The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  Yes, I said.

  “Stole away,” Howe repeated. “Just stole away. But what I wanted to talk with you about is this deal I thought you might be interested in. It’s a one-shot, but it won’t take you more than three weeks. It’s a steal. They’re green, and they’re dumb, and they’re loaded, and it’s just like stealing.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, then, can you meet me for lunch at Cardin’s at twelve-thirty, and I’ll give you the details?” Howe asked.

  “O. K.,” I said hoarsely. “Thanks a lot, Burt.”

  “We went out to the shack on Sunday,” the man in the next office was saying as I hung up. “Louise got bit by a poisonous spider. The doctor gave her some kind of injection. She’ll be all right.” He dialed another number and began, “We went out to the shack on Sunday. Louise got bit by a poisonous spider…”

  It was possible that a man whose wife had been bitten by a spider and who found some time on his hands might call three or four friends and tell them about it, and it was equally possible that the spider might be a code of warning or of assent to some unlawful traffic. What frightened me was that by becoming a thief I seemed to have surrounded myself with thieves and operators. My left eye had begun to twitch again, and the inability of one part of my consciousness to stand up under the reproach that was being heaped into it by another part made me cast around desperately for someone else who could be blamed. I had read often enough in the papers that divorce sometimes led to crime. My parents were divorced when I was about five. This was a good clue and quickly led me on to something better.

  My father went to live in France after the divorce, and I didn’t see him for ten years. Then he wrote Mother for permission to see me, and she prepared me for this reunion by telling me how drunken, cruel, and lewd the old man was. It was in the summer, and we were on Nantucket, and I took the steamer alone, and went to New York on the train. I met my father at the Plaza early in the evening, but not so early that he hadn’t begun to drink. With the long, sensitive nose of an adolescent I smelled the gin on his breath, and I noticed that he bumped into a table and sometimes repeated himself. I realized later that this reunion must have been strenuous for a man of sixty, which he was. We had dinner and then went to see The Roses of Picardy. As soon as the chorus came on, Father said that I could have any one of them that I wanted; the arrangements were all made. I could even have one of the specialty dancers. Now, if I’d felt that he had crossed the Atlantic to perform this service for me, it might have been different, but I felt he’d made the trip in order to do a disservice to my mother. I was scared. The show was in one of those old-fashioned theatres that appear to be held together with angels. Brown-gold angels held up the ceiling; they held up the boxes; they even seemed to hold up the balcony with about four hundred people in it. I spent a lot of time looking at those dusty gold angels. If the ceiling of the theatre had fallen on my head, I would have been relieved. After the show, we went back to the hotel to wash before meeting the girls, and the old man stretched out on the bed for a minute and began to snore. I picked his wallet of fifty dollars, spent the night at Grand Central, and took an early morning train to Woods Hole: So the whole thing was explained, including the violence of the emotion I had experienced in the Warburtons’ upstairs hall; I had been reliving that scene at the Plaza. It had not been my fault that I had stolen then, and it had not been my fault when I went to the Warburtons’. It was my father’s fault! Then I remembered that my father was buried in Fontainebleau fifteen years ago, and could be nothing much more now than dust.

  I went into the men’s room and washed my hands and face, and combed my hair down with a lot of water. It was time to go out for lunch. I thought anxiously of the lunch ahead of me, and, wondering why, was astonished to realize that it was Burt Howe’s free use of the word “steal.” I hoped he wouldn’t keep on saying it.

  Even as the thought floated across my mind in the men’s room, the twitching in my eye seemed to spread over my cheek; it seemed as if this verb were embedded in the English language like a poisoned fishhook. I had committed adultery, and the word “adultery” had no force for me; I had been drunk, and the word “drunkenness” had no extraordinary power. It was only “steal” and all its allied nouns, verbs, and adverbs that had the power to tyrannize over my nervous system, as if I had evolved, unconsciously, some doctrine wherein the act of theft took precedence over all the other sins in the Decalogue and was a sign of moral death.

  The sky was dark when I came out on the street. Lights were burning everywhere. I looked into the faces of the people that I passed for some encouraging signs of honesty in such a crooked world, and on Third Avenue I saw a young man with a tin cup, holding his eyes shut to impersonate blindness. That seal of blindness, the striking innocence of the upper face, was betrayed by the frown and the crow’s-feet of a man who could see his drinks on the bar. There was another blind beggar on Forty-first Street, but I didn’t examine his eye sockets, realizing that I couldn’t assess the legitimacy of every beggar in the city.

  Cardin’s is a men’s restaurant in the Forties. The stir and bustle in the vestibule only made me feel retiring, and the hat-check girl, noticing, I suppose, the twitch in my eye, gave me a very jaded look.

  Burt was at the bar, and when we had ordered our drinks, we got down to business. “For a deal like this, we ought to meet in some back alley,” he said, “but a fool and his money and so forth. It’s three kids. P. J. Burdette is one of them, and they’ve got a cool million between them to throw away. Someone’s bound to steal from them, so it may as well be you.” I put my hand over the left side of my face to cover the tic. When I tried to raise my glass to my mouth, I spilled gin all over my suit. “They’re all three of them just out of college,” Burt said. “And they’ve all three of them got so much in the kitty that even if you picked them clean they wouldn’t feel any pain. Now, in order to participate in this burglary, all you have to do…”

  The toilet was at the other end of the restaurant, but I got there. Then I drew a basin of cold water and stuck my head and face into it. Burt had followed me to the washroom. As I was drying myself with a paper towel, he said, “You know, Hakie, I wasn’t going to mention it, but now that you’ve been sick, I may as well tell you that you look awful. I mean, from the minute I saw you I knew something was wrong. I just want to tell you that whatever it is—sauce or dope or trouble at home—it’s a lot later than you think, and maybe you should be doing something about it. No hard feelings?” I said that I was sick, and waited in the toilet long enough for Burt to make a getaway. Then I got my hat and another jaded look from the hat-check girl, and saw in the afternoon paper on a chair by the checkroom that some bank robbers in Brooklyn had got away with eighteen thousand dollars.

  I walked around the streets, wondering how I would shape up as a pickpocket and bag snatcher, and all the arches and spires of St. Patrick’s only reminded me of poor boxes. I took the regular train home, looking out of the window at a peaceable landscape and a spring evening, and it seemed to me fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sand-lot ball players and lovers unashamed of their sport and the owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world that were made by men like me.

  NOW CHRISTINA is the kind of woman who, when she is asked by the alumnae secretary of her college to describe her status, gets dizzy thinking about the variety of her activities and interests. And what, on a given day, stretching a point here and there, does she have to do? Drive me to the train. Have the skis repaired. Book a tennis court. Buy the wine and groceries for the monthly dinner of the Société Gastronomique du Westchester Nord. Look up some definitions in Larousse. Attend a League of Women Voters symposium on sewers. Go to a full-dress lunch for Bobsie Neil’s aunt. Weed the garden. Iron a uniform for the part-time maid. Type two and a half pages of her paper on the early novels of Henry James. Empty the wastebaskets. Help
Tabitha prepare the children’s supper. Give Ronnie some batting practice. Put her hair in pin curls. Get the cook. Meet the train. Bathe. Dress. Greet her guests in French at half past seven. Say bon soir at eleven. Lie in my arms until twelve. Eureka! You might say that she is prideful, but I think only that she is a woman enjoying herself in a country that is prosperous and young. Still, when she met me at the train that night, it was difficult for me to rise to all this vitality.

  It was my bad luck to have to take the collection at early Communion on Sunday, although I was in no condition. I answered the pious looks of my friends with a very crooked smile and then knelt by a lancet-shaped stained-glass window that seemed to be made from the butts of vermouth and Burgundy bottles. I knelt on an imitation-leather hassock that had been given by some guild or auxiliary to replace one of the old, snuff-colored hassocks, which had begun to split at the seams and show bits of straw, and made the whole place smell like an old manger. The smell of straw and flowers, and the vigil light, and the candles flickering in the rector’s breath, and the damp of this poorly heated stone building were all as familiar to me and belonged as much to my early life as the sounds and smells of a kitchen or a nursery, and yet they seemed, that morning, to be so potent that I felt dizzy. Then I heard, in the baseboard on my right, a rat’s tooth working like an auger in the hard oak. “Holy, Holy, Holy,” I said very loudly, hoping to frighten the rat. “Lord God of hosts, Heaven and earth are FULL of Thy Glory!” The small congregation muttered its amens with a sound like a footstep, and the rat went on scraping away at the baseboard. And then—perhaps because I was absorbed in the noise of the rat’s tooth, or because the smell of dampness and straw was soporific—when I looked up from the shelter I had made of my hands, I saw the rector drinking from the chalice and realized that I had missed Communion.

  At home, I looked through the Sunday paper for other thefts, and there were plenty. Banks had been looted, hotel safes had been emptied of jewelry, maids and butlers had been tied to kitchen chairs, furs and industrial diamonds had been stolen in job lots, delicatessens, cigar stores, and pawnshops had been broken into, and someone had stolen a painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Late in the afternoon, I raked leaves. What could be more contrite than cleaning the lawn of the autumn’s dark rubbish under the streaked, pale skies of spring?

  While I was raking leaves, my sons walked by. “The Toblers are having a softball game,” Ronnie said. “Everybody’s there.”

  “Why don’t you play?” I asked.

  “You can’t play unless you’ve been invited,” Ronnie said over his shoulder, and then they were gone. Then I noticed that I could hear the cheering from the softball game to which we had not been invited. The Toblers lived down the block. The spirited voices seemed to sound clearer and clearer as the night came on; I could even hear the noise of ice in glasses, and the voices of the ladies raised in a feeble cheer.

  Why hadn’t I been asked to play softball at the Toblers’? I wondered. Why had we been excluded from these simple pleasures, this lighthearted gathering, the fading laughter and voices and slammed doors of which seemed to gleam in the darkness as they were withdrawn from my possession? Why wasn’t I asked to play softball at the Toblers’? Why should social aggrandizement—climbing, really—exclude a nice guy like me from a softball game? What kind of a world was that? Why should I be left alone with my dead leaves in the twilight—as I was—feeling so forsaken, lonely, and forlorn that I was chilled?

  If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists—all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone. The legless beggar in Times Square with his poor display of pencils, the rouged old lady in the subway who talks to herself, the exhibitionist in the public toilet, the drunk who has dropped on the subway stairs, do more than excite their pity; they are at a glance transformed into these unfortunates. Derelict humanity seems to trample over their unrealized souls, leaving them at twilight in a condition closely resembling the scene of a prison riot. Disappointed in themselves, they are always ready to be disappointed for the rest of us, and they will build whole cities, whole creations, firmaments and principalities, of tear-wet disappointment. Lying in bed at night, they will think tenderly of the big winner who lost his pari-mutuel ticket, of the great novelist whose magnum opus was burned mistakenly for trash, and of Samuel Tilden, who lost the Presidency of the United States through the shenanigans of the electoral college. Detesting this company, then, it was doubly painful for me to find myself in it. And, seeing a bare dogwood tree in the starlight, I thought, How sad everything is!

  WEDNESDAY was my birthday. I recalled this fact in the middle of the afternoon, at the office, and the thought that Christina might be planning a surprise party brought me in one second from a sitting to a standing position, breathless. Then I decided that she wouldn’t. But just the preparations the children would make presented an emotional problem; I didn’t see how I could face it.

  I left the office early and had two drinks before I took the train. Christina looked pleased with everything when she met me at the station, and I put a very good face on my anxiety. The children had changed into clean clothes, and wished me a happy birthday so fervently that I felt awful. At the table there was a pile of small presents, mostly things the children had made—cuff links out of buttons, and a memo pad, and so forth. I thought I was very bright, considering the circumstances, and pulled my snapper, put on my silly hat, blew out the candles on the cake, and thanked them all, but then it seemed that there was another present—my big present—and after dinner I was made to stay inside while Christina and the children went outside, and then Juney came in and led me outdoors and around in back of the house, where they all were. Leaning against the house was an aluminum extension ladder with a card and a ribbon tied to it, and I said, as if I’d been hit, “What in hell is the meaning of this?”

  “We thought you’d need it, Daddy,” Juney said.

  ‘What would I ever need a ladder for? What do you think I am—a second-story worker?”

  “Storm windows,” Juney said. “Screens—”

  I turned to Christina. “Have I been talking in my sleep?”

  “No,” Christina said. “You haven’t been talking in your sleep.”

  Juney began to cry.

  “You could take the leaves out of the rain gutters,” Ronnie said. Both of the boys were looking at me with long faces.

  “Well, you must admit it’s a very unusual present,” I said to Christina.

  “God!” Christina said. “Come on, children. Come on.” She herded them in at the terrace door.

  I kicked around the garden until after dark. The lights went on upstairs. Juney was still crying, and Christina was singing to her. Then she was quiet. I waited until the lights went on in our bedroom, and after a little while I climbed the stairs. Christina was in a nightgown, sitting at her dressing table, and there were heavy tears in her eyes.

  “You’ll have to try and understand,” I said.

  “I couldn’t possibly. The children have been saving for months to buy you that damned-fool contraption.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve been through,” I said.

  “If you’d been through hell, I wouldn’t forgive you,” she said. “You haven’t been through anything that would justify your behavior. They’ve had it hidden in the garage for a week. They’re so sweet.”

  “I haven’t felt like myself,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me that you haven’t felt like yourself,” she said. “I’ve looked forward to having you leave in the morning, and I’ve dreaded having you come home at night.”

  “I can’t have been all that bad,” I said.

  “It’s been hell,” she said. “You’ve been sharp with the children, nasty to me, rude to your friends, and malicious behind their backs. It’s been hideous.”

  “Would
you like me to go?”

  “Oh, Lord, would I like you to go! Then I could breathe.”

  “What about the children?”

  I went down the hall to the closet where we keep the bags. When I took out my suitcase, I found that the children’s puppy had chewed the leather binding loose all along one side. Trying to find another suitcase, I brought the whole pile down on top of me, boxing my ears. I carried my bag with this long strip of leather trailing behind me back into our bedroom. “Look,” I said. “Look at this, Christina. The dog has chewed the binding off my suitcase.” She didn’t even raise her head. “I’ve poured twenty thousand dollars a year into this establishment for ten years,” I shouted, “and when the time comes for me to go, I don’t even have a decent suitcase! Everybody else has a suitcase. Even the cat has a nice traveling bag.” I threw open my shirt drawer, and there were only four clean shirts. “I don’t have enough clean shirts to last a week!” I shouted. Then I got a few things together, clapped my hat on my head, and marched out. I even thought, for a minute, of taking the car, and I went into the garage and looked it over. Then I saw the FOR SALE sign that had been hanging on the house when we bought it long, long ago. I wiped the dirt off the sign and got a nail and a rock and went around to the front of the house and nailed the FOR SALE sign onto a maple tree. Then I walked to the station. It’s about a mile. The long strip of leather was trailing along behind me, and I stopped and tried to rip it off the suitcase, but it wouldn’t come. When I got down to the station, I found there wasn’t another train until four in the morning. I decided I would wait. I sat down on my suitcase and waited five minutes. Then I marched home again. Halfway there I saw Christina coming down the street, in a sweater and a skirt and sneakers—the quickest things to put on, but summery things—and we walked home together and went to bed.

  On Saturday, I played golf, and although the game finished late, I wanted to take a swim in the club pool before I went home. There was no one at the pool but Tom Maitland. He is a dark-skinned and nice-looking man, very rich, but quiet. He seems withdrawn. His wife is the fattest woman in Shady Hill, and nobody much likes his children, and I think he is the kind of man whose parties and friendship and affairs in love and business all rest like an intricate superstructure—a tower of matchsticks—on the melancholy of his early youth. A breath could bring the whole thing down. It was nearly dark when I had finished swimming; the clubhouse was lighted and you could hear the sounds of dinner on the porch. Maitland was sitting at the edge of the pool dabbling his feet in the bright-blue water, with its Dead Sea smell of chlorine. I was drying myself off, and as I passed him, I asked if he wasn’t going in. “I don’t know how to swim,” he said. He smiled and looked away from me then to the still, polished water of the pool, in the dark landscape. “We used to have a pool at home,” he said, “but I never got a chance to swim in it. I was always studying the violin.” There he was, forty-five years old and at least a millionaire, and he couldn’t even float, and I don’t suppose he had many occasions to speak as honestly as he had just spoken. While I was getting dressed, the idea settled in my head—with no help from me—that the Maitlands would be my next victims.