by John Cheever
He returned to the fire. Here was the physical world, fire-lit, stubborn and beloved, and yet his physical response was not to the parlor but to the darkness in the rooms around him. Why, sitting so close to the fire, did he feel a chill slide down his left shoulder and a moment later coarsen with cold the skin of his chest, as if a hand had been placed there? If there were ghosts, he believed with his father that they kept low company. They consorted with the poorhearted and the faint. He knew that we sometimes leave after us, in a room, a stir of love or rancor when we are gone. He believed that whatever we pay for our loves in money, venereal disease, scandal or ecstasy, we leave behind us, in the hotels, motels, guest rooms, meadows and fields where we discharge this much of ourselves, either the scent of goodness or the odor of evil, to influence those who come after us. Thus it was possible that this passionate and eccentric cast had left behind them some ambiance that made his presence seem like an intrusion. It was time to go to bed and he got some blankets out of a closet and made up a bed in the spare room, nearest the stairs.
He woke at three. There was enough radiance from the moon or the night sky itself to light the room. What had waked him, he knew immediately, was not a dream, a reverie or an apprehension; it was something that moved, something that he could see, something strange and unnatural. The terror began with his optic nerves and reverberated through his whole person but it was in the beam of his eye that the terror had begun. He was able to trace the disturbance back through his nervous system to his pupil. The eye counted on reality and what he had seen or thought he had seen was the ghost of his father. The chaos set into motion by this hallucination was horrendous and he shook with psychic and physical cold, he shook with terror, and sitting up in bed he roared: “Oh, Father, Father, Father, why have you come back?”
The loudness of his voice was some consolation. The ghost seemed to leave the room. He thought he could hear stair lifts give. Had he come back to look for a bowl of crackers and milk, to read some Shakespeare, come back because he felt like all the others that the pain of death was bitter? Had he come back to relive that moment when he had relinquished the supreme privileges of youth—when he had waked feeling less peckery than usual and realized that the doctor had no cure for autumn, no medicine for the north wind? The smell of his green years would still be in his nose—the reek of clover, the fragrance of women’s breasts, so like the land-wind, smelling of grass and trees—but it was time for him to leave the field for someone younger. Spavined, gray, he had wanted no less than any youth to chase the nymphs. Over hill and dale. Now you see them; now you don’t. The world a paradise, a paradise! Father, Father, why have you come back?
There was the noise of something falling in the next room. The knowledge that this was a squirrel, as it was, would not have brought Coverly to his senses. He was too far gone. He grabbed his clothing, flew down the stairs and left the front door standing open. He stopped on the sidewalk long enough to draw on his underpants. Then he ran to the corner. Here he put on his trousers and shirt but he ran the rest of the way to Honora’s barefoot. He scribbled a farewell note, left it on her hall table and caught the milk train north, a little after dawn, past the Markhams’, past the Wilton Trace, past the Lowells’, who had changed the sign on their barn from BE KIND TO ANIMALS to GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS, past the house where old Mr. Sturgis used to live and repair watches.
CHAPTER IV
Going back to Talifer where he lived with Betsey, Coverly had the choice of concluding that he was demented or that he had seen his father’s ghost. He chose the latter, of course, and yet he could not say so to his wife; he could not explain to his brother Moses why the house on River Street was empty. The specter of his father seemed to sit beside him in the plane that took him west. Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back! What, he wondered, would Leander have made of Talifer?
The site for Missile Research and Development had a population of twenty thousand, divided, like any society, whatever its aspirations, into first class, second class, third class and steerage. The large aristocracy was composed of physicists and engineers. Tradesmen made up the middle class, and there was a vast proletariat of mechanics, ground crewmen and gantry hands. Most of the aristocracy had been given underground shelters and while this fact had never been publicized it was well known that in the case of a cataclysm the proletariat would be left to scald. This made for some hard feeling. The vitals of the place were the twenty-nine gantries at the edge of the desert, the mosque-shaped atomic reactor, the underground laboratories and hangars and the two-square-mile computation and administration center. The concerns of the site were entirely extraterrestrial, and while common sense would scotch any sentimental and transparent ironies about the vastness of scientific research undertaken at Talifer and the capacity for irrational forlornness, loneliness and ecstasy among the scientists, it was a way of life that presented some strenuous intellectual contrasts.
Security was always a problem. Talifer was never mentioned in the newspapers. It had no public existence. This concern with security seemed to inhibit life at every level. One Saturday afternoon Betsey was watching television. Coverly had taken Binxey for a trip to the shopping center. Out of her window she saw that Mr. Hansen, who lived across the street, was taking down his storm windows and putting up his screens. He had a stepladder, which he planted carefully in his flowerbeds, then he raised and unhooked his windows and carried them into the garage. His wife and children seemed to be off. There were no other signs of life around the place. When he had removed the windows from the first floor he started on the upstairs bedrooms. His ladder didn’t reach these and he had to work by leaning out of the open windows, unhooking the frames and drawing them on their rectilinear bias into the house. The hardware for one of the windows seemed warped or rusted. It would not come loose. He straddled the windowsill and yanked at the frame. He fell out of the window and landed with a thud onto a little terrace that he had paved with cement block a few weeks earlier. Betsey looked out of the window long enough to see that his body was inert. Then she returned to her television set. Twenty minutes later she heard a siren and an ambulance came down the street and took the still inert form away on a stretcher. She learned that evening that he had been instantly killed. Some children had given the alarm. But why hadn’t she? How could she account for her unnatural behavior? The general concern for security seemed to be at the bottom of her negligence. She had not wanted to do anything that would call attention to herself, that would involve giving testimony or answering questions. Presumably her concern for security had led her to overlook the death of a neighbor.
Coverly would have had some difficulty explaining to Leander that while he had been trained as a taper and sub-programmer, he had been switched to public relations when he was transferred from the Remsen to the Talifer Site. This was a mistake, made by one of the computations machines in personnel, but there was no appeal. They lived in a mixed neighborhood. Betsey wanted a shelter and Coverly had applied for a transfer to another neighborhood but the government-operated real-estate office was swamped with such applications and anyhow Coverly was not unhappy where he was. Ginkgo trees had been planted along the sidewalks where children roller-skated, and song birds had nested in the trees. Sitting in his back yard before dinner he could watch the sere and moving mountain twilight—that sour and powerful glow—beyond the distant gantries. They had a little garden and a grill for cooking meat. The house on their right was owned by a man named Armstrong, who was in the World Relations Department. Armstrong had developed a dry, manly and monosyllabic prose style for ghosting the chronicles of astronauts. The house on their left was owned by a gantry-crew man named Murphy, who got drunk and beat up his wife on Saturday nights. The Wapshots did not get along with the Murphys. One morning when Coverly was at work the signal board indicated that there was a telephone call for him. He left the security area to take the call. It was Betsey. “She stole my garbage pail,” Betsey said.
“I don’t un
derstand, sugar,” Coverly said.
“Mrs. Murphy,” Betsey said. “The garbage man came this morning, he always comes on Tuesdays, and when he took away the garbage she took that nice, new, tin, galvanized garbage pail of mine and carried it right up to the back of her house, leaving me with that cracked, plastic old thing they brought from Canaveral.”
“Well, I can’t do anything about it now,” Coverly said. “I’ll be home at half-past five.”
Betsey was still excited when he returned. “You go right over there now and get it back,” she said. “They’ll fill it up with garbage and claim that it’s theirs. You should have painted our name on it. You go right over there now and get it away from them. There he is, he’s cutting the grass.”
Coverly left the house and walked to the boundary of his lot. Pete Murphy had just started up his lawn mower. The distant mountains were blue. The time of day, the sameness of the houses, the popping noise of the one-cylinder engine and the two men in their white shirt sleeves gave to the scene some unwonted otherness, as if Coverly were not about to accuse his neighbor, or his neighbor’s wife, of theft, but was about to remark that merchandising indices showed in their uptrend the inarguable power of direct-mail advertising. In short, their reality and their passions seemed challenged. The distant mountains had been formed by fire and water but the houses in the valley looked so insubstantial that they seemed, in the dusk, to smell of shirt cardboards. Coverly cracked his knuckles nervously and signaled to Pete with a jerk of his head. Pete pushed the lawn mower directly past him and muffled Coverly’s words with noise of the motor. Coverly waited. Pete made a second circle of the lawn and then throttled down the motor and stopped in front of Coverly.
“My wife tells me you stole our garbage pail,” Coverly said.
“So what?”
“Are you in the habit of helping yourself to other people’s property?” Coverly was more perplexed than angry.
“Listen, chicken,” Murphy said. “Where I grew up you either helped yourself or you ate dirt.”
“But this doesn’t happen to be where you grew up,” said Coverly. It was the wrong tack. He seemed to be footnoting the dispute. Then, confident of his rightness he spoke sternly and in a full voice, marred by some old-fashioned or provincial haughtiness.
“Would you be good enough to return our garbage pail?” he asked.
“Listen,” Murphy said. “You’re trespassing. You’re on my land. Get off my land or you’ll go home a cripple for life. I’ll gouge out your eyes. I’ll break your nose. I’ll tear off your ears.”
Coverly swung a right from the hip, and Murphy, a big man and a coward, it seemed, went down. Coverly stood there, a little bewildered. Then Murphy came forward on his hands and knees and sank his teeth into Coverly’s shin. Coverly roared. Betsey and Mrs. Murphy came running out of their kitchens. Just then a missile left its pad and, in the dusk, shed a light as bright as the light of a midsummer’s day over the valley and the site, throwing the shadows of the combatants, their houses and their ginkgo trees blackly onto the grass, while air waves demarked the earth-shaking roar so that it sounded like the humble click of track joints. The missile ascended, the light faded with it, and the two women took their husbands home.
Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
The computation and administration center where Coverly worked appeared from a distance to be a large, one-story building but this single story merely contained the elevator terminals and the security offices. The other offices and the hardware were underground. The one visible story was made of glass, tinted darkly to the color of oily water. The darkened glass did not diminish but it did alter the light of day. Beyond these dim glass walls one could see some flat pasture land and the buildings of an abandoned farm. There was a house, a barn, a clump of trees and a split-rail fence, and the abandoned buildings with the gantries beyond them had a nostalgic charm. They were signs of the past, and whatever the truth may have been, they appeared to be signs of a rich and a natural way of life. The abandoned farm evoked a spate of vulgar and bucolic imagery—open fires, pails of fresh milk and pretty girls swinging in apple trees—but it was nonetheless persuasive. One turned away from this then to the dark, oil-colored glass and moved into another world, buried six stories beneath the cow pasture. It was a new world in every way. Its newness was most apparent in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and usefulness that seems lost to most of us today. To observe that the elevators sometimes broke down, that one of the glass walls had cracked, and that the pretty receptionists in the security office had a primitive and an immemorial appeal was like burdening oneself with the observations of some old man, pushed by time past the boundaries of all usefulness. The crowds that went to and from the computation center had a look of contentment and purpose that you won’t find in the New York or Paris subways, where we seem to regard one another with the horror and dismay of a civilization of caricaturists. Leaving his office late one night Coverly had heard Dr. Cameron, the site director, ending a dispute with one of his lieutenants. The doctor was shouting, “You’ll never get a Goddamned man onto the Goddamned moon, and if you do, it won’t do you any Goddamned good.”
Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
Betsey had hoped to be transferred to Canaveral and was disappointed in Talifer. They had been there two months then but no one had come to call. She had made no friends. In the evening she could hear the sounds of talk and laughter but she and Coverly were never included in these gatherings. From her window Betsey could see Mrs. Armstrong working in her flower garden and she interpreted this interest in flowers as the sign of a kindly nature. One day, when Binxey was taking his nap, Betsey went next door and rang the bell. Mrs. Armstrong answered the door. “I’m Betsey Wapshot,” Betsey said, “and I’m your next-door neighbor. My husband Coverly was trained as a subprogrammer but they’ve got him on public relations right now. I’ve seen you in your garden and I thought I’d pay you a call.” The woman kindly invited her in. She seemed not inhospitable but subdued. “What I wanted to ask you about,” Betsey said, “was my neighbors. We’ve been here two months now but we just seem to have been too busy to make friends. We don’t know anybody and so I thought I’d like to give a little cocktail party and see who’s who. I want to know who to ask.”
“Well, my dear, I’d wait a little while, if I were you,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “For some reason this seems to be quite a conservative community. I think you’d better meet your neighbors before you invite them.”
“Well, I come from a small town,” Betsey said, “where everybody’s neighbors, and I often say to myself that if I can’t trust in the friendliness of strangers, well, then what in the world is there that I can trust in?”
“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Armstrong.
“I’ve lived in all kinds of places,” Betsey said. “High society. Low society. My husband’s family came over on the Arbella. That’s the ship that came after the Mayflower but it had a higher class of people. It seems to me that people are all the same, under their skins. What I want you to do is to give me a list of twenty-five or thirty of the most interesting people in the neighborhood.”
“But, my dear, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“There isn’t time.”
“Well, it wouldn’t take very long, would it?” Betsey asked. “I’ve got a pencil and paper right here. Now just tell me who lives in the house on the corner.”
“The Seldons.”
“Are they interesting?”
“Yes, they’re quite interesting but they’re not terribly friendly.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Herbert.”
“Who lives in the house next to them?”
“The Trampsons.”
“Are they interesting?”
“Yes, they’re terribly interesting. He and Reginald Tappan discovered the Tappan Constant. He’s been nominated for a Nobel Prize but he’s not terr
ibly friendly.”
“And then on the other side of them?” Betsey asked.
“The Harnecks,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “But I must warn you, my dear, that you’ll be making a mistake if you ask them before you’ve been introduced.”
“And that’s where I think you’re wrong,” Betsey said. “You just wait and see. Who lives on the other side of them?”
In the end she went away with a list of twenty-five names. Mrs. Armstrong explained that she would be unable to come to the party herself because she was going to Denver. With the thought of a party to occupy her Betsey was happy and at peace with the world. She explained her plans to the proprietor of a liquor store in the shopping center. He told her what she would need and gave her the telephone number of a couple—a maid and barman—who would mix the drinks and prepare the food. At the stationery store she bought a box of invitations and happily spent an afternoon and an evening addressing these. On the day of the party the couple arrived at three. Betsey dressed herself and her little son, Coverly came home at five, when the first guests were expected, and the scene was set.
When no one had come by half-past five Coverly opened a beer and the barman made a whisky and ginger ale for Betsey. Cars went to and fro on the street but none of them stopped at the Wapshots’. She could hear the sounds of a tennis game from a court in the next block; laughter and talk. The bartender said kindly that the neighborhood was a strange one. He had worked in Denver and he longed to get back to a place where people were more courteous and predictable. He halved limes, squeezed lemons, arranged a row of cocktail glasses on the table and filled these with ice. At six o’clock the maid took a paper-back novel out of her bag and sat down to read. At a little after six the back doorbell rang and Betsey hastened to answer it. It was the delivery man from the dry-cleaners. Coverly heard Betsey ask him in for a drink. “Oh, I’d love to, Mrs. Wapshot,” the man said, “but I have to go home now and cook my supper. I’m living alone now. I guess I told you. My wife ran off with one of the butchers in the food express. The lawyer told me to put the kids in an orphanage, he said I’d get custody quicker that way, so I’m all alone. I’m so alone that I talk with the flies. There’s a lot of flies where I live but I don’t kill them. I just talk with them. They’re like friends. ‘Hello, flies,’ I say. ‘We’re all alone, you and me. You’re looking good, flies.’ I suppose you might think I was crazy for talking with the flies but that’s the way it is. I don’t have anybody else to talk to.”