by John Cheever
ALSO BY JOHN CHEEVER
NOVELS
Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982)
Falconer (1977)
The Wapshot Scandal (1964)
The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
STORIES
The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
The World of Apples (1973)
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964)
Some People, Places, and Things That
Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961)
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959)
The Enormous Radio (1953)
The Way Some People Live (1942)
Table of Contents
Other Books by this Author
Dedication
Part I
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Part II
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Part III
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
About the Author
Copyright
To
Robert and Susan Cowley
PART I
I
Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country—unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.
A train arrives, a passenger departs and is met by a real-estate agent named Hazzard, for who else will know the exact age, usefulness, value and well-being of the houses in the town. “Welcome to Bullet Park. We hope you’ll like it well enough to join us here.” Mr. Hazzard does not happen to live in Bullet Park. His name, like that of every other licensed real-estate dealer, is nailed to the trees in vacant lots, but he transacts his business in a small office in the next village. The stranger has left his wife in the Hotel Plaza, watching television. The search for shelter seems to him to go on at a nearly primordial level. Prices are high these days and nothing is exactly what one wants. The scuffed paint and discarded portables of earlier owners seem as alive and demanding as the clothing and papers one sorts out after a death in the family. The house or the flat that he looks for, he knows, will have had to have appeared at least twice in his dreams. When it is all over, when the gardens are planted and the furniture is settled, the rigors of the journey will have been concealed; but on this evening the blood-memory of travel and migrations courses through his veins. The people of Bullet Park intend not so much to have arrived there as to have been planted and grown there, but this of course was untrue. Disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears and desperation had characterized most of their arrivals and departures.
“This is our commercial center,” says Hazzard. “We have all sorts of plans for its improvement. There’s Powder Hill,” says Hazzard, nodding towards a lighted hill on their right. “There’s a property there I’d like to show you. The asking price is fifty-seven thousand. Five bedrooms, three baths …” The lights of Powder Hill twinkled, its chimneys smoked and a pink plush toilet-seat cover flew from a clothesline. Seen at an improbable distance by some zealous and vengeful adolescent, ranging over the golf links, the piece of plush would seem to be the imprimatur, the guerdon, the accolade and banner of Powder Hill behind which marched, in tight English shoes, the legions of wife-swapping, Jew-baiting, booze-fighting spiritual bankrupts. Oh damn them all, thought the adolescent. Damn the bright lights by which no one reads, damn the continuous music which no one hears, damn the grand pianos that no one can play, damn the white houses mortgaged up to their rain gutters, damn them for plundering the ocean for fish to feed the mink whose skins they wear and damn their shelves on which there rests a single book—a copy of the telephone directory, bound in pink brocade. Damn their hypocrisy, damn their cant, damn their credit cards, damn their discounting the wilderness of the human spirit, damn their immaculateness, damn their lechery and damn them above all for having leached from life that strength, malodorousness, color and zeal that give it meaning. Howl, howl, howl.
But the adolescent, as adolescents always are, would be mistaken. Take the Wickwires, for instance, whose white house (estimated resale price: $65,000) Hazzard and the traveler were passing. If the social customs of Powder Hill were to be attacked by the adolescent the Wickwires would make a splendid target. They were charming, they were brilliant, they were incandescent, and their engagement calendar was booked solid from Labor Day to the Fourth of July. They were quite literally social workers—celebrants—using their charm and their brilliance to make things go at a social level. They were people who understood that cocktails and dinner in their time and place were as important to the welfare of the community as the village caucus, the school board and the municipal services. For a community that had so few altars—four to be exact—and none of them sacrificial, they seemed, as serious and dedicated celebrants, to have improvised a sacrificial altar on which they had literally given up some flesh and blood. They were always falling downstairs, bumping into sharp-edged furniture and driving their cars into ditches. When they arrived at a party they would be impeccably dressed but her right arm would be in a sling. He would support a game leg with a gold-headed cane and wear dark glasses. She had sprained her arm in a fall. He had broken his leg in the winter and the dark glasses concealed a mouse that had the thrilling reds and purples of a late winter moon, cloud-buried and observed by some yearning and bewildered youth. Their brilliance was not diminished by their injuries. In fact they almost always appeared with some limb in a sling, some extremity bandaged, some show of court plaster.
Their brilliance, their ardor as celebrants, is serious. After any common weekend when they have lunched and dined out for three days running the seriousness of their role can best be estimated when the light of Monday morning shines on them as they sleep. When the alarm rings he mistakes it for the telephone. Their children are away at school and he concludes that one of them is sick or in trouble. When he understands that it is the alarm and not the telephone he puts his feet onto the floor. He groans. He swears. He stands. He feels himself to be a hollow man but one who has only recently been eviscerated and who can recall what it felt like to have a skinful of lively lights and vitals. She whimpers in pain and covers her face with a pillow. Feeling himself to be a painful cavity he goes down the hall to the bathroom. Looking at himself in the mirror he gives a loud cry of terror and revulsion. His eyes are red, his face is scored with lines, his light hair seems clumsily dyed. He possesses for a moment the curious power of being able to frighten himself. He soaks his face with water and shaves his beard. This exhausts his
energies and he comes back down the hall to the bedroom, says that he will take a later train, returns to bed and pulls the blankets over his face to shut out the morning. She whimpers and cries. She then leaves the bed, her nightgown hooked up over her comely backside. She goes to the bathroom but she shuts her eyes as she passes the mirror. Back in bed she covers her face with a pillow and they both lie there, groaning loudly. He then joins her on her side of the bed and they engage in a back-breaking labor of love that occupies them for twenty minutes and leaves them both with a grueling headache. He has already missed the 8:11, the 8:22 and the 8:30. “Coffee,” he mutters, and gets out of bed once more. He goes downstairs to the kitchen. Stepping into the kitchen he lets out another cry of pain when he sees the empties on the shelf by the sink.
They are ranged there like the gods in some pantheon of remorse. Their intent seems to be to force him to his knees and to wring from him some prayer. “Empties, oh empties, most merciful empties have mercy upon me for the sake of Jack Daniels and Seagram Distillers.” Their immutable emptiness gives them a look that is cruel and censorious. Their labels—scotch, gin and bourbon—have the ferocity of Chinese demons, but he definitely has the feeling that if he tried to placate them with a genuflection they would be merciless. He drops them into a wastebasket, but this does not dispose of their force. He puts some water on to boil and feeling for the wall like a blind man makes his way back to the bedroom where he can hear his wife’s cries of pain. “Oh I wish I were dead,” she cries, “I wish I were dead.” “There, there, dear,” he says thickly. “There, there.” He sets out a clean suit, a shirt, a tie and some shoes and then gets back into bed again and pulls the blankets over his face. It is now close to nine and the garden is filled with light. They hear the schoolbus at the corner, sounding its horn for the Marsden boy. The week has begun its splendid procession of days. The kettle begins to whistle.
He gets out of bed for the third time, returns to the kitchen and makes some coffee. He brings a cup for them both. She gets out of bed, washes her face without examining it and then returns to bed. He puts on some underwear and then returns to bed himself. For the next hour they are up and down, in and out, struggling to rejoin the stream of things, and finally he dresses and racked by vertigo, melancholy, nausea and fitful erections he boards his Gethsemane—the Monday-morning 10:48.
There was nothing hypocritical about the Wickwires’ Monday mornings, and so much for the adolescent.
The stranger might observe that the place seems very quiet; they seem to have come inland from the sounds of wilderness—gulls, trains, cries of pain and love, creaking things, hammerings, gunfire—not even a child practices the piano in this precinct of disinfected acoustics. They pass the Howestons (7 bedrooms, 5 baths, $65,000) and the Welchers (3 bedrooms, 1½ baths, $31,000). The wind draws through the beam of their headlight some yellow elm leaves, a credit card, potato chips, bills, checks and ashes. Are there songs for this place, the stranger might wonder; and there are. Songs sung to children and by children, songs for cooking, songs for undressing, water songs, ecclesiastical doggerel (We throw our crowns at Your feet), madrigals, folk songs, and a little native music. Mr. Elmsford (6 bedrooms, 3 baths, $53,000) dusts off his tarnished psalter which is something he never mastered and sings: “Hotchkiss, Yale, an indifferent marriage, three children and twenty-three years with the Universal Tuffa Corporation. Oh, why am I so disappointed,” he sings, “why does everything seem to have passed me by.” There is a rush for the door before he starts his second verse but he goes on singing. “Why does everything taste of ashes, why is there no brilliance or promise in my affairs.” The waiters empty the ashtrays, the bartender locks an iron screen over the bottles and they finally turn off the lights, but he goes on singing, “I tried, I tried, I did the best I knew how to do so why should I feel so sad and blue?” “This place is shut, mister,” they tell him, “and you’re the guy who shut it.” Then there are the affirmative singers: “Bullet Park is growing, growing, Bullet Park is here to stay, Bullet Park shows great improvement, every day in every way …”
Vital statistics? They were of no importance. The divorce rate was way down, the suicide rate was a secret; traffic casualties averaged twenty-two a year because of a winding highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil. The winters were too inclement for citrus fruit but much too clement for the native white birch.
Hazzard drew his car up in front of a white house with lighted windows. “This is the property I had in mind for you,” he said. “I hope she won’t be in. She’s not much of a saleswoman. She said she was going out.” He rang the bell but Mrs. Heathcup opened the door. It appeared that she was preparing to go out but had not quite made it. She was a stocky woman with skewered silver-gilt hair, wearing a bathrobe. On the tip of one of her silk slippers there was a cloth rose; on the other there was none. “Well you’re welcome to look,” she said in a hoarse, carrying voice. “I hope you’ll like it well enough to buy it. I’m getting a little tired of having people track mud through the place and then decide on something else. It’s a lovely house and everything works—you’ll have to take my word for that—but I’ve known people around here to sell houses with dangerous wiring, backed-up septic tanks, obsolete plumbing and leaky roofs. There’s nothing like that here. Before my husband passed away he saw that everything was in apple-pie order and the only reason I’m selling is because there’s nothing here for me, now that he’s gone. Nothing at all. There’s nothing in a place like this for any single woman. Speaking of tribes, it’s like a regular tribe. Widows, divorcées, single men, the tribal elders give them all the gate. Fifty-seven is my price. That’s not my asking price, it’s my final price. We put twenty thousand into the place and my husband painted it every single year before he passed away. In January he’d paint the kitchen. Saturdays and Sundays and nights, that is. Then he’d paint the hallway and the living room and the dining room and the bedrooms and then next January he’d start all over again in the kitchen. He was painting the dining room the day he passed away. I was upstairs. When I say that he passed away I don’t want you to think that he died in his sleep. While he was painting I heard him talking to himself. ‘I can’t stand it any longer,’ he said. I still don’t know what he meant. Then he went out into the garden and shot himself. That was when I found out what kind of neighbors I had. You can look all over the world but you won’t find neighbors as kind and thoughtful as the people in Bullet Park. As soon as they heard about my husband passing away they came over here to comfort me. There must have been ten or twelve of them and we all had something to drink and they were so comforting that I almost forgot what had happened. I mean it didn’t seem as though anything had happened. Well here’s the living room. Eighteen by thirty-two. We’ve had fifty guests here for cocktails but it never seems crowded. I’ll sell you the rug for half of what I gave for it. All wool. If your wife wants the curtains I’m sure we can work something out. Do you have a daughter? This hallway would be a beautiful place for a wedding. I mean when the bride throws down her bouquet. Now the dining room …”
The dinner table was set for twelve with soup plates, wine glasses, candlesticks and wax flowers. “I always keep my table set,” said Mrs. Heathcup. “I haven’t entertained for months but Mr. Heathcup hated to see an empty table and so I always keep it set, sort of in memory. An empty table depressed him. I change the setting once or twice a week. There are four churches in the village. I suppose you know about the Gorey Brook Country Club. It has a good eighteen-hole course designed by Pete Ellison, four en tout cas courts and a pool. I hope you’re not Jewish. They’re very strict about that. I don’t have a pool myself and frankly it’s something of a limitation. When people start talking about pool chemicals and so forth you’ll find yourself left out of the conversation. I’ve had an estimate made and you can have one put in the back garden for eight thousand. Maintenance comes to around twenty-five a week and they charge a hundred to open and clos
e it. The neighbors, as I’ve said, are wonderful people although they take some knowing. You might think Harry Plutarch, who lives across the street, a little odd unless you knew the whole story. His wife ran off with Howie Jones. What she did was to have a moving van come to the house one morning and take everything out of the place except a chair, a single bed and a parrot cage. When he came home from work he found an empty house and he’s been living with a chair, a bed and a parrot ever since. Here’s a copy of the evening paper. It might give you some idea of what the place is like …”
As Mrs. Heathcup flushed toilets, opened and shut doors, the stranger, whose name was Hammer, felt a lack of interest in her house increase until it seemed like a kind of melancholy, but the tragic and brightly lighted place was commodious and efficient and one lived in such places. There was the ghost of poor Heathcup, but every house has a ghost. “I think it’s what we want,” he said. “I’ll bring Mrs. Hammer out tomorrow and let her decide.”
Hazzard drove him back to the railroad station then and left him there. Suburban waiting rooms are not maintained and the place had been sacked. Broken windows let in the night wind. The clock face was smashed. The hands of the clock were gone. The architect, so many years ago, had designed the building with some sense of the erotic and romantic essence of travel, but all his inventions had been stripped or defaced and Hammer found himself in a warlike ruin. He opened the paper and read: “The Lithgow Club had its annual dinner on Thursday evening at Harvey’s restaurant. The program began with a parade of sweethearts—wives of the members—which was followed by a demonstration of the hula given by Mrs. Leonard A. Atkinson who was accompanied by her husband on the ukelele …
“Seventeen debutantes were presented to society at the Gorey Brook Country Club …
“Mr. Lewis Harwich was burned to death last night when a can of charcoal igniter exploded and set fire to his clothing during a barbecue party in the garden of his home at 23 Redburn Circle …
