The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  Will got past Mrs. Walpole and went up the stairs to get his coat. Bridget had gone, and Helen Bulstrode was sitting alone in the hall in a red dress. Helen was a lush. She was treated kindly in Shady Hill. Her husband was pleasant, wealthy, and forbearing. Now Helen was very drunk, and whatever she had meant to forget when she first poured herself a drink that day had long since been lost in the clutter. She rolled a little in her chair while Will was putting on his coat, and suddenly she addressed him copiously in French. Will did not understand. Her voice got louder and angrier, and when he got down to the hall, she went to the head of the stairs to call after him. He went off without saying goodbye to anyone.

  Maria was in the living room reading a magazine when Will came in. "Look, Mummy," he said. "Can you tell me this? Did you lose your shoes last night?"

  "I lost my pocketbook," Maria said, "but I don't think I lost my shoes."

  "Try and remember," he said. "It isn't like a raincoat or an umbrella. People usually remember when they lose their shoes."

  "What is the matter with you, Willy?"

  "Did you lose your shoes?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you wear a girdle?"

  "What are you talking about, Will?"

  "By Christ, I've got to find out!"

  He went upstairs to their room, which was dark. He turned on a light in her closet and opened the chest where she kept her shoes. There were a great many pairs, and among them were gold shoes, silver shoes, bronze shoes, and he was shuffling through the collection when he saw Maria standing in the doorway. "Oh, my God, Mummy, forgive me!" he said. "Forgive me!"

  "Oh, Willie!" she exclaimed. "Look what you've done to my shoes."

  Will felt all right in the morning, and he had a good day in the city. At five, he made the trip uptown on the subway and crossed the station to his train automatically. In the train, he got an aisle seat and scanned the asininities in the evening paper. An old man was suing his young wife for divorce, on the ground of adultery; the fact that this story had no power to disturb Will not only pleased him but left him feeling exceptionally fit and happy. The train traveled north under a sky that was still spread with light.

  A little rain had begun to fall when Will stepped onto the platform at Shady Hill. "Hello, Trace," he said. "Hello, Pete. Hello, Herb." Around him, his neighbors were greeting their wives and children. He took the route up Alewives Lane to Shadrock Road, past rows and rows of lighted houses. He put his car in the garage and went around to the front and looked at his tulips, gleaming in the rain and the porch light. He let the fawning cat in out of the wet, and Flora, his youngest daughter, ran through the hall to kiss him. Some deep recess in his spirit seemed to respond to the good child and the light-filled rooms. He had the feeling that there would never be any less to his life than this. Presently, he would be sitting on a folding chair in the June sunlight watching Flora graduate from Smith.

  Maria came into the hall wearing a gray silk dress—a cloth and a color that flattered her. Her eyes were bright and wide, and she kissed him tenderly. The telephone began to ring, for it was that hour in the suburbs when the telephone rings steadily with board-meeting announcements, scraps of gossip, fund-raising pleas, and invitations. Maria answered it and he heard her say, "Yes, Edith."

  Will went into the living room to make a cocktail, and a few minutes later the doorbell rang. Edith Hastings, a good neighbor and a friendly woman, preceded Maria into the living room, protesting, "I really shouldn't break in on you like this." Still protesting, she sat down and took the glass that Will handed her. He had never seen her color so high or her eyes so bright. "Charlie's in Oregon," she said. "He'll be gone three weeks this trip. He wanted me to speak to you, Will, about some apple trees. He meant to speak to you before he left, but he didn't have the time. He can get apple trees by the dozen from a nursery in New Jersey, and he wanted to know if you wouldn't like to buy six."

  Edith Hastings was one of those women—and there were many of them in Shady Hill—whose husbands were away on business from one to three weeks out of every month. They lived—conjugally—the life of a Grand Banks fisherman's wife, with none of the lore of ships and sailors to draw on. None—or almost none—of these widows could be accused of not having attacked their problems gallantly. They solicited funds for cancer, heart trouble, lameness, deafness, and mental health. They cultivated tropical plants in a capricious climate, wove cloth, made pottery, cared tenderly for their children, and did everything imaginable to make up for the irremediable absence of their men. They remained lonely women with a natural proneness to gossip.

  "But of course you don't have to decide this minute," Edith went on when he didn't answer her question. "I don't suppose you really have to decide until Charlie comes back from Oregon. I mean, there isn't any special time for planting apple trees, is there? And, speaking of apple trees, how was the fete?"

  Will turned his back and opened a window. Outside, the rain fell steadily, but he doubted then that it was the rain that had heightened Edith's color and made her eyes shine. He heard Maria reply, and then he heard Edith ask, "When did you people leave?" She could not keep the excitement out of her voice. "And I understand that a pair of slippers and a girdle..." Will swung around. "Is that what you came here to talk about?" he asked sharply.

  "What?"

  "Is that what you came here to talk about?"

  "I really came here to talk about apple trees."

  "I gave Charlie a check for those apple trees six months ago."

  "Charlie didn't tell me."

  "Why should he? It was all settled."

  "Well, I guess I'd better go."

  "Please do," Will said. "Please go. And if anyone asks how we are, tell them we're getting along fine."

  "Oh, Will, Will, Will!" Maria said.

  "I seem to have come at the wrong time," Edith said.

  "And when you call the Trenchers and the Farquarsons and the Abbotts and the Beardens, tell them that I don't give a good goddamn what happened at the party. Tell them to think up some gossip about someone else. Tell them to imagine some filth about the Fuller Brush man or the chump who delivers eggs on Friday or the Slaters' gardener, but tell them to leave us alone."

  She was gone. Maria, crying, looked at him so wantonly that he nearly choked. Then she climbed the stairs in her gray silk dress and shut the door to their room. He followed her and found her lying on their bed in the dark. "Who was it, Mummy?" he asked. "Just tell me who it was and I'll forget about it."

  "It wasn't anybody," she said. "There wasn't anybody."

  "Now, Mummy," he said heavily. "I know better than that. I don't want to reproach you. That isn't why I ask, I just want to know so I can forget about it."

  "Please let me alone!" she cried. "Please let me alone for a little while."

  Waking at dawn in the guest room, Will saw the whole thing clearly. He was astonished to realize how the strength of his feeling had obstructed his vision. The villain was Henry Bulstrode. It was Henry who had been with her on the train when she returned that rainy night at two. It was Henry who had whistled when she did her dance at the Women's Club. It was Henry's head and shoulders he had seen on Madison Avenue when he recognized Maria ahead of him. And now he remembered poor Helen Bulstrode's haggard face at the Townsends' party—the face of a woman who was married to a libertine. It was her husband's unregeneracy that she had been trying to forget. The spate of drunken French she had aimed at him must have been about Maria and Henry. Henry Bulstrode's face, grinning with naked and lascivious mockery, appeared in the middle of the guest room. There was only one thing to do.

  Will bathed, dressed, and ate his breakfast. Maria slept on. It was still early when he finished his coffee, and he decided to walk to the train. He strode down Shadrock Road with the peculiar briskness of the aging. Only a few people had gathered on the platform for the eight-nineteen when he reached the station. Trace Bearden joined him, and then Buff Worden. And then Henry Bulstrode stepped o
ut of the waiting room, showed his white teeth in a smile, and frowned at his newspaper. Without any warning at all, Will walked over to him and knocked him down. Women screamed, and the scuffle that followed was very confusing. Herbert McGrath, who had missed the action, assumed that Henry had started it and stood over him saying, "No more of this, young man! No more of this!" Trace and Buff pinned Will's arms to his sides and quick-stepped him down to the far end of the platform, asking, "You crazy, Will? Have you gone crazy?" Then the eight-nineteen came around the bend, the fracas was suspended by the search for seats, and when the station-master rushed out onto the platform to see what was happening, the train had departed and they were all gone.

  The amazing thing was how well Will felt when he boarded the train. Now his fruitful life with Maria would be resumed. They would walk on Sunday afternoons again, and play word games by the open fire again, and weed the roses again, and love one another under the sounds of the rain again, and hear the singing of the crows; and he would buy her a present that afternoon as a signal of love and forgiveness. He would buy her pearls or gold or sapphires—something expensive; emeralds maybe; something no young man could afford.

  BRIMMER

  No one is interested in a character like Brimmer because the facts are indecent and obscene; but come then out of the museums, gardens, and ruins where obscene facts are as numerous as daisies in Nantucket. In the dense population of statuary around the Mediterranean shores there are more satyrs than there are gods and heroes. Their general undesirability in organized society only seems to have whetted their aggressiveness and they are everywhere; they are in Paestum and Syracuse and in the rainy courts and porches north of Florence. They are even in the gardens of the American Embassy. I don't mean those pretty boys with long ears—although Brimmer may have been one of those in the beginning. I mean the older satyrs with lined faces and conspicuous tails. They always carry grapes or pipes, and the heads are up and back in attitudes of glee. Aside from the long ears, the faces are never animal—these are the faces of men, sometimes comely and youthful, but advanced age does not change in any way the lively cant of the head and the look of lewd glee.

  I speak of a friend, an acquaintance anyhow—a shipboard acquaintance on a rough crossing from New York to Naples. These were his attitudes in the bar where I mostly saw him. His eyes had a pale, horizontal pupil like a goat's eye. Laughing eyes, you might have said, although they were sometimes very glassy. As for the pipes, he played, so far as I know, no musical instrument; but the grapes could be accounted for by the fact that he almost always had a glass in his hand. Many of the satyrs stand on one leg with the other crossed over in front—toe down, heel up—and that's the way he stood at the bar, his legs crossed, his head up in that look of permanent glee, and the grapes, so to speak, in his right hand. He was lively—witty and courteous and shrewd—but had he been much less I would have been forced to drink and talk with him anyhow. Excepting Mme. Troyan, there was no one else on board I would talk with.

  How dull travel really is! How, at noon, when the whistle sounds and the band plays and the confetti has been thrown, we seem to have been deceived into joining something that subsists upon the patronage of the lonely and the lost—the emotionally second-rate of all kinds. The whistle blows again. The gangways and the lines are cleared and the ship begins to move. We see the faces of our dearly beloved friends and relations rubbed out by distance, and going over to the port deck to make a profoundly emotional farewell to the New York skyline we find the buildings hidden in rain. Then the chimes sound and we go below to eat a heavy lunch. Obsolescence might explain that chilling unease we experience when we observe the elegance of the lounges and the wilderness of the sea. What will we do between now and tea? Between tea and dinner? Between dinner and the horse races? What will we do between here and landfall?

  She was the oldest ship of the line and was making that April her last Atlantic crossing. Many seasoned travelers came down to say goodbye to her famous interiors and to filch an ashtray or two, but they were sentimentalists to a man, and when the go-ashore was sounded they all went ashore, leaving the rest of us, so to speak, alone. It was a cheerless, rainy midday with a swell in the channel and, beyond the channel, gale winds and high seas. Her obsolescence you could see at once was more than a matter of marble fireplaces and grand pianos. She was a tub. It was not possible to sleep on the first night out, and going up on deck in the morning I saw that one of the lifeboats had been damaged in the gale. Below me, in second class, some undiscourageable travelers were trying to play Ping-Pong in the rain. It was a bleak scene to look at and a hopeless prospect for the players and they finally gave up. A few minutes later a miscalculation of the helmsman sent a wall of water up the side of the ship and filled the stern deck with a boiling sea. Up swam the Ping-Pong table and; as I watched, it glided overboard and could be seen bobbing astern in the wake, a reminder of how mysterious the world must seem to a man lost overboard.

  Below, all the portable furniture had been corralled and roped together as if this place were for sale. Ropes were strung along all the passageways, and all the potted palm trees had been put into some kind of brig. It was hot—terribly hot and humid—and the elegant lounges, literally abandoned and very much abandoned in their atmosphere, seemed to be made, if possible, even more forlorn by the continuous music of the ship's orchestra. They began to play that morning and they played for the rest of the voyage and they played for no one. They played day and night to those empty rooms where the chairs were screwed to the floor. They played opera. They played old dance music. They played selections from Show Boat. Above the crashing of the mountainous seas there was always this wild, tiresome music in the air. And there was really nothing to do. You couldn't write letters, everything tipped so; and if you sat in a chair to read, it would withdraw itself from you and then rush up to press itself against you like some apple-tree swing. You couldn't play cards, you couldn't play chess, you couldn't even play Scrabble. The grayness, the thinly jubilant and continuous music, and the roped-up furniture all made it seem like an unhappy dream, and I wandered around like a dreamer until twelve-thirty, when I went into the bar. The regulars in the bar then were a Southern family—Mother, Father, Sister, and Brother. They were going abroad for a year. Father had retired and this was their first trip. There were also a couple of women whom the bartender identified as a "Roman businesswoman" and her secretary. And there was Brimmer, myself, and presently Mme. Troyan. I had drinks with Brimmer on the second day out. He was a man of about my age, I should say, slender, with well-kept hands that were, for some reason, noticeable, and a light but never monotonous voice and a charming sense of urgency—liveliness—that seemed to have nothing to do with nervousness. We had lunch and dinner together and drank in the bar after dinner. We knew the same places, but none of the same people, and yet he seemed to be an excellent companion. When we went below—he had the cabin next to mine—I was contented to have found someone I could talk with for the next ten days.

  Brimmer was in the bar the next day at noon, and while we were there Mme. Troyan looked in. Brimmer invited her to join us and she did. At my ripe age, Mme. Troyan's age meant nothing. A younger man might have placed her in her middle thirties and might have noticed that the lines around her eyes were ineradicable. For me these lines meant only a proven capacity for wit and passion. She was a charming woman who did not mean to be described. Her dark hair, her pallor, her fine arms, her vivacity, her sadness when the bartender told us about his sick son in Genoa, her impersonations of the captain—the impression of a lovely and a brilliant woman who was accustomed to seeming delightful was not the listed sum of her charms.

  We three had lunch and dinner together and danced in the ballroom after dinner—we were the only dancers—but when the music stopped and Brimmer and Mme. Troyan started back to the bar I excused myself and went down to bed. I was pleased with the evening and when I closed my cabin door I thought how pleasant it would have been to have Mm
e. Troyan's company. This was, of course, impossible, but the memory of her dark hair and her white arms was still strong and cheering when I turned out the light and got into bed. While I waited patiently for sleep it was revealed to me that Mme. Troyan was in Brimmer's cabin.

  I was indignant. She had told me that she had a husband and three children in Paris—and what, I thought, about them? She and Brimmer had only met by chance that morning and what carnal anarchy would crack the world if all such chance meetings were consummated! If they had waited a day or two—long enough to give at least the appearance of founding their affair on some romantic or sentimental basis—I think I would have found it more acceptable. To act so quickly seemed to me skeptical and depraved. Listening to the noise of the ship's motors and the faint sounds of tenderness next door, I realized that I had left my way of life a thousand knots astern and that there is no inclination to internationalism in my disposition. They were both, in a sense, Europeans.

  But the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man's nature, and the importance of love. When I had picked up my possessions and repaired my appearance, I fell asleep.

  It was dark and rainy in the morning—now the wind was cold—and I walked around the upper deck, four laps to the mile, and saw no one. The immorality next door would have changed my relationship to Brimmer and Mme. Troyan, but I had no choice but to look forward to meeting them in the bar at noon. I had no resources to enliven a deserted ship and a stormy sea. My depraved acquaintances were in the bar when I went there at half past twelve, and they had ordered a drink for me. I was content to be with them and thought perhaps they regretted what they had done. We lunched together, amiably, but when I suggested that we find a fourth and play some bridge Brimmer said that he had to send some cables and Mme. Troyan wanted to rest. There was no one in the lounges or on the decks after lunch, and when the orchestra began, dismally, to tune up for their afternoon concert, I went down to my cabin, where I discovered that Brimmer's cables and Mme. Troyan's rest were both fabrications, meant, I suppose, to deceive me. She was in his cabin again. I went up and took a long walk around the deck with an Episcopalian clergyman. I found him to be a most interesting man, but he did not change the subject, since he was taking a vacation from a parish where alcoholism and morbid promiscuity were commonplace. I later had a drink with the clergyman in the bar, but Brimmer and Mme. Troyan didn't show up for dinner.