The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  "Moonlight on the Ganges,"

  "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along,"

  "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,"

  "Carolina in the Morning," and "The Sheik of Araby." We seemed to be dancing on the grave of social coherence. But while the scene was plainly revolutionary, where was the new day, the world to come? The next set was "Lena from Palesteena,"

  "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles,"

  "Louisville Lou,"

  "Smiles," and "The Red Red Robin" again. That last one really gets us jumping. but when the band blew the spit out of their instruments I saw them shaking their heads in deep moral disapproval of our antics. Millie went back to her table, and I stood by the door, wondering why my heart should heave when I see people leave a dance floor at the end of a set—heave as it heaves when I see a crowd pack up and leave a beach as the shadow of the cliff falls over the water and the sand, heave as if I saw in these gentle departures the energies and the thoughtlessness of life itself.

  Time, I thought, strips us rudely of the privileges of the bystander, and in the end that couple chatting loudly in bad French in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne (Athens) turns out to be us. Someone else has got our post behind the potted palms, our quiet corner in the bar, and, exposed, perforce we cast around for other avenues of observation. What I wanted to identify then was not a chain of facts but an essence—something like that indecipherable collision of contingencies that can produce exaltation or despair. What I wanted to do was to grant my dreams, in so incoherent a world, their legitimacy. None of this made me moody, and I danced, drank, and told stories at the bar until about one, when we went home. I turned on the television set to a commercial that, like so much else I had seen that day, seemed terribly funny. A young woman with a boarding-school accent was asking, "Do you offend with wet-fur-coat odor? A fifty-thousand-dollar sable cape caught in a thundershower can smell worse than an old hound dog who's been chasing a fox through a swamp. Nothing smells worse than wet mink. Even a light mist can make lamb, opossum, civet, baum marten, and other less costly and serviceable furs as malodorous as a badly ventilated lion house in a zoo. Safeguard yourself from embarrassment and anxiety by light applications of Elixircol before you wear your furs..." She belonged to the dream world, and I told her so before I turned her off. I fell asleep in the moonlight and dreamed of an island.

  I was with some other men, and seemed to have reached the place on a sailing boat. I was sunburned, I remember, and, touching my jaw, I felt a three-or four-day stubble. The island was in the Pacific. There was a smell of rancid cooking oil in the air—a sign of the China coast. It was in the middle of the afternoon when we landed, and we seemed to have nothing much to do. We wandered through the streets. The place either had been occupied by the Army or had served as a military way station, because many of the signs in the windows were written in an approximation of English. "Crews Cutz," I read on a sign in an Oriental barbershop. Many of the stores had displays of imitation American whiskey. Whiskey was spelled "Whikky." Because we had nothing better to do, we went into a local museum. There were bows, primitive fishhooks, masks, and drums. From the museum we went to a restaurant and ordered a meal. I had a struggle with the local language, but what surprised me was that it seemed to be an informed struggle. I seemed to have studied the language before coming ashore. I distinctly remembered putting together a sentence when the waiter came up to the table. "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego," I said. The waiter smiled and complimented me, and, when I woke from the dream, the fact of the language made the island in the sun, its population, and its museum real, vivid, and enduring. I thought with longing of the quiet and friendly natives and the easy pace of their lives.

  Sunday passed swiftly and pleasantly in a round of cocktail parties, but that night I had another dream. I dreamed that I was standing at the bedroom window of the cottage in Nantucket that we sometimes rent. I was looking south along the fine curve of the beach. I have seen finer, whiter, and more splendid beaches, but when I look at the yellow of the sand and the arc of the curve, I always have the feeling that if I look at the curve long enough it will reveal something to me. The sky was cloudy. The water was gray. It was Sunday—although I couldn't have said how I knew this. It was late, and from the inn I could hear that most pleasant sound of dishes being handled, while families would be eating their Sunday-night suppers in the old matchboard dining room. Then I saw a single figure coming down the beach. It seemed to be a priest or a bishop. He carried a crozier, and wore the miter, cope, soutane, chasuble, and alb for high votive Mass. His vestments were heavily worked with gold, and now and then they were lifted by the sea wind. His face was clean-shaven. I could not make out his features in the fading light. He saw me at my window, raised his hand, and called. "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego." Then he hurried along the sand, striking his crozier down like a walking stick, his stride impeded by the voluminousness of his vestments. He passed the window where I stood and disappeared where the curve of the bluff overtakes the curve of the shore.

  I worked on Monday, and on Tuesday morning woke at about four from a dream in which I had been playing touch football. I was on the winning team. The score was six to eighteen. It was a scrub Sunday-afternoon game on somebody's lawn. Our wives and daughters watched from the edge of the grass, where there were chairs and tables and things to drink. The winning play was a long end run, and when the touchdown had been scored a big blonde named Helene Farmer got up and organized the women into a cheering section. "Rah, rah, rah," they said. "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego. Rah, rah, rah." I found none of this disconcerting. It was what I had wanted, in a way. Isn't the unconquerable force in man the love of discovery? The repetition of this sentence had the excitement of discovery for me. The fact that I had been on the winning team made me feel happy, and I went cheerfully down to breakfast, but our kitchen, alas, is a part of dreamland. With its pink, washable walls, chilling lights, built-in television (where prayers were being said), and artificial potted plants, it made me nostalgic for my dream, and when my wife passed me the stylus and Magic Tablet on which we write our breakfast orders, I wrote, "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego." She laughed and asked me what I meant. When I repeated the sentence—it seemed, indeed, to be the only thing I wanted to say—she began to cry, and I saw in the bitterness of her tears that I had better take a rest. Dr. Howland came over to give me a sedative, and I took a plane to Florida that afternoon.

  Now it is late. I drink a glass of milk and take a sleeping pill. I dream that I see a pretty woman kneeling in a field of wheat. Her light-brown hair is full and so are the skirts of her dress. Her clothing seems old-fashioned—it seems before my time—and I wonder how I can know and feel so tenderly toward a stranger who is dressed in clothing that my grandmother might have worn. And yet she seems real—more real than the Tamiami Trail four miles to the east, with its Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands, more real than the back streets of Sarasota. I do not ask her who she is. I know what she will say. But then she smiles and starts to speak before I can turn away. "Porpozec ciebie..." she begins. Then either I awake in despair or am waked by the sound of rain on the palms. I think of some farmer who, hearing the noise of rain, will stretch his lame bones and smile, feeling that the rain is falling into his lettuce and his cabbages, his hay and his oats, his parsnips and his corn. I think of some plumber who, waked by the rain, will smile at a vision of the world in which all the drains are miraculously cleansed and free. Right-angle drains, crooked drains, root-choked and rusty drains all gurgle and discharge their waters into the sea. I think that the rain will wake some old lady, who will wonder if she has left her copy of Dombey and Son in the garden. Her shawl? Did she cover the chairs? And I know that the sound of the rain will wake some lovers, and that its sound will seem to be a part of that force that has thrust them into one another's arms. Then I sit up in bed and exclaim aloud to my
self, "Valor! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!" The words seem to have the colors of the earth, and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night.

  REUNION

  The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station. I was going from my grandmother's in the Adirondacks to a cottage on the Cape that my mother had rented, and I wrote my father that I would be in New York between trains for an hour and a half, and asked if we could have lunch together. His secretary wrote to say that he would meet me at the information booth at noon, and at twelve o'clock sharp I saw him coming through the crowd. He was a stranger to me—my mother divorced him three years ago and I hadn't been with him since—but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations. He was a big, good-looking man, and I was terribly happy to see him again. He struck me on the back and shook my hand. "Hi, Charlie," he said. "Hi, boy. I'd like to take you up to my club, but it's in the Sixties, and if you have to catch an early train I guess we'd better get something to eat around here." He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together.

  We went out of the station and up a side street to a restaurant. It was still early, and the place was empty. The bartender was quarreling with a delivery boy, and there was one very old waiter in a red coat down by the kitchen door. We sat down, and my father hailed the waiter in a loud voice. "Keilner!" he shouted. "Garçon! Cameriere! You!" His boisterousness in the empty restaurant seemed out of place. "Could we have a little service here!" he shouted. "Chop-chop." Then he clapped his hands. This caught the waiter's attention, and he shuffled over to our table.

  "Were you clapping your hands at me?" he asked.

  "Calm down, calm down, sommelier," my father said. "If it isn't too much to ask of you—if it wouldn't be too much above and beyond the call of duty, we would like a couple of Beefeater Gibsons."

  "I don't like to be clapped at," the waiter said.

  "I should have brought my whistle," my father said. "I have a whistle that is audible only to the ears of old waiters. Now, take out your little pad and your little pencil and see if you can get this straight: two Beefeater Gibsons. Repeat after me: two Beefeater Gibsons."

  "I think you'd better go somewhere else," the waiter said quietly.

  "That," said my father, "is one of the most brilliant suggestions I have ever heard. Come on, Charlie, let's get the hell out of here."

  I followed my father out of that restaurant into another. He was not so boisterous this time. Our drinks came, and he cross-questioned me about the baseball season. He then struck the edge of his empty glass with his knife and began shouting again. "Garçon! Keliner! Cameriere! You! Could we trouble you to bring us two more of the same."

  "How old is the boy?" the waiter asked.

  "That," my father said, "is none of your God-damned business."

  "I'm sorry, sir," the waiter said, "but I won't serve the boy another drink."

  "Well, I have some news for you," my father said. "I have some very interesting news for you. This doesn't happen to be the only restaurant in New York. They've opened another on the corner. Come on, Charlie."

  He paid the bill, and I followed him out of that restaurant into another. Here the waiters wore pink jackets like hunting coats, and there was a lot of horse tack on the walls. We sat down, and my father began to shout again. "Master of the hounds! Tallyhoo and all that sort of thing. We'd like a little something in, the way of a stirrup cup. Namely, two Bibson Geefeaters."

  "Two Bibson Geefeaters?" the waiter asked, smiling.

  "You know damned well what I want," my father said angrily. "I want two Beefeater Gibsons, and make it snappy. Things have changed in jolly old England. So my friend the duke tells me. Let's see what England can produce in the way of a cocktail."

  "This isn't England," the waiter said.

  "Don't argue with me," my father said. "Just do as you're told."

  "I just thought you might like to know where you are," the waiter said.

  "If there is one thing I cannot tolerate," my father said, "it is an impudent domestic. Come on, Charlie."

  The fourth place we went to was Italian. "Buon giorno," my father said. "Per favore, possiamo avere clue cocktail americani, forti, forti. Molto gin, poco vermut."

  "I don't understand Italian," the waiter said.

  "Oh, come off it," my father said. "You understand Italian, and you know damned well you do. Voglianio due cocktail americani. Subito."

  The waiter left us and spoke with the captain, who came over to our table and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but this table is reserved."

  "All right," my father said. "Get us another table."

  "All the tables are reserved," the captain said.

  "I get it," my father said. "You don't desire our patronage. Is that it? Well, the hell with you. Vacla all' inferno. Let's go, Charlie."

  "I have to get my train," I said.

  "I'm sorry, sonny," my father said. "I'm terribly sorry." He put his arm around me and pressed me against him. "I'll walk you back to the station. If there had only been time to go up to my club."

  "That's all right, Daddy," I said.

  "I'll get you a paper," he said. "I'll get you a paper to read on the train."

  Then he went up to a newsstand and said, "Kind sir, will you he good enough to favor me with one of your Goddamned, no-good, ten-cent afternoon papers?" The clerk turned away from him and stared at a magazine cover. "Is it asking too much, kind sir," my father said, "is it asking too much for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimens of yellow journalism?"

  "I have to go, Daddy," I said. "It's late."

  "Now, just wait a second, sonny," he said. "Just wait a second. I want to get a rise out of this chap."

  "Goodbye, Daddy," I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.

  AN EDUCATED AMERICAN WOMAN

  Item: "I remain joined in holy matrimony to my unintellectual 190-pound halfback, and keep myself busy chauffeuring my son Bibber to and from a local private school that I helped organize. I seem, at one time or another, to have had the presidency of every civic organization in the community, and last year I ran the local travel agency for nine months. A New York publisher (knock on wood) is interested in my critical biography of Gustave Flaubert, and last year I ran for town supervisor on the Democratic ticket and got the largest Democratic plurality in the history of the village. Polly Coulter Mellowes stayed with us for a week on her way home from Paris to Minneapolis and we talked, ate, drank, and thought in French during her visit. Shades of Mlle. de Grasse! I still find time to band birds and knit Argyle socks."

  This report, for her college alumnae magazine, might have suggested an aggressive woman, but she was not that at all. Jill Chidchester Madison held her many offices through competence, charm, and intellect, and she was actually quite shy. Her light-brown hair, at the time of which I'm writing, was dressed simply and in a way that recalled precisely how she had looked in boarding school twenty years before. Boarding school may have shaded her taste in clothing; that and the fact that she had a small front and was one of those women who took this deprivation as if it was something more than the loss of a leg. Considering her comprehensive view of life, it seemed strange that such a thing should have bothered her, but it bothered her terribly. She had pretty legs. Her coloring was fresh and high. Her eyes were brown and set much too close together, so that when she was less than vivacious she had a mousy look.

  Her mother, Amelia Faxon Chidchester, was a vigorous, stocky woman with splendid white hair, a red face, and
an emphatic accent whose roots seemed more temperamental than regional. Mrs. Chidchester's words were shaped to express her untiring vigor, her triumph over pain, her cultural enthusiasm, and her trust in mankind. She was the author of seventeen unpublished books. Jill's father died when she was six days old. She was born in San Francisco, where her father had run a small publishing house and administered a small estate. He left his wife and daughter with enough money to protect them from any sort of hardship and any sort of financial anxiety, but they were a good deal less rich than their relatives. Jill appeared to be precocious, and when she was three her mother took her to Munich, where she was entered in the Gymnasium für Kinder, run by Dr. Stock for the purpose of observing gifted children. The competition was fierce, and her reaction tests were only middling, but she was an amiable and a brilliant girl. When she was five, they shifted to the Scuola Pantola in Florence, a similar institution. They moved from there to England, to the famous Tower Hill School, in Kent. Then Amelia, or Melee, as she was called, decided that the girl should put down some roots, and so she rented a house in Nantucket, where Jill was entered in the public school.

  I don't know why it is that expatriate children should seem underfed, but they often do, and Jill, with her mixed clothing, her mixed languages, her bare legs and sandals, gave the impression that the advantages of her education had worked out in her as a kind of pathos. She was the sort of child who skipped a lot. She skipped to school. She skipped home. She was shy. She was not very practical, and her mother encouraged her in this. "You shall not wash the dishes, my dear," she said. "A girl of your intelligence is not expected to waste her time washing dishes." They had a devoted servant—all of Melee's servants worshipped the ground she walked on—and Jill's only idea about housework was that it was work she was not expected to do. She did, when she was about ten, learn to knit Argyle socks and was allowed this recreation. She was romantic. Entered in her copybook was the following: "Mrs. Amelia Faxon Chidchester requests the honor of your company at the wedding of her daughter Jill to Viscount Ludley-Huntington, Earl of Ashmead, in Westminster Abbey. White tie. Decorations." The house in Nantucket was pleasant, and Jill learned to sail. It was in Nantucket that her mother spoke to her once about that subject for which we have no vocabulary in English—about love. It was late afternoon. A fire was burning and there were flowers on a table. Jill was reading and her mother was writing. She stopped writing and said, over her shoulder, "I think I should tell you, my dear, that during the war I was in charge of a canteen at the Embarcadero, and I gave myself to many lonely soldiers."