by John Cheever
Front-porch committee led by self-designated Grand Marshal and Chief Bottle Washer Dr. Helen Archibald approached hotel manager and issued ultimatum. Unable to hear terms from desk but surmised they dealt with Lottie. Committee then entered dining salon in full panoply, sat down and put on pince-nezs and other assorted storm windows, pretending to study menus. (Menus printed for every meal.) Other guests entered and were seated. Music of string trio did nothing to relieve tension. Soup is being served when Lottie comes downstairs in salmon or coral-colored dress. Beautiful! She is waylaid by hotel proprietor who urges her sotto voce to dine in her suite at the expense of the management. No soap. On sweeps Lottie into the lion’s den. Considerable noise of dropped soup spoons. Also storm windows. Then silence. Grand Marshal for the opposition deals the first and only blow. “I will not eat off the same dishes as that whore,” says she. Then up spake the desk clerk in the swallowtail coat. “Apologize to Miss Beauchamp, Dr. Archibald.” “You’re fired,” says the manager. “When was this?” says I. “The day before yesterday,” says he and the forces of Venus retired in confusion. Lottie took a trip to Travertine and went up to Boston on freight train with load of cranberries. I walked to St. Botolphs, carrying my straw suitcase and, finding Cousin Honora’s dark, spent the night at the Viaduct House. Only concern was indignation at having been fired. Was never fired before or since during fifty-five years in business.
Went up to Boston on noon cars. Joined Lottie as per arrangement in Brown’s Hotel. Very tough joint. Lottie preparing to open two weeks season with Farquarson and Freedom. Urged writer to take job with company as bit-player, walk-on, crowd recruiter and bouncer. Theater more free and easy than today. Great attraction of times was Count Johannes. Audience came armed with over-ripe produce. Missiles began to fly before first act ended. Actors served as moving targets for remainder of performance. Sometimes produced bushel baskets and nets to catch vegetables. No reflection on theatrical greats intended. Julia Marlowe as Parthenia in Ingomar. Glorious! E. H. Sothern in Romeo and Juliet. Basset D’Arcy’s Lear. Howard Athenaeum then open. Also Boston Museum, Old Boston Theatre and Hollis Street Theatre.
Accepted position with Farquarson and Freedom. Played Marcellus in opening production of Hamlet with Farquarson as Hamlet and Lottie as Ophelia. Played numerous soldiers, sailors, gentlemen, guards and sundry watch-men during two-week season. Opened National Tour in Congress Opera House, Providence, R.I.
Tour included Worcester, Springfield, Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Jamestown, Ashtabula, Cleveland, Columbus and Zanesville. Suspected Lottie of concupiscence in Jamestown. Found naked stranger in clothes closet in Ashtabula. Caught redhanded in Cleveland. Sold gold cuff-links and returned to Boston via steam-cars on March 18th. No hard feelings. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.
CHAPTER IX
When Moses had Honora’s letter he was much more alarmed than his brother. He had mortgaged his trust on the strength of Honora’s age and he wrote directly to Boston. The Appleton Bank and Trust Company did not reply and when he telephoned Boston they told him that the trust officer was skiing in Peru. On Sunday night Moses took a plane to Detroit, starting on a wild-goose chase across the country to see if he could raise fifty thousand dollars on the strength, largely, of his charm. Fifty thousand dollars would barely cover his obligations.
On Monday night, alone in the house with the cook and her son, Melissa had a sentimental dream. The landscape was romantic. It was evening, and since there was no trace anywhere of mechanical things—automobile tracks and the noise of planes—it seemed to her to be evening in another century. The sun had set, but a polished afterglow lighted up the sky. There was a winding stream with alders, and on the farther banks the ruins of a castle. She spread a white cloth on the grass and set this with long-necked wine bottles and a loaf of new bread, whose fragrance and warmth were a part of the dream. Upstream a man was swimming naked in a pool. He spoke to her in French, and it was part of the dream’s lightness that it all transpired in another country, another time. She saw the man pull himself up onto the banks and dry himself with a cloth while she went on setting out the things for supper.
She was waked from this dream by the barking of a dog. It was 3 A.M. She heard the wind. It was changing its quarter and beginning to blow from the northwest. She was about to fall asleep when she heard the front door come open. Sweat started at her armpits and her young heart strained its muscles, although she knew it was only the wind that had opened the door. Not long ago, a thief had broken into a house in the neighborhood. In the garden, behind a lilac bush, a pile of cigarette ends had been found, where he must have waited patiently for hours for the lights of the house to be turned out. He had made an opening in a window with a glass cutter, rifled a wall safe of cash and jewelry, and left by the front door. In reporting the theft, the police had described his movements in detail: He had waited in the garden. He had entered by a back window. He had gone through the kitchen and pantry into the dining room. But who was he? Had he been tall or short, heavy or slender? Had his heart throbbed with tenor in the dark rooms, or had he experienced the thief’s supreme sense of triumph over a pretentious and gullible society? He had left traces of himself—cigarette ends, footprints, broken glass and a rifled safe—but he had never been found, and so he remained disembodied and faceless.
It was the wind, she told herself; no thief would have left the door standing open. Now she could feel the cold air spreading through the house, rising up the stairs and moving the curtains in the hall. She got out of bed and put on a wrapper. She turned on the hall light and started down the stairs, asking herself what it was she was afraid of in the dark rooms below. She was afraid of the dark, like a primitive or a child, but why? What was there about darkness that threatened her? She was afraid of the dark as she was afraid of the unknown, and what was the unknown but the force of evil, and why should she be afraid of this? She turned on the lights one after another. The rooms were empty, and the wind was enjoying the liberty of the place, scattering the mail on the hall table and peering under the edge of the rug. The wind was cold, and she shivered as she closed and locked the front door, but now she was unafraid and very much herself. In the morning she had a cold.
The doctor came several times during that week, and when she got no better he ordered her to go to the hospital. In the middle of the morning, she went upstairs to pack. She had been to the hospital in recent years only once, to have her son, and then the drives of pregnancy had carried her unthinkingly through her preparations. This time she carried no life within her; she carried, instead, an infection. And, alone in her bedroom, choosing a nightgown and a hairbrush, she felt as if she had been singled out to make some mysterious voyage. She was not a sentimental woman, and she had no sad thoughts about parting from the pleasant room she shared with her husband. She felt weary but not sick, although there was a cutting pain in her chest. A stranger watching her would have thought she was insane. Why did she empty the carnations into the wastebasket and rinse out the vase? Why did she count her stockings, lock her jewelry box and hide the key, glance at her bank balance, dust off the mantelpiece and stand in the middle of the room, looking as if she were listening to distant music? The foolish impulse to dust the mantelpiece was irresistible, but she had no idea why she did it, and anyhow it was time to go.
The hospital was new, and conscientious efforts had been made to make it a cheerful place, but her loveliness—you might say her elegance—was put at a disadvantage by the undisguisable atmosphere of regimentation, and she looked terribly out of place. A wheelchair was brought for her, but she refused to use it. She would have looked crestfallen and ridiculous, she knew, with her coat bunched up around her middle and her purse in her lap. A nurse took her upstairs and led her into a pleasant room, where she was told to undress and get into bed. While she was undressing, someone brought her lunch on a tray. It was a small matter, but she found it disconcerting to be given a chop and some ca
nned fruit while she was half-naked and before the clocks had struck noon. She ate her lunch dutifully and the doctor came at two and told her she could count on being in the hospital ten days or two weeks. He would call Moses. She fell asleep, and woke at five with a fever.
The imagery of her fever was similar to the imagery of love. Her reveries were spacious, and she seemed to be promised the revelation of some truth that lay at the center of the labyrinthine and palatial structures where she wandered. The fever, as it got higher, eased the pain in her breast and made her indifferent to the heavy beating of her heart. The fever dreams seemed like a healthy employment of her imagination to distract her from the struggle that went on in her breast. She was standing at the head of a broad staircase with red walls. Many people were climbing the stairs. They had the attitudes of pilgrims. The climb was grueling and lengthy, and when she reached the summit she found herself in a grove of lemon trees and lay down on the grass to rest. When she woke from this dream, her nightgown and the bed linen were soaked with sweat. She rang for a nurse, who changed them.
She felt much better when this was done, and felt that the fever had been a crisis and that, passing safely through it, she had triumphed over her illness. At nine the nurse gave her some medicine and said good night. Some time later she felt the lassitude of fever returning. She rang, but no one came, and she could not resist the confusion in her mind as her temperature rose. The labored beating of her heart sounded like a drum. She confused it with a drum in her mind, and saw a circle of barbaric dancers. The dance was long, rising to a climax, and at the moment of the climax, when she thought her heart would burst, she woke, shaking with a fresh chill and wet with sweat. A nurse finally came and changed her clothing and her linen again. She was relieved to be dry and warm. The two attacks of fever had weakened her but left her with a feeling of childish contentment. She felt wakeful, got out of bed and by supporting herself on the furniture made her way to the window to see the night.
While she watched, clouds covered the moon. It must have been late because most of the windows were dark. Then a window in the wall at her left was lighted, and she saw a nurse introduce a young woman and her husband into a room identical to the one where she sat in the dark. The young woman was pregnant but not having labor pains. She undressed in the bathroom and got into bed, while her husband was unpacking her bag. The window, like all the others, was hung with a Venetian blind, but no one had bothered to close it. When the unpacking was done, he unfastened the front of her nightgown, knelt beside the bed and lay his head on her breasts. He remained this way for several minutes without moving. Then he got up—he must have heard the nurse approach—and covered his wife. The nurse came in and snapped the blinds shut.
Melissa heard a night bird calling, and wondered what bird it was, what it looked like, what it was up to, what its prey was. There was a deep octave of thunder, magnificent and homely, as if someone in heaven had moved a chest of drawers. Then there was some lightning, distant and discolored, and a moment later a shower of rain dressed the earth. The sound of the rain seemed to Melissa, with the cutting pain in her breast, like the repeated attentions of a lover. It fell on the flat roofs of the hospital, the lawns and the leaves in the wood. The pain in her chest seemed to spread and sharpen in proportion to her stubborn love of the night, and she felt for the first time in her life an unwillingness to leave any of this; a fear as senseless and powerful as her fear of the dark when she went down to shut the door; a horror of death.
CHAPTER X
Now that was the year when the squirrels were such a pest and everybody worried about cancer and homosexuality. The squirrels upset garbage pails, bit delivery men and entered houses. Cancer was a commonplace but men and women, at its mercy, were told that their pain was some trifling complication while behind their backs their brothers and their sisters, their husbands and wives, would whisper: “All we can hope is that they will go quickly.” This cruel and absolute hypocrisy was bound to backfire and in the end no one could tell or count upon being told if that pain in the middle was the knock of death or some trifling case of gas. Most maladies have their mythologies, their populations, their scenery and their grim jokes. The Black Plague had masques, street songs and dances. Tuberculosis in its heyday was like a civilization where a caste of comely, brilliant and doomed men and women fell in love, waltzed and invented privileges for their disease; but here was the grappling hand of death disinfected by a social conspiracy of all its reality. “Why, you’ll be up and around in no time at all,” says the nurse to the dying man. “You want to dance at your daughter’s wedding, don’t you? Don’t you want to see your daughter married? Well, then, we can’t expect to get better if we’re not more cheerful, can we?” She cleans his arm with alcohol and prepares the syringe. “Your wife tells me you’re a great mountain-climber but if you want to get better and climb the mountains again you’ll have to be more cheerful. You do want to climb the mountains again, don’t you?” The contents of the syringe flow into his veins. “I’ve never climbed a mountain myself,” the nurse says, “but I expect it must be very exciting when you get to the top. I don’t think I’d like the climbing part of it very much but the view from the summit must be lovely. They tell me that in the Alps roses grow in the snow banks and if you want to see all these things again you’ll have to be more cheerful.” Now he is drowsy and she raises her voice. “Oh, you’ll be up and around in no time at all,” she exclaims and softly, softly she closes the door to his room and says to his family, gathered in the corridor: “I’ve put him to sleep again and all we can do is hope and pray that he will never wake up.” Melissa was one of those unfortunate people who was to suffer from this attitude.
Moses returned from his wild-goose chase as soon as he learned of Melissa’s illness, having borrowed enough money to at least give an impression of solvency. The fact that Melissa was convalescent when he returned might have seemed to account for the fact that he did not describe to her his financial embarrassments but this was not so. He would not have been able to describe them to her under any circumstances; no more could Coverly state that he had seen the ghost of his father. Had Moses lived in Parthenia he would have felt free to put a FOR SALE sign in his living room window and another in the windshield of his convertible but to do this in Proxmire Manor would have been subversive. He expressed his worries not in irritability but in a manner that was very broad and jocular. Melissa then had this forced jocularity to cope with as well as the absurd conviction that she had cancer. She could not convince herself that she was cured nor could she trust what the doctor told her. She telephoned the hospital and asked to speak with her nurse. She asked the nurse if they could meet for a drink. “Why not?” the nurse asked. “Sure. Why not?” She went off duty at four and Melissa planned to meet her at the traffic light by the hospital at four-fifteen.
They went to a bar near there, a roadside place. The nurse ordered a double martini. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m worn out. My sister, she’s married, she called me last night and said would I take care of the baby while she and her husband go to a cocktail party. So I’d said sure, I’d take care of the baby if it was just for cocktails, an hour or two. So I went there at six and you know when they came home? Midnight! The baby didn’t shut her eyes once. She bawled all the time. Kind sister, that’s me.”
“I wanted to ask you about my x-rays,” Melissa said. “You saw them.”
“What are you afraid of,” the nurse asked, “cancer?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what they’re all afraid of.”
“I don’t have cancer?”
“Not to my knowledge.” She raised her face and watched the wind carry some leaves past the window. “Leaves,” she said, “leaves, leaves, look at them. I’ve got a little apartment with a back yard and it’s me that rakes the leaves. I spend all my spare time raking leaves. Just as soon as I get one bunch cleaned up down comes another. As soon as you get rid of the leaves it begins to snow.�
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“Would you like another drink?” Melissa asked.
“No, thanks. You know, I wondered what you wanted to see me about but I didn’t think it was cancer. You know what I thought you wanted?”
“What?”
“Heroin.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I thought maybe you wanted me to smuggle some heroin out to you. You’d be surprised at the number of people who think I can get them drugs. Top-ranking people, some of them. Oh, I could name names. Shall we go?”
She stood, late one afternoon, at her window watching the ring of golden light that crowned the eastern hills at that season and time of day. It rested on the Babcocks’ lawn, the Filmores’ ranch house, the stone walls of the church, the Thompsons’ chimney—lambent, and as yellow and clear as strained honey and a ring, because, as she watched, she saw at the base of the hills a clear demarcation between the yellow light and the rising dark, and watched the band of light lift past the Babcocks’ lawn, the Filmores’ ranch house, the stone walls of the church and the Thompsons’ chimney, up into thin air. The street was empty, or nearly so. Everyone in Proxmire Manor had two cars and no one walked with the exception of old Mr. Cosden, who belonged to the generation that took constitutionals. Up the street he came, his blue eyes fixed on the last piece of yellow light that touched the church steeple, as if exclaiming to himself, “How wonderful, how wonderful it is!” He passed, and then a much stranger figure took her attention—a tall man with unusually long arms. He was a stray, she decided; he must live in the slums of Parthenia. In his right hand he carried an umbrella and a pair of rubbers. He was terribly stooped and to see where he was going had to crane his neck forward and upward like an adder. He had not bent his back over a whetstone or a workbench or under the weight of a brick hod or at any other honest task. It was the stoop of weak-mindedness, abnegation and bewilderment. He had never had any occasion to straighten his back in self-esteem. Stooped with shyness as a child, stooped with loneliness as a youth, stooped now under an invisible burden of social disregard, he walked now with his long arms reaching nearly to his knees. His wide, thin mouth was set in a silly half-grin, meaningless and sad, but the best face he had been able to hit on. As he approached the house, the beating of her heart seemed to correspond to his footsteps, the cutting pain returned to her breast, and she felt the return of her fear of darkness, evil and death. Carrying his umbrella and rubbers, although there was not a cloud in the sky, he duck-footed out of sight.