The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  THE SUMMER the pig fell into the well was also Esther's tennis summer and the summer that she became so thin. Esther had been very fat when she entered college, but during her freshman year she had begun the arduous—and, in her case, successful—struggle to put on a new appearance and a new personality. She went on a strict diet, and played twelve and fourteen sets of tennis a day, and her chaste, athletic, and earnest manner never relaxed. Russell was her tennis partner that summer. Mrs. Nudd had offered Russell a job again that summer, but instead he had taken a job with a dairy farmer, delivering milk. The Nudds supposed that he wanted to be independent, and they understood, for they all had Russell's best interests at heart. They took a familial pride in the fact that he had finished his sophomore year on the Dean's list. As it turned out, the job with the dairy farmer changed nothing. Russell was finished with his milk route at ten in the morning, and he spent most of the summer playing tennis with Esther. He often stayed to supper.

  They were playing tennis that afternoon when Nora came running through the garden and told them that the pig had got out of the tool house and fallen into the well. Someone had left the door of the well shed open. Russell and Esther went over to the well and found the animal swimming in six feet of water. Russell made a slipknot in a clothesline and began fishing for the pig. In the meantime, Mrs. Nudd was waiting for Miss Coolidge to arrive, and Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha were coming back from Polett's Landing in the launch. There were high waves on the lake, and the boat rolled, and some sediment was dislodged from the gas tank and plugged the feed line. The wind blew the disabled boat onto Gull Rock and put a hole in her bow. Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha put on life jackets and swam the twenty yards or so to shore.

  MR. NUDD'S part in the narration was restrained (Aunt Martha was dead), and he did not join in until he was asked. "Was Aunt Martha really praying?" Joan would ask, and he would clear his throat to say—his manner was extremely dry and deliberate—"She was indeed, Joany. She was saying the Lord's Prayer. She had never, up until then, been a notably religious woman, but I'm sure that she could be heard praying from the shore."

  "Was Aunt Martha really wearing corsets?" Joan would ask.

  "Well, I should say so, Joany," Mr. Nudd would reply. 'When she and I came up onto the porch where your mother and Miss Coolidge were having their tea, the water was still pouring from our clothes in bucketfuls, and Aunt Martha had on very little that couldn't be seen."

  Mr. Nudd had inherited from his father a wool concern, and he always wore a full woolen suit, as if he were advertising the business. He spent the whole summer in the country the year the pig fell into the well—not because his business was running itself but because of quarrels with his partners. "There's no sense in my going back to New York now," he kept saying. "I'll stay up here until September and give those sons of bitches enough rope to hang themselves." The stupidity of his partners and associates frustrated Mr. Nudd. "You know, Charlie Richmond doesn't have any principles," he would say to Mrs. Nudd desperately and yet hopelessly, as if he did not expect his wife to understand business, or as if the impact of stupidity was indescribable. "He doesn't have any ethics," he would go on, "he doesn't have any code of morals or manners, he doesn't have any principles, he doesn't think about anything but making money." Mrs. Nudd seemed to understand. It was her opinion that people like that killed themselves. She had known a man like that. He had worked day and night making money. He ruined his partners and betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children, and then, after making millions and millions of dollars, he went down to his office one Sunday afternoon and jumped out of the window.

  HARTLEY'S PART in the story about the pig centered on a large pike he had caught that day, and Randy didn't enter into the narrative until close to its end. Randy had been fired out of college that spring. He and six friends had gone to a lecture on Socialism, and one of them had thrown a grapefruit at the speaker. Randy and the others refused to name the man who had thrown the grapefruit, and they were all expelled. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd were disheartened by this, but they were pleased with the way Randy had behaved. In the end, this experience made Randy feel like a celebrity and increased his already substantial self-respect. The fact that he had been expelled from college, that he was going to work in Boston in the fall, made him feel superior to the others.

  The story did not begin to take on weight until a year after the pig incident, and already in this short time alterations had been made in its form. Esther's part changed in Russell's favor. She would interrupt the others to praise Russell. "You were so wonderful, Russell. How did you ever learn to make a slipknot? By Jupiter, if it hadn't been for Russell, I'll bet that pig would still be in the well." The year before, Esther and Russell had kissed a few times, and had decided that even if they fell in love they could never marry. He would not leave Macabit. She could not live there. They had reached these conclusions during Esther's tennis summer, when her kisses, like everything else, were earnest and chaste. The following summer, she seemed as anxious to lose her virginity as she had been to lose her corpulence. Something—Russell never knew what—had happened in the winter to make her ashamed of her inexperience.

  She talked about sex when they were alone. Russell had got the idea that her chastity was of great value, and he was the one who had to be persuaded, but then he lost his head quickly and went up the back stairs to her room. After they had become lovers, they continued to talk about how they could never marry, but the impermanence of their relationship did not seem to matter, as if this, like everything else, had been enlightened by the innocent and transitory season. Esther refused to make love in any place but her own bed, but her room was at the back of the house and could be reached by the kitchen stairs, and Russell never had any trouble in getting there without being seen. Like all the other rooms of the camp, it was unfinished. The pine boards were fragrant and darkened, a reproduction of a Degas and a photograph of Zermatt were tacked to the walls, the bed was lumpy, and on those summer nights, with the June bugs making the screens resound, with the heat of the day still caught in the boards of the old camp, with the parched smell of her light-brown hair, with her goodness and her slenderness in his arms, Russell felt that this happiness was inestimable.

  They thought that everyone would find out, and that they were lost. Esther did not regret what she had done, but she didn't know how it would end. They kept waiting for trouble, and when nothing happened, they were perplexed. Then she decided one night that everyone must know about it, but that everyone understood. The thought that her parents were young enough at heart to understand this passion as innocent and natural made Esther cry. "Aren't they wonderful people, darling?" she asked Russell. "Did you ever know such wonderful people. I mean, they were brought up so strictly, and all of their friends are stuffy, and isn't it wonderful that they understand?" Russell agreed. His respect for the Nudds was deepened by the thought that they could overlook convention for something larger. But both Esther and Russell were mistaken, of course. No one spoke to them about their meetings because no one knew about them. It never once occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Nudd that anything like that was going on.

  THE FALL BEFORE, Joan had married suddenly, and gone out to Minneapolis to live. The marriage did not last. She was in Reno by April, and had her divorce in time to return to Whitebeach Camp for the summer. She was still a pretty girl, with a long face and fair hair. No one had expected her to return, and the things in her room had been scattered. She kept looking for her pictures and her books, her rugs and her chairs. When she joined the others on the porch after supper, she would ask a lot of questions. "Has anyone a match?"

  "Is there an ashtray over there?"

  "Is there any coffee left?"

  "Are we going to have drinks?"

  "Is there an extra pillow around?" Hartley was the only one to answer her questions kindly.

  Randy and his wife were there for two weeks. Randy still borrowed money from his sisters. Pamela w
as a slight, dark girl who did not get on with Mrs. Nudd at all. She had been brought up in Chicago, and Mrs. Nudd, who had spent all her life in the East, sometimes thought that this might account for their differences. "I want the truth," Pamela often said to Mrs. Nudd, as if she suspected her mother-in-law of telling lies. "Do you think pink looks well on me?" she would ask. "I want the truth." She disapproved of Mrs. Nudd's management of Whitebeach Camp, and on one occasion tried to do something about the waste that she saw everywhere. Behind Mrs. Nudd's garden there was a large currant patch, which the hired man mulched and pruned every year, although the Nudds disliked currants and never picked them. One morning, a truck came up the driveway and four men, strangers, went into the patch. The maid told Mrs. Nudd, and she was on the point of asking Randy to drive the strangers away when Pamela came in and explained everything. "The currants are rotting," she said, "so I told the man in the grocery store that he could pick them if he'd pay us fifteen cents a quart. I hate to see waste..." This incident troubled Mrs. Nudd and everyone else, although they could not have said why.

  BUT AT ITS HEART that summer was like all the others. Russell and "the children" went to Sherill's Falls, where the water is gold; they climbed Macabit Mountain; and they went fishing at Bates's Pond. Because these excursions were yearly, they had begun to seem like rites. After supper, the family would go out onto the open porch. Often there would be pink clouds in the sky. "I just saw the cook throw out a dish of cauliflower," Pamela would say to Mrs. Nudd. "I'm not in a position to correct her, but I hate to see waste. Don't you?" Or Joan would ask, "Has anyone seen my yellow sweater? I'm sure I left it at the bathhouse but I've just been down there and I can't find it. Did anyone bring it back? That's the second sweater I've lost this year." Then for a time no one would speak, as if they had all been unshackled by the evening from the stern laws of conversation, and when the talk began again it would continue to be trifling; it would involve the best ways of caulking a boat, or the difference in comfort between buses and trolley cars, or the shortest ways of driving into Canada. The darkness would come into the soft air as thickly as silt. Then someone speaking of the sky would remind Mrs. Nudd of how red the sky had been the night the pig fell into the well.

  "You were playing tennis with Esther, weren't you, Russell? That was Esther's tennis summer. Didn't you win the pig at the fair in Lanchester, Randy? You won it at one of those things where you throw baseballs at a target. You were always such a good athlete."

  The pig, they all knew, had been won in a raffle, but no one corrected Mrs. Nudd for her slight alteration in the narrative. She had recently begun to praise Randy for distinctions that he had never enjoyed. This was not conscious on her part, and she would have been confused if anyone had contradicted her, but now she would often recall how well he had done in German, how popular he had been in boarding school, how important he had been to the football team—all false, good-hearted memories that seemed aimed at Randy, as if they might hearten him. "You were going to build a pen for the pig," she said. "You were always such a good carpenter. Remember that bookcase you built? Then Pamela called you up, and you drove over there in the old Cadillac."

  MISS COOLIDGE had arrived on that famous day at four, they all remembered. She was a spinster from the Middle West who made a living as a church soloist. There was nothing remarkable about her, but she was, of course, very different from the easygoing family, and it pleased them to think that they excited her disapproval. When she had been settled, Mrs. Nudd took her out onto the porch and Nora Quinn brought them some tea. After Nora served the tea, she took a bottle of Scotch out of the dining room surreptitiously and went up to her attic and began to drink. Hartley returned from the lake with his seven-pound pike in a pail. He put this in the back hall and joined his mother and Miss Coolidge, attracted by the cookies on the table. Miss Coolidge and Mrs. Nudd were recalling school days in Switzerland when Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha, fully dressed and soaking wet, came up onto the porch and were introduced. The pig had drowned by this time, and Russell didn't get it out of the well until suppertime. Hartley loaned him a razor and a white shirt, and he stayed for supper. The pig was not mentioned in front of Miss Coolidge, but there was a lot of talk at the table about how salty the water tasted. After supper, they all went out on the porch. Aunt Martha had hung her corsets to dry in her bedroom window, and when she went upstairs to see how they were drying, she noticed the sky and called down to the others to look at it. "Look at the sky, everybody, look at the sky!" A moment earlier, the clouds had been shut; now they began to discharge worlds of fire. The glare then spread over the lake was blinding. "Oh, look at the sky, Nora!" Mrs. Nudd called upstairs to the cook, but by the time Nora, who was drunk, got to the window, the illusion of fire had gone and the clouds were dull, and, thinking that she might have misunderstood Mrs. Nudd, she went to the head of the stairs to ask if there was something they wanted. She fell down the stairs and upset the pail with the live pike in it.

  AT THIS POINT in the story, Joan and Mrs. Nudd laughed until they wept. They all laughed happily except Pamela, who was waiting impatiently for her part in the narrative. It came immediately after the fall downstairs. Randy had stayed at the Blaisdells' for supper and had returned to the camp with Pamela while Hartley and Russell were trying to get Nora into bed. They had news for everybody, they said; they had decided to get married. Mrs. Nudd had never wanted Randy to marry Pamela, and their news made her sad, but she kissed Pamela tenderly and went upstairs to get a diamond ring. "Oh, it's beautiful!" Pamela said when she was given the ring. "But don't you need it? Won't you miss it? Are you sure you want me to have it? Tell me the truth..." Miss Coolidge, who had been very quiet until then and who must have felt very much a stranger, asked if she could sing.

  ALL THE LONG DISCUSSIONS that Russell had had with Esther about the impermanence of their relationship did not help him that autumn when the Nudds went away. He missed the girl and the summer nights in her room painfully. He began to write long letters to Esther when he got back to Albany. He was troubled and lonely as he had never been before. Esther did not answer his letters, but this did not change the way he felt. He decided that they should become engaged. He would stay on at college and get a Master's degree, and with a teaching job they could live in some place like Albany. Esther did not even answer his proposal of marriage, and in desperation Russell telephoned her at college. She was out. He left a message to call him back. When she had not called him by the next evening, he telephoned her again, and when he got her this time, he asked her to marry him. "I can't marry you, Russell," she said impatiently. "I don't want to marry you." He hung up miserably and was lovesick for a week. Then he decided that Esther's refusal was not her decision, that her parents had forbidden her to marry him—a conjecture that was strengthened when none of the Nudds returned to Macabit the next summer. But Russell was mistaken. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd took Joan and Esther to California that summer, not to keep Esther away from Russell but because Mrs. Nudd had received a legacy and had decided to spend it on the trip. Hartley took a job in Maine at a summer camp. Randy and Pamela—Randy had lost his job in Boston and had taken one in Worcester—were having a baby in July, and so Whitebeach Camp was not opened at all.

  THEN THEY ALL came back. A year later, on a June day when a horse van was bringing the bays up to the Macabit Riding Stable and there were a lot of motorboats on trailers along the road, the Nudds returned. Hartley had a teaching job, so he was there all summer. Randy took two weeks without pay so that he and Pamela and their baby could be there for a month. Joan had not planned to come back; she had gone into partnership with a woman who owned a tearoom at Lake George, but she quarreled with her partner early in this venture, and in June Mr. Nudd drove to the lake and brought her home. Joan had been to a doctor that winter because she had begun to suffer from depressions, and she talked freely about her unhappiness. "You know, I think the trouble with me," she would say at breakfast, "is that I was so jealous of Hartley when he f
irst went to boarding school. I could have killed him when he came home that year for Christmas, but I repressed all of my animosity..."

  "Remember that nursemaid, O'Brien?" she would ask at lunch. "Well, I think O'Brien warped my whole outlook on sex. She used to get undressed in the closet, and she beat me once for looking at myself in a mirror when I didn't have any clothes on. I think she warped my whole outlook..."

  "I think the trouble with me is that Grandmother was always so strict," she would say at dinner. "I never had the feeling that I gratified her. I mean, I got such bad marks at school, and she always made me feel so guilty. I think it's colored my attitude toward other women."

  "You know," she would say on the porch after supper, "I think the whole turning point in my life was that awful Trenchard boy who showed me those pictures when I was only ten..." These recollections brought her a momentary happiness, but half an hour later she would be biting her fingernails. Surrounded all her life by just and kindly people, she was having a hard time finding the causes of her irresolution, and, one by one, she blamed the members of her family, and their friends, and the servants.

  Esther had married Tom Dennison the previous fall, when she returned from California. This match pleased everyone in the family. Tom was pleasant, industrious, and intelligent. He had a freshman job with a firm that manufactured cash registers. His salary was small, and he and Esther began their marriage in a cold-water tenement in the East Sixties. Speaking of this arrangement, people sometimes added, "That Esther Nudd is so courageous!" When the summer came around, Tom had only a short vacation, and he and Esther went to Cape God in June. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd hoped that Esther would then come to Whitebeach Camp, but Esther said no, she would stick it out in the city with Tom. She changed her mind in August, and Mr. Nudd drove to the junction and met her train. She would only stay for ten days, she said, and this would be her last summer at Whitebeach Camp. Tom and she were going to buy a summer place of their own on Cape God. When it was time for her to go, she telephoned Tom, and he told her to stay in the country; the heat was awful. She telephoned him once a week and stayed at Whitebeach Camp until the middle of September.