Bullet Park

by John Cheever

  The rain lets up. Nailles comes home. Swallows and blackbirds hunt in the early dark. The wind is out of the northeast and coming up the steps he can distinguish the sounds made by the different trees as the wind fills them: maple, birch, tulip and oak. What good is this knowledge for his son or himself? Someone has to observe the world. The steady twilight seems like a sustained note, perfect in pitch. Nellie tells him that the guru is upstairs but that he cannot be disturbed. Nailles drinks heavily and after dinner Nellie says she is going upstairs to lie down. She makes Nailles promise not to disturb the guru. He gives her a kiss and picks up a novel to bolster his self-control. “In the little town of Ostervogen in northern Denmark,” he reads, “the following events took place in 1869. One morning in January a young man could be seen walking down the main street. The polish and elegance of his boots and the cut of his clothing suggested that they had been bought in Copenhagen or Paris. He was bareheaded and wore on his left hand an enormous signet ring, engraved with the crest of the Von Hendreichs. It had snowed during the night and the roofs of the little village were white. Maidservants were sweeping the dry snow off the walks with brooms made of twigs. The young man—it was Count Eric von Hendreichs—stopped in front of the largest residence and consulted a heavy, golden pocket watch. A moment later the bells of St. Michael’s church rang eleven. As the last vibration of the bronze bells died on the cold air the young man ran lightly up the steps of the house and rang the bell. A maid wearing the apron and ribbons prescribed for servants at that time answered his ring, gave him a shy smile and dropped a deep curtsy. She was a pretty young woman but even the voluminousness of her costume could not conceal the fact that she was pregnant. He followed her down a dark hall to a large drawing room where an old lady sat by a samovar. The young count greeted his hostess affectionately in French and accepted a cup of tea. ‘I can only stay a moment,’ he said. ‘I’m taking the stage to Copenhagen and the evening packet to Ostend.’ ‘Quel dommage,’ said the old woman. At her side was an embroidery frame and below this a gilded basket heaped with hanks of colored yarn. She reached into the basket, extracted a small ivory-handled pistol and shot the young count through the heart …”

  Nailles slams this book down on a table and picks up another called Rainy Summer. He reads the first sentence: “It was a very rainy summer and the ashtrays on the tables around the swimming pool were always filled with rainwater and cigarette butts …” He throws this book across the room. The doorbell rings. Nailles opens it and sees his neighbor Mrs. Harvey. Why is her face wet, he wonders. Beyond her shoulder he can see stars in the sky. Can she be crying and why is she crying? It is his turn to cry. “Please come in,” Nailles says. “Please come in.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been here since I solicited for the mutual fund,” she says. She is crying. “I’m soliciting again.” Red Cross, thinks Nailles, Muscular Dystrophy, Heart Trouble? “What is your cause tonight,” Nailles asks.

  “The Harvey family,” she says. “I’m soliciting for Dads.” She laughs; she sobs.

  “Please come in and sit down,” says Nailles. “Let me get you a drink.”

  “Well it’s a long story,” she says, “but I guess I’d better tell it if I expect your help. I guess you know that Charlie’s a junior in Amherst. He went down to Boston and took part in a demonstration. He was arrested and spent a couple of nights in jail but they let him off with a fine and suspended sentence. Then two weeks ago the draft board changed his classification from student deferment to 1A. He was ordered to report for induction the day before yesterday. I mentioned the fact that he was going to be inducted when I was at the beauty parlor and the woman beside me—I don’t really know her—told me there was a psychiatrist in the village who makes a specialty in drilling young men in how to disqualify themselves for the army. He charges five hundred dollars. I thought of speaking to Dads about this but it seemed dishonest. Charlie doesn’t want to be a soldier but he doesn’t want to be a liar either. I mean it seems like killing yourself in order to avoid getting killed. Anyhow I didn’t mention this. He was supposed to report for induction on Thursday and on Wednesday Dads went to the savings bank and took out three thousand. It was all we had. He gave Charlie five hundred in cash and the rest in a certified check. We never once discussed his plans. After supper he went upstairs and packed a suitcase and came down and Dads drove him to the station. They didn’t say anything, they didn’t even say goodbye. Dads said he didn’t dare say goodbye because he would start crying. I suppose he’s in Canada or Sweden but we haven’t heard from him. Well a day later a man came to Dads’s office—a man from the government—and said that he knew Dads had taken three thousand out of the bank in order to enable his son to emigrate. Dads and I thought our bank accounts were private but evidently not. He said that he wanted to see Dads at home so Dads took an early train today and the man drove over—the government man—from the county seat where his office is. He first accused Dads of assisting a draft evader and then he said he was going to make it short and sweet and he took a cigarette out of his pocket and put it on the table and said that Dads was under arrest for the possession of dangerous drugs. The cigarette was a marijuana but it was the first one Dads had ever seen. The man explained that he was after draft evaders because he had spent a year and a half in a POW camp in Germany, eating rats and mice. He wanted the younger generation to learn what it was all about. So then Dads called the lawyer here—Harry Marchand—and they all drove over to the county seat and Dads was arrested for the possession of drugs and put into jail. They set the bail at two thousand and because this is the end of the month we simply don’t have it so I’m going from house to house trying to raise it.”

  “I think I have two hundred upstairs,” says Nailles, “if that would help.”

  “Oh it would help.”

  In the dark bedroom Nellie asks who is downstairs. “It’s Grace Harvey,” Nailles says. “I’ll tell you about it later.” When he opens the wall safe and takes out the money she asks: “Is the swami finished? Are you paying him?”

  “No,” Nailles says. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Would you like me to write a receipt,” Grace asks.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I’ve done the mutual fund for five years,” she says, “but I never thought I’d be going from door to door collecting bail for Dads.”

  By now Tony’s room smells strongly of sandalwood. “Ever since my experience in the station,” says the swami, “I have believed in prayer. As I am not a member of any organized religion you might well ask to whom it is that I pray and I would not be able to answer you. I believe in prayer as a force and not as a conversation with God and when my prayers are answered, as they sometimes are, I honestly do not know where to direct my expressions of gratitude. I have cured several cases of arthritis but my methods don’t always work. I pray they will work for you.

  “Your mother has informed me that you were an athlete and played football. I would like you to think of me as a spiritual cheerleader. Cheers don’t make touchdowns, do they, but they sometimes help. I have all kinds of cheers. I have love cheers and compassionate cheers and hopeful cheers and then I have the cheers of place. In the place cheers I just think of someplace where I would like to be and then I keep repeating to myself a description of the place. For instance, in a place cheer I’ll say that I’m in a house by the sea. Then I pick the time of day and the weather I like. I’ll say that I’m in a house by the sea at four in the afternoon and it’s raining. Then I’ll say that I’m sitting in a kind of chair, a ladderback chair, and I have a book in my lap. Then I’ll say that I have a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return. I say this all over and over again. I say that I’m in a house by the sea at four in the afternoon and it’s raining and I’m sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap and I’m waiting for a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return. There are all kinds of place cheers. If you have a special city you lik
e—I like Baltimore—then you pick the time of day and the weather and the circumstances and you repeat all of this. Now will you do what I say?”

  “Yes,” says Tony, “I’ll do anything.”

  “I want you to repeat after me whatever I say.”

  “Sure,” says Tony.

  “I am in a house by the sea.”

  “I am in a house by the sea.”

  “It is four o’clock and raining.”

  “It is four o’clock and raining.”

  “I am sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap.”

  “I am sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap.”

  “I have a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return.”

  “I have a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return.”

  “I am sitting under an apple tree in clean clothes. I am content.”

  “I am sitting under an apple tree in clean clothes. I am content.”

  “That was very good,” the swami says. “Now let’s try the love cheer. Repeat Love a hundred times. You don’t really have to count. Just say Love, Love, Love until you get tired of saying it. We’ll do it together.”

  “Love, Love, Love, Love, Love …”

  “That was fine,” the swami says. “That was very good. I could tell that you meant it. Let’s see if you can sit up.”

  “It’s crazy,” Tony says, “I know it’s crazy but I do feel much better. I’d like to try another prayer.”

  When Nailles hears them chanting HOPE, HOPE, HOPE, he has another whiskey. Was he a voodoo priest? Would he put a spell over Tony? Since Nailles claimed not to believe in magic why should magic have the power to frighten him? Out of the window he can see his lawns in the starlight, HOPE, HOPE, HOPE, HOPE. Their voices sound like drums. His lawns and the incantations came from different kingdoms. Nothing made any sense.

  “Now try and sit up,” the swami tells Tony. “Sit up and see if you can put your feet on the floor?”

  Tony stands. He has lost all weight and muscle. His ribcage shows. His buttocks are wasted and there are red sores on his back.

  “Take a few steps,” the swami says. “Not many. Just two or three.”

  Tony does. Then he begins to laugh. “Oh I feel like myself,” he says. “I feel like myself again. I’m weak of course but I’m not sad any more. That terrible feeling has gone.”

  “Well why don’t you put on some clothes and we’ll go down and see your parents,” the swami says.

  Tony dresses and they go down together. “I’m all better, Daddy,” Tony says. “I’m still weak but that terrible sadness has gone. I don’t feel sad any more and the house doesn’t seem to be made of cards. I feel as though I’d been dead and now I’m alive.”

  Nellie comes down the stairs in a wrapper and stands in the hall. She is crying.

  “How can we thank you,” Nailles asks. “Can we get you a drink?”

  “Oh no thank you,” says the swami in his thin singsong voice. “I have something within me that is much more stimulating than alcohol.”

  “You must let me pay you.”

  “Oh no thank you,” the swami says. “You see whatever I have is a gift and I must give it away. You can however drive me home. It is sometimes most difficult to get a taxicab.”

  So that was it. Tony went back to school ten days later and everything was as wonderful as it had been, although Nailles, each Monday morning, continued to meet his pusher in the supermarket parking lot, the public toilet, the laundromat, and a variety of cemeteries.

  PART II

  XI

  My first knowledge of Nailles (Hammer wrote) was in a dentist’s anteroom in Ashburnham. There was a photograph and a brief article about his promotion to head of the Mouthwash Division at Saffron. The article mentioned his years in Rome and that he was a member of the Bullet Park Volunteer Fire Department and the Gorey Brook Country Club. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now why I singled him out for my attentions. There was the coincidence of our names and I liked his looks. It wasn’t until some months later that I made my decision. I was sitting on a beach. I had been swimming and was reading a book.

  I was alone and it was at a time when the regard for domesticity had gotten so intense that the natural condition of singleness had become a sore point of suspicion. One appeared on the beach perforce with one’s wife, one’s children, sometimes one’s parents or a brace of house guests. One seldom saw a lonely man. It was a beautiful beach and I remember it clearly. We traditionally associate nakedness with judgments and eternity and so on those beaches where we are mostly naked the scene seems apocalyptic. Standing at the surf line we seem, quite innocently, to have strayed into a timeless moral vortex. The judgment that afternoon seemed to have been evangelical and the only sound of sadness was the wailing of some child who was afraid of the waves. Presently a faggot came along the strand and stopped about ten feet from where I lay. This was a direct consequence of my being alone. His walk was not incriminating but it was definitely smug. His body was comely and tanned and his trunks were exceedingly scant. He gave me an amorous and slightly cross-eyed gaze and then hooked his thumbs into his trunks and lowered them to show an inch or two of backside. At the same time another man appeared on the scene. He was a good deal older than the faggot—forty perhaps—and had the bright sunburn of someone whose days or hours on the beach were numbered. He was in no way muscular or comely—a conscientious desk worker with a natural stoop and a backside broadened by years of honest toil. With him were his wife and two children and he was trying to fly a kite. He was standing leeward on the dunes, the kite wouldn’t rise and the line was snarled. The faggot threw me another sidelong glance, gazed out to sea and gave another absentminded pull at his trunks. I got to my feet and joined the man with the kite. I explained that if he stood on the crown of the beach the kite would likely fly and I helped him to unsnarl the line. At this the faggot sighed, hitched up his trunks and wandered off as I had intended that he should, but the filament of kite line in my fingers, both tough and fine, that had quite succinctly declared my intentions to the faggot seemed for a moment to possess some extraordinary moral force as if the world I had declared to live in was bound together by just such a length of string—cheap, durable and colorless. When the line was cleared I carried the kite to the crown of the beach and, holding it up, watched the wind lift it straight into the blue sky. The children were delighted. The stranger and his wife thanked me for my assistance. I returned to my book. The faggot had vanished but I longed then for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of kite string.

  I was born out of wedlock—the son of Franklin Pierce Taylor and Gretchen Shurz Oxencroft, his one-time secretary. I have not met my mother for several years but I can see her now—her gray hair flying and her fierce blue eyes set plainly in her face like the waterholes in a prairie. She was born in an Indiana quarry town, the fourth and by far the plainest of four daughters. Neither of her parents had more than a high-school education. The hardships and boredom of the provincial Middle West forced them into an uncompromising and nearly liturgical regard for the escape routes of learning. They kept a volume of the complete works of Shakespeare on their parlor table like a sort of mace. Her father was a Yorkshireman with thick light-brown hair and large features. He was slender and wiry and was discovered, in his forties, to have tuberculosis. He began as a quarry worker, was promoted to quarry foreman and then, during a drop in the limestone market, was unemployed. In the house where she was raised there was a gilt mirror, a horsehair sofa and some china and silver that her mother had brought from Philadelphia. None of this was claimed to prove lost grandeur or even lost comfort, but Philadelphia! Philadelphia!—how like a city of light it must have seemed in the limestone flats. Gretchen detested her name and claimed at one time or another to be named Grace, Gladys, Gwendolyn, Gertrude, Gabriella, Giselle and Gloria. In her adolescence a publi
c library was opened in the village where she lived and through some accident or misdirection she absorbed the complete works of John Galsworthy. This left her with a slight English accent and an immutable clash between the world of her reveries and the limestone country. Going home from the library one winter afternoon on a trolley car she saw her father standing under a street lamp with his lunch pail. The driver did not stop for him and Gretchen turned to a woman beside her and exclaimed: “Did you see that poor creature! He signaled for the tram to stop but the driver quite overlooked him.” These were the accents of Galsworthy in which she had been immersed all afternoon, and how could she fit her father into this landscape? He would have failed as a servant or gardener. He might have passed as a groom although the only horses he knew were the wheel horses at the quarry. She knew what a decent, courageous and cleanly man he was and it was the intolerable sense of his aloneness that had forced her, in a contemptible way, to disclaim him. Gretchen—or Gwendolyn as she then called herself—graduated from high school with honors and was given a scholarship at the university in Bloomington. A week or so after her graduation from the university she left the limestone country to make her fortune in New York. Her parents came down to the station to see her off. Her father was wasted. Her mother’s coat was threadbare. As they waved goodbye another traveler asked if they were her parents. It was still in her to explain in the accents of Galsworthy that they were merely some poor people she had visited but instead she exclaimed: “Oh yes, yes, they are my mother and father.”