The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  I remember the morning I left, Saturday, that is. I got up around seven and had some coffee and looked into my suitcase again. Later I heard the maid taking in my mother's breakfast tray. There was nothing to do but wait for Tibi and I went out onto the balcony to watch for him in the street. I knew he would have to park the car in the piazzale and cross the street in front of the palace. Saturday in Rome is like any other day and the street was crowded with traffic and there were crowds on the sidewalk—Romans and pilgrims and members of religious orders and tourists with cameras. It was a nice day and while it is not my place to say that Rome is the most beautiful city in the world I have often thought that, with its flat-topped pines and the buildings all the colors of ripening, folded in among the hills like bone and paper, and those big round clouds that in Nantucket would mean a thunderstorm before supper but that mean nothing in Rome, only that the sky will turn purple and fill up with stars and all the lighthearted people make it a lively place to be; and at least a thousand travelers before me, at least a thousand must have said that the light and the air are like wine, those yellow wines from the costelli that you drink in the fall. Then in the crowd I noticed someone wearing the brown habit that they wear at the Sant' Angelo School and then I saw it was my homeroom teacher, Father Antonini. He was looking for our address. The bell rang and the maid answered it and I heard the priest ask for my mother. Then the maid went down to my mother's room and I heard my mother go out to the vestibule and say, "Oh, Father Antonini, how nice to see you."

  "Peter has been sick?" he asked.

  "What made you think so?"

  "He hasn't been in school for six weeks."

  "Yes," she said, but you could tell that all of her heart wasn't in the lie. It was very upsetting to hear my mother telling this lie; upsetting because I could see that she didn't care about me or whether or not I got an education or anything, that all she wanted was that I should get Tibi's old picture across the border so that he would have some money. "Yes. He's been very sick."

  "Could I see him?"

  "Oh, no. I've sent him home to the States."

  I left the balcony then and went down the salone to the hall and down the hall to my room and waited for her there. "You'd better go down and wait for Tibi," she said, "Kiss me goodbye and go. Quickly. Quickly. I hate scenes." If she hated scenes I wondered then why she always made such painful scenes but this was the way we had parted ever since I could remember and I got my suitcase and went out and waited for Tibi in the courtyard.

  It was half past nine or later before he showed up and even before he spoke I could tell what he was going to say. He was too tired to drive me to Naples. He had the Pinturicchio wrapped in brown paper and twine and I opened my suitcase and put it in with my shirts. I didn't say goodbye to him—I made up my mind then that I was never going to speak to him again—and I started for the station.

  I have been to Naples many times but that day I felt very strange. The first thing when I went into the railroad station I thought I was being followed by the porter from the Palazzo Tavola-Calda. I looked around twice but this stranger bent his face over a newspaper and I couldn't be sure but I felt so strange anyhow that it seemed I might have imagined him. Then when I was standing in line at the ticket window someone touched me on the shoulder and I had that awful feeling that my father had come back to give me help. It was an old man who wanted a match and I lighted his cigarette but I could still feel the warmth of the touch on my shoulder and that memory that we would all be happy together again and help one another and then the feeling that I would never get all the loving I needed, no, never.

  I got into the train and watched the other passengers hurrying along the platform and this time I saw the porter. There was no mistake. I had only seen him once but I could remember his face and I guessed he was looking for me. He didn't seem to see me and went on down to the third class compartments and I wondered then if this was the Big World, if this was really what it was like—women throwing themselves away over halfwits like Tibi and purloined paintings and pursuers. I wasn't worried about the porter but I was worried about the idea that life was this much of a contest.

  But I am not a boy in Rome but a grown man in the old prison and river town of Ossining, swatting hornets on this autumn afternoon with a rolled-up newspaper. I can see the Hudson River from my window. A dead rat floats downstream and two men in a sinking rowboat come up against the tide. One of them is rowing desperately with a boat seat and I wonder have they escaped from prison or have they just been fishing for perch and why should I exchange this scene for the dark streets around the Pantheon? Why, never having received from my parents anything but affection and understanding, should I invent a grotesque old man, a foreign grave, and a foolish mother? What is the incurable loneliness that makes me want to pose as a fatherless child in a cold wind and wouldn't the imposture make a better story than Tibi and the Pinturicchio? But my father taught me, while we hoed the beans, that I should complete for better or worse whatever I had begun and so we go back to the scene where he leaves the train in Naples.

  In Naples I got off the train at the Mergellina hoping to duck the porter. Only a handful of people got off there and I don't think the porter was one of them although I couldn't be sure. There was a little hotel on a side street near the station and I went there and took a room and left my suitcase with the painting in it under the bed and locked the door. Then I went out to look for the office of the airline where I could buy my ticket and this was way on the other side of Naples. It was a small airline and a very small office and I think the man who sold me my ticket was probably the pilot too. The plane left at eleven that night so then I walked back to the hotel and as soon as I stepped into the lobby the lady at the desk said that my friend was waiting for me and there he was, the porter, with two carabinieri. He began to holler and yell—all the same things. I had bombed Frascati and Tivoli and invented the hydrogen bomb and now I was stealing one of the paintings that formed the invaluable heritage of the Italian people. The carabinieri were really very nice although I don't like to talk with people who wear swords but when I asked if I could call the Consulate they said yes and I did. It was about four o'clock then and they said they would send an officer over and pretty soon this big nice American came over who kept saying "Yurp." I told him I was carrying a package for a friend and that I didn't know what it contained and he said, "Yurp, yurp." He had on a big double-breasted suit and he seemed to be having some trouble with his belt or his underwear because every so often he would take hold of his waist and give it a big yank. Then everyone agreed that in order to open my package they would have to get a justice and I got my bag and we all got into the car the consular officer had and drove off to some questura or courthouse where we had to wait a half hour for the justice to put on his sash of office with the golden fringe. Then I opened my suitcase and he passed the package to an attendant who undid the knots in the twine. Then the justice unwrapped the package and there was nothing in it but a piece of cardboard. The porter let out such a roar of anger and disappointment when he saw this that I don't think he could have been an accomplice and I think the old lady must have thought the whole thing up herself. They would never get back the money they had paid her, any of them, and I could see her, licking her chops like Reddy the Fox. I even felt sorry for Tibi.

  In the morning I tried to get a refund on my plane ticket but the office was shut and so then I walked to the Mergellina to get the morning train to Rome. A ship was in. There were twenty-five or thirty tourists waiting on the platform. They were tired and excited, you could see, and were pointing at the espresso machine and asking if they couldn't have a large cup with cream but they didn't seem funny to me that morning—they seemed to be nice and admirable and it seemed to me that there was a lot of seriousness at the bottom of their wandering. I was not as disappointed myself as I have been about less important things and I even felt a little cheerful because I knew that I would go back to Nantucket sometime o
r if not to Nantucket to someplace where I would be understood. And then I remembered that old lady in Naples, so long ago, shouting across the water, "Blessed are you, blessed are you, you will see America, you will see the New World," and I knew that large cars and frozen food and hot water were not what she meant. "Blessed are you, blessed are you," she kept shouting across the water and I knew that she thought of a place where there are no police with swords and no greedy nobility and no dishonesty and no briberies and no delays and no fear of cold and hunger and war and if all that she imagined was not true, it was a noble idea and that was the main thing.

  A MISCELLANY OF CHARACTERS THAT WILL NOT APPEAR

  The pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby game. She wandered up and down behind the crowd that was ranged along the foul line. She seemed to have no date, no particular companion but to be known to everyone. Everyone called her name (Florrie), everyone was happy to see her, and, as she stopped to speak with friends, one man put his hand fiat on the small of her back, and at this touch (in spite of the fine weather and the green of the playing field) a dark and thoughtful look came over his face, as if he felt immortal longings. Her hair was a fine dark gold, and she pulled a curl down over her eyes and peered through it. Her nose was a little too quick, but the effect was sensual and aristocratic, her arms and legs were round and fine but not at all womanly, and she squinted her violet eyes. It was the first half, there was no score, and Dartmouth kicked the ball offside. It was a muffed kick, and it went directly into her arms. The catch was graceful; she seemed to have been chosen to receive the ball and stood there for a second, smiling, bowing, observed by everyone, before she tossed it charmingly and clumsily back into play. There was some applause. Then everyone turned their attention from Florrie back to the field, and a second later she dropped to her knees, covering her face with her hands, recoiling violently from the excitement. She seemed very shy. Someone opened a can of beer and passed it to her, and she stood and wandered again along the foul line and out of the pages of my novel because I never saw her again.

  . All parts for Marlon Brando.

  . All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build.

  . All such scenes as the following: "Clarissa stepped into the room and then out with this and all other explicit descriptions of sexual commerce, for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if—jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts—we were describing the changing of a flat tire?

  . All lushes. For example: The curtain rises on the copy office of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, where X, our principal character, is working out the exploitation plans for a new brand of rye whiskey. On a drafting table to the right of his fruitwood desk is a pile of suggestions from the art department. Monarchal and baronial crests and escutcheons have been suggested for the label. For advertising there is a suggested scene of plantation life where the long-gone cotton aristocracy drink whiskey on a magnificent porch. X is not satisfied with this and examines next a watercolor of pioneer America. How fresh, cold, and musical is the stream that pours through the forest. The tongues of the brook speak into the melancholy silence of a lost wilderness, and what is that in the corner of the blue sky but a flight of carrier pigeons. On a rock in the foreground a wiry young man, in rude leather clothing and a coonskin hat, is drinking rye from a stone jug. This prospect seems to sadden X, and he goes on to the next suggestion, which is that one entertain with rye; that one invite to one's house one exploded literary celebrity, one unemployed actress, the grand-niece of a President of the United States, one broken-down bore, and one sullen and wicked literary critic. They stand grouped around an enormous bottle of rye. This picture disgusts X, and he goes on to the last, where a fair young couple in evening dress stand at dusk on a medieval battlement (aren't those the lights and towers of Siena in the distance?) toasting what must be a seduction of indescribable prowess and duration in the rye that is easy on your dollar.

  X is not satisfied. He turns away from the drafting table and walks toward his desk. He is a slender man of indiscernible age, although time seems to have seized upon his eye sockets and the scruff of his neck. This last is seamed and scored as wildly as some disjointed geodetic survey. There is a cut as deep as a saber scar running diagonally from the left to the right of his neck with so many deep and numerous branches and tributaries that the effect is discouraging. But it is in his eyes that the recoil of time is most noticeable. Here we see, as on a sandy point we see the working of two tides, how the powers of his exaltation and his misery, his lusts and his aspirations, have stamped a wilderness of wrinkles onto the dark and pouchy skin. He may have tired his eyes looking at Vega through a telescope or reading Keats by a dim light, but his gaze seems hangdog and impure. These details would lead you to believe that he was a man of some age, but suddenly he drops his left shoulder very gracefully and shoots the cuff of his silk shirt as if he were eighteen—nineteen at the most. He glances at his Italian calendar watch. It is ten in the morning. His office is soundproofed and preternaturally still. The voice of the city comes faintly to his high window. He stares at his dispatch case, darkened by the rains of England, France, Italy, and Spain. He is in the throes of a grueling melancholy that makes the painted walls of his office (pale yellow and pale blue) seem like fabrications of paper put up to conceal the volcanos and floodwaters that are the terms of his misery. He seems to be approaching the moment of his death, the moment of his conception, some critical point in time. His head, his shoulders, and his hands begin to tremble. He opens his dispatch case, takes out a bottle of rye, gets to his knees, and thirstily empties the bottle.

  He is on the skids, of course, and we will bother with only one more scene. After having been fired from the office where we last saw him he is offered a job in Cleveland, where the rumors of his weakness seem not to have reached. He has gone to Cleveland to settle the arrangements and rent a house for his family. Now they are waiting at the railroad station for him to return with good news. His pretty wife, his three children, and the two dogs have all come down to welcome Daddy. It is dusk in the suburb where they live. They are, by this time, a family that have received more than their share of discouragements, but in having been recently denied the common promises and rewards of their way of life—the new car and the new bicycle—they have discovered a melancholy but steady quality of affection that has nothing to do with acquisitions. They have glimpsed, in their troubled love for Daddy, the thrill of a destiny. The local rattles into view. A soft spray of golden sparks falls from the brake box as the train slows and halts. They all feel, in the intensity of their anticipation, nearly incorporeal. Seven men and two women leave the train, but where is Daddy? It takes two conductors to get him down the stairs. He has lost his hat, his necktie, and his topcoat, and someone has blacked his right eye. He still holds the dispatch case under one arm. No one speaks, no one weeps as they get him into the car and drive him out of our sight, out of our jurisdiction and concern. Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they throw so little true light on the way we live.

  . And while we are about it, out go all those homosexuals who have taken such a dominating position in recent fiction. Isn't it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and moved on? The scene this time is Hewitt's Beach on the afternoon of the Fourth of July. Mrs. Ditmar, the wife of the Governor, and her son Randall have carried their picnic lunch up the beach to a deserted cove, although the American flag on the clubhouse can be seen flying beyond the dunes.

  The boy is sixteen, well formed,
his skin the fine gold of youth, and he seems to his lonely mother so beautiful that she admires him with trepidation. For the last ten years her husband, the Governor, has neglected her in favor of his intelligent and pretty executive secretary. Mrs. Ditmar has absorbed, with the extraordinary commodiousness of human nature, a nearly daily score of wounds. Of course she loves her son. She finds nothing of her husband in his appearance. He has the best qualities of her family, she thinks, and she is old enough to think that such things as a slender foot and fine hair are marks of breeding, as indeed they may be. His shoulders are square. His body is compact. As he throws a stone into the sea, it is not the force with which he throws the stone that absorbs her but the fine grace with which his arm completes the circular motion once the stone has left his hand—as if every gesture he made were linked, one to the other. Like any lover, she is immoderate and does not want the afternoon with him to end. She does not dare wish for an eternity, but she wishes the day had more hours than is possible. She fingers her pearls in her worn hands, and admires their sea lights, and wonders how they would look against his golden skin.