by John Cheever
He got his rifle together and loaded the weapon. Then he went into the living room and turned off the TV. “You’re all going to see this,” he said. “It’s about time somebody around here realized how serious life is. We can’t go on welfare because I got this business but we got to make sacrifices and Buster is going to be the first sacrifice we make.”
Both of the children began to cry, “Oh no, no, Daddy, no, no.” In years to come, both of his daughters, lying naked in the arms of strangers, would say with as much intimacy as a declaration of love: “Did I ever tell you about the night Daddy shot the dog?” But now they were children, bewildered by the adult world and by a scene that would bewilder anyone in its grotesqueness. We know very little about the canine intelligence and nothing at all about the canine sense of eternity, but Buster seemed to understand what was expected of him and to welcome the chance to play a useful role in the life of the family even if it cost him his own life. The children were screaming. Maria’s sobbing was profound and life appeared to her a chaos with no guiding lights of any sort. Sammy led the old dog out into the backyard and asked him to sit down a little to the right of the charcoal brazier. He then backed away a few yards and shot him through the heart.
As soon as she saw this, Maria went to the telephone and called Sam’s Uncle Luigi and said she had to see him. Sam came from one of those south of Naples families whose bonds had been strengthened by their emigration to a new world. Luigi ran the family restaurant out on the old post-road spur that fed into the four-digit interstate. She didn’t ask to see Luigi, she simply told him that she was on her way.
Luigi’s was one of those Italian restaurants that remind us all of how truly new is our settlement on this continent and how many of us here are still strangers. The rudiments of southern Italy—its archways and masonry—were here, but like some plant that has been transported thoughtlessly to alien soil the archways seemed to have lost some of their ancient usefulness and beauty and taken on new attributes. The place had passed from one branch of the family to another and had changed its name and its specialties again and again. It had been Emilio’s and Giovanni’s; it had had topless dancers and black singers and at one time it had even advertised Chinese cooking. When Maria came into the place that night a stranger in a dirty tuxedo asked her what she wanted and when she said that she wanted to see Luigi he said Luigi was unavailable. She pushed past him and opened a door beyond the bar, where she found Luigi watching a news show on television.
“Oh Lou, Lou,” she said, and she was crying. “I know I’m not Italian and none of you think I can cook and most of the family treat me like a stranger but now you’ve got to try and help. Like about twenty minutes ago he took the dog out in the backyard and shot him where everybody could see. It’s just that we don’t have any money. We don’t need very much. We don’t need much at all. He doesn’t have nobody but the family. He won’t even join the volunteer fire department. I’m too old to work in fast-food places and I can’t sew fast enough for that sweatshop in Lansville. You’ve got to help us.”
“Sam’s not sick?”
“No, he’s not sick, he’s not even sick in the head, he’s just worried sick that’s all.”
“You live near the pond she’s a called Beasley’s?” Luigi asked.
“Yes. We live on Hitching Post Lane. It’s about half a mile away.”
“You tell him he comes here tomorrow afternoon.”
The chain of energy in the Salazzo organization was exactingly familial and traditional. Their home in southern Italy had been along the sea before the Mediterranean had been bankrupted but they had none of the attributes of a maritime people with the exception of pirates. Nor were they like a mountain people. Perhaps all one could say was that they were a people who had been very poor. The exalted members of the family asked the governor to their weddings and two of them had had dinner in the White House. Sam knew this rank of the Salazzos mostly from what he read in the papers. He was one of a large number of barbers, gas pumpers and masons who made up the Salazzo proletariat. All of this was true until the night he shot the dog. The next night a large black car stopped by the house and a young man—not a member of the family—invited Sam to be vice-chairman of the governor’s committee for the impartial uses of Beasley’s Pond. He would be paid a salary three times what he made on a good day in the barbershop. He was to avoid any sort of show—he was not, for example, to buy a new car—but the organization would help him to profitably invest his savings. His only duties were to collect cash payment for the dumping of fill in Beasley’s Pond.
Three days later Sam put a FOR RENT sign in the barbershop window and at seven one morning went out to Beasley’s Pond where a five-axle, eighteen-wheel dump truck was waiting. The rate was eighty dollars a load and on his first day Sam took in close to six thousand dollars. He kept a ledger to record the dumping and had been given a leather bag for the cash. He knew enough to be scrupulously honest, and while the reputation of southern Italians as murderers was highly exaggerated, he had no disposition to steal. Each night at seven with some punctuality, two men in a large black car stopped at his house to collect the cash.
The collectors were not particularly sinister. The older of them was one of those small, old Italians who always wear their hats tipped forward over their brows as if they were, even in the rain, enduring the glare of an equinoctial sun. These same old men walk with their knees quite high in the air as if they were forever climbing those hills on the summits of which so much of Italy stands. The younger man had a mustache and smiled a great deal. They both refused wine and coffee—they refused to sit down—and on Fridays they paid Sam his salary. It was a great deal more money than he had ever had before and he parceled this out to Maria although he was not ungenerous.
The only other witness to the assassination of Buster had been Betsy Logan, who lived in the house next to the Salazzos. She was a young woman with two small children whose husband worked in the post office. The Salazzos and the Logans were not friendly neighbors, perhaps because the Salazzos’ daughters were too old to play with Betsy Logan’s sons. The only closeness had been with Buster, who came over to the Logans for table scraps; and when Betsy saw Sam murder the old dog she felt nothing for her neighbor but hatred and contempt. She noticed the FOR RENT sign in the barbershop window and saw from her kitchen window the strangers who came to the house each night at dusk. From the rubbish that was dumped into the pond Sam had salvaged a broken overstuffed chair and he sat in this while he collected his fees. Betsy had seen Sam reposing in this as she drove out toward Buy Brite on the interstate. He seemed to be supervising the death of Beasley’s Pond, although Betsy would always think of him as the murderer of an old and friendly dog.
4
IN the next month or so Sears became familiar with a great many parish houses and church basements as well as with the vicinity of the New School for Social Research, where she studied accounting on Friday nights. He was constitutionally a traditional specimen with a traditional and at times benighted concept of a woman’s role in the world, but her unchallengeable good looks seemed, so far as he was concerned, to secure her place in the stream of things. A good-looking woman studying arithmetic seemed to him something of a lark, and the people in her class in accounting presented an earnest, friendly and readily acceptable appearance. However, the other gatherings where she sometimes spent three nights a week continued to disturb him with their violent lack of uniformity. Night after night they looked like the crowd scattered by a thunderstorm on the evening of some holiday in any park in the Western world.
The janitor had told him that these gatherings aimed at abstinence in sex, food, alcohol and tobacco. He had suffered a good deal of embarrassment from carnal importunacy but he could not imagine tempering this in a drafty parish house. He had never smoked, his weight was constant and he thoroughly enjoyed drinking. As I say, the authority of her good looks—she seemed too friendly to be thought a beauty—made her association with thi
s weird crowd somewhat palatable. She let him kiss her goodnight and he would, for the softness of her lips and the fragrance of her breasts, have waited for her in a condemned mine shaft. She was, as women go, relatively punctual and Sears had come to believe that punctuality in engagements was an infallible gauge of sexual spontaneity. He had observed that, without exception, women who were tardy for dinner engagements were unconsciously delayed in their erotic transports and that women who were early for lunch or dinner would sometimes climax in the taxi on their way home.
Renée had nothing to do, of course, with the length of these sessions that she attended and Sears knew nothing but pleasure in waiting for her in parish houses and church basements, and watching the crowd with whom she chose to associate had begun to interest him, partly because they were her associates, partly because he was obliged by circumstances to regard them and because they so disconcertingly challenged his common sense. The traditional forces of selection—the clubs, the social register and the professional lists—were all obsolete, he knew, but some traces or hints of caste seemed necessary to him for the comprehension and enjoyment of the world. These people seemed not only to belong to no organized society, they seemed to confound any such possibility. They were a genuine cross-section—something he abhorred.
But since abstinence, continence, some intangible moral value was at the bottom of this group, how could he have expected anything but a disparate gathering? The life of the spirit had no part, it seemed, in the establishment of caste. Not, at least, in the Western World. Early Christianity cut the widest swath. So, coming from a generation that could, perhaps, be characterized by the vastness of its disposition to complain, he didn’t suppose that he could scorn men and women who must be looking for something better. That things had been better was the music, the reprise of his days. It had been sung by his elders, by his associates, he had heard it sung in college by Toynbee and Spengler. Things had been better, things were getting worse, and the lengthening moral and intellectual shadows that one saw spreading over the Western World were final. What a bore it had been to live in this self-induced autumnal twilight! He supposed that these strangers—this queer congregation—would agree with him. However, he would not dream of abdicating his airs and pretenses for their company.
But she was always there—lightness and swiftness and the sense of an agility that flatteringly complemented his age. They dined and joked and she kissed him goodnight in the street by her house until one evening when she telephoned him and invited him to meet her, not in some church basement but in her apartment. “Don’t bother to make a reservation,” she said. “I’ll cook the dinner here.”
That was a rainy night. It would be very unlike Sears to ally the sound of rain to his limited knowledge of love but there was, in fact, some alliance. It seemed that the most he knew of love had been revealed to him while he heard the music of rain. Light showers, heavy rains, torrential rains, floods, in fact, seemed joined in his memory to loving although this did not cross his mind while he bathed, very carefully, and dressed that evening. The importance of rain is agricultural and plenty may have been involved, since plenteousness is one aspect of love. Darkness to some degree belongs to rain and darkness to some degree belongs to love. In countless beds he had numbered his blessings while he heard the rain on the roof, heard it drip from a faulty gutter, heard it fall into fields and gardens and on the roofs and backyards of many cities. He walked across the city that night in the rain.
At the time of which I’m writing jogging was very popular in every city of the world with which he was familiar. Toward the end of the day in Rotterdam or Moscow, in the brilliant winter afterglow that New York sometimes enjoys or in the early snows in Copenhagen you would find men and women of every imaginable age and specification going forth to enjoy a run. The only rewards for these exertions were small and worthless trophies. Commercialization would come, of course, but it would come later, and jogging was then one of the few taxing human endeavors that had absolutely nothing to do with the banks. One evening in Amsterdam or Leningrad—Sears couldn’t remember the city but he must have known something of the language—Sears had stopped a dozen joggers and asked them why they ran. “I run to find myself,” they said, “I run to lose weight, I run because I’m in love, I run to forget my debts, I run because I’ve had a stiff prick for the last three weeks and I hope to cool it, I run to escape my mother-in-law, I run for the glory of God.” He found all the answers gratifying and understandable, and now whenever at dusk in Bucharest or Des Moines, in Venice or Calgary he saw the runners appear they seemed to him the salt of the earth, they seemed to him stubborn and irreducible proof of man’s determination to excel. As he crossed the city that rainy night he was passed by many runners.
She met him at the door wearing a wrapper, a shabby blue wrapper. He was out of his clothes in a minute. “You were hardpacked,” she said sweetly, sometime later. “You’ve burned the vegetables,” he said. “I put everything on the back of the stove when you telephoned from the lobby,” said she. He spent the night and left at around nine. Elevator men, janitors, the whole service population play an important role of approval or shock in our extracurricular appearances, and the elevator man in Renée’s apartment seemed surprised and bewildered by Sears’s appearance. His look of bewilderment was followed by a look of solicitude as if Sears aroused in him some concern. He asked if he could get Sears a taxi. Sears thanked him and said no. Sears thought him already a member of the cast and wondered how the tip for Christmas was arranged in that particular building, although it was not yet Easter.
Oh the wind and the rain! Back in Janice Maria Salazzo bought some wind chimes at Buy Brite when she had some extra money after Sam shot the dog.
Betsy first heard the chimes one night in early spring when she was getting supper. Sam had hung them from the ceiling of the Salazzos’ back porch, which was very close to the Logans’ kitchen, and even when Betsy closed the window she could hear the music of the wind chimes. That night their music woke her. It was three in the morning and she couldn’t get back to sleep. The wind chimes seemed to speak to her although she wanted nothing to do with them. She blamed herself. She disliked the Salazzos because they had killed their dog and she disliked everything else about them including their wind chimes. It was her fault that she couldn’t get back to sleep until dawn and when the alarm woke her the next thing she heard was the music of the wind chimes.
Betsy was working part time as a file clerk at the Scandinavian Lamp Factory, but when she came home from work and paid off the old lady who sat with Binxie she heard the wind chimes again. She closed the window. She still seemed to hear them and she went upstairs and closed all the windows on that side of the house. It was a warm evening for that time of year and when Henry came home and kissed her he asked why all the windows were shut. “The Salazzos’ wind chimes are driving me crazy,” Betsy said. “I may be neurotic or something but I hate the noise they make.” “I’ll turn up the TV so you can’t hear it,” said Henry, and he did, but when he turned off the TV and they went to bed at about eleven she could hear the wind chimes again, telling their dumb, continuous story in a language she could not understand. She imagined the Salazzos to be much less sensitive and refined than she and Henry and she guessed that their insensitivity involved an indifference to the sounds of the world around them, including the sounds of their wind chimes. However, they woke her again at three and kept her pretty much awake until dawn. She could not discern what she found so troubling in the noise they made but she thought they made a troublesome noise. When she came home the next night and was taking off her shoes she called her friend Liz Holland and told her about the problem.
“Well, ask her to take them down,” Liz said. “Just tell her they’re driving you crazy. Or maybe first ask her politely if she can hear them and if the noise doesn’t bother her. Why don’t you try that?”
At that time of year the Salazzos almost never came out of their house except to go
to work. It was too cold for them to have filled their new stand-up swimming pool and there wasn’t any grass to cut. Betsy didn’t want to bring up the problem on the telephone but the next night when she was unwrapping some frozen vegetables she saw Maria Salazzo come down the back stairs with a garbage container. Betsy ran out of the house and crossed the yard. “Hasn’t it been a nice day?” she asked.
“It depends on what you were doing,” said Maria. She banged the garbage container against the pail. Betsy had been told that she sometimes drank a lot. She hoped she wasn’t drunk. “I see you have new wind chimes,” said Betsy.
“I got them at a sale at Buy Brite,” said Maria, “but I think they’re all gone. I got a friend in the Oriental Arts business who might be able to get you a set.”
“Oh, I don’t want any,” Betsy said. “I just wondered if you can hear them as loudly as we can.”
“Of course I can hear them,” Maria said. “What do you think I bought them for?”
“Well, the thing is we can hear them too much,” said Betsy. She was struggling. To say that they kept her awake would seem to state that she was an enfeebled sleeper. “I mean I wondered if you couldn’t turn them off at night.”
“You must be going crazy,” said Maria. “You think I can turn off the wind?”
5
DURING the weeks that followed Renée refused to take any presents from Sears. She gave him a scarf, gloves and a pair of cuff links but when he gave her a piece of jewelry she made him return it. “You don’t,” she said, kissing him, “understand the first thing about women.” Sears’s sexual demands had given him a great deal of pleasure, some embarrassment and a painful suspicion that the polarities in his constitution were acutely incompatible and that the only myth that suited his disposition was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He’d never read the book but he had seen the movie. Renée’s understanding, her willingness to accommodate him in taxis and hallways was of a beauty that he could not remember ever having experienced before. There was an unspoken understanding between them. She had once said, over her shoulder, that male discharges were, in her experience the most restorative face cream and while he had heard this remark he had swiftly forgotten it since the clinical aspects of carnality were not what he sought. His importunacy and her deep concern with youthfulness were facts but facts that he would dismiss since in constructing a useful paradigm for love there are various organic needs that seem to contribute nothing to the pleasure we take in one another. They both had something the other wanted.
