The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  Will left the next morning for a trip that took him to Cleveland, Chicago, and Topeka. He called Maria on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and the maid said that she was out. She would be putting up the decorations in the club, he realized. The pancakes he ate for breakfast on Thursday disagreed with him at once, and gave him a stomach ache that none of the many medicines he carried with him in his suitcase could cure. Friday was foggy in Kansas, and his plane was grounded until late that night. At the airport, he ate some chicken pie; it made him feel worse. He arrived in New York on Sunday morning, and had to go directly to his office, and did not get out to Shady Hill until late Saturday afternoon. It was the day of the party, and Maria was still at the club. He spent an hour raking dead leaves from the flower beds at the side of the house. When Maria came home, he thought she looked superb. Her color was high and her eyes were bright.

  She showed Will the costume she had rented for him. It was a suit of chain mail with a helmet. Will was pleased with the costume, because it was a disguise. Exhausted and bilious, he felt he needed a disguise for the dance. When he had bathed and shaved, Maria helped him strap himself into his coat of mail. She cut some ostrich plumes off an old hat and stuck them gaily into his helmet. Will went toward a mirror to see himself, but just as he got there, the visor slammed shut, and he couldn't get it to stay open. He went downstairs, holding on to the banister—the chain mail was heavy—and wedged the visor open with a folded timetable and sat down to have a drink. When Maria came down in her pink tights and her gold slippers, Will rose to admire her. She said that she would not be able to leave the dance early, because she was on the committee; if Will wanted to go home, she would get a ride with someone else. He had never gone home from a party without her, and he hated the idea. Maria put on a wrap and kissed the children, and they went off to dinner at the Beardens'.

  At the Beardens', the party was large and late. They drank cocktails until after nine. When they went in to dinner, Will sat beside Ethel Worden. She was a pretty young woman, but she had been drinking Martinis for two hours; her face was drawn and her eyes were red. She said that she loved Will, that she always had, but Will was looking down the table at Maria. Even at that distance, he seemed to take in something vital from the play of shadow upon her face. He would have liked to be near enough to hear what she was saying.

  Ethel Worden didn't make it any easier. "We're poor, Will," she said sadly. "Did you know that we're poor? Nobody realizes that there are people like us in a community like this. We can't afford eggs for breakfast. We can't afford a cleaning woman. We can't afford a washing machine. We can't afford..."

  Before dessert was finished, several couples got up to leave for the club. Will saw Trace Bearden handing Maria her wrap, and got up suddenly. He wanted to get to the club in time to have the first dance with her. When he got outside, Trace and Maria had gone. He asked Ethel Worden to drive over with him. She was delighted. As he put the car in the parking lot at the country club, Ethel began to cry. She was poor and lonely and hungry for love. She drew Will to her and wept on his chain-mail shoulder, while he looked out the back windows of the station wagon to see if he could recognize Trace Bearden's car. He wondered if Maria was already in the clubhouse or if she was having trouble in a parked car herself. He dried Ethel's tears and spoke to her tenderly, and they went in.

  It was late by then—it was after midnight—and that dance was always a rhubarb. The floor was crowded, and plumes, crowns, animal heads, and turbans were rocking in the dim light. It was that hour when the band accelerates its beat, when the drums deepen, when the aging dancers utter loud cries of lust and joy, seize their partners by the girdle, and break into all kinds of youthful and wanton specialties—the shimmy, the Charleston, hops, and belly dances. Will danced clumsily in his mail. Now and then, he glimpsed Maria in the distance, but he was never able to catch up with her. Going into the bar for a drink, he saw her at the other end of the room, but the crowd was too dense for him to get to her. She was surrounded by men. He looked for her in the lounge during the next intermission, but he could not find her. When the music started again, he gave the band ten dollars and asked them to play "I Could Write a Book." It was their music. She would hear it through the bedlam. It would remind her of their marriage, and she would leave her partner and find him. He waited alone at the edge of the floor through this song.

  Discouraged, then, and tired from his traveling and the weight of his chain mail, he went into the lounge, took off his helmet, and fell asleep. When he woke, a half hour later, he saw Larry Helmsford taking Ethel Worden out the terrace door toward the parking lot. She was staggering. Will wandered back to the ballroom, drawn there by shouts of excitement. Someone had set fire to a feathered headdress. The fire was being put out with champagne. It was after three o'clock. Will put on his helmet, propped the visor open with a folded match paper, and went home.

  Maria danced the last dance. She had a drink from the last bottle of wine. It was morning then. The band had gone, but a pianist was still playing and a few couples were dancing in the daylight. Breakfast parties were forming, but she refused these invitations in order to drive home with the Beardens. Will might be worried. After she said goodbye to the Beardens, she stood on her front steps to get some air. She had lost her pocketbook. Her tights had been torn by the scales of a dragon. The smell of spilled wine came from her clothes. The sweetness of the air and the fineness of the light touched her. The party seemed like gibberish. She had had all the partners she wanted, but she had not had all the right ones. The hundreds of apple blossoms that she had tied to branches and that had looked, at a distance, so like real blossoms would soon be swept into the ash can.

  The trees of Shady Hill were filled with birds—larks, thrushes, robins, crows—and now the air began to ring with their song. The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal—some simple way of life, in which she dried her hands on an apron and Will came home from the sea—that she had betrayed. She did not know where she had failed, but the gentle morning light illuminated her failure pitilessly. She began to cry.

  Will was asleep, but he woke when she opened the front door. "Mummy?" he asked as she climbed the stairs. "Mummy?... Hello, Mummy. Good morning!" She didn't reply.

  He saw her tears, the gash in her tights, and the stains on her front. She sat down at her dressing table, laid her face on the glass, and went on crying. "Oh, don't cry, Mummy!" he said. "Don't cry! I don't care, Mummy. I thought I would but I guess it doesn't really matter. I won't ever mention it, Mummy. Now, come to bed. Come to bed and get some sleep."

  Her sobbing got louder. He got up and went to the dressing table and put his arms around her. "I told you what would happen if you wore that costume, didn't I? But it doesn't matter any more. I'll never ask you anything about it. I'll forget the whole thing. But come to bed now and get some sleep."

  Her head was swimming, and his voice droned on and on, shutting out the noises of the morning. Then his anxious love, his nagging passion, were more than she could support. "I don't care. I'm willing to forget it," he said.

  She got out of his embrace, crossed the room to the hall, and shut the guest-room door in his face.

  Downstairs, sitting over a cup of coffee, Will realized that his supervision of Maria's life had been anything but thorough. If she had wanted to deceive him, her life couldn't have been planned along more convenient lines. In the summer, she was alone most of the time, except weekends. He was away on business one week out of every month. She went to New York whenever she pleased—sometimes in the evening. Only a week before the dance she had gone into town to have dinner with some old friends. She had planned to come home on a train that reached Shady Hill at eleven. Will drove to the station to meet her. It was a rainy night and he remembered waiting, in a rather gloomy frame of mind, on the station platform. As soon as he saw the distant lights of the train, his mood was changed by the anticipation of greeting her and taking her home. When the train stopped
and only Charlie Curtin—half tipsy—got off, Will was disappointed and worried. Soon after he got home, the telephone rang. It was Maria calling to say that she had missed the train and would not be home until two. At two, Will returned to the station. It was still rainy. Maria and Henry Bulstrode were the only passengers. She walked swiftly up the platform in the rain to kiss Will. He remembered that there had been tears in her eyes, but he had not thought anything about it at the time. Now he wondered about her tears.

  A few nights before that, she had said, after dinner, that she wanted to go to the movies in the village. Will had offered to take her, although he was tired, but she said she knew how much he disliked movies. It had seemed odd to him at the time that before going off to the nine-o'clock show she should take a bath, and when she came downstairs, he heard, under her mink coat, the rustling of a new dress. He fell asleep before she returned, and for all he knew, she might have come in at dawn. It had always seemed generous of her not to insist on his going with her to meetings of the Civic Improvement Association, but how did he know whether she had gone off to discuss the fluorination of water or to meet a lover?

  He remembered something that had happened in February. The Women's Club had given a revue for charity. He had known before he went to it that Maria was going to do a dance expressing the view of the Current Events Committee on the tariff. She came onto the stage to the music of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." She wore a long evening dress, gloves, and a fur piece—the recognizable getup of a striptease artist—and, to his dismay, she was given a rousing reception. Maria walked around the stage and took off her fur piece, to applause, shouts, and some whistling. During the next chorus, she peeled off her gloves. Will pretended to be enjoying himself, but he had begun to sweat. With the third chorus, she took off her belt. This was all, but the uproarious applause she had been given rang again in Will's ears now and made them warm.

  A few weeks earlier, Will had gone uptown for lunch—a thing he seldom did. Walking down Madison Avenue, he thought he saw Maria ahead of him, with another man. The dark-red suit, the fur piece, and the hat were hers. He did not recognize the man. Acting impulsively where he might have acted stealthily, he had shouted her name—"Maria! Maria! Maria!" The street was crowded, and there was the distance of half a block between them. Before he could reach the woman, she had disappeared. She might have stepped into a taxi or a store. That evening, when he said to Maria, cheerfully enough, that he thought he saw her on Madison Avenue, she answered crossly, "Well, you didn't." After dinner, she claimed to have a headache. She asked him to sleep in the guest room.

  The afternoon of the day after the dance, Will took the children for a walk without Maria. He lectured them, as he always did, on the names of the trees. "That's a ginkgo... That's a weeping beech. That bitter smell comes from the boxwood in the hollow." It may have been because he had received no education himself that he liked to give an educational tone to his time with the children. They recited the states of the Union at the lunch table, discussed geology during some of their walks, and named the stars in the sky if they stayed out after dusk. Will was determined to be cheerful this afternoon, but the figures of his children, walking ahead, saddened him, for they seemed like live symbols of his trouble. He had not actually thought of leaving Maria—he had not let the idea form—but he seemed to breathe the atmosphere of separation. When he passed the tree where he had carved their initials, he thought of the stupendous wickedness of the world.

  The house was dark when they came back up the driveway at the end of their walk—dark and cold. Will turned on some lights and heated the coffee he had made at breakfast. The telephone rang, but he did not answer it. He took a cup of coffee up to the guest room, where Maria was. He thought at first she was still sleeping. When he turned on the light, he saw that she was sitting against the pillows. She smiled, but he responded warily to her charm.

  "Here's some coffee, Mummy."

  "Thank you. Did you have a nice walk?"

  "Yes."

  "I feel better," she said. "What time is it?"

  "Half past five."

  "I don't feel strong enough to go to the Townsends'."

  "Then I won't go."

  "Oh, I wish you would, Willy. Please go to the party and come home and tell me all about it. Please go."

  Now that she urged him, the party seemed like a good idea.

  "You must go, Will," Maria said. "There'll be a lot of gossip about the dance, and you can hear it all, and then you can come home and tell me all about it. Please go to the party, darling. It will make me feel guilty if you stay home on my account."

  At the Townsends', cars were parked on both sides of the street, and all the windows of the big house were brightly lighted. Will stepped in the lamplight, the firelight, and the cheerful human noises of the gathering with a sincere desire to lose his heaviness of spirit. He went upstairs to leave his coat. Bridget, an old Irishwoman, took it. She was a free-lance maid who worked at most of the big parties in Shady Hill. Her husband was caretaker at the country club. "So your lady isn't with you," she said in her sweet brogue. "Ah, well, I can't say that I blame her." Then she laughed suddenly. She put her hands on her knees and rocked back and forth. "I shouldn't tell you, I know, so help me God, but when Mike was sweeping up the parking lot this morning, he found a pair of gold slippers and a blue lace girdle."

  Downstairs, Will spoke with his hostess, and she said she was so sorry that Maria hadn't come. Crossing the living room, he was stopped by Pete Parsons, who drew him over to the fireplace and told him a joke. This was what Will had come for, and his spirits began to improve. But, going from Pete Parsons toward the door of the bar, he found his way blocked by Buff Worden. Ethel's story of their neediness, her tears, and her trip to the parking lot with Larry Helmsford were still fresh in his mind. He did not want to see Buff Worden. He did not like it that Buff could muster a cheerful and open face after his wife had been seduced in the Helmsfords' station wagon.

  "Did you hear what Mike Reilly found in the parking lot this morning?" Buff asked. "A pair of slippers and a girdle." Will said that he wanted a drink, and he got past Buff, but the entrance to the passage between the living room and the bar was blocked by the Chesneys.

  In almost every suburb there is a charming young couple designated by their gifts to be an ambassadorial pair. They are the ones who meet John Mason Brown at the train and drive him to the auditorium. They are the ones who organize the bumper tennis tournaments, handle the most difficult cases in the fund-raising campaign, and can be counted on by their hostesses to humor the bore, pass the stuffed celery, breathe fire into the dying conversation, and expel the drunk. Their social and family connections are indescribably rich and varied, and physically they are models of attractiveness and fashion—direct, mild, well groomed, their eyes twinkling with trust and friendliness. Such a young couple were the Chesneys.

  "So glad to see you," Mark Chesney said, removing his pipe from his mouth and putting a hand on Will's shoulder. "Missed you at the dance last night, although I saw Maria enjoying herself. But what I wanted to speak to you about is something of a higher order. Give me a minute? As you may or may not know, I'm in charge of the adult-education program at the high school this year. We've had a disappointing attendance, and we have a speaker coming on Thursday for whom I'm anxious to rustle up a sizable audience. Her name is Mary Bickwald, and she's going to speak on marriage problems—extramarital affairs, that sort of thing. If you and Maria are free on Thursday, I think you'll find it worth your time." The Chesneys went on into the living room, and Will continued toward the bar.

  The bar was full of a noisy and pleasant company, and Will was glad to join it and get a drink. He had begun to feel like himself when the rector of Christ Church bore down on him, shook his hand, and drew him away from the others.

  The rector was a large man and, unlike some of his suburban colleagues, not at all wary of clerical black. When he and Will met at cocktail parties, they usu
ally talked about blankets. Will had given many blankets to the church. He had given blankets to its missions and blankets to its shelters. When the shepherds knelt in the straw at Mary's knees in the Nativity play, they were clothed in Will's blankets. Since he expected to be asked for blankets, he was surprised to hear the rector say, "I want you to feel free to come to my study, Will, and talk to me if anything is troubling you." While Will was thanking the rector for this invitation, they were joined by Herbert McGrath.

  Herbert McGrath was a banker, a wealthy, irritable man. At the bottom of his thinking there seemed to be an apprehension—a nightmare—that without the kind of order he represented, the world would fly apart. He despised men who raced to catch the morning train. In the "no smoking" car, it was customary for people to light cigarettes as the train approached Grand Central Station, and this infringement so irritated Herbert that he would tap his neighbors on the shoulder and tell them that the smoker was in the rear. Mixed with his insistence on propriety was a curious strain of superstition. When he walked along the station platform in the morning, he looked around him. If he saw a coin, he would shoulder his way past the other commuters and bend down to get it. "Good luck, you know," he would explain as he put the coin in his pocket. "You need both luck and brains." Now he wanted to talk about the immorality at the party, and Will decided to go home.

  He put his glass on the bar and started thoughtfully through the passage to the living room. His head was down, and he walked straight into Mrs. Walpole, a very plain woman. "I see that your wife hasn't recovered sufficiently to face the public today," she said gaily.

  A peculiar fate seems to overtake homely women at the ends of parties—and journeys, too. Their curls and their ribbons come undone, particles of food cling to their teeth, their glasses steam, and the wide smile with which they planned to charm the world lapses into a look of habitual discontent and bitterness. Mrs. Walpole had got herself up bravely for the Townsends' party, but time itself—she was drinking sherry—had destroyed the impression she intended to make. Someone seemed to have sat on her hat, her voice was strident, and the camellia pinned to her shoulder had died, "But I suppose Maria sent you to see what they're saying about her," she said.