The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  The guide came out from behind a wall, and they all got in the bus and started off again.

  Rome was ugly; at least, the outskirts were: trolley cars and cut-rate furniture stores and torn-up streets and the sort of apartment houses that nobody ever really wants to live in. The old ladies began to gather their guidebooks and put on their coats and hats and gloves. Journey's end is the same everywhere. Then, dressed for their destination, they all sat down again, with their hands folded in their laps, and the bus was still. "Oh, I wish I'd never come," one old lady said to another. "I just wish I'd never left home." She was not the only one.

  "Ecco, ecco Rome," the guide said, and so it was.

  STREETER WENT to Kate's at seven on Thursday. Assunta let him in, and, for the first time, he walked down the scala without his copy of I Promessi Sposi, and sat down by the fireplace. Charlie came in then. He had on the usual outfit—the tight Levi's, with cuffs turned up, and a pink shirt. When he moved, he dragged or banged the leather heels of his loafers on the marble floor. He talked about baseball and exercised his owlish laugh, but he didn't mention Uncle George. Neither did Kate, when she came in, nor did she offer Streeter a drink. She seemed to be in the throes of an emotional storm, with all her powers of decision suspended. They talked about the weather. At one point, Charlie came and stood by his mother, and she took both of his hands in one of hers. Then the doorbell rang, and Kate went down the room to meet her uncle. They embraced very tenderly—the members of a family—and when this was over he said, "I was robbed, Katie. I was robbed yesterday of four hundred dollars. Coming up from Naples on the bus."

  "Oh, I'm so sorry!" she said. "Wasn't there anything you could do, George? Wasn't there anyone you could speak to?"

  "Speak to, Katie? There hasn't been anyone I could speak to since I got off the boat. No speaka da English. If you cut off their hands, they wouldn't be able to say anything. I can afford to lose four hundred dollars—I'm not a poor man—but if I could only have given it to some worthwhile cause."

  "I'm terribly sorry."

  "You've got quite a place here, Katie."

  "And, Charlie, this is Uncle George."

  If she had counted on their not getting along, this chance was lost in a second. Charlie forgot his owlish laugh and stood so straight, so in need of what America could do for him that the rapport between the man and the boy was instantaneous, and Kate had to separate them in order to introduce Streeter. Uncle George shook hands with her student and came to a likely but erroneous conclusion.

  "Speaka da English?" he asked.

  "I'm an American," Streeter said.

  "How long is your sentence?"

  "This is my second year," Streeter said. "I work at F. R. U. P. C."

  "It's an immoral country," Uncle George said, sitting down in one of the golden chairs. "First they rob me of four hundred dollars, and then, walking around the streets here, all I see is statues of men without any clothes on. Nothing."

  Kate rang for Assunta, and when the maid came in she ordered whiskey and ice, in very rapid Italian. "It's just another way of looking at things, Uncle George," she said.

  "No, it isn't," Uncle George said. "It isn't natural. Not even in locker rooms. There's very few men who'd choose to parade around a locker room stark naked if a towel was handy. It's not natural. Everywhere you look. Up on the roofs. At the main traffic intersections. When I was coming over here, I passed through a little garden—playground, I guess you'd say—and right in the middle of it, right in the middle of all these little children, is one of these men without anything on."

  "Will you have some whiskey?"

  "Yes, please... The boat sails on Saturday, Katie, and I want you and the boy to come home with me."

  "I don't want Charlie to leave," Kate said.

  "He wants to leave—don't you, Charlie? He wrote me a nice letter. Nicely worded, and he's got a nice handwriting. That was a nice letter, Charlie. I showed it to the high-school superintendent, and he said you can enter the Krasbie high school whenever you want. And I want you to come, too, Kate. It's your home, and you've only got one. The trouble with you, Katie, is that when you were a kid they used to make fun of you in Krasbie, and you just started running, that's all, and you never stopped."

  "If that's true—and it may be," she said quickly, "why should I want to go back to a place where I will seem ridiculous."

  "Oh, Katie, you won't seem ridiculous. I'll take care of that."

  "I want to go home, Mama," Charlie said. He was sitting on a stool by the fireplace—not so straight-backed any more. "I'm homesick all the time."

  "How could you possibly be homesick for America?" Her voice was very sharp. "You've never seen it. This is your home."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Your home is with your mother."

  "There's more to it than that, Mama. I feel strange here all the time. Everybody on the street speaking a different language."

  "You've never even tried to learn Italian."

  "Even if I had, it wouldn't make any difference. It would still sound strange. I mean, it would still remind me that it wasn't my language. I just don't understand the people, Mama. I like them all right, but I just don't understand them. I never know what they're going to do next."

  "Why don't you try and understand them?"

  "Oh, I do, but I'm no genius, and you don't understand them, either. I've heard you say so, and sometimes you're homesick, too, I know. I can tell by the way you look."

  "Homesickness is nothing," she said angrily. "It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don't suppose you're old enough to understand. When you're in one place and long to be in another, it isn't as simple as taking a boat. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find."

  "Oh, I don't mean that, Mama. I just mean if I was with people who spoke my language, people who understood me, I'd be more comfortable."

  "If comfort is all you expect to get out of life, God help you."

  Then the doorbell rang and Assunta answered it. Kate glanced at her watch and saw that it was five after eight. It was also the first Thursday in the month. Before she could get out an explanation, they had started down the sala, with the old Duke of Rome in the lead, holding some flowers in his left hand. A little behind him was the Duchess, his wife—a tall, willowy, gray-haired woman wearing a lot of jewelry that had been given to the family by Francis I. An assortment of nobles brought up the rear, looking like a country circus, gorgeous and travel-worn. The Duke gave Kate her flowers. They all bowed vaguely to her company and went out through the kitchen, with its smell of gas leaks, to the service door.

  "Oh, Giuseppe the barber he gotta the cash," Uncle George sang loudly, "He gotta the bigga the blacka mustache." He waited for someone to laugh, and when no one did he asked, "What was that?"

  Kate told him, but her eyes were brighter, and he noticed this.

  "You like that kind of thing, don't you?" he said.

  "Possibly," she said.

  "It's crazy, Katie," he said. "It's crazy, it's crazy. You come home with me and Charlie. You and Charlie can live in the other half of my house, and I'll have a nice American kitchen put in for you."

  Streeter saw that she was touched by this remark, and he thought she was going to cry. She said quickly, "How in hell do you think America would have been discovered if everybody stayed home in places like Krasbie?"

  "You're not discovering anything, Katie."

  "I am. I am."

  "We'll all be happier, Mama," Charlie said. "We'll all be happier if we have a nice clean house and lots of nice friends and a nice garden and kitchen and stall shower."

  She stood with her back to them, by the mantelpiece, and said loudly, "No nice friends, no kitchen, no garden, no shower bath or anything else will keep me from wanting to see the world and the different people who live in it." Then she turned to her son an
d spoke softly. "You'll miss Italy, Charlie."

  The boy laughed his owlish laugh. "I'll miss the black hairs in my food," he said. She didn't make a sound. She didn't even sigh. Then the boy went to her and began to cry. "I'm sorry, Mummy," he said. "I'm sorry. That was a dumb thing to say. It's just an old joke." He kissed her hands and the tears on her cheeks, and Streeter got up and left.

  "Tel era ci che di meno deforme e di men compassionevole si faceva veclere intorno, i scini, gli agiati," Streeter read when he went again for his lesson Sunday. "Che dopo tante immagini di miseria, pensando a quella ancor piit grave, per mezzo ella quale dovrem condurre il lettore, no ci fermeremo ore a dir qual fosse lo spettacolo degli appestati che si strascicavano o giacevano per le stracle, de' poveri, de' fanciulli, delle donne."

  The boy had gone, he could tell—not because she said so but because the place seemed that much bigger. In the middle of his lesson, the old Duke of Rome came through in his bathrobe and slippers, carrying a bowl of soup to his sister, who was sick. Kate looked tired, but then she always did, and when the lesson ended and Streeter stood up, wondering if she would mention Charlie or Uncle George, she complimented him on the progress he had made and urged him to finish I Promessi Sposi and to buy a copy of the Divine Comedy for next week.

  THE WRYSONS

  THE WRYSONS WANTED things in the suburb of Shady Hill to remain exactly as they were. Their dread of change—of irregularity of any sort—was acute, and when the Larkin estate was sold for an old people's rest home, the Wrysons went to the Village Council meeting and demanded to know what sort of old people these old people were going to be. The Wrysons' civic activities were confined to upzoning, but they were very active in this field, and if you were invited to their house for cocktails, the chances were that you would be asked to sign an upzoning petition before you got away. This was something more than a natural desire to preserve the character of the community. They seemed to sense that there was a stranger at the gates—unwashed, tirelessly scheming, foreign, the father of disorderly children who would ruin their rose garden and depreciate their real-estate investment, a man with a beard, a garlic breath, and a book. The Wrysons took no part in the intellectual life of the community. There was hardly a book in their house, and, in a place where even cooks were known to have Picasso reproductions hanging above their washstands, the Wrysons' taste in painting stopped at marine sunsets and bowls of flowers. Donald Wryson was a large man with thinning fair hair and the cheerful air of a bully, but he was a bully only in the defense of rectitude, class distinctions, and the orderly appearance of things. Irene Wryson was not a totally unattractive woman, but she was both shy and contentious, especially contentious on the subject of upzoning. They had one child, a little girl named Dolly, and they lived in a pleasant house on Alewives Lane, and they went in for gardening. This was another way of keeping up the appearance of things, and Donald Wryson was very critical of a neighbor who had ragged syringa bushes and a bare spot on her front lawn. They led a limited social life; they seemed to have no ambitions or needs in this direction, although at Christmas each year they sent out about six hundred cards. The preparation and addressing of these must have occupied their evenings for at least two weeks. Donald had a laugh like a jackass, and people who did not like him were careful not to sit in the same train coach with him. The Wrysons were stiff; they were inflexible. They seemed to experience not distaste but alarm when they found quack grass in their lawn or heard of a contemplated divorce among their neighbors. They were odd, of course. They were not as odd as poor, dizzy Flossie Dolmetch, who was caught forging drug prescriptions and was discovered to have been under the influence of morphine for three years. They were not as odd as Caruthers Mason, with his collection of two thousand lewd photographs, or as odd as Mrs. Temon, who, with those two lovely children in the next room—But why go on? They were odd.

  Irene Wryson's oddness centered on a dream. She dreamed once or twice a month that someone—some enemy or hapless American pilot—had exploded a hydrogen bomb. In the light of day, her dream was inadmissible, for she could not relate it to her garden, her interest in upzoning, or her comfortable way of life. She could not bring herself to tell her husband at breakfast that she had dreamed about the hydrogen bomb. Faced with the pleasant table and its view of the garden—faced even with rain and snow—she could not find it in herself to explain what had troubled her sleep. The dream cost her much in energy and composure, and often left her deeply depressed. Its sequence of events varied, but it usually went like this.

  The dream was set in Shady Hill—she dreamed that she woke in her own bed. Donald was always gone. She was at once aware of the fact that the bomb had exploded. Mattress stuffing and a trickle of brown water were coming through a big hole in the ceiling. The sky was gray—lightless—although there were in the west a few threads of red light, like those charming vapor trails we see in the air after the sun has set. She didn't know if these were vapor trails or some part of that force that would destroy the marrow in her bones. The gray air seemed final. The sky would never shine with light again. From her window she could see a river, and now, as she watched, boats began to come upstream. At first, there were only two or three. Then there were tens, and then there were hundreds. There were outboards, excursion boats, yachts, schooners with auxiliary motors; there were even rowboats. The number of boats grew until the water was covered with them, and the noise of motors rose to a loud din. The jockeying for position in this retreat up the river became aggressive and then savage. She saw men firing pistols at one another, and a rowboat, in which there was a family with little children, smashed and sunk by a cruiser. She cried, in her dream, to see this inhumanity as the world was ending. She cried, and she went on watching, as if some truth was being revealed to her—as if she had always known this to be the human condition, as if she had always known the world to be dangerous and the comforts of her life in Shady Hill to be the merest palliative.

  Then in her dream she turned away from the window and went through the bathroom that connected their room and Dolly's. Her daughter was sleeping sweetly, and she woke her. At this point, her emotions were at their strongest. The force and purity of the love that she felt toward this fragrant child was an agony. She dressed the little girl and put a snowsuit on her and led her into the bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet, the one place in the house that the Wrysons, in their passion for neatness, had not put in order. It was crowded with leftover medicines from Dolly's trifling illnesses—cough syrups, calamine lotion for poison ivy, aspirin, and physics. And the mild perfume of these remnants and the tenderness she had felt for her daughter when she was ill—as if the door of the medicine cabinet had been a window opening onto some dazzling summer of the emotions—made her cry again. Among the bottles was one that said 'Poison," and she reached for this and unscrewed the top, and shook into her left hand a pill for herself and one for the girl. She told the trusting child some gentle lie, and was about to put the pill between her lips when the ceiling of the bathroom collapsed and they stood knee deep in plaster and dirty water. She groped around in the water for the poison, but it was lost, and the dream usually ended in this way. And how could she lean across the breakfast table and explain her pallor to her husky husband with this detailed vision of the end of the world? He would have laughed his jackass laugh.

  DONALD WRYSON'S ODDNESS could be traced easily enough to his childhood. He had been raised in a small town in the Middle West that couldn't have had much to recommend it, and his father, an old-fashioned commercial traveler, with a hothouse rose in his buttonhole and buff-colored spats, had abandoned his wife and his son when the boy was young. Mrs. Wryson had few friends and no family. With her husband gone, she got a job as a clerk in an insurance office, and took up, with her son, a life of unmitigated melancholy and need. She never forgot the horror of her abandonment, and she leaned so heavily for support on her son that she seemed to threaten his animal spirits. Her life was a Calvary, as she often
said, and the most she could do was to keep body and soul together.

  She had been young and fair and happy once, and the only way she had of evoking these lost times was by giving her son baking lessons. When the nights were long and cold and the wind whistled around the four-family house where they lived, she would light a fire in the kitchen range and drop an apple peel onto the stove lid for the fragrance. Then Donald would put on an apron and scurry around, getting out the necessary bowls and pans, measuring out flour and sugar, separating eggs. He learned the contents of every cupboard. He knew where the spices and the sugar were kept, the nutmeats and the citron, and when the work was done, he enjoyed washing the bowls and pans and putting them back where they belonged. Donald loved these hours himself, mostly because they seemed to dispel the oppression that stood unlifted over those years of his mother's life—and was there any reason why a lonely boy should rebel against the feeling of security that he found in the kitchen on a stormy night? She taught him how to make cookies and muffins and banana bread and, finally, a Lady Baltimore cake. It was sometimes after eleven o'clock when their work was done. "We do have a good time together, don't we, son?" Mrs. Wryson would ask. "We have a lovely time together, don't we, you and me? Oh, hear that wind howling! Think of the poor sailors at sea." Then she would embrace him, she would run her fingers through his light hair, and sometimes, although he was much too big, she would draw him onto her lap.

  All of that was long ago. Mrs. Wryson was dead, and when Donald stood at the edge of her grave he had not felt any very great grief. She had been reconciled to dying years before she did die, and her conversation had been full of gallant references to the grave. Years later, when Donald was living alone in New York, he had been overtaken suddenly, one spring evening, by a depression as keen as any in his adolescence. He did not drink, he did not enjoy books or movies or the theatre, and, like his mother, he had few friends. Searching desperately for some way to take himself out of this misery, he hit on the idea of baking a Lady Baltimore cake. He went out and bought the ingredients—deeply ashamed of himself—and sifted the flour and chopped the nuts and citron in the kitchen of the little walk-up apartment where he lived. As he stirred the cake batter, he felt his depression vanish. It was not until he had put the cake in the oven and sat down to wipe his hands on his apron that he realized how successful he had been in summoning the ghost of his mother and the sense of security he had experienced as a child in her kitchen on stormy nights. When the cake was done he iced it, ate a slice, and dumped the rest into the garbage.