The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  Assunta began to cry, and stamped down the stairs. From the window, I saw her crossing the courtyard. When the priest began to administer the last rites, I went out.

  I kept a sort of vigil in the café. The church bells tolled at three, and a little later news came down from the villa that the signorina was dead. No one in the café seemed to suspect that they were anything but an eccentric old spinster and a cranky servant. At four o'clock the band concert opened up with "Tiger Rag." I moved that night from the villa to the Hotel National, and left Montraldo in the morning.

  THE OCEAN

  I am keeping this journal because I believe myself to be in some danger and because I have no other way of recording my fears. I cannot report them to the police, as you will see, and I cannot confide in my friends. The losses I have recently suffered in self-esteem, reasonableness, and charity are conspicuous, but there is always some painful ambiguity about who is to blame. I might be to blame myself. Let me give you an example. Last night I sat down to dinner with Cora, my wife, at half past six. Our only daughter has left home, and we eat, these days, in the kitchen, off a table ornamented with a goldfish bowl. The meal was cold ham, salad, and potatoes. When I took a mouthful of salad I had to spit it out. "Ah, yes," my wife said. "I was afraid that would happen. You left your lighter fluid in the pantry, and I mistook it for vinegar."

  As I say, who was to blame? I have always been careful about putting things in their places, and had she meant to poison me she wouldn't have done anything so clumsy as to put lighter fluid in the salad dressing. If I had not left the fluid in the pantry, the incident wouldn't have taken place. But let me go on—for a minute. During dinner a thunderstorm came up. The sky got black. Suddenly there was a soaking rain. As soon as dinner was over, Cora dressed herself in a raincoat and a green shower cap and went out to water the lawn. I watched her from the window. She seemed oblivious of the ragged walls of rain in which she stood, and she watered the lawn carefully, lingering over the burnt spots. I was afraid that she would compromise herself in the eyes of our neighbors. The woman in the house next door would telephone the woman on the corner to say that Cora Fry was watering her lawn in a downpour. My wish that she not be ridiculed by gossip took me to her side, although as I approached her, under my umbrella, I realized that I lacked the tact to get through this gracefully. What should I say? Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends. Come in, dear," I said. "You might get struck."

  "Oh, I doubt that very much," she said in her most musical voice. She speaks these days in the octave above middle C.

  "Won't you wait until the rain is over?" I asked.

  "It won't last long," she said sweetly. "Thunderstorms never do."

  Under my umbrella, I returned to the house and poured myself a drink. She was right. A minute later the storm blew off, and she went on watering the grass. She had some rightness on her side in both of these incidents, but this does not change my feeling that I am in some danger.

  Oh, world, world, world, wondrous and bewildering, when did my troubles begin? This is being written in my house in Bullet Park. The time is 10 A. M. The day is Tuesday. You might well ask what I am doing in Bullet Park on a weekday morning. The only other men around are three clergymen, two invalids, and an old codger on Turner Street who has lost his marbles. The neighborhood has the serenity, the stillness of a terrain where all sexual tensions have been suspended—excluding mine, of course, and those of the three clergymen. What is my business? What do I do? Why didn't I catch the train? I am forty-six years old, hale, well-dressed, and have a more thorough knowledge of the manufacture and merchandising of Dynaflex than any other man in the entire field. One of my difficulties is my youthful looks. I have a thirty-inch waistline and jet-black hair, and when I tell people that I used to be vice-president in charge of merchandising and executive assistant to the president of Dynaflex—when I tell this to strangers in bars and on trains—they never believe me, because I look so young.

  Mr. Estabrook, the president of Dynaflex and in some ways my protector, was an enthusiastic gardener. While admiring his flowers one afternoon, he was stung by a bumblebee, and he died before they could get him to the hospital. I could have had the presidency, but I wanted to stay in merchandising and manufacture. Then the directors—including myself, of course—voted a merger with Milltonium Ltd., putting Eric Penumbra, Milltonium's chief, at the helm. I voted for the merger with some misgivings, but I concealed these and did the most important part of the groundwork for this change. It was my job to bring in the approval of conservative and reluctant stockholders, and one by one I brought them around. The fact that I had worked for Dynaflex since I had left college, that I had never worked for anyone else, inspired their trust. A few days after the merger was a fact, Penumbra called me into his office. "Well," he said, "you've had it."

  "Yes, I have," I said. I thought he was complimenting me on having brought in the approvals. I had traveled all over the United States and made two trips to Europe. No one else could have done it.

  "You've had it," Penumbra said harshly. "How long will it take you to get out of here?"

  "I don't understand," I said.

  "How the hell long will it take you to get out of here!" he shouted. "You're obsolete. We can't afford people like you in the shop. I'm asking how long it will take you to get out of here."

  "It will take about an hour," I said.

  "Well, I'll give you to the end of the week," he said. "If you want to send your secretary up, I'll fire her. You're really lucky. With your pension, severance pay, and the stock you own, you'll have damned near as much money as I take home, without having to lift a finger." Then he left his desk and came to where I stood. He put an arm around my shoulders. He gave me a hug. "Don't worry," Penumbra said. "Obsolescence is something we all have to face. I hope I'll be as calm about it as you when my time comes."

  "I certainly hope you will," I said, and I left the office.

  I went to the men's room. I locked myself up in a cubicle and wept. I wept at Penumbra's dishonesty, wept for the destinies of Dynaflex, wept for the fate of my secretary—an intelligent spinster, who writes short stories in her spare time—wept bitterly for my own naïveté, for my own lack of guile, wept that I should be overwhelmed by the plain facts of life. At the end of a half hour I dried my tears and washed my face. I took everything out of my office that was personal, took a train home, and broke the news to Cora. I was angry, of course, and she seemed frightened. She began to cry. She retired to her dressing table, which has served as a wailing wall for all the years of our marriage.

  "But there's nothing to cry about," I said. "I mean, we've got plenty of money. We've got loads of money. We can go to Japan. We can go to India. We can see the English cathedrals." She went on crying, and after dinner I called our daughter Flora, who lives in New York. "I'm sorry, Daddy," she said, when I told her the news. "I'm very sorry, I know how you must feel, and I'd like to see you later but not right now. Remember your promise—you promised to leave me alone."

  The next character to enter the scene is my mother-in-law, whose name is Minnie. Minnie is a harsh-voiced blonde of about seventy, with four scars on the side of her face, from cosmetic surgery. You may have seen Minnie rattling around Neiman-Marcus or the lobby of practically any Grand Hotel. Minnie uses the word "fashionable" with great versatility. Of her husband's suicide in 1932. Minnie says, "Jumping out of windows was quite fashionable." When her only son was fired out of secondary school for improper conduct and went to live in Paris with an older man, Minnie said, "I know it's revolting, but it seems to be terribly fashionable." Of her own outrageous plumage she says, "It's hideously uncomfortable but it's divinely fashionable." Minnie is cruel and idle, and Cora, who is her only daughter, hates her. Cora has drafted her nature along lines that are the opposite of Minnie's. She is loving, serious-minded, sober, and kind. I think that in order to safeguard her virtues—her hopefulness, really—Cora has been forced to evolve
a fantasy in which her mother is not Minnie at all but is instead some sage and gracious lady, working at an embroidery hoop. Everybody knows how persuasive and treacherous fantasies can be.

  I spent the day after I was cashiered by Penumbra hanging around the house. With the offices of Dynaflex shut to me, I was surprised to find that I had almost no place else to go. My club is a college adjunct where they serve a cafeteria lunch, and it is not much of a sanctuary. I have always wanted to read good books, and this seemed to be my chance. I took a copy of Chaucer into the garden and read half a page, but it was hard work for a businessman. I spent the rest of the morning hoeing the lettuce, which made the gardener cross. Lunch with Cora was for some reason strained. After lunch Cora took a nap. So did the maid, I discovered, when I stepped into the kitchen to get a glass of water. She was sound asleep with her head on the table. The stillness of the house at that hour gave me a most peculiar feeling. But the world with all its diversions and entertainments was available to me, and I called New York and booked some theatre tickets for that evening. Cora doesn't much enjoy the theatre, but she came with me. After the theatre we went to the St. Regis to get some supper. When we entered the place, the band was knocking out the last number of a set—all horns up, flags flying, and the toothy drummer whacking crazily at everything he could reach. In the middle of the dance floor was Minnie, shaking her backside, stamping her feet, and popping her thumbs. She was with a broken-winded gigolo, who kept looking desperately over his shoulder, as if he expected his trainer to throw in the sponge. Minnie's plumage was exceptionally brilliant, her face seemed exceptionally haggard, and a lot of people were laughing at her. As I say, Cora seems to have invented a dignified parent, and these encounters with Minnie are cruel. We turned and went away. Cora said nothing during the long drive home.

  Minnie must have been beautiful many years ago. It was from Minnie that Cora got her large eyes and her fine nose. Minnie comes to visit us two or three times a year. There is no question about the fact that if she announced her arrivals we would lock up the house and go away. Her ability to make her daughter miserable is consummate and voracious, and so, with some cunning, she makes her arrivals at our house a surprise. I spent the next afternoon trying to read Henry James in the garden. At about five I heard a car stop in front of the house. A little while later it began to rain, and I stepped into the living room and saw Minnie standing by a window. It was quite dark, but no one had bothered to turn on a light. "Why, Minnie," I exclaimed, "how nice to see you, what a pleasant surprise. Let me get you a drink..

  I turned on a lamp and saw that it was Cora.

  She turned on me slowly a level and eloquent look of utter misgiving. It might have been a smile had I not known that I had wounded her painfully; had I not felt from her a flow of emotion like the flow of blood from a wound. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, darling," I said. "I'm terribly sorry. I couldn't see." She went out of the room, "It was the dark," I said. "It got so dark all of a sudden, when it began to rain. I'm terribly sorry, but it was just the dark and the rain." I heard her climb the dark stairs and close the door to our room.

  When I saw Cora in the morning—and I didn't see her again until morning—I could tell by the pained look on her face that she thought I had wickedly pretended to mistake her for Minnie. I suppose she was as deeply and lastingly hurt as I had been hurt when Penumbra called me obsolete. It was at this point that her voice became an octave higher, and she spoke to me—when she spoke to me at all—in notes that were weary and musical, and her looks were accusing and dark. Now, I might not have noticed any of this had I been absorbed in my work and tired in the evening. To strike a healthy balance between motion and scrutiny was nearly impossible with my opportunities for motion so suddenly curtailed. I went on with my program of serious reading, but more than half my time was spent in observing Cora's sorrows and the disorganized workings of my house. A part-time maid came four times a week, and when I saw her sweeping dust under the rugs and taking catnaps in the kitchen, I got irritable. I said nothing about this, but a vexatious relationship quickly sprang up between us. It was the same with the gardener. If I sat on the terrace to read, he would cut the grass under my chair, and he took a full day, at four dollars an hour, to cut the lawns, although I knew from experience that this could be done in a much shorter time. As for Cora, I saw how empty and friendless her life was. She never went out to lunch. She never played cards. She arranged flowers, went to the hairdresser, gossiped with the maid, and rested. The smallest things began to irritate and offend me, and I was doubly offended by my unreasonable irritability. The sound of Cora's light and innocent footstep as she wandered aimlessly around the house made me cross. I was even offended at her manner of speaking. "I must try to arrange the flowers," she would say. "I must try to buy a hat. I must try to have my hair done. I must try to find a yellow pocketbook." Leaving the lunch table she would say, "Now I shall try to lie in the sun." But why try? The sun poured from the heavens down onto the terrace, where there was a large assortment of comfortable furniture, and a few minutes after she had stretched herself out in a long chair she was asleep. Rising from her nap she would say, "I must try not to get a sunburn," and entering the house she would say, "Now I am going to try to take a bath."

  I drove down to the station one afternoon to watch the six-thirty-two come in. It was the train I used to return home on. I stopped my car in a long line of cars driven mostly by housewives. I was terribly excited. I was waiting for no one, and the women around me were merely waiting for their husbands, but it seemed to me that we were all waiting for much more. The stage, it seemed, was set. Pete and Harry, the two cab drivers, stood by their cars. With them was the Bruxtons' Airedale, who wanders. Mr. Winters, the station agent, was talking with Louisa Balcolm, the postmistress, who lives two stops up the line. These, then, were the attendant players, the porters and gossips who would put down the groundwork for the spectacle. I kept an eye on my wristwatch. Then the train pulled in, and a moment later an eruption, a jackpot of humanity, burst through the station doors—so numerous and eager, so like sailors home from the sea, so hurried, so loving, that I laughed with pleasure. There they all were, the short and the tall, the rich and the poor, the sage and the foolish, my enemies and friends, and they all headed out the door with such a light step, so bright an eye, that I knew I must rejoin them. I would simply go back to work. This decision made me feel cheerful and magnanimous, and when I came home my cheer seemed for a moment to be infectious. Cora spoke for the first time in days in a voice that was full and warm, but when I replied, she said, musically, "I was speaking to the goldfish." She was indeed. The beautiful smile that she had withheld from me was aimed at the goldfish bowl, and I wondered if she had not left the world, its lights, cities, and the clash of things, for this sphere of glass and its foolish castle. Watching her bend lovingly over the goldfish bowl, I got the distinct impression that she looked longingly into this other world.

  I went to New York in the morning and called the friend who has always been most complimentary about my work with Dynaflex. He told me to come to his office at around noon—I guessed for lunch. "I want to go back to work," I told him. "I want your help."

  "Well, it isn't simple," he said. "It isn't as simple as it might seem. To begin with, you can't expect much in the way of sympathy. Everybody in the business knows how generous Penumbra was to you. Most of us would be happy to change places. I mean, there's a certain amount of natural envy. People don't like to help a man who's in a more comfortable position than they. And another thing is that Penumbra wants you to stay in retirement. I don't know why this is, but I know it's a fact, and anybody who took you on would be in trouble with Milltonium. And, to get on with the unpleasant facts, you're just too damned old. Our president is twenty-seven. Our biggest competitor has a chief in his early thirties. So why don't you enjoy yourself? Why don't you take it easy? Why don't you go around the world?" Then I asked, very humbly, if I made an investment in his firm—
say fifty thousand dollars—could he find me a responsible post. He smiled broadly. It all seemed so easy. "I'll be happy to take your fifty thousand," he said lightly, "but as for finding you anything to do, I'm afraid..." Then his secretary came in to say that he was late for lunch.

  I stood on a street corner, appearing to wait for the traffic light to change, but I was just waiting. I was staggered. What I wanted to do was to make a sandwich board on which I would list all my grievances. On it I would describe Penumbra's dishonesty, Cora's sorrow, the indignities I had suffered from the maid and gardener, and how cruelly I had been hurled out of the stream of things by a vogue for youth and inexperience. I would hang this sign from my shoulders and march up and down in front of the public library from nine until five, passing out more detailed literature to those who were interested. Throw in a snowstorm, gale winds, and the crash of thunder; I wanted it to be a spectacle.

  I then stepped into a side-street restaurant to get a drink and some lunch. It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious. The headwaiter was a brisk character off the Corso di Roma. He duckfooted, banging down the heels of his Italian shoes, and hunched his shoulders as if his suit jacket bound. He spoke sharply to the bartender, who then whispered to a waiter, "I'll kill him! Someday I'll kill him!"

  "You and me," whispered the waiter, "we'll kill him together." The hat-check girl joined the whispering. She wanted to kill the manager. The conspirators scattered when the headwaiter returned, but the atmosphere remained mutinous. I drank a cocktail and ordered a salad, and then I overheard the impassioned voice of a man in the booth next to mine. I had nothing better to do than listen. "I go to Minneapolis," he said. "I have to go to Minneapolis, and as soon as I check into the hotel the telephone's ringing. She wants to tell me that the hot-water heater isn't working. There I am in Minneapolis and she's on Long Island and she calls me long-distance to say that the hot-water heater isn't working. So then I ask her why doesn't she call the plumber, and then she begins to cry. She cries over long-distance for about fifteen minutes, just because I suggest that she might call the plumber. Well, anyhow, in Minneapolis there's this very good jewelry store, and so I bought her a pair of earrings. Sapphires. Eight hundred dollars. I can't afford this kind of thing, but I can't afford not to buy her presents. I mean, I can make eight hundred dollars in ten minutes, but as the tax lawyer says, I don't take away more than a third of what I make, and so a pair of eight-hundred-dollar earrings cost me around two thousand. Anyway, I get the earrings, and I give them to her when I get home, and we go off to a party at the Barnstables. When we come home, she's lost one of the earrings. She doesn't know where she lost it. She doesn't care. She won't even call the Barnstables to see if it's lying around on the floor. She doesn't want to disturb them. So then I say it's just like throwing money into the fire, and she begins to cry and says that sapphires are cold stones—that they express my inner coldness toward her. She says there wasn't any love in the present—it wasn't a loving present. All I had to do was to step into a jewelry store and buy them, she says. They didn't cost me anything in thoughtfulness and affection. So then I ask her does she expect me to make her some earrings—does she want me to go to night school and learn how to make one of those crummy silver bracelets they make? Hammered. You know. Every little hammer blow a sign of love and affection. Is that what she wants, for Christ's sake? That's another night when I slept in the guest room..."