The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  Maria danced the last dance. She had a drink from the last bottle of wine. It was morning then. The band had gone, but a pianist was still playing and a few couples were dancing in the daylight. Breakfast parties were forming, but she refused these invitations in order to drive home with the Beardens. Will might be worried. After she said goodbye to the Beardens, she stood on her front steps to get some air. She had lost her pocketbook. Her tights had been torn by the scales of a dragon. The smell of spilled wine came from her clothes. The sweetness of the air and the fineness of the light touched her. The party seemed like gibberish. She had had all the partners she wanted, but she had not had all the right ones. The hundreds of apple blossoms that she had tied to branches and that had looked, at a distance, so like real blossoms would soon be swept into the ash can.

  The trees of Shady Hill were filled with birds—larks, thrushes, robins, crows—and now the air began to ring with their song. The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal—some simple way of life, in which she dried her hands on an apron and Will came home from the sea—that she had betrayed. She did not know where she had failed, but the gentle morning light illuminated her failure pitilessly. She began to cry.

  Will was asleep, but he woke when she opened the front door. “Mummy?” he asked as she climbed the stairs. “Mummy?… Hello, Mummy. Good morning!” She didn’t reply.

  He saw her tears, the gash in her tights, and the stains on her front. She sat down at her dressing table, laid her face on the glass, and went on crying. “Oh, don’t cry, Mummy!” he said. “Don’t cry! I don’t care, Mummy. I thought I would but I guess it doesn’t really matter. I won’t ever mention it, Mummy. Now, come to bed. Come to bed and get some sleep.”

  Her sobbing got louder. He got up and went to the dressing table and put his arms around her. “I told you what would happen if you wore that costume, didn’t I? But it doesn’t matter any more. I’ll never ask you anything about it. I’ll forget the whole thing. But come to bed now and get some sleep.”

  Her head was swimming, and his voice droned on and on, shutting out the noises of the morning. Then his anxious love, his nagging passion, were more than she could support. “I don’t care. I’m willing to forget it,” he said.

  She got out of his embrace, crossed the room to the hall, and shut the guest-room door in his face.

  Downstairs, sitting over a cup of coffee, Will realized that his supervision of Maria’s life had been anything but thorough. If she had wanted to deceive him, her life couldn’t have been planned along more convenient lines. In the summer, she was alone most of the time, except weekends. He was away on business one week out of every month. She went to New York whenever she pleased—sometimes in the evening. Only a week before the dance she had gone into town to have dinner with some old friends. She had planned to come home on a train that reached Shady Hill at eleven. Will drove to the station to meet her. It was a rainy night and he remembered waiting, in a rather gloomy frame of mind, on the station platform. As soon as he saw the distant lights of the train, his mood was changed by the anticipation of greeting her and taking her home. When the train stopped and only Charlie Curtin—half tipsy—got off, Will was disappointed and worried. Soon after he got home, the telephone rang. It was Maria calling to say that she had missed the train and would not be home until two. At two, Will returned to the station. It was still rainy. Maria and Henry Bulstrode were the only passengers. She walked swiftly up the platform in the rain to kiss Will. He remembered that there had been tears in her eyes, but he had not thought anything about it at the time. Now he wondered about her tears.

  A few nights before that, she had said, after dinner, that she wanted to go to the movies in the village. Will had offered to take her, although he was tired, but she said she knew how much he disliked movies. It had seemed odd to him at the time that before going off to the nine-o’clock show she should take a bath, and when she came downstairs, he heard, under her mink coat, the rustling of a new dress. He fell asleep before she returned, and for all he knew, she might have come in at dawn. It had always seemed generous of her not to insist on his going with her to meetings of the Civic Improvement Association, but how did he know whether she had gone off to discuss the fluorination of water or to meet a lover?

  He remembered something that had happened in February. The Women’s Club had given a revue for charity. He had known before he went to it that Maria was going to do a dance expressing the view of the Current Events Committee on the tariff. She came onto the stage to the music of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” She wore a long evening dress, gloves, and a fur piece—the recognizable getup of a striptease artist—and, to his dismay, she was given a rousing reception. Maria walked around the stage and took off her fur piece, to applause, shouts, and some whistling. During the next chorus, she peeled off her gloves. Will pretended to be enjoying himself, but he had begun to sweat. With the third chorus, she took off her belt. This was all, but the uproarious applause she had been given rang again in Will’s ears now and made them warm.

  A few weeks earlier, Will had gone uptown for lunch—a thing he seldom did. Walking down Madison Avenue, he thought he saw Maria ahead of him, with another man. The dark-red suit, the fur piece, and the hat were hers. He did not recognize the man. Acting impulsively where he might have acted stealthily, he had shouted her name—“Maria! Maria! Maria!” The street was crowded, and there was the distance of half a block between them. Before he could reach the woman, she had disappeared. She might have stepped into a taxi or a store. That evening, when he said to Maria, cheerfully enough, that he thought he saw her on Madison Avenue, she answered crossly, “Well, you didn’t.” After dinner, she claimed to have a headache. She asked him to sleep in the guest room.

  The afternoon of the day after the dance, Will took the children for a walk without Maria. He lectured them, as he always did, on the names of the trees. “That’s a ginkgo… That’s a weeping beech. That bitter smell comes from the boxwood in the hollow.” It may have been because he had received no education himself that he liked to give an educational tone to his time with the children. They recited the states of the Union at the lunch table, discussed geology during some of their walks, and named the stars in the sky if they stayed out after dusk. Will was determined to be cheerful this afternoon, but the figures of his children, walking ahead, saddened him, for they seemed like live symbols of his trouble. He had not actually thought of leaving Maria—he had not let the idea form—but he seemed to breathe the atmosphere of separation. When he passed the tree where he had carved their initials, he thought of the stupendous wickedness of the world.

  The house was dark when they came back up the driveway at the end of their walk—dark and cold. Will turned on some lights and heated the coffee he had made at breakfast. The telephone rang, but he did not answer it. He took a cup of coffee up to the guest room, where Maria was. He thought at first she was still sleeping. When he turned on the light, he saw that she was sitting against the pillows. She smiled, but he responded warily to her charm.

  “Here’s some coffee, Mummy.”

  “Thank you. Did you have a nice walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel better,” she said. “What time is it?”

  “Half past five.”

  “I don’t feel strong enough to go to the Townsends’.”

  “Then I won’t go.”

  “Oh, I wish you would, Willy. Please go to the party and come home and tell me all about it. Please go.”

  Now that she urged him, the party seemed like a good idea.

  “You must go, Will,” Maria said. “There’ll be a lot of gossip about the dance, and you can hear it all, and then you can come home and tell me all about it. Please go to the party, darling. It will make me feel guilty if you stay home on my account.”

  At the Townsends’, cars were parked on both sides of the street, and all the windows of the big house were brightly lighted. Will stepped in the lamplight, the fire
light, and the cheerful human noises of the gathering with a sincere desire to lose his heaviness of spirit. He went upstairs to leave his coat. Bridget, an old Irishwoman, took it. She was a freelance maid who worked at most of the big parties in Shady Hill. Her husband was caretaker at the country club. “So your lady isn’t with you,” she said in her sweet brogue. “Ah, well, I can’t say that I blame her.” Then she laughed suddenly. She put her hands on her knees and rocked back and forth. “I shouldn’t tell you, I know, so help me God, but when Mike was sweeping up the parking lot this morning, he found a pair of gold slippers and a blue lace girdle.”

  Downstairs, Will spoke with his hostess, and she said she was so sorry that Maria hadn’t come. Crossing the living room, he was stopped by Pete Parsons, who drew him over to the fireplace and told him a joke. This was what Will had come for, and his spirits began to improve. But, going from Pete Parsons toward the door of the bar, he found his way blocked by Buff Worden. Ethel’s story of their neediness, her tears, and her trip to the parking lot with Larry Helmsford were still fresh in his mind. He did not want to see Buff Worden. He did not like it that Buff could muster a cheerful and open face after his wife had been seduced in the Helmsfords’ station wagon.

  “Did you hear what Mike Reilly found in the parking lot this morning?” Buff asked. “A pair of slippers and a girdle.” Will said that he wanted a drink, and he got past Buff, but the entrance to the passage between the living room and the bar was blocked by the Chesneys.

  In almost every suburb there is a charming young couple designated by their gifts to be an ambassadorial pair. They are the ones who meet John Mason Brown at the train and drive him to the auditorium. They are the ones who organize the bumper tennis tournaments, handle the most difficult cases in the fund-raising campaign, and can be counted on by their hostesses to humor the bore, pass the stuffed celery, breathe fire into the dying conversation, and expel the drunk. Their social and family connections are indescribably rich and varied, and physically they are models of attractiveness and fashion—direct, mild, well groomed, their eyes twinkling with trust and friendliness. Such a young couple were the Chesneys.

  “So glad to see you,” Mark Chesney said, removing his pipe from his mouth and putting a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Missed you at the dance last night, although I saw Maria enjoying herself. But what I wanted to speak to you about is something of a higher order. Give me a minute? As you may or may not know, I’m in charge of the adult-education program at the high school this year. We’ve had a disappointing attendance, and we have a speaker coming on Thursday for whom I’m anxious to rustle up a sizable audience. Her name is Mary Bickwald, and she’s going to speak on marriage problems—extramarital affairs, that sort of thing. If you and Maria are free on Thursday, I think you’ll find it worth your time.” The Chesneys went on into the living room, and Will continued toward the bar.

  The bar was full of a noisy and pleasant company, and Will was glad to join it and get a drink. He had begun to feel like himself when the rector of Christ Church bore down on him, shook his hand, and drew him away from the others.

  The rector was a large man and, unlike some of his suburban colleagues, not at all wary of clerical black. When he and Will met at cocktail parties, they usually talked about blankets. Will had given many blankets to the church. He had given blankets to its missions and blankets to its shelters. When the shepherds knelt in the straw at Mary’s knees in the Nativity play, they were clothed in Will’s blankets. Since he expected to be asked for blankets, he was surprised to hear the rector say, “I want you to feel free to come to my study, Will, and talk to me if anything is troubling you.” While Will was thanking the rector for this invitation, they were joined by Herbert McGrath.

  Herbert McGrath was a banker, a wealthy, irritable man. At the bottom of his thinking there seemed to be an apprehension—a nightmare—that without the kind of order he represented, the world would fly apart. He despised men who raced to catch the morning train. In the “no smoking” car, it was customary for people to light cigarettes as the train approached Grand Central Station, and this infringement so irritated Herbert that he would tap his neighbors on the shoulder and tell them that the smoker was in the rear. Mixed with his insistence on propriety was a curious strain of superstition. When he walked along the station platform in the morning, he looked around him. If he saw a coin, he would shoulder his way past the other commuters and bend down to get it. “Good luck, you know,” he would explain as he put the coin in his pocket. “You need both luck and brains.” Now he wanted to talk about the immorality at the party, and Will decided to go home.

  He put his glass on the bar and started thoughtfully through the passage to the living room. His head was down, and he walked straight into Mrs. Walpole, a very plain woman. “I see that your wife hasn’t recovered sufficiently to face the public today,” she said gaily.

  A peculiar fate seems to overtake homely women at the ends of parties—and journeys, too. Their curls and their ribbons come undone, particles of food cling to their teeth, their glasses steam, and the wide smile with which they planned to charm the world lapses into a look of habitual discontent and bitterness. Mrs. Walpole had got herself up bravely for the Townsends’ party, but time itself—she was drinking sherry—had destroyed the impression she intended to make. Someone seemed to have sat on her hat, her voice was strident, and the camellia pinned to her shoulder had died, “But I suppose Maria sent you to see what they’re saying about her,” she said.

  Will got past Mrs. Walpole and went up the stairs to get his coat. Bridget had gone, and Helen Bulstrode was sitting alone in the hall in a red dress. Helen was a lush. She was treated kindly in Shady Hill. Her husband was pleasant, wealthy, and forbearing. Now Helen was very drunk, and whatever she had meant to forget when she first poured herself a drink that day had long since been lost in the clutter. She rolled a little in her chair while Will was putting on his coat, and suddenly she addressed him copiously in French. Will did not understand. Her voice got louder and angrier, and when he got down to the hall, she went to the head of the stairs to call after him. He went off without saying goodbye to anyone.

  Maria was in the living room reading a magazine when Will came in. “Look, Mummy,” he said. “Can you tell me this? Did you lose your shoes last night?”

  “I lost my pocketbook,” Maria said, “but I don’t think I lost my shoes.”

  “Try and remember,” he said. “It isn’t like a raincoat or an umbrella. People usually remember when they lose their shoes.”

  “What is the matter with you, Willy?”

  “Did you lose your shoes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you wear a girdle?”

  “What are you talking about, Will?”

  “By Christ, I’ve got to find out!”

  He went upstairs to their room, which was dark. He turned on a light in her closet and opened the chest where she kept her shoes. There were a great many pairs, and among them were gold shoes, silver shoes, bronze shoes, and he was shuffling through the collection when he saw Maria standing in the doorway. “Oh, my God, Mummy, forgive me!” he said. “Forgive me!”

  “Oh, Willie!” she exclaimed. “Look what you’ve done to my shoes.”

  Will felt all right in the morning, and he had a good day in the city. At five, he made the trip uptown on the subway and crossed the station to his train automatically. In the train, he got an aisle seat and scanned the asininities in the evening paper. An old man was suing his young wife for divorce, on the ground of adultery; the fact that this story had no power to disturb Will not only pleased him but left him feeling exceptionally fit and happy. The train traveled north under a sky that was still spread with light.

  A little rain had begun to fall when Will stepped onto the platform at Shady Hill. “Hello, Trace,” he said. “Hello, Pete. Hello, Herb.” Around him, his neighbors were greeting their wives and children. He took the route up Alewives Lane to Shadrock Road, pas
t rows and rows of lighted houses. He put his car in the garage and went around to the front and looked at his tulips, gleaming in the rain and the porch light. He let the fawning cat in out of the wet, and Flora, his youngest daughter, ran through the hall to kiss him. Some deep recess in his spirit seemed to respond to the good child and the light-filled rooms. He had the feeling that there would never be any less to his life than this. Presently, he would be sitting on a folding chair in the June sunlight watching Flora graduate from Smith.

  Maria came into the hall wearing a gray silk dress—a cloth and a color that flattered her. Her eyes were bright and wide, and she kissed him tenderly. The telephone began to ring, for it was that hour in the suburbs when the telephone rings steadily with board-meeting announcements, scraps of gossip, fund-raising pleas, and invitations. Maria answered it and he heard her say, “Yes, Edith.”

  Will went into the living room to make a cocktail, and a few minutes later the doorbell rang. Edith Hastings, a good neighbor and a friendly woman, preceded Maria into the living room, protesting, “I really shouldn’t break in on you like this.” Still protesting, she sat down and took the glass that Will handed her. He had never seen her color so high or her eyes so bright. “Charlie’s in Oregon,” she said. “He’ll be gone three weeks this trip. He wanted me to speak to you, Will, about some apple trees. He meant to speak to you before he left, but he didn’t have the time. He can get apple trees by the dozen from a nursery in New Jersey, and he wanted to know if you wouldn’t like to buy six.”

  Edith Hastings was one of those women—and there were many of them in Shady Hill—whose husbands were away on business from one to three weeks out of every month. They lived—conjugally—the life of a Grand Banks fisherman’s wife, with none of the lore of ships and sailors to draw on. None—or almost none—of these widows could be accused of not having attacked their problems gallantly. They solicited funds for cancer, heart trouble, lameness, deafness, and mental health. They cultivated tropical plants in a capricious climate, wove cloth, made pottery, cared tenderly for their children, and did everything imaginable to make up for the irremediable absence of their men. They remained lonely women with a natural proneness to gossip.