The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  He was in a room with two other patients. He had broken a leg, he looked dreadful, and there were tears in his eyes. I asked him when he would be allowed to go home. “To Grace?” he asked. “Never. I am never going back. Her father and mother are with her now. They are arranging a legal separation. I am going to Verona. I am taking the Colombo on the twenty-seventh.” He sobbed. “You know what she is asking me?” he said.

  “No, Boobee. What did she ask you?”

  “She is asking me to change my name.” He began to cry.

  I saw him off on the Colombo, more because I like ships and sailings than because of the depth of our friendship, and I never saw him again. The last of my story has no more relevance than the wall in Verona, but when it happened I was reminded of Boobee, and so I’ll put it down. It was in a little town called Adrianapolis, about sixty miles from Yalta on the dry side of the Crimean Mountains. I had come over from the coast in a cab and was waiting for a plane to Moscow when I met another American. We were both, naturally, very happy to encounter someone who spoke English, and we went to the dining room and ordered a bottle of vodka. He was working as an engineer in a chemical-fertilizer plant in the mountains and was on his way back to the States for a six weeks’ vacation. We had a table by a window overlooking the airfield, where there was very little activity. At home it would have passed for one of those private airfields you find in the suburbs, mostly used by charter flights. There was a public address system, and a young woman with a very pure and musical voice was making announcements in Russian. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I suppose she was asking Igor Vassilyevitch Kryukov to please report to the Aeroflot ticket counter.

  “That reminds me of my wife,” my friend said. “The voice. I’m divorced now, but I was married five years to this girl. She was everything you could ask for. Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, loving, a great cook—she even had some money. She had planned to be an actress, but when this didn’t work out she wasn’t bitter or disappointed or anything. She realized she wasn’t up to the competition, and she gave it up, just like that. I mean, she wasn’t one of these women who claim to have given up a big career. We had a little apartment in Bayside, and she looked around for a job, and because of her training—I mean, she knew how to use her voice—they took her on at Newark Airport as an announcer. She had a very pretty voice, not affected or anything, very calm and humorous and musical. She worked on a four-hour shift, saying things like ‘Will passengers for United’s jet flight to Seattle please board at Gate Sixteen? Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter? Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?’ I suppose that girl is saying the same sort of thing.” He nodded his head toward the loudspeaker. “It was a great job, and just working four hours a day she made more money than I did, and she had plenty of time to shop and cook and be wifely, at which she was very good. Well, when we had about five thousand in the savings account, we began to think about having a child and moving out to the country. She had been announcing at Newark then for about five years. Well, one night before supper, I was drinking whiskey and reading the paper when I heard her say, in the kitchen, ‘Will you please come to the table? Supper is ready. Will you please come to the table?’ She was speaking to me in that same musical voice she used at the airport, and it made me angry, and so I said, ‘Honey, don’t speak to me like that—don’t speak to me in that voice,’ and then she said, ‘Will you please come to the table?’ just as if she was saying, ‘Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?’ So then I said, ‘Honey, you make me feel as if I were waiting for a plane or something. I mean, your voice is very pretty, but you sound very impersonal.’ So then she said, in this very well-modulated voice, ‘I don’t suppose that can be helped,’ and she gave me one of those forced, sweet smiles like those airplane clerks give you when your flight is four hours late and you’ve missed the connecting flight and will have to spend a week in Copenhagen. So then we sat down to dinner, and all through dinner she talked to me in this even and musical voice. It was like having dinner with a recording. It was like having dinner with a tape. So then, after dinner, we watched some television, and she went to bed and then she called to me, ‘Will you please come to bed now? Will you please come to bed now?’ It was just like being told that passengers for San Francisco were boarding at Gate Seven. I went to bed, and thought things would be better in the morning.

  “Anyhow, the next night when I came home I shouted, ‘Hello, honey!’ or something like that, and I heard this very impersonal voice from the kitchen saying, ‘Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent? Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent?’ So then I went into the kitchen and gathered her up in my arms and gave her a big, messy kiss and said, ‘Come off it, baby, come off it.’ Then she began to cry, and I thought this might be a step in the right direction, but she cried and cried and said I was unfeeling and cruel and just imagined things about her voice that weren’t true in order to pick a quarrel. Well, we stayed together for another six months, but that was really the end of it. I really loved her. She was a marvelous girl until she began to give me this feeling that I was a dumb passenger, one of hundreds in some waiting room, being directed to the right gate and the right flight. We quarreled all the time then, and I finally left, and she got a consent decree in Reno. She still works at Newark, and naturally I prefer Kennedy, but sometimes I have to use Newark, and I can hear her telling Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the American Airlines ticket counter… But it isn’t only in Newark that I hear her voice, it’s everywhere. Orly, London, Moscow, New Delhi. I have to travel by air, and in every airport in the whole wide world I can hear her voice or a voice just like hers asking Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the ticket counter. Nairobi, Leningrad, Tokyo, it’s always the same even if I can’t understand the language, and it reminds me of how happy I was those five years and what a lovely girl she was, really lovely, and what mysterious things can happen in love. Shall we have another bottle of vodka? I’ll pay for it. They give me more rubles than I can spend for the trip, and I have to turn them in at the border.” PERCY

  REMINISCENCE, along with the cheese boards and ugly pottery sometimes given to brides, seems to have a manifest destiny with the sea. Reminiscences are written on such a table as this, corrected, published, read, and then they begin their inevitable journey toward the bookshelves in those houses and cottages one rents for the summer. In the last house we rented, we had beside our bed the Memories of a Grand Duchess, the Recollections of a Yankee Whaler, and a paperback copy of Goodbye to All That, but it is the same all over the world. The only book in my hotel room in Taormina was Recordi d’un Soldato Garibaldino, and in my room in Yalta I found [Title of a Russian Book in Cyrillic Script]. Unpopularity is surely some part of this drifting toward salt water, but since the sea is our most universal symbol for memory, might there not be some mysterious affinity between these published recollections and the thunder of waves? So I put down what follows with the happy conviction that these pages will find their way into some bookshelf with a good view of a stormy coast. I can even see the room—see the straw rug, the window glass clouded with salt, and feel the house shake to the ringing of a heavy sea.

  Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead. My father’s cousin, Anna Boynton, who had taught Greek at Radcliffe, starved herself to death during the Armenian famine. She and her sister Nanny had the copper skin, high cheekbones, and black hair of the Natick Indians. My father liked to recall the night he drank all the champagne on the New York-Boston train. He started drinking splits with some friend before d
inner, and when they finished the splits they emptied the quarts and the magnums and were working on a jeroboam when the train reached Boston. He felt that this guzzling was heroic. My Uncle Hamlet—a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team—called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter—droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him. This all took place in the environs of Athenian Boston, but the family seemed much closer to the hyperbole and rhetoric that stem from Wales, Dublin, and the various principalities of alcohol than to the sermons of Phillips Brooks.

  One of the most vivid members of my mother’s side of the family was an aunt who called herself Percy, and who smoked cigars. There was no sexual ambiguity involved. She was lovely, fair, and intensely feminine. We were never very close. My father may have disliked her, although I don’t recall this. My maternal grandparents had emigrated from England in the 1890s with their six children. My Grandfather Holinshed was described as a bounder—a word that has always evoked for me the image of a man leaping over a hedge just ahead of a charge of buckshot. I don’t know what mistakes he had made in England, but his transportation to the New World was financed by his father-in-law, Sir Percy Devere, and he was paid a small remittance so long as he did not return to England. He detested the United States and died a few years after his arrival here. On the day of his funeral, Grandmother announced to her children that there would be a family conference in the evening. They should be prepared to discuss their plans. When the conference was called, Grandmother asked the children in turn what they planned to make of their lives. Uncle Tom wanted to be a soldier. Uncle Harry wanted to be a sailor. Uncle Bill wanted to be a merchant. Aunt Emily wanted to marry. Mother wanted to be a nurse and heal the sick. Aunt Florence—who later called herself Percy—exclaimed, “I wish to be a great painter, like the Masters of the Italian Renaissance!” Grandmother then said, “Since at least one of you has a clear idea of her destiny, the rest of you will go to work and Florence will go to art school.” That is what they did, and so far as I know none of them ever resented this decision.

  How smooth it all seems and how different it must have been. The table where they gathered would have been lighted by whale oil or kerosene. They lived in a farmhouse in Dorchester. They would have had lentils or porridge or at best stew for dinner. They were very poor. If it was in the winter, they would be cold, and after the conference the wind would extinguish Grandmother’s candle—stately Grandmother—as she went down the back path to the malodorous outhouse. They couldn’t have bathed more than once a week, and I suppose they bathed out of pails. The succinctness of Percy’s exclamation seems to have obscured the facts of a destitute widow with six children. Someone must have washed all those dishes, and washed them in greasy water, drawn from a pump and heated over a fire.

  The threat of gentility in such recollections is Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation, and when Grandmother spoke French at the dinner table, as she often did, she merely meant to put her education to some practical use. It was, of course, a much simpler world. For example, Grandmother read in the paper one day that a drunken butcher, the father of four, had chopped up his wife with a meat cleaver, and she went directly to Boston by horse-car or hansom—whatever transportation was available. There was a crowd around the tenement where the murder had taken place, and two policemen guarded the door. Grandmother got past the policemen and found the butcher’s four terrified children in a bloody apartment. She got their clothes together, took the children home with her, and kept them for a month or longer, when other homes were found. Cousin Anna’s decision to starve and Percy’s wish to become a painter were made with the same directness. It was what Percy thought she could do best—what would make most sense of her life.

  She began to call herself Percy in art school, because she felt that there was some prejudice against women in the arts. In her last year in art school she did a six-by-fourteen-foot painting of Orpheus taming the beasts. This won her a gold medal and a trip to Europe, where she studied at the Beaux-Arts for a few months. When she returned, she. was given three portrait commissions, but she was much too skeptical to succeed at this. Her portraits were pictorial indictments, and all three of them were unacceptable. She was not an aggressive woman, but she was immoderate and critical.

  After her return from France she met a young doctor named Abbott Tracy at some yacht club on the North Shore. I don’t mean the Corinthian. I mean some briny huddle of driftwood nailed together by weekend sailors. Moths in the billiard felt. Salvaged furniture. Two earth closets labeled “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” and moorings for a dozen of those wide-waisted catboats that my father used to say sailed like real estate. Percy and Abbott Tracy met in some such place, and she fell in love. He had already begun a formidable and clinical sexual career, and seemed unacquainted in any way with sentiment, although I recall that he liked to watch children saying their prayers. Percy listened for his footsteps, she languished in his absence, his cigar cough sounded to her like music, and she filled a portfolio with pencil sketches of his face, his eyes, his hands, and, after their marriage, the rest of him.

  They bought an old house in West Roxbury. The ceilings were low, the rooms were dark, the windows were small, and the fireplaces smoked. Percy liked all of this, and shared with my mother a taste for drafty ruins that seemed odd in such high-minded women. She turned a spare bedroom into a studio and did another large canvas—Prometheus bringing fire to man. This was exhibited in Boston, but no one bought it. She then painted a nymph and centaur. This used to be in the attic, and the centaur looked exactly like Uncle Abbott. Uncle Abbott’s practice was not very profitable, and I guess he was lazy. I remember seeing him eating his breakfast in pajamas at one in the afternoon. They must have been poor, and I suppose Percy did the housework, bought the groceries, and hung out the wash. Late one night when I had gone to bed, I overheard my father shouting, “I cannot support that cigar-smoking sister of yours any longer.” Percy spent some time copying paintings at Fenway Court. This brought in a little money, but evidently not enough. One of her friends from art school urged her to try painting magazine covers. This went deeply against all of her aspirations and instincts, but it must have seemed to her that she had no choice, and she began to turn out deliberately sentimental pictures for magazines. She got to be quite famous at this.

  She was never pretentious, but she couldn’t forget that she had not explored to the best of her ability those gifts that she may have had, and her enthusiasm for painting was genuine. When she was able to employ a cook, she gave the cook painting lessons. I remember her saying, toward the end of her life, “Before I die, I must go back to the Boston Museum and see the Sargent watercolors.” When I was sixteen or seventeen, I took a walking tour in Germany with my brother and bought Percy some van Gogh reproductions in Munich. She was very excited by these. Painting, she felt, had some organic vitality—it was the exploration of continents of consciousness, and here was a new world. The deliberate puerility of most of her work had damaged her draftsmanship, and at one point she began to hire a model on Saturday mornings and sketch from life. Going there on some simple errand—the return of a book or a newspaper clipping—I stepped into her studio and found, sitting on the floor, a naked young woman. “Nellie Casey,” said Percy, “this is my nephew, Ralph Warren.” She went on sketching. The model smiled sweetly—it was nearly a social smile and seemed to partially temper her monumental nakedness. Her breasts were very beautiful, and the nipples, relaxed and faintly colored, were bigger than silver dollars. The atmosphere was not erotic or playful, and I soon left. I dreamed for years of Nellie Casey. Percy’s covers brought in enough money for her to buy a house on the Cape, a house in Maine, a large automobile, and a small painting by Whistler that used to hang in the livi
ng room beside a copy Percy had made of Titian’s Europa.

  Her first son, Lovell, was born in the third year of her marriage. When he was four or five years old, it was decided that he was a musical genius, and he did have unusual manual dexterity. He was great at unsnarling kite lines and fishing tackle. He was taken out of school, educated by tutors, and spent most of his time practicing the piano. I detested him for a number of reasons. He was extremely dirty-minded, and used oil on his hair. My brother and I wouldn’t have been more disconcerted if he had crowned himself with flowers. He not only used oil on his hair but when he came to visit us he left the hair-oil bottle in our medicine cabinet. He had his first recital in Steinway Hall when he was eight or nine, and he always played a Beethoven sonata when the family got together.

  Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband’s lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion. How could a man that she adored be faithless? She hired a detective agency, which tracked him down to an apartment house near the railroad station called the Orpheus. Percy went there and found him in bed with an unemployed telephone operator. He was smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. “Now, Percy,” he is supposed to have said, “why did you have to go and do this?” She then came to our house and stayed with us for a week or so. She was pregnant, and when her son Beaufort was born his brain or his nervous system was seriously damaged. Abbott always claimed that there was nothing wrong with his son, but when Beaufort was five or six years old he was sent off to some school or institution in Connecticut. He used to come home for the holidays, and had learned to sit through an adult meal, but that was about all. He was an arsonist, and he once exposed himself at an upstairs window while Lovell was playing the “Waldstein.” In spite of all this, Percy was never bitter or melancholy, and continued to worship Uncle Abbott.