trouble. Her children were in it most of the time, but that afternoon she did not know where to turn for help. Nils, the houseman, hated Prescott. The gardener had gone home. Ernest, the butler, was too old. Then she remembered Victor's face, although she had only glimpsed it in the hall when they were introduced. She found him in the Great Hall and called him aside. He thought he was going to be asked to mix the cocktails. When she made her request, he said that he would be glad to help. He drove to the roadhouse, where he found Prescott sitting at a table. Someone had given him a bloody nose, and his clothing was splattered with blood, but he was still pugnacious, and when Victor told him to come home, he got up swinging. Victor knocked him down. This subdued Prescott, who began to cry and stumbled obediently out to the car. Victor returned to Salisbury Hall by a service driveway. Then, supporting Prescott, who could not walk, he got him into a side door that opened into the armory. No one saw them. The air in the unheated room was harsh and bitter. Victor pushed the sobbing drunk under the rags of royal battle flags and pennants that hung from the rafters and past a statue of a man on horseback that displayed a suit of equestrian armor. He got Prescott up a marble staircase and put him to bed. Then he brushed the sawdust off his own evening clothes and went down to the Great Hall and made the cocktails.

  He didn't mention this incident to anyone—not even to Theresa and on Sunday afternoon Mrs. Brownlee took him aside again, to thank him. "Oh, bless your heart, Mr. Mackenzie!" she said. "You're a good Samaritan. When that man called me up yesterday, I didn't know where to turn." They heard someone approaching across the Great Hall. It was Prescott. He had shaved, dressed his wounds, and soaked his hair down with water, but he was drunk again. "Going to New York," he mumbled to his mother. "Ernest's going to drive me to the plane. See you." He turned and wandered back across the library into the Venetian Salon and out of sight, and his mother set her teeth as she watched him go. Then she seized Victor's hand and said, "I want you and your lovely wife to come and live at Salisbury Hall. I know that you're living in a hotel. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. You'll be doing me a favor. That's what it amounts to."

  The Mackenzies gracefully declined her offer and returned to Pittsburgh on Sunday night. A few days later, the old lady, hearing that Theresa was sick in bed, sent flowers, and a note repeating her invitation. The Mackenzies discussed it that night. "We must think of it as a business arrangement, if we think of it at all," Victor said. "We must think of it as the practical answer to a practical problem." Theresa had always been frail, and living in the country would be good for her. This was the first thing they thought of. Victor had a job in town, but he could commute from the railroad station nearest Salisbury Hall. They talked with Mrs. Brownlee again and got her to agree to accept from them what they would have paid for rent and food, so that the arrangement would be kept impersonal. Then they moved into a suite of rooms above the Great Hall.

  It worked out very well. Their rooms were large and quiet, and the relationship with Mrs. Brownlee was easygoing. Any sense of obligation they may have felt was dispelled by their knowing that they were useful to their hostess in a hundred ways. She needed a man around the place, and who else would want to live in Salisbury Hall? Except for gala occasions, more than half the rooms were shut, and there were not enough servants to intimidate the rats that lived in the basement. Theresa undertook the herculean task of repairing Mrs. Brownlee's needlepoint; there were eighty-six pieces. The tennis court at Salisbury Hall had been neglected since the war, and Victor, on his weekends, weeded and rolled it and got it in shape again. He absorbed a lot of information about Mrs. Brownlee's house and her scattered family, and when she was too tired to take interested guests around the place, he was always happy to. "This hall," he would say, "was removed panel by panel and stone by stone from a Tudor house near the cathedral in Salisbury... The marble floor is part of the lobby floor of the old First National Bank. Mr. Brownlee gave Mrs. Brownlee the Venetian Salon as a birthday present, and these four columns of solid onyx came from the ruins of Herculaneum. They were
floated down Lake Erie from Buffalo to Ashtabula..." Victor could also point out the scar on a tree where Spencer Brownlee had wrecked his car, and the rose garden that had been planted for Hester Brownlee when she was so sick. We have seen how helpful he was on occasions like the dance for the Girl Scout fund.

  Violet was away in camps and schools. "Why do you live here?" she asked the first time she came to visit her parents in Salisbury Hall. "What a moldy old wreck! What a regular junk heap!" Mrs. Brownlee may have heard Violet laughing at her house. In any event, she took a violent dislike to the Mackenzies' only child, and Violet's visits were infrequent and brief. The only one of Mrs. Brownlee's children who returned from time to time was Prescott. Then, one evening not long after the Girl Scout dance, Mrs. Brownlee got a wire from her daughter Hester, who had been living in Europe for fifteen years. She had arrived in New York and was coming on to Pittsburgh the following day.

  Mrs. Brownlee told the Mackenzies the good news at dinner. She was transported. "Oh, you'll love Hester," she said. "You'll both love her! She was always just like Dresden china. She was sickly when she was a child and I guess that's why she's always been my favorite. Oh, I hope she'll stay! I wish there was time to have her rooms painted! You must urge her to stay, Victor. It would make me so happy. You urge her to stay. I think she'll like you."

  Mrs. Brownlee's words echoed through a dining room that had the proportions of a gymnasium; their small table was pushed against a window and separated from the rest of the room by a screen, and the Mackenzies liked to have dinner there. The window looked down the lawns and stairways to the ruin of a formal garden. The iron lace on the roof of the broken greenhouses, the noise of the fountains whose basins were disfigured and cracked, the rattle of the dumb-waiter that brought their tasteless dinner up from the basement kitchens, where the rats lived—the Mackenzies regarded all this foolishness with the deepest respect, as if it had some genuine significance. They may have suffered from an indiscriminate sense of the past or from an inability to understand that the past plays no part in our happiness. A few days earlier, Theresa had stumbled into a third-floor bedroom that was full of old bon-voyage baskets—gilded, and looped with dog-eared ribbons—that had been saved from Mrs. Brownlee's many voyages.

  While Mrs. Brownlee talked about Hester that evening, she kept her eye on the garden and saw, in the distance, a man climbing over one of the marble walls. Then a girl handed him down a blanket, a picnic hamper, and a bottle, and jumped into his arms. They were followed by two more couples. They settled themselves in the Temple of Love and, gathering a pile of broken latticework, built a little fire.

  "Drive them away, Victor," Mrs. Brownlee said.

  Victor left the table and crossed the terrace and went down to the garden and told the party to go.

  "I happen to be a very good friend of Mrs. Brownlee's," one of the men said.

  "That doesn't matter," Victor said. "You'll have to get out."

  "Who says so?"

  "I say so.

  "Who are you?"

  Victor didn't answer. He broke up their fire and stamped out the embers. He was outnumbered and outweighed, and he knew that if it came to a fight, he would probably get hurt, but the smoke from the extinguished fire drove the party out of the temple and gave Victor an advantage. He stood on a flight of steps above them and looked at his watch. "I'll give you five minutes to get over the wall and out," he said.

  "But I'm a friend of Mrs. Brownlee's!"

  "If you're a friend of Mrs. Brownlee's," Victor said, "come in the front way. I give you five minutes." They started down the path toward the wall, and Victor waited until one of the girls—they were all pretty—had been hoisted over it. Then he went back to the table and finished his dinner while Mrs. Brownlee talked on and on about Little Hester.

  The next day was Saturday, but Victor spent most of it in Pittsburgh, looking for work. He didn't get out to Salisbury Hall until about four, and he was hot and dirty. When he stepped into the Great Hall, he saw that the doors onto the terrace were open and the florist's men were unloading a truck full of tubbed orange trees. A maid came up to him excitedly. "Nils is sick and can't drive!" she exclaimed. "Mrs. Brownlee wants you to go down to the station and meet Miss Hester. You'd better hurry. She's coming on the four-fifteen. She doesn't want you to take your car. She wants you to take the Rolls-Royce. She says you have permission to take the Rolls-Royce."

  The four-fifteen had come and gone by the time Victor arrived at the station. Hester Brownlee was standing in the waiting room, surrounded by her luggage. She was a middle-aged woman who had persevered with her looks, and might at a distance have seemed pretty. "How do you do, Miss Brownlee?" Victor said. "I'm Victor Mackenzie. I'm—"

  "Yes, I know," she said. "I've heard all about you from Prescott." She looked past his shoulder. "You're late."

  "I'm sorry," Victor said, "but your mother..."

  "These are my bags," she said. She walked out to the Rolls-Royce and got into the back seat.

  Victor lighted a cigarette and smoked it halfway down. Then he carried her bags out to the car and started home to Salisbury Hall along a back road.

  "You're going the wrong way," Miss Brownlee called. "Don't you even know the way?"

  "I'm not going the usual way," Victor said patiently, "but a few years ago they built a factory down the road, and the traffic is heavy around closing time. It's quicker this way. But I expect that you'll find a good many changes in the neighborhood. How long has it been, Miss Brownlee, since you've seen Salisbury Hall?" There was no answer to his question, and, thinking that she might not have heard him, he asked again, "How long has it been, Miss Brownlee, since you've seen Salisbury Hall?"

  They made the rest of the trip in silence. When they got to the house, Victor unloaded her bags and stood them by the door. Miss Brownlee counted them aloud. Then she opened her purse and handed Victor a quarter. "Why, thank you!" Victor said. "Thank you very much!" He went down into the garden to walk off his anger. He decided not to tell Theresa about this meeting. Finally, he went upstairs. Theresa was at work on one of the needlepoint stools. The room they used for a parlor was cluttered with half-repaired needlepoint. She embraced Victor tenderly, as she always did when they had been separated for a day. Victor had dressed when a maid knocked on the door. "Mrs. Brownlee wants to see you, both of you," she said. "She's in the office. At once."

  Theresa clung to Victor's arm as they went downstairs. The office, a cluttered and dirty room beside the elevator, was brightly lighted. Mrs. Brownlee, in grande tenue, sat at her husband's desk. "You're the straw that broke the camel's back—both of you," she said harshly when they came in. "Shut the door. I don't want everybody to hear me. Little Hester has come home for the first time in fifteen years, and the first thing she gets off the train, you have to insult her. For nine years, you've had the privilege of living in this beautiful house—a wonder of the world—and how do you repay me? Oh, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back! Prescott's told me often enough that you weren't any good, either of you, and Hester feels the same way, and gradually I'm beginning to see it myself."

  The harried and garishly painted old lady wielded over the Mackenzies the power of angels. Her silver dress glittered like St. Michael's raiment, and thunder and lightning, death and destruction, were in her right hand. "Everybody's been warning me about you for years," she said. "And you may not mean to do wrong—you may just be unlucky—but one of the first things Hester noticed is that half the needlepoint is missing. You're always repairing the chair that I want to sit down in. And you, Victor—you told me that you fixed the tennis court, and, of course, I don't know about that because I can't play tennis, but when I asked the Beardons over to play tennis last week, they told me that the court wasn't fit to play on, and you can imagine how embarrassed I was, and those people you drove out of the garden last night turned out to be the children of a very dear friend of the late Mr. Brownlee's. And you're two weeks behind with your rent."
>
  "I'll send you the rent," Victor said. "We will go."

  Theresa had not taken her arm out of his during the interview, and they left the office together. It was raining, and Ernest was putting out pails in the Venetian Salon, where the domed ceiling had sprung a leak. "Could you help me with some suitcases?" Victor asked. The old butler must have overheard the interview, because he didn't answer.

  There was in the Mackenzies' rooms an accumulation of sentimental possessions—photographs, pieces of silver, and so forth. Theresa hastily began to gather these up. Victor went down to the basement and got their bags. They packed hurriedly—they did not even stop to smoke a cigarette—but it took them most of the evening. When they had finished, Theresa stripped the bed and put the soiled towels into a hamper, and Victor carried the bags down. He wrote a postcard to Violet's school, saying that his address was no longer Salisbury Hall. He waited for Theresa by the front door. "Oh, my darling, where will we go?" she murmured when she met him there. She waited in the rain for him to bring their car around, and they drove away, and God knows where they did go after that.

  GOD KNOWS where they went after that, but for our purposes they next appeared, years later, at a resort on the coast of Maine called Horsetail Beach. Victor had some kind of job in New York, and they had driven to Maine for his vacation. Violet was not with them. She had married and was living in San Francisco. She had a baby. She did not write to her parents, and Victor knew that she thought of him with bitter resentment, although he did not know why. The waywardness of their only child troubled Victor and Theresa, but they could seldom bring themselves to discuss it. Helen Jackson, their hostess at Horsetail Beach, was a spirited young woman with four children. She was divorced. Her house was tracked with sand, and most of the furniture was broken. The Mackenzies arrived there on a stormy evening when the north wind blew straight through the walls of the house. Their hostess was out to dinner, and as soon as they arrived, the cook put on her hat and coat and went off to the movies, leaving them in charge of the children. They carried their bags upstairs, stepping over several wet bathing suits, put the four children to bed, and settled themselves in a cold guest room.