by John Cheever
Coverly heard the door close. Betsey drew some water in the sink. When she came back into the room her face was pale. “Well, let’s have a party,” Coverly said. “Let’s you and I have a party.” He got her another drink and passed her a tray of sandwiches but she seemed so stiff with pain that she could not turn her head and when she drank her whisky she spilled some on her chin. “The things you read about in these paper books,” the maid said. “I don’t know. I been married three times but right here in this book they’re doing something and I don’t know what it is. I mean I don’t know what they’re doing. . . .” She glanced at the little boy and went on reading. Coverly asked the couple if they wouldn’t like a drink but they both politely refused and said that they didn’t drink on duty. Their presence seemed to amplify a pain of embarrassment that was swiftly turning into shame; their eyes seemed to be the eyes of the world, civil as they were, and Coverly finally asked them to go. They were enormously relieved. They had the good taste not to say that they were sorry; not to say anything but good-bye. “We’ll leave everything out for the latecomers,” Betsey called gallantly after them as they went out the door.
It was her last gallantry. The pain in her breast threatened to overwhelm her. Her spirit seemed about to break under the organized cruelty of the world. She had offered her innocence, her vision of friendly strangers, to the community and she had been wickedly spurned. She had not asked them for money, for help of any kind, she had not asked them for friendship, she had only asked that they come to her house, drink her whisky and fill the empty rooms with the noise of talk for a little time and not one of them had the kindness to come. It was a world that seemed to her as hostile, incomprehensible and threatening as the gantry lines on the horizon, and when Coverly put an arm around her and said, “I’m sorry, sugar,” she pushed him away from her and said harshly, “Leave me be, leave me be, you just leave me be.”
In the end Coverly, by way of consolation, took Betsey to a coffee house in the commercial center. They bought their tickets and sat in canvas chairs with mugs of coffee to drink. A young woman with yellow hair drawn back over her ears was plucking a small harp and singing:
“Oh Mother, dear Mother, oh Mother,
Why is the sky so dark?
Why does the air smell of roach powder?
Why is there no one in the park?”
“It’s nothing, my darling daughter,
This isn’t the way the world ends,
The washing machine is on spinner,
And I’m waiting to entertain friends.”
“But Mother, dear Mother, please tell me,
Why does your Geiger counter tick?
And why are all those nice people
Jumping into the creek?”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, my darling,
It’s really nothing at all,
My Geiger counter simply records
An increase in radioactive fall.”
“But Mother, dear Mother, please tell me,
Before I go up to bed,
Why are my yellow curls falling,
Falling off of my head?
And why is the sky so red?
Why is the sky so red . . .”
There was something in Coverly’s nature—something provincial no doubt—that made this sort of lamentation intolerable and he seized Betsey’s hand and marched out of the coffee house, snorting like someone much older. It wasn’t much of a night.
Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
CHAPTER V
Moses and Melissa Wapshot lived in Proxmire Manor, a place that was known up and down the suburban railroad line as the place where the lady got arrested. The incident had taken place five or six years before, but it had the endurance of a legend, and the lady had seemed briefly to be the genius of the pretty place. The facts are simple. With the exception of one unsolved robbery, the eight-man police force of Proxmire Manor had never found anything to do. Their only usefulness was to direct traffic at weddings and large cocktail parties. They listened day and night on the interstate police radio to the crimes and alarms in other communities—car thefts, mayhem, drunkenness and murder—but the blotter in Proxmire Manor was clean. The burden of this idleness on their self-esteem was heavy as, armed with pistols and bandoleers of ammunition, they spent their days writing parking tickets for the cars left at the railroad station. It was like a child’s game, ticketing commuters for the most trifling infractions of the rules the police themselves invented, and they played it enthusiastically.
The lady—Mrs. Lemuel Jameson—had similar problems. Her children were away at school, her housework was done by a maid, and while she played cards and lunched with friends, she was often made ill-tempered by abrasive boredom. Coming home from an unsuccessful shopping trip in New York one afternoon, she found her car ticketed for being a little over a white line. She tore the ticket to pieces. Later that afternoon, a policeman found the pieces in the dirt and took them to the police station, where they were pasted together.
The police were excited, of course, at this open challenge to their authority. Mrs. Jameson was served with a summons. She called her friend Judge Flint—he was a member of the Club—and asked him to fix it. He said that he would, but later that afternoon he had an attack of acute appendicitis and was taken to the hospital. When Mrs. Jameson’s name was called in traffic court and there was no response, the police were alert. A warrant for her arrest was issued, the first such warrant in years. In the morning two patrolmen, heavily armed and in fresh uniforms and in the company of an old police matron, drove to Mrs. Jameson’s house with the warrant. A maid opened the door and said that Mrs. Jameson was sleeping. With at least a hint of force, they entered the beautiful drawing room and told the maid to wake Mrs. Jameson. When Mrs. Jameson heard that the police were downstairs she was indignant. She refused to move. The maid went downstairs, and in a minute or two Mrs. Jameson heard the heavy steps of the policemen. She was horrified. Would they dare enter her bedroom? The ranking officer spoke to her from the hall. “You get out of bed, lady, and come with us or we’ll get you up.” Mrs. Jameson began to scream. The police matron, reaching for her shoulder holster, entered the bedroom. Mrs. Jameson went on screaming. The matron told her to get up and dress or they would take her to the station house in her nightclothes. When Mrs. Jameson started for the bathroom, the matron followed her and she began to scream again. She was hysterical. She screamed at the policemen when she encountered them in the upstairs hallway, but she let herself be led out to the car and driven to the station house. Here she began to scream again. She finally paid the one-dollar fine and was sent home in a taxi.
Mrs. Jameson was determined to have the policemen fired, and the moment she walked into her house she began to organize her campaign. Counting over her neighbors for someone who would be eloquent and sympathetic, she thought of Peter Dolmetch, a free-lance television writer, who rented the Fulsoms’ gatehouse. No one liked him, but Mrs. Jameson sometimes invited him to her cocktail parties, and he was indebted to her. She called and told him her story. “I can’t believe it, darling,” he said. She said that she was asking him, because of his natural eloquence, to defend her. “I’m against Fascism, darling,” he said, “wherever it raises its ugly head.” She then called the mayor and demanded a hearing. It was set for eight-thirty that night. Mr. Jameson happened to be away on business. She called a few friends, and by noon everyone in Proxmire Manor knew that she had been humiliated by a policewoman, who followed her into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub while she dressed, and that Mrs. Jameson had been taken to the station house at the point of a gun. Fifteen or twenty neighbors showed up for the hearing. The mayor and his councilmen numbered seven, and the two patrolmen and the matron were also there. When the meeting was called to order, Peter stood and asked, “Has Fascism come to Proxmire Manor? Is the ghost of Hitler stalking our tree-shaded streets? Must we, in the privacy of our homes, dread the tread of the Storm Troopers’ b
oots on our sidewalks and the pounding of the mailed fist on the door?” On and on he went. He must have spent all day writing it. It was all aimed at Hitler, with only a few passing references to Mrs. Jameson. The audience began to cough, to yawn, and then to excuse themselves. When the protest was dismissed and the meeting adjourned, there was no one left but the principals, and Mrs. Jameson’s case was lost, but it was not forgotten. The conductor on the train, passing the green hills, would say, “They arrested a lady there yesterday”; then, “They arrested a lady there last month”; and presently, “That’s the place where the lady got arrested.” That was Proxmire Manor.
The village stood on three leafy hills north of the city, and was handsome and comfortable, and seemed to have eliminated, through adroit social pressures, the thorny side of human nature. This knowledge was forced on Melissa one afternoon when a neighbor, Laura Hilliston, came in for a glass of sherry. “What I wanted to tell you,” Laura said, “is that Gertrude Lockhart is a slut.” Melissa heard the words down the length of the room as she was pouring sherry, and wondered if she had heard correctly, the remark seemed so callous. What kind of tidings were these to carry from house to house? She was never sure—how could one be, it was all so experimental?—of the exact nature and intent of the society in which she lived, but did it really embrace this kind of thing?
Laura Hilliston laughed. Her laughter was healthy and her teeth were white. She sat on the sofa, a heavy woman with her feet planted squarely on the rug. Her hair was brown. So were her large, soft eyes. Her face was fleshy, but with a fine ruddiness. She was long married and had three grown sons, but she had recently stepped out of the country of love—briskly and without a backward glance, as if she had spent too much time in its steaming jungles. She was through with all that, she had told her wretched husband. She had put on some perfume for the visit, and she wore a thick necklace of false gold that threw a brassy light up onto her features. Her shoes had high heels, and her dress was tight, but these lures were meant to establish her social position and not to catch the eyes of a man.
“I just thought you ought to know,” Laura said. “It isn’t mere gossip. She has been intimate with just about everybody. I mean the milkman, and that old man who reads the gas meter. That nice fresh-faced boy who used to deliver the laundry lost his job because of her. The truck used to be parked there for hours at a time. Then she began to buy her groceries from Narobi’s, and one of the delivery boys had quite a lot of trouble. Her husband’s a nice-looking man, and they say he puts up with it for the sake of the children. He adores the children. But what I really wanted to say is that we’re getting her out. They have a twenty-eight-thousand-dollar mortgage with a repair clause, and Charlie Peterson at the bank has just told them that they’ll have to put a new roof on the house. Of course, they can’t afford this, and so Bumps Trigger is going to give them what they paid for the place, and they’ll have to go somewhere else. I just thought you might like to know.”
“Thank you,” Melissa said. “Will you have some more sherry?”
“Oh, no, thank you. I must get along. We’re going to the Wishings’. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, we are,” Melissa said.
Laura put on a short mink jacket and stepped out of the house with that grace, that circumspection, that gentle and unmistakable poise of a lady who has said farewell to love.
Then the back doorbell rang. The cook was out with the baby, and so Melissa went to the back door and let in one of Mr. Narobi’s grocery boys. She wondered if he was the one Mrs. Lockhart had tried to seduce. He was a slender young man with brown hair and blue eyes that shed their light evenly, as the eyes of the young will, and were so unlike the eyes of the old—those haggard lanterns that shed no light at all. She would have liked to ask him about Mrs. Lockhart, but this, of course, was not possible. She gave him a quarter tip, and he thanked her politely, and she went upstairs to bathe and dress for the Wishings’ dance.
The Wishings’ dance was an annual affair. As Mrs. Wishing kept explaining, they gave it each year before the rugs were put down. There was a three-piece orchestra, a fine dinner, with glazed salmon, boeuf en daube, a dark flowery claret and a bar for drinks. By quarter after ten, Melissa felt bored and would have asked Moses to take her home, but he was in another room. Lovely and high-spirited, she was seldom bored. Watching the dancers, she thought of poor Mrs. Lockhart, who was being forced out of this society. On the other hand, she knew how easy, how mistaken it was to assume that the exceptions—the drunkard and the lewd—penetrate, through their excesses, the carapace of immortal society. Did Mrs. Lockhart know more about mankind than she, Melissa? Who did have the power of penetration? Was it the priest who saw how their hands trembled when they reached for the chalice, the doctor who had seen them stripped of their clothing, or the psychiatrist who had seen them stripped of their obdurate pride, and who was now dancing with a fat woman in a red dress? And what was penetration worth? What did it matter that the drunken and unhappy woman in the corner dreamed frequently that she was being chased through a grove of trees by a score of naked lyric poets? Melissa was bored, and she thought her dancing neighbors were bored, too. Loneliness was one thing, and she knew herself how sweet it could make lights and company seem, but boredom was something else, and why, in this most prosperous and equitable world, should everyone seem so bored and disappointed?
Melissa went to the bathroom. The Wishings’ house was large and she lost her way. She stepped by mistake into a dark bedroom. The moment she entered the room another woman, who must have been waiting, embraced her, groaning with ardor. Then realizing her mistake she said: “I’m terribly sorry,” and went out the door. Melissa saw only that she had dark hair and full skirts. She stood in the dark room for a moment, trying, with no success at all, to fit this encounter somewhere into the distant noise of dance music. It could only mean that two of her neighbors, two housewives, had fallen in love and had planned a rendezvous in the middle of the Wishings’ dance. But who could it have been? None of her neighbors seemed possible. It must have been someone from out of town; someone from the wicked world beyond Proxmire Manor. She stepped into the lighted hallway and found her way to where she had been going in the first place and all she seemed able to do was to forget the encounter. It had not happened.
She asked Bumps Trigger to get her a drink, and he brought her back a glass of dark bourbon. She felt a profound nostalgia, a longing for some emotional island or peninsula that she had not even discerned in her dreams. She seemed to know something about its character—it was not a paradise—but its elevating possibilities of emotional richness and freedom stirred her. It was the stupendous feeling that one could do much better than this; that the reality was not Mrs. Wishing’s dance; that the world was not divided into rigid parliaments of good and evil but was ruled by the absolute authority and range of her desire.
She began to dance then, and danced until three, when the band stopped playing. Her feelings had changed from boredom to a ruthless greed for pleasure. She did not ever want the party to stop, and stayed until dawn, when she then yielded to Moses’ attentions. Moses was a very attentive husband. He was attentive in boathouses and leaky canoes, on beaches and mossy banks, in motels, hotels, guest rooms, sofas, and day beds. The house rang nightly with his happy cries of abandon but within this lather of love there were rigid canons of decency and some forms of sexual commerce seemed to him shocking and distasteful. In the light of day (excepting Saturdays, Sundays and holidays) his standards of decency were exacting. He would smash any man in the nose who told a dirty story in mixed company and once spanked his little son for saying damn. He was the sort of paterfamilias who inspires sympathy for the libertine. Nightly he romanced Melissa, nightly he climbed confidently into bed, while the poor libertine enjoys no such security. He—love’s wanderer—must write letters, spend his income on flowers and jewelry, squire women to restaurants and theaters and listen to interminable reminiscences—How Mean My Sister Was To M
e and The Night the Cat Died. He must apply his intelligence and his manual dexterity to the nearly labyrinthine complications of women’s clothing. He must anticipate problems of geography, caprices of taste, jealous husbands, suspicious cooks, all for a few hours’, sometimes a few moments’, stolen sweetness. He is denied the pleasures of friendship, he is a suspicious character to the police, and it is sometimes difficult for him to find employment, while the world smiles gently on that hairy brute, his married neighbor. This volcanic area that Moses shared with Melissa was immense, but it was the only one. They agreed on almost nothing else. They drank different brands of whisky, read different books and papers. Outside the dark circle of love they seemed almost like strangers, and glimpsing Melissa down a long dinner table he had once wondered who was that pretty woman with light hair. That this boisterousness, this attentiveness, was not entirely spontaneous was revealed to Melissa one morning when she opened a drawer in the hall table and found a series of clipped memos dated for a month or six weeks and titled: “Drink Score.” The entries ran: “12 noon 3 martinis. 3:20 1 pickmeup. 5:36 to 6:40 3 bourbons on train. 4 bourbons before dinner. 1 pint moselle. 2 whiskies after.” The entries didn’t vary much from day to day. She put them back into the drawer. It was something else to be forgotten.