by John Cheever
“Hmmm,” said Grandmother. Her face, usually quite bright, was troubled.
“I shall have it set and give it to my wife,” said the lord.
“But it’s my pearl,” Grandmother said. “This is my house. These are my oysters. The pearl is mine.”
“I hadn’t quite thought of it that way,” said the lord. He sighed and gave the pearl to Grandmother.
As soon as she had it in her hands she saw that it was Woolworth’s and, turning to me at the end of the table, she said, “Go to your room.” I went to the kitchen, had dinner and then went to my room. She never mentioned the pearl again but things between us were never the same. I was sent away to school in September.
XIII
Grandmother died in my last year at school and I had no place to go for Christmas. I had plenty of friends, as I recall, but I either didn’t receive any Christmas invitations or I didn’t accept any. I was left alone in the dormitory when school closed for the holidays. I was terribly lonely in the empty building and felt that my illegitimacy was a cruel injustice. Everyone else in school had at least one parent while I had none. It seemed that my father could at least buy me a beer on the Christmas holidays. That’s all I wanted from him. I knew that he was married and living in Boston and I flew to Boston that night. I found his name in one of the suburban telephone directories and drove out to Dedham, where he lived. I was just going to ask him to buy me a beer. That’s really all I had in mind. I rang the bell and when his wife opened the door I was surprised to see a very homely white-haired woman. Her face was sallow and her teeth were long but having so little or nothing at all to do with physical charm she seemed to have mustered another kind of charm. She seemed kindly and intelligent. Her mouth was large and thin-lipped but her smile was beautiful. I said that I was Paul Hammer and that I wanted to see Mr. Taylor. I think she knew who I was. She said he was in the city.
“He went in for a party on Wednesday,” she said, “and when he goes to a party it’s usually several days before he returns. He stays at the Ritz.”
There was nothing long-suffering in her tone. Maybe she was happy to have him out of the house. I thanked her and drove to the Ritz. He was registered but he didn’t answer the house phone and I took the elevator up to his floor. He didn’t answer the doorbell either, but the door was unlocked and I went in.
There had been a party all right. The living room was full of the usual empty bottles and dirty glasses without which you can’t, after all, have a party. He was in the bedroom. There were two unmade beds, both of which had seen some venereal mileage. He lay on one in a poleaxed, drunken sleep, naked. Around his neck he wore a chain of champagne corks—seventeen—which I guessed some friend had put there after he had stoned out. He was over fifty then but weight-lifting had paid off and if you couldn’t see very well you might think he was a much younger man. He was lithe, really lithe, but this unseasonable litheness seemed to be obscene. He looked, hurled onto his bed by liquor, like the faded figure of some Icarus or Ganymede that you might find painted on the wall of some old-fashioned, second-rate Italian restaurant, flyspecked and badly drawn. I don’t think he would have waked if I’d shouted in his ears, and anyhow he needed the sleep. I was that charitable. I was even more charitable. He was my father, the author with some collaboration of my heart, vitals, lights and mind, and how far could a man go with such a creator? I could kill him, I could abuse him and I could forgive him but I had to do something so I settled on an uneasy brand of forgiveness and went away. My next stop was Kitzbühel. If my father wouldn’t buy me a beer maybe I could get a cup of tea out of Mother.
We speak of travel—world travel—as if it were the most natural human condition. “Mr. X,” we read, “then traveled from Boston to Kitzbühel.” How far this is from the truth! I got an evening plane for London at Logan Airport. The plane was delayed and I drank five martinis at the airport bar and crossed the Atlantic in a drunken stupor. We got to London at daybreak, where I discovered that my bag had been lost. I wandered around the airport until three that afternoon when my bag was found and took a cab to the Dorchester. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get some sleep and then went out to a movie and got stoned at a pub. I had tickets for an early-morning flight to Frankfurt-am-Main but there was a thick fog over London that morning and when I got to the airport everything was grounded. It was announced at half-hour intervals that the fog was expected to lift. I ate my complimentary breakfast. Then I ate my complimentary lunch. At three o’clock the airport was declared closed for the day. I went back to the Dorchester but there were no rooms and after trying four other hotels I ended up in a rooming house in Parkman Square where I was kept awake most of the night by noises that I do not choose to describe. In the morning it was still foggy but it seemed to be lifting and I returned to the airport. I drank a cup of abominable coffee and a glass of orange-colored water. The effect of this on my digestion was galvanic and I quick-stepped to the men’s room. I had been there about fifteen minutes when I heard my flight announced. I pulled up my pants, ran the length of the airport and just caught the Frankfurt plane. My digestive troubles were not over and I spent the flight from London to Frankfurt in the toilet. Lighted signs in three languages commanded me to return to my seat but how could I? In Frankfurt, where I got a plane for Innsbruck, it was very cold. In Innsbruck I got the Transalpini to Kitzbühel, arriving at my destination at four in the afternoon, but I did not, in fact, seem to have arrived anywhere. I seemed merely to have scattered my guts and vitals a third of the way around the world.
Mother’s address was the Pension Bellevue. The façade of the wooden building was decked with horns and I wondered if the Tyrolese had failed to make the connection with cuckoldry or was it that kind of a pension? When I asked to see my mother they seemed astonished. She was a Fraulein. A maid went upstairs and brought Mother down. She cried with delight when she saw me and I took her in my arms. Her hair had begun to turn gray but she was not heavy. The color of her eyes remained a brilliant blue.
“Have you come for Christmas, Paul,” she asked. “Have you come to spend Christmas with your mother? I usually go to the Estoril long before this but there hasn’t been any snow this year and so I’m simply hanging on until the first flakes fall.”
They gave me a room next to hers and we went upstairs together. She made some tea on a spirit lamp and poured me a cup. Then the door flew open and a bony woman flew in, exclaiming: “You’ve taken our sugarbowl! You borrowed our sugarbowl yesterday at teatime and you neglected to return it.”
“But I did return your sugarbowl,” my mother said politely. “I put it on your bookshelf. You’ll find it there.” When the stranger had left Mother turned to me and asked: “How is your horrid country?”
“It’s not horrid, Mother,” I said, “and it’s your country.”
“It’s true that I travel on an American passport,” she said, “but that’s merely the sort of compromise one has to strike in dealing with a bureaucracy. It is, however, a horrid place. When I was in the Socialist Party with your father I said again and again that if American capitalism continued to exalt mercenary and dishonest men the economy would degenerate into the manufacture of drugs and ways of life that would make reflection—any sort of thoughtfulness or emotional depth—impossible. I was right.” She poked a finger at me. “I see American magazines in the café and the bulk of their text is advertising for tobacco, alcohol and absurd motor cars that promise—quite literally promise—to enable you to forget the squalor, spiritual poverty and monotony of selfishness. Never, in the history of civilization, has one seen a great nation singlemindedly bent on drugging itself. I went out to California last year …”
“I didn’t know you’d been home,” I said.
“Well I was,” she said. “I didn’t call you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I knew it wouldn’t,” she said harshly. “Well, to make a long story short, I went out to see some friends in Los Angeles and they
took me for a ride on the freeway and here I saw another example of forgetfulness, suicide, municipal corruption and the debauchery of natural resources. I won’t go back again because if I did do you know what I’d do?”
“No, Mother.”
“I would settle in some place like Bullet Park. I would buy a house. I would be very inconspicuous. I would play bridge. I would engage in charities. I would entertain in order to conceal my purpose.”
“What would that be?”
“I would single out as an example some young man, preferably an advertising executive, married with two or three children, a good example of a life lived without any genuine emotion or value.”
“What would you do to him?”
“I would crucify him on the door of Christ’s Church,” she said passionately. “Nothing less than a crucifixion will wake that world.”
“How would you crucify him,” I asked.
“Oh, I haven’t worked out the details,” she said. Suddenly she was a gentle, gray-haired old lady again. “I suppose I’d drug him or poison him at some cocktail party. I wouldn’t want him to suffer.”
I went into my room to unpack. The plaster wall was thin and I could hear my mother talking through the partition. At first I thought someone had joined her after I’d left but then I could tell by the level of her voice that she was talking to herself. I could hear her clearly. “My father was a common quarry worker, often unemployed. I had read somewhere that the trajectory of a person’s career could be plotted from their beginnings and given such humble beginnings I thought that if I accepted them I would end up as a waitress in a diner or at best a small-town librarian. I kept trying to tamper with my origins so that I would have more latitude for a career. Having been raised in a small town I was terrified of being confined to one …”
I went down the hall and opened her door. She had taken off her shoes and was lying on her bed, fully dressed, talking to the ceiling or the air.
“What in the world are you doing, Mother?”
“Oh, I’m analyzing myself,” she said cheerfully. “I thought I might benefit from psychoanalysis. I went to a doctor in the village. He charged a hundred schillings an hour. I simply couldn’t afford this and when I said so he suggested that I get rid of my car and cut down on my meals. Imagine. Then I decided to analyze myself. Now, three times a week, I lie down on my bed and talk to myself for an hour. I’m very frank. I don’t spare myself any unpleasantness. The therapy seems to be quite effective and, of course, it doesn’t cost me a cent. I still have three quarters of an hour to go and if you don’t mind leaving me alone …” I went out and closed the door but I stood in the hall long enough to hear her say: “When I sleep flat on my back my dreams are very linear, composed and seemly. I often dream, on my back, of a Palladian villa. I mean an English house built along the lines of Palladio. When I sleep in a prenatal position my dreams are orotund, unsavory and sometimes erotic. When I sleep on my abdomen …”
I went back to my room and packed, the only son of a male caryatid holding up the three top floors of the Mercedes Hotel and a crazy old woman. I left her a note saying that I had suddenly gotten restless. To appear and disappear did not seem to me a dirty trick. I had the feeling that she was so wrapped up in her own eccentricities that she would hardly notice my going. I got a cab to the station and began my travels again. I was back in London that night in time for dinner. That was the twenty-third of December. After dinner I took a walk. It was snowing. I passed a theater or movie house where an evangelist, whose name I can’t remember, was holding a meeting. I went in out of curiosity. The hall was about half full.
The evangelist was a plain man dressed plainly in gray—not ugly—but possessing one of those disconcerting faces that have no harmony. His nose was bulbous and red. His lips were delicate and thin. His hair and his ears seemed to have been slapped on as an afterthought. The house lights were on and I looked around at the congregation. There were plenty of rooming-house types—lonely old men and lonely old women whose devotions would be rooted in stupidity and boredom—but there were also clear faces, young faces, the faces of men and women putting up some creditable struggle for peace of mind. The ardor with which they bowed their heads in prayer and the sense of shared humanity moved me deeply. It seemed to me then that the cruel burdens of insularity, suspicion, loneliness, fear and worry had been lifted. Life was natural and we, together, were natural men and women. A man beside me seemed to plunge into the attitudes of prayer. At the end of the exhortation we were asked to come to the front of the theater, confess our sins and be forgiven. The congregation then, in small groups, went to the front of the theater and were blessed.
As they turned away, after the blessing, many of their faces were radiant, and what point would there be in my asking how long their exaltation would last? They must return, many of them, to empty rooms, the care of invalids, bankrupt marriages, contumely, ridicule and despair, but some promise had been made. I went down the aisle myself with one of the last groups. Oh Father I have sinned. I ate more than my share of the sandwiches at the picnic. I have performed every known form of carnal indecency. I left my new bicycle out in the rain. I do not love my parents. I have admired myself in a looking glass. Cleanse and forgive me most merciful Father.
Then, standing there with my head bowed, I felt completely cleansed and forgiven. Life was simple, natural, a privilege. My life had a purpose although it was not revealed to me until later. I walked happily back to the hotel.
XIV
In my sophomore year at Yale I petitioned the New Haven court to have my name changed from Paul Hammer to Robert Levy. I’m not quite sure why. Hammer, of course, was no name at all. Levy had for me a pure and simple sound and, belonging really to no community, I suppose I hoped to insinuate myself into the Jewish community. My lawyer spoke eloquently of the fact that I had been born out of wedlock and had been named for a humble and rudimentary tool that had been seen passing a window. The judge, whose name was Weinstock, refused my petition. The New Haven paper carried the story, including the origin of my name, and as a result I was dropped from the social register and lost at least a dozen friends. I have always been astonished to find that bastardy remains a threat to organized society.
I’ll skip school and college. When I was twenty-four and living in Cleveland I invested fifty thousand dollars of the money Grandmother left me in a publishing house run by a man I’d known in college. We were both inexperienced and the business went poorly. At the end of a year we mortgaged our firm to a larger publishing house who, six months later, foreclosed the mortgage and copped my investment. I don’t think there was any connection—I still had an adequate income—but at about this time I began to suffer from melancholy—a cafard—a form of despair that sometimes seemed to have a tangible approach. Once or twice, I think, I seemed to glimpse some of its physical attributes. It was covered with hair—it was the classical bête noire—but it was as a rule no more visible than a moving column of thin air. I decided then to move to New York and translate the poetry of Eugenio Montale. I took a furnished apartment, but I seemed to know almost no one in the city and this left me alone much of the time and much of the time with my cafard.
It overtook me on trains and planes. I would wake feeling healthy and full of plans, to be crushed by the cafard while I shaved or drank my first cup of coffee. It was most powerful and I was most vulnerable when the noise of traffic woke me at dawn. My best defense, my only defense, was to cover my head with a pillow and summon up those images that represented for me the excellence and beauty I had lost. The first of these was a mountain—it was obviously Kilimanjaro. The summit was a perfect, snow-covered cone, lighted by a passing glow. I saw the mountain a thousand times—I begged to see it—and as I grew more familiar with it I saw the fire of a primitive village at its base. The vision dated, I guess, from the bronze or the iron age. Next in frequency I saw a fortified medieval town. It could have been Mont-St-Michel or Orvieto or the grand lamasery
in Tibet but the image of the walled town, like the snow-covered mountain, seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm and love. I also saw less frequently and less successfully a river with grassy banks. I guessed these were the Elysian Fields although I found them difficult to arrive at and at one point it seemed to me that a railroad track or a thruway had destroyed the beauty of the place.
I had begun to drink heavily to lick the cafard and one morning—I had been in New York for about a month—I took a hooker of gin while I shaved. I then went back to bed again, covered my head with a pillow and tried to evoke the mountain, the fortified town or the green fields, but I saw instead a pale woman wearing a shirt with light-blue stripes. I seemed to feel for her deeply and clearly during the moment or two that I saw her but then she vanished.
I stayed in bed that day until eleven or later, when I went out to the corner drugstore and ordered some breakfast. The place had begun to fill up with the lunch-hour crowd and the noise and the smells nauseated me. I drank some coffee and orange juice and went back to my apartment and had another drink. I was drinking straight gin. This made me feel better and I had a third drink and went out once more to see if I couldn’t eat something. This time I went to a French restaurant where my alcoholic fastidiousness would not be offended. I ordered a martini, some pâté and a plate of scrambled eggs and was able to get this down. Then I returned to my apartment, undressed and got back into bed again, pulling the covers over my face. I hated the light of day, it seemed to be the essence of my cafard, as if darkness would lessen my frustrations, as if the night were a guise of forgetfulness. I stayed in bed, neither sleeping nor waking. When I dressed again and went out onto the street it was beginning to get dark. I went back to the French restaurant, where I had some snails and a beef filet, and then went to a movie. It was a spy movie and seemed so old-fashioned that it undermined my already feeble sense of time and reality. I left halfway through the movie and went back to bed again. It must have been about ten. I took a couple of sleeping pills and stayed in bed until two the next afternoon, when I dressed and went out to the restaurant and had another plate of scrambled eggs. I then returned to bed and stayed there until ten the next morning. What I wanted then was a long, long, long sleep and I had enough pills to accomplish this. I flushed the pills down the toilet and called one of my few friends and asked for the name of his doctor. I then called the doctor and asked him for the name of a psychiatrist. He recommended a man named Doheny.
