The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  I didn't want to read any more—not then. Wallowyck had been enough for one day. I wanted only to go back to the club car and have another drink and assert my healthy indifference to the fancies of strangers. But the writing was there, and it was irresistible—it seemed to be some part of my destiny—and, although I read it with bitter unwillingness, I read through the first paragraph. The penmanship was the most commanding of all.

  Why does not everyone who can afford it have a geranium in his window? It is very cheap. Its cheapness is next to nothing if you raise it from seed or from a slip. It is a beauty and a companion. It sweetens the air, rejoices the eye, links you with nature and innocence, and is something to love. And if it cannot love you in return, it cannot hate you, it cannot utter a hateful thing even for your neglecting it, for though it is all beauty, it has no vanity, and such being the case, and living as it does purely to do you good and afford pleasure, how will you be able to neglect it? But, pray, if you choose a geranium. Back in the club car, it was getting dark. I was disturbed by these tender sentiments and depressed by the general gloom of the countryside at that time of day. Was what I had read the expression of some irrepressible love of quaintness and innocence? Whatever it was, I felt then a manifest responsibility to declare what I had discovered. Our knowledge of ourselves and of one another, in a historical moment of mercurial change, is groping. To hedge our observation, curiosity, and reflection with indifference would be sheer recklessness. My three chance encounters proved that this kind of literature was widespread. If these fancies were recorded and diagnosed, they might throw a brilliant illumination onto our psyche and bring us closer to the secret world of the truth. My search had its unconventional aspects, but if we are any less than shrewd, courageous, and honest with ourselves we are contemptible. I had six friends who worked for foundations, and I decided to call their attention to the phenomenon of the writing in public toilets. I knew they had financed poetry, research in zoology, studies of the history of stained glass and of the social significance of high heels, and, at that moment, the writing in public toilets appeared to be an avenue of truth that demanded exploration.

  When I got back to New York, I arranged a lunch for my friends, in a restaurant in the Sixties that has a private dining room. At the end of the meal, I made my speech. My best friend there was the first to answer. "You've been away too long," he said. "You're out of touch. We don't go for that kind of thing over here. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I think the idea is repulsive." I glanced down and saw that I was wearing a brocade double-breasted vest and pointed yellow shoes, and I suppose I had spoken in the flat and affected accent of most expatriates. His accusation that my thinking was alien, strange, and indecent seemed invincible. I felt then, I feel now, that it was not the impropriety of my discovery but its explosiveness that disconcerted him, and that he had, in my absence, joined the ranks of those new men who feel that the truth is no longer usable in solving our dilemmas. He said goodbye, and one by one the others left, all on the same note—I had been away too long; I was out of touch with decency and common sense.

  I returned to Europe a few days later. The plane for Orly was delayed, and I killed some time in the bar and then looked around for the men's room. The message this time was written on tile. "Bright Star!" I read, "would I were stedfast as thou art—Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night..." That was all. My flight was announced, and I sailed through the eaves of heaven back to the city of light.

  MONTRALDO

  The first time I robbed Tiffany's, it was raining. I bought an imitation-diamond ring at a costume-jewelry place in the Forties. Then I walked up to Tiffany's in the rain and asked to look at rings. The clerk had a haughty manner. I looked at six or eight diamond rings. They began at eight hundred and went up to ten thousand. There was one priced at three thousand that looked to me like the paste in my pocket. I was examining this when an elderly woman—an old customer, I guessed—appeared on the other side of the counter. The clerk rushed over to greet her, and I switched rings. Then I called, "Thank you very much. I'll think it over."

  "Very well," the clerk said haughtily, and I went out of the store. It was as simple as pie. I walked down to the diamond market in the Forties and sold the ring for eighteen hundred. No questions were asked. Then I went to Thomas Cook and found that the Conte di Salvini was sailing for Genoa at five. This was in August, and there was plenty of space on the eastbound crossing. I took a cabin in first class and was standing at the bar when she sailed. The bar was not officially open, of course, but the bar Jack gave me a Martini in a tumbler to hold me until we got into international waters. The Salvini had an exceptionally percussive whistle, and you may have heard it if you were anywhere near midtown, although who ever is at five o'clock on an August afternoon?

  That night I met Mrs. Winwar and her elderly husband at the horse races. He promptly got seasick, and we plunged into the marvelous skulduggery of illicit love. The passed notes, the phony telephone calls, the affected indifference, and what happened when we were behind the closed door of my cabin made my theft of a ring seem guileless. Mr. Winwar recovered in Gibraltar, but this only seemed like a challenge, and we carried on under his nose. We said goodbye in Genoa, where I bought a second-hand Fiat and started down the coast.

  I got to Montraldo late one afternoon. I stopped there because I was tired of driving. There was a semi-circular bay, set within high stone cliffs, and one of those beaches that are lined with cafés and bathing houses. There were two hotels, a Grand and a National, and I didn't care for either one of them, and a waiter in a café told me I could rent a room in the villa on the cliff. It could be reached, he said, either by a steep and curving road or by a flight of stone steps—one hundred and twenty-seven, I discovered later—that led from the back garden down into the village. I took my car up the curving road. The cliff was covered with rosemary, and the rosemary was covered with the village laundry, drying in the sun. There were signs on the door in five languages, saying that rooms were for rent. I rang, and a thick-set, bellicose servant opened the door. I learned that her name was Assunta. I never saw any relaxation of her bellicosity. In church, when she plunged up the aisle to take Holy Communion, she looked as if she were going to knock the priest down and mess up the acolyte. She said I could have a room if I paid a week's rent in advance, and I had to pay her before I was allowed to cross the threshold.

  The place was a ruin, but the white-washed room she showed me into was in a little tower, and through a broken window the room had a broad view of the sea. The one luxury was a gas ring. There was no toilet, and there was no running water; the water I washed in had to be hauled out of a well in a leaky marmalade can. I was obviously the only guest. That first afternoon, while Assunta was praising the healthfulness of the sea air, I heard a querulous and elegant voice calling to us from the courtyard. I went down the stairs ahead of the servant, and introduced myself to an old woman standing by the well. She was short, frail, and animated, and spoke such a flowery Roman that I wondered if this wasn't a sort of cultural or social dust thrown into one's eyes to conceal the fact that her dress was ragged and dirty. "I see you have a gold wristwatch," she said. "I, too, have a gold wristwatch. We will have this in common."

  The servant turned to her and said, "Go to the devil!"

  "But it is a fact. The gentleman and I do both have gold wristwatches," the old lady said. "It will make us sympathetic."

  "Bore," the servant said. "Rot in hell."

  "Thank you, thank you, treasure of my house, light of my life," the old lady said, and made her way toward an open door.

  The servant put her hands on her hips and screamed, "Witch! Frog! Pig!"

  "Thank you, thank you, thank you infinitely," the old lady said, and went in at the door.

  That night, at the café, I asked about the signorina and her servant, and the waiter was fully informed. The signorina, he said, came from a noble Roman family, from which she had been expelled because o
f a romantic and unsuitable love affair. She had lived as a hermit in Montraldo for fifty years. Assunta had been brought here from Rome to be her donna di servizio, but all she did for the old lady these days was to go into the village and buy her some bread and wine. She had robbed the old woman of all her possessions—she had even taken the bed from her room—and she now kept her a prisoner in the villa. Both the Grand Hotel and the National were luxurious and commodious. Why did I stay in such a place?

  I stayed because of the view, because I had paid my rent in advance, and because I was curious about the eccentric old spinster and her cranky servant. They began quarreling early the next morning. Assunta opened up with obscenity and abuse. The signorina countered with elaborate sarcasm. It was a depressing performance. I wondered if the old lady was really a prisoner, and later in the morning, when I saw her alone in the courtyard, I asked her if she would like to drive with me to Tambura, the next village up the coast. She said, in her flowery Roman, that she would be delighted to join me. She wanted to have her watch, her gold watch, repaired. The watch was of great value and beauty and there was only one man she dared entrust it to. He was in Tambura. While we were talking, Assunta joined us.

  "Why do you want to go to Tambura?" she asked the old lady.

  "I want to have my gold watch repaired," the old lady said.

  "You don't have a gold watch," Assunta said.

  "That is true," the old lady said. "I no longer have a gold watch, but I used to have a gold watch. I used to have a gold watch, and I used to have a gold pencil."

  "You can't go to Tambura to have your watch repaired if you don't have a watch," Assunta said.

  "That is true, light of my life, treasure of my house," the old lady said, and she went in at her door.

  I spent most of my time on the beach and in the cafés. The fortunes of the resort seemed to be middling. The waiters complained about business, but then they always do. The smell of the sea was riggish but unfresh, and I used to think with homesickness of the wild and magnificent beaches of my own country. Gay Head is, I know, sinking into the sea, but the sinkage at Montraldo seemed to be spiritual—as if the waves were eroding the vitality of that place. The sea was incandescent; the light was clear but not brilliant. The flavor of Montraldo, as I member it, was immutable, intimate, depleted—everything I detest; for shouldn't the soul of man be as limpid and cutting as a diamond? The waves spoke in French or Italian—now and then a word of dialect—but they seemed to speak without force.

  One afternoon a remarkably beautiful woman came down the beach, followed by a boy of about eight, I should say, and an Italian woman dressed in black—a maid. They carried sandwich bags from the Grand Hotel, and my guess was that the boy lived mostly in hotels. He was pitiful. The maid took some toys from an assortment she carried in a string bag. They seemed to be all wrong for his age. There was a sand bucket, a shovel, some molds, a whiffle ball, and an old-fashioned pair of water wings. I suspected that the mother, stretched out on a blanket with an American novel, was a divorcée, and that she would presently have a drink with me in the café. With this in mind, I got to my feet and offered to play whiffle ball with the boy. He was delighted to have some company, but he could neither throw nor catch a ball, and, making a guess at his tastes, I asked, with one eye on the mother, if he would like me to build him a sand castle. He would. I built a water moat, then an escarpment with curved stairs, a dry moat, a crenelated wall with cannon positions, and a cluster of round towers with parapets. I worked as if the impregnability of the place was a reality, and when it was completed I set flags, made of candy wrappers, flying from every tower. I thought naïvely that it was beautiful, and so did the boy, but when I called his mother's attention to my feat she said, "Andiamo." The maid gathered up the toys, and off they went, leaving me, a grown man in a strange country, with a sand castle.

  At Montraldo, the high point of the day came at four, when there was a band concert. This was the largesse of the municipality. The bandstand was wooden, Turkish in inspiration, and weathered by sea winds. The musicians sometimes wore uniforms, sometimes bathing suits, and their number varied from day to day, but they always played Dixieland. I don't think they were interested in the history of jazz. I just think they'd found some old arrangements in a trunk and were stuck with them. The music was comical, accelerated—they seemed to be playing for some ancient ballroom team. "Clarinet Marmalade," "China Boy," "Tiger Rag," "Careless Love"—how stirring it was to hear this old, old jazz explode in the salty air. The concert ended at five, when most of the musicians packed up their instruments and went out to sea with the sardine fleet and the bathers returned to the cafés and the village. Men, women, and children on a beach, band music, sea grass, and sandwich hampers remind me much more forcibly than classical landscapes of our legendary ties to paradise. So I would go up with the others to the café, where, one day, I befriended Lord and Lady Rockwell, who asked me for cocktails. You may wonder why I put these titles down so breathlessly, and the reason is that my father was a waiter.

  He wasn't an ordinary waiter; he used to work at a dinner-dance spot in one of the big hotels. One night he lost his temper at a drunken brute, pushed his face into a plate of cannelloni, and left the premises. The union suspended him for three months, but he was, in a way, a hero, and when he went back to work they put him on the banquet shift, where he passed mushrooms to Kings and Presidents. He saw a lot of the world, but I sometimes wonder if the world ever saw much more of him than the sleeve of his red coat and his suave and handsome face, a little above the candlelight. It must have been like living in a world divided by a sheet of one-way glass. Sometimes I am reminded of him by those pages and guards in Shakespeare who come in from the left and stand at a door, establishing by their costumes the fact that this is Venice or Arden. You scarcely see their faces, they never speak a line; nor did my father, and when the after-dinner speeches began he would vanish like the pages on stage. I tell people that he was in the administrative end of the hotel business, but actually he was a waiter, a banquet waiter.

  The Rockwells' party was large, and I left at about ten. A hot wind was blowing off the sea. I was later told that this was the sirocco. It was a desert wind, and so oppressive that I got up several times during the night to drink some mineral water. A boat offshore was sounding its foghorn. In the morning, it was both foggy and suffocating. While I was making some coffee, Assunta and the signorina began their morning quarrel. Assunta started off with the usual "Pig! Dog! Witch! Dirt of the streets!" Leaning from an open window, the whiskery old woman sent down her flowery replies: "Dear one. Beloved. Blessed one. Thank you, thank you." I stood in the door with my coffee, wishing they would schedule their disputes for some other time of day. The quarrel was suspended while the signorina came down the stairs to get her bread and wine. Then it started up again: "Witch! Frog! Frog of frogs! Witch of witches!" etc. The old lady countered with "Treasure! Light! Treasure of my house! Light of my life!" etc. Then there was a scuffle—a tug-of-war over the loaf of bread. I saw Assunta strike the old woman cruelly with the edge of her hand. She fell on the steps and began to moan "Aiee! Aieee!" Even these cries of pain seemed florid. I ran across the courtyard to where she lay in a disjointed heap. Assunta began to scream at me, "I am not culpable, I am not culpable!" The old lady was in great pain. "Please, signore," she asked, "please find the priest for me!" I picked her up. She weighed no more than a child, and her clothing smelled of soil. I carried her up the stairs into a high-ceilinged room festooned with cobwebs and put her onto a couch. Assunta was on my heels, screaming, "I am not culpable!" Then I started down the one hundred and twenty-seven steps to the village.

  The fog streamed through the air, and the African wind felt like a furnace draft. No one answered the door at the priest's house, but I found him in the church, sweeping the floor with a broom made of twigs. I was excited and impatient, and the more excited I became, the more slow-moving was the priest. First, he had to put his broom in a
closet.

  The closet door was warped and wouldn't shut, and he spent an unconscionable amount of time trying to close it. I finally went outside and waited on the porch. It took him half an hour to get collected, and then, instead of starting for the villa, we went down into the village to find an acolyte. Presently a young boy joined us, pulling on a soiled lace soutane, and we started up the stairs. The priest negotiated ten steps and then sat down to rest. I had time to smoke a cigarette. Then ten more steps and another rest, and when we were halfway up the stairs, I began to wonder if he would ever make it. His face had turned from red to purple, and the noises from his respiratory tract were harsh and desperate. We finally arrived at the door of the villa. The acolyte lit his censer. Then we made our way into that ruined place. The windows were open. There was sea fog in the air. The old woman was in great pain, but the notes of her voice remained genteel, as I expect they truly were. "She is my daughter," she said. "Assunta. She is my daughter, my child."

  Then Assunta screamed, "Liar! Liar!"

  "No, no, no," the old lady said, "you are my child, my only child. That is why I have cared for you all my life."