The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  By now the harbor of Naples must be full of tears, so many are wept there whenever a boat pulls out with its load of emigrants, and I wondered what it would feel like to go away once more because you hear so much talk about loving Italy among my mother's friends that you might think the peninsula was shaped more like a naked woman than a boot. Would I miss it, I wondered, or would it all slip away like a house of cards, would it all slip away and be forgotten? Beside me on the wharf was an old Italian lady in black clothes who kept calling across the water, "Blessed are you, blessed are you, you will see the New World," but the man she was shouting to, he was an old, old man, was crying like a baby.

  After lunch there was nothing to do so I bought an excursion ticket to Vesuvius. There were some Germans and Swiss on the bus and these two American girls, the one who had dyed her hair in some hotel washbasin a funny shade of red and was wearing a mink stole in spite of the heat and the other who had not dyed her hair at all and at the sight of whom my heart, like a big owl, some night bird anyhow, spread its wings and flew away. She was beautiful. Just looking at her different parts, her nose and her neck and so forth, made her seem more beautiful. She kept poking her fingers into her black hair—patting and poking it—and just watching her do this made me very happy. I was jumping, I was positively jumping just watching her fix her hair. I could see I was making a fool of myself so I looked out of the window at all the smoking chimneys south of Naples and the Autostrada there and thought that when I next saw her she would look less beautiful and so I waited until we got to the end of the Autostrada and looked again and she was as fair as ever.

  They were together and there wasn't any way of getting between them when we lined up for the chair lift but then after we were swung up the mountain to the summit it turned out that the redhead couldn't walk around because she had on sandals and the hot cinders of the volcano burned her feet so I offered to show her friend the sights, what there were to be seen, Sorrento and Capri in the distance and the crater and so forth. Her name was Eva and she was an American making a tour and when I asked her about her friend she said the redhead wasn't her friend at all but that they had just met in the bus and sat down together because they could both speak English but that was all. She told me she was an actress, she was twenty-two years old and did television commercials, mostly advertising ladies' razors, but that she only did the speaking part, some other girl did the shaving, and that she had made enough money doing this to come to Europe.

  I sat with Eva on the bus back into Naples and we talked all the time. She said she liked Italian cooking and that her father had not wanted her to come alone to Europe. She had quarreled with her father. I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery. I thought I would ask her to have supper with me at Santa Lucia and so forth but then somewhere near the Garibaldi Station the bus ran into one of those little Fiats and there was the usual thing that happens in Italy when you have a collision. The driver got out to make a speech and everybody got out to hear him and then when we got back into the bus again, Eva wasn't there. It was late in the day and near the station and very crowded, but I've seen enough movies of men looking for their loved ones in railroad-station crowds to feel sure that this was all going to end happily and I looked for her for an hour on the street, but I never saw her again. I went back to the place where we were staying, but there was no one at home, thank God, and I went up to my room, a furnished room—I forgot to say that the marquesa rented rooms—and lay down on my bed and put my face in my arms and thought again that I was never going to get all the loving I needed, no, never.

  Later my mother came in and said that I would get my clothes all rumpled, lying around like that. Then she sat down in a chair by my window and asked wasn't the view divine although I knew that all she could see was a lagoon and some hills and some fishermen on a wharf. I was cross at my mother and with some reason too because she has always taught me to respect invisible things and I have been an apt pupil but I could see that night that nothing invisible was going to improve the way I felt. She has always taught me that the most powerful moral forces in life are invisible and I have always gone along with her thinking that starlight and rain are what keep the world from flying to pieces. I went along with her up until that moment when it was revealed to me that all her teaching was wrong—it was faint-hearted and revolting like the smell of Chinese Temple Incense that comes off that man in church. What did the starlight have to do with my needs? I have often admired my mother, especially in repose, and she is supposed to be beautiful but that night she seemed to me very misled. I sat on the edge of the bed staring at her and thinking how ignorant she was. Then I had a terrible impulse. What I wanted to do was to give her a boot, a swift kick, and I imagined—I let myself imagine the whole awful scene—the look on her face and the way she would straighten her skirt and say that I was an ungrateful son; that I had never appreciated the advantages of my life: Christmas in Kitzbühel, etc. She said something else about the divine view and the charming fishermen and I went to the window to see what she was talking about.

  What was so charming about the fishermen? They were dirty, you could be sure, and dishonest and dumb and one of them was probably drunk because he kept taking swigs out of a wine bottle. While they wasted their time at the wharf their wives and their children were probably waiting for them to bring home some money and what was so charming about that? The sky was golden but this was nothing but an illusion of gas and fire, and the water was blue but the harbor there is full of sewage and the many lights on the hill came from the windows of cold and ugly houses where the rooms would smell of parmigiano rinds and washing. The light was golden, but then the golden light changed to another color, deeper and rosier, and I wondered where I had seen the color before and I thought I had seen it on the outer petals of those roses that bloom late on the mountains after the hoarfrost. Then it paled off, it got so pale that you could see the smoke from the city rising into the air and then through the smoke the evening star turned on, burning like a street light, and I began to count the other stars as they appeared, but very soon they were countless. Then suddenly my mother began to cry and I knew she was crying because she was so lonely in the world and I was very sorry that I had ever wanted to kick her. Then she said why didn't we not go to San Carlo and take the night train to Rome which is what we did and she was happy to see Tibi lying on the sofa when we got back.

  WHILE LYING in bed that night, thinking about Eva and everything, in that city where you can't hear the rain, I thought I would go home. Nobody in Italy really understood me. If I said good morning to the porter, he wouldn't know what I was saying. If I went out on the balcony and shouted help or fire or something like that, nobody would understand. I thought I would like to go back to Nantucket where I would be understood and where there would be many girls like Eva walking on the beach. Also it seemed to me that a person should live in his own country; that there is always something a little funny or queer about people who choose to live in another country. Now my mother has many American friends who speak fluent Italian and wear Italian clothes—everything they have is Italian including their husbands sometimes—but to me there always seems to be something a little funny about them as if their stockings were crooked or their underwear showed and I think that is always true about people who choose to live in another country. I wanted to go home. I talked with my mother about it the next day and she said it was out of the question, I couldn't go alone and she didn't know anyone any more. Then I asked if I could go back for the summer and she said she couldn't afford this, she was going to rent a villa at Santa Marinella and then I asked if I could get the money myself could I go and she said of course.

  I began to look around then for a part-time job and these are hard to find, but I asked Tibi and he was helpful. He isn't much, but he is always kind. He said he would keep me in mind and then one day when I came home he asked me if I would like to work for Roncari, the sights
eeing company, as a guide on Saturdays and Sundays. This was perfect for me and they tried me out the next Saturday on the bus that goes to Hadrian's Villa and Tivoli and the Americans liked me I guess because I reminded them of home and I went to work on Sunday. The money was fair and the hours fitted in with my schoolwork and I also thought that the job might offer me an opportunity to meet some wealthy American industrialist who would want to take me back to the United States and teach me all about the steel business, but I never did. I saw lots of American wanderers though and I saw, in my course of duty, how great is the hunger in many Americans who have comfortable and lovely homes to wander around the world and see its sights. Sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays when I watched them piling into the bus it seemed to me that we are a wandering breed like the nomads. On the trip we first went out to the villa where they had a half hour to see the place and take pictures, and then I counted them off and we drove up the big hill to Tivoli and the Villa d'Este. They took more pictures and I showed them where to buy the cheapest postcards and then we would drive down the Tiburtina past all the new factories here and into Rome. In the wintertime it was dark when we got back to the city and the bus would go around to all the hotels where they were staying or someplace near anyhow. The tourists were always very quiet on the trip back and I think this was because, in their sightseeing bus, they felt the strangeness of Rome swirling around them with its lights and haste and cooking smells, where they had no friends and relations, no business of any kind really but to visit ruins. The last stop was up by the Pincian Gate and it was often windy there in the winter and I would wonder if there was really any substance to life and if it wasn't all like this, really, hungry travelers, some of them with sore feet, looking for dim hotel lights in a city that is not supposed to suffer winter but that suffers plenty, and everybody speaking another language.

  I opened a bank account in the Santo Spirito and on Easter vacation I worked full-time on the Rome-Florence run.

  In this business there are shirt, bladder, and hair stops. A shirt stop is two days where you can get a shirt washed and a hair stop is three days where the ladies can get their hair fixed. I would pick up the passengers on Monday morning and sitting up in front with the driver would tell them the names of the castles and roads and rivers and villages we went by. We stopped at Avezano and Assisi. Perugia was a bladder stop and we got to Florence about seven in the evening. In the morning I would pick up another group who were coming down from Venice. Venice is a hair stop.

  When vacation was over I went back to school but about a week after this they called me from Roncari and said that a guide was sick and could I take the Tivoli bus. Then I did something terrible, I made the worst decision I ever made so far. No one was listening and I said I would. I was thinking about Nantucket and going home to a place where I would be understood. I played hooky the next day and when I came home nobody noticed the difference. I thought I would feel guilty, but I didn't feel guilty at all. What I felt was lonely. Then Roncari called again and I skipped another day and then they offered me a steady job and I never went back to school at all. I was making money, but I felt lonely all the time. I had lost all my friends and my place in the world and it seemed to me that my life was nothing but a lie. Then one of the Italian guides complained because I didn't have a license. They were very strict about this and they had to fire me and then I didn't have any place to go. I couldn't go back to school and I couldn't hang around the palace. I'd get up in the morning and take my books—I always carried my books—and would just bum around the streets or the Forum and eat my sandwiches and sometimes go to the movies in the afternoon. Then when it was time for school and soccer practice to be over I would go home where Tibi was usually sitting around with my mother.

  Tibi knew all about my playing hooky and I guess his friends at Roncari had told him but he promised not to tell my mother. We had a long talk together one night when my mother was getting dressed to go out. He was saying first how strange it was that I wanted to go home and he didn't want to go home. Tibi doesn't want to go home because he has a difficult family situation. He doesn't get along with his father who is a businessman and he has a stepmother named Verna and he hates Verna. He doesn't ever want to go home. But then he asked me how much money I had saved and I told him I had enough to get home but not to live on or anything or get back and he said he thought he could do something to help me and I trusted him because after all he had got me the job with Roncari.

  The next day was Saturday and my mother told me not to make any plans because we were going to pay a visit to the old Princess Tavola-Calda. I said I didn't much want to go but she said I had to go and that was that. We went over there around four, after the siesta. Her palace is in an old part of Rome where the streets turn in on themselves and a run-down quarter too where like in any other run-down quarter they sell secondhand mattresses and old clothes and powders against fleas and bedbugs and cures for itchiness and other thorns in the flesh of the poor. We could tell which palace was hers because the old Princess had her head out of one of the windows and was having a fight with a fat woman who was sweeping the steps with a broom. We stopped at the corner because my mother thought the Princess would not want us to see her having a fight. The Princess wanted the broom and the fat woman said that if she wanted a broom she could buy a broom. She, the fat woman, had worked for the Princess forty-eight years and was paid so miserably that every night she and her husband sat down to a supper of water and air. The Princess came right back at her in spite of her age and frailty and said she had been robbed by the government and that there was nothing but air in her own stomach and that she needed the broom to sweep the salone. Then the fat woman said that if she gave her the broom she would give it to her in the squash. Then the Princess got sarcastic and called the fat woman cara, cara, and said she had cared for her like a baby for forty-eight years, bringing her lemons when she was sick, and that yet she did not have the gentleness to loan her a broom for a moment. Then the fat woman looked up at the Princess and took her right hand and bunched her lips together between her thumb and forefinger and made the loudest raspberry I ever heard. Then the Princess said, Cara, cara, thank you very much my dear, my old and gentle friend, and went away from the window and came back with a pot of water which she meant to dump on the fat woman, but she missed and only wet the steps. Then the fat woman said, Thank you, your royal highness, thank you, Princess, and went on sweeping and the Princess slammed the windows and went away.

  During all of this some men were going in and out of the palace carrying old automobile tires and loading them onto a truck and I found out later that the whole palace, excepting where the Princess lived, was rented out as a warehouse. To the right of the big door there was a porter's apartment and the porter stopped us and asked us what we wanted. My mother said we wanted to take tea with the Princess and he said we were wasting our time. The Princess was crazy—matta—and if we thought she was going to give us something we were mistaken because everything she had belonged to him and his wife who had worked for the Princess forty-eight years without a salary. Then he said he didn't like Americans because we had bombed Frascati and Tivoli and all the rest of it. Finally I pushed him out of the way and we climbed up to the third floor where the Princess had some rooms. Zimba barked when we rang and she opened the door a crack and then she let us in.

  I suppose everyone knows what old Rome is like by now but she needed that broom. First she apologized for her ragged clothes but she said that all her best clothes, the court dresses and so forth, were locked up in this trunk and she had lost the key. She has a fancy way of speaking so that you would be sure to know that she is a Princess or at least some kind of a noble in spite of her rags. She is supposed to be a famous miser and I think this is true because although she sometimes sounds crazy you never lose the feeling that she is cunning and greedy. She thanked us for coming, but she said that she could not offer us any tea or coffee or cake or wine because her life was such a mis
fortune. The land redistribution projects after the war had drawn all the good peasants away from her farms and she could not find anyone to work her lands. The government taxed her so unmercifully that she could not afford to buy a pinch of tea and all that was left to her was her paintings and while these were worth millions the government claimed that they belonged to the nation and would not let her sell them. Then she said she would like to give me a present, a seashell that had been given to her by the Emperor of Germany when he came to Rome in 1912 and called on her dear father, the Prince. She went out of the room and she was gone a long time and when she came back she said alas, she could not give me the shell because it was locked up with her court dresses in the trunk with the lost key. We said goodbye and went out, but the porter was waiting for us to make sure we hadn't gotten anything and we walked back home through the terrible traffic and the dark streets.

  Tibi was there when we got back and he had dinner with us and then late that night when I was reading someone knocked on my bedroom door and it was Tibi. He seemed to have gone out because he had his coat on over his shoulders like a cloak the way the Romans do. He also had on his plush hat and his tight pants and his plush shoes with gold buckles and he looked like a messenger. I think he felt like a messenger too because he was very excited and spoke to me in a whisper. He said it was all arranged. The old Princess had a painting that she wanted to sell in the United States and he had convinced her that I could smuggle it in. It was a small painting, a Pinturicchio, not much bigger than a shirt. All I had to do was to look like a schoolboy and no one would search my bags. He had given the old woman all of his money as security and he said some other people had bought in and I wondered if he meant my mother, but I didn't think this was possible. When I delivered the painting in New York I would be paid five hundred dollars. He would drive me down to Naples on Saturday morning. There was a little airline that carried passengers and freight between Naples and Madrid and I could take this and catch a plane for New York in Madrid and pick up my five hundred dollars on Monday morning. Then he went away. It was after midnight, but I got out of bed and packed my suitcase. I wouldn't be leaving for a week but I was on my way.