The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  "I know what you mean," he said. "I'll ask her."

  BY HIS FIFTH LESSON, the days had grown much shorter and there was no longer any fiery sunset at the foot of Bellevue Avenue to remind him of his high hopes, his longings. He knocked, and stepped into the little house, and noticed at once the smell of cigarette smoke. He took off his hat and coat and went into the living room, but Miss Deming was not on her rubber cushion. He called her, and she answered from the kitchen and opened the door onto a scene that astonished him. Two young men sat at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking beer. Their dark hair gleamed with oil and was swept back in wings. They wore motorcycle boots and red hunting shirts, and their manners seemed developed, to a fine point, for the expression of lawless youth. "We'll be waiting for you, lover," one of them said loudly as she closed the door after her, and as she came toward Seton he saw a look of pleasure on her face—of lightness and self-esteem—fade, and the return of her habitually galled look.

  "My boys," she said, and sighed.

  "Are they neighbors?" Seton asked.

  "Oh, no. They come from New York. They come up and spend the night sometimes. I help them when I can, poor things. They're like sons to me."

  "It must be nice for them," Seton said.

  "Please commence," she said. All the feeling had left her voice.

  "My wife wanted to know if I couldn't have something different—a new piece."

  "They always do," she said wearily.

  "Something a little less repetitious," Seton said.

  "None of the gentlemen who come here have ever complained about my methods. If you're not satisfied, you don't have to come. Of course, Mr. Purvis went too far. Mrs. Purvis is still in the sanatorium, but I don't think the fault is mine. You want to bring her to her knees, don't you? Isn't that what you're here for? Please commence."

  Seton began to play, but with more than his usual clumsiness. The unholy old woman's remarks had stunned him. What had he got into? Was he guilty? Had his instinct to flee when he first entered the house been the one he should have followed? Had he, by condoning the stuffiness of the place, committed himself to some kind of obscenity, some kind of witchcraft? Had he agreed to hold over a lovely woman the subtle threat of madness? The old crone spoke softly now and, he thought, wickedly. "Play the melody lightly, lightly, lightly," she said. "That is how it will do its work."

  He went on playing, borne along on an unthinking devotion to consecutiveness, for if he protested, as he knew he should, he would only authenticate the nightmare. His head and his fingers worked with perfect independence of his feelings, and while one part of him was full of shock, alarm, and self-reproach, his fingers went on producing the insidious melody. From the kitchen he could hear deep laughter, the pouring of beer, the shuffle of motorcycle boots. Perhaps because she wanted to rejoin her friends—her boys—she cut the lesson short, and Seton's relief was euphoric.

  He had to ask himself again and again if she had really said what he thought he heard her say, and it seemed so improbable that he wanted to stop and talk with Jack Thompson about it, until he realized that he could not mention what had happened; he would not be able to put it into words. This darkness where men and women struggled pitilessly for supremacy and withered crones practiced witchcraft was not the world where he made his life. The old lady seemed to inhabit some barrier reef of consciousness, some gray moment after waking that would be demolished by the light of day.

  Jessica was in the living room when he got home, and as he put his music on the rack he saw a look of dread in her face. "Did she give you a piece?" she asked. "Did she give you something besides that drill?"

  "Not this time," he said. "I guess I'm not ready. Perhaps next time.

  "Are you going to practice now?"

  "I might."

  "Oh, not tonight, darling! Please not tonight! Please, please, please not tonight, my love!" and she was on her knees.

  THE RESTORATION of Seton's happiness—and it returned to them both with a rush—left him oddly self-righteous about how it had come about, and when he thought of Miss Deming he thought of her with contempt and disgust. Caught up in a whirl of palatable suppers and lovemaking, he didn't go near the piano. He washed his hands of her methods. He had chosen to forget the whole thing. But when Wednesday night came around again, he got up to go there at the usual time and say goodbye. He could have telephoned her. Jessica was uneasy about his going back, but he explained that it was merely to end the arrangement, and kissed her, and went out.

  It was a dark night. The Turkish shapes of Bellevue Avenue were dimly lighted. Someone was burning leaves. He knocked on Miss Deming's door and stepped into the little hall. The house was dark. The only light came through the windows from the street. "Miss Deming," he called. "Miss Deming?" He called her name three times. The chair beside the piano bench was empty, but he could feel the old lady's touch on everything in the place. She was not there—that is, she did not answer his voice—but she seemed to be standing in the door to the kitchen, standing on the stairs, standing in the dark at the end of the hall; and a light sound he heard from upstairs seemed to be her footfall.

  He went home, and he hadn't been there half an hour when the police came and asked him to come with them. He went outside—he didn't want the children to hear—and he made the natural mistake of protesting, since, after all, was he not a most law-abiding man? Had he not always paid for his morning paper, obeyed the traffic lights, bathed daily, prayed weekly, kept his tax affairs in order, and paid his bills on the tenth of the month? There was not, in the broad landscape of his past, a trace, a hint of illegality. What did the police want with him? They wouldn't say, but they insisted that he come with them, and finally he got into the patrol car with them and drove to the other side of town, across some railroad tracks, to a dead-end place, a dump, where there were some other policemen. It was a scene for violence—bare, ugly, hidden away from any house, and with no one to hear her cries for help. She lay on the crossroads, like a witch. Her neck was broken, and her clothes were still disordered from her struggle with the great powers of death. They asked if he knew her, and he said yes. Had he ever seen any young men around her house, they asked, and he said no. His name and address had been found in a notebook on her desk, and he explained that she had been his piano teacher. They were satisfied with this explanation, and they let him go.

  A WOMAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

  I saw her that spring between the third and fourth races at Campino with the Conte de Capra—the one with the mustache—drinking Campari at that nice easygoing track, with the mountains in the distance and beyond the mountains a mass of cumulus clouds that at home would have meant a tree-splitting thunderstorm by supper but that amounts to nothing over there. I next saw her at the Tennerhof in Kitzbühel, where a Frenchman was singing American cowboy songs to an audience that included the Queen of the Netherlands, but I never saw her in the mountains, and I don't think she skied, but just went there, like so many others, for the crowds and the excitement. Then I saw her at the Lido, and again in Venice late one morning when I was taking a gondola to the station and she was sitting on the terrace of the Gritti, drinking coffee. I saw her at the Passion Play in Erl—not at the Passion Play, actually, but at the inn in the village, where you have lunch during the intermission, and I saw her at the horse show in the Piazza di Siena, and that autumn in Treviso, boarding the plane for London. Blooey.

  But it all might have happened. She was one of those tireless wanderers who go to bed night after night to dream of bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. Although she came from a small lumber-mill town in the north where they manufactured wooden spoons, the kind of lonely place where international society is spawned, this had nothing to do with her wanderings. Her father was the mill agent, and the mill was owned by the Tonkin family—they owned a great deal, they owned whole counties, and their divorce proceedings were followed by the tabloids—and young Marchand Tonkin, learning the business, spent a month there and fe
ll in love with Anne. She was a plain girl with a sweet and modest disposition—qualities that she never lost—and they were married at the end of a year. Though immensely rich, the Tonkins were poor-mouthed, and the young couple lived modestly in a small town near New York where Marchand worked in the family office. They had one child and lived a contented and uneventful life until one humid morning in the seventh year of their marriage.

  Marchand had a meeting in New York, and he had to catch an early train. He planned to have breakfast in the city. It was about seven when he kissed Anne goodbye. She had not dressed and was lying in bed when she heard him grinding the starter on the car that he used to take to the station. Then she heard the front door open and he called up the stairs. The car wouldn't start, and could she drive him to the station in the Buick? There was no time to dress, so she drew a jacket over her shoulders and drove him to the station. What was visible of her was properly clad, but below the jacket her nightgown was transparent. Marchand kissed her goodbye and urged her to get some clothes on, and she drove away from the station, but at the junction of Alewives Lane and Hill Street she ran out of gas.

  She was stopped in front of the Beardens', and they would give her some gasoline, she knew, or at least lend her a coat. She blew the horn and blew it and blew it, until she remembered that the Beardens were in Nassau. All she could do then was to wait in the car, virtually naked, until some friendly housewife came by and offered her help. First, Mary Pym drove by, and although Anne waved to her, she did not seem to notice. Then Julia Weed raced by, rushing Francis to the train, but she was going too fast to notice anything. Then Jack Burden, the village rake, who, without being signaled to or appealed to in any way, seemed drawn magnetically to the car. He stopped and asked if he could help. She got into his car—what else could she do—thinking of Lady Godiva and St. Agnes. The worst of it was that she didn't seem able to wake up—to accomplish the transition between the shades of sleep and the lights of day. And it was a lightless day, close and oppressive, like the climate of a harrowing dream. Their driveway was sheltered from the road by some shrubbery, and when she got out of the car and thanked Jack Burden, he followed her up the steps and took advantage of her in the hallway, where they were discovered by Marchand when he came back to get his briefcase.

  Marchand left the house then, and Anne never saw him again. He died of a heart attack in a New York hotel ten days later. Her parents-in-law sued for the custody of the only child, and during the trial Anne made the mistake, in her innocence, of blaming her malfeasance on the humidity. The tabloids picked this up—"IT WASN'T ME, IT WAS THE HUMIDITY"—and it swept the country. There was a popular song, "Humid Isabella." It seemed that everywhere she went she heard them singing:

  Oh, Humid Isabella

  Never kissed a fellah

  Unless there was moisture in the air,

  But when the skies were cloudy,

  She got very rowdy.

  In the middle of the trial she surrendered her claims, put on smoked glasses, and sailed incognito for Genoa, the outcast of a society that seemed to her to modify its invincible censoriousness only with a ribald sense of humor.

  Of course, she had a boodle—her sufferings were only spiritual—but she had been burned, and her memories were bitter. From what she knew of life she was entitled to forgiveness, but she had received none, and her own country, remembered across the Atlantic, seemed to have passed on her a moral judgment that was unrealistic and savage. She had been made a scapegoat; she had been pilloried; and because she was genuinely pure-hearted she was deeply incensed. She based her expatriation not on cultural but on moral grounds. By impersonating a European she meant to express her disapproval of what had gone on at home. She drifted all over Europe, but she finally bought a villa in Tavola-Calda, and spent at least half the year there. She not only learned Italian, she learned all the grunting noises and hand signals that accompany the language. In the dentist's chair she would say "aiiee" instead of "ouch," and she could wave a hornet away from her wineglass with great finesse. She was proprietary about her expatriation—it was her demesne, achieved through uncommon sorrow—and it irritated her to hear other foreigners speaking the language. Her villa was charming—nightingales sang in the oak trees, fountains played in the garden, and she stood on the highest terrace, her hair dyed the shade of bronze that was fashionable in Rome that year, calling down to her guests, "Bentornati. Quanto piacere!" but the image was never quite right. It seemed like a reproduction, with the slight imperfections that you find in an enlargement—the loss of quality. The sense was that she was not so much here in Italy as that she was no longer there in America.

  She spent much of her time in the company of people who, like herself, claimed to be the victims of an astringent and repressive moral climate. Their hearts were on the shipping lanes, running away from home. She paid for her mobility with some loneliness. The party of friends she was planning to meet in Wiesbaden moved on without leaving an address. She looked for them in Heidelberg and Munich, but she never found them. Wedding invitations and weather reports ("Snow Blankets the Northeast U. S.") made her terribly homesick. She continued to polish her impersonation of a European, and while her accomplishments were admirable, she remained morbidly sensitive to criticism and detested being taken for a tourist. One day at the end of the season in Venice, she took a train south, reaching Rome late on a hot September afternoon. Most of the people of Rome were asleep, and the only sign of life was the tourist buses, grinding tirelessly through the streets like some basic piece of engineering—like the drains or the light conduits. She gave her luggage check to a porter and described her bags to him in fluent Italian, but he seemed to see through her and he mumbled something about the Americans. Oh, there were so many. This irritated her and she snapped at him, "I am not an American."

  "Excuse me, signora," he said. "What, then, is your country?"

  "I am," she said, "a Greek."

  The enormity, the tragedy of her lie staggered her. What have I done? she asked herself wildly. Her passport was as green as grass, and she traveled under the protectorate of the Great Seal of the United States. Why had she lied about such an important part of her identity?

  She took a cab to a hotel on the Via Veneto, sent her bags upstairs, and went into the bar for a drink. There was a single American at the bar—a white-haired man wearing a hearing aid. He was alone, he seemed lonely, and finally he turned to the table where she sat and asked most courteously if she was American.

  "Yes.

  "How come you speak the language?"

  "I live here."

  "Stebbins," he said, "Charlie Stebbins. Philadelphia."

  "How do you do," she said, "Where in Philadelphia?"

  "Well, I was born in Philadelphia," he said, "but I haven't been back in forty years. Shoshone, California's my real home. They call it the gateway to Death Valley. My wife came from London. London, Arkansas. Ha ha. My daughter went to school in six states of the Union. California. Washington. Nevada, North and South Dakota, and Louisiana. Mrs. Stebbins passed away last year, and so I thought I'd see a little of the world."

  The Stars and Stripes seemed to break out in the air above his head, and she realized that in America the leaves were turning.

  "Where have you been?" she asked.

  "You know, it's a funny thing, but I'm not sure myself. This agency in California planned the trip for me, and they told me I'd be traveling with a group of Americans, but as soon as I get on the high seas I find that I'm traveling alone. I'll never do it again. Sometimes there's whole days in which I don't hear any decent American spoken. Why, sometimes I just sit up in my room and talk to myself for the pleasure of hearing American. Why I took a bus from Frankfurt to Munich, and you know there wasn't anybody on that bus who spoke a word of English? Then I took a bus from Munich to Innsbruck, and there wasn't anybody on that bus who spoke English, either. Then I took a bus from Innsbruck to Venice, and there wasn't anybody on that bus who spoke English
, either, until some Americans got on at Cortina. But I don't have any complaints about the hotels. They usually speak English in the hotels, and I've stayed in some very nice ones."

  Sitting on a bar stool in a Roman basement, the stranger seemed to Anne to redeem her country. He seemed to gleam with shyness and honesty. The radio was tuned to the Armed Forces station in Verona, where they were playing a recording of "Star Dust."

  "'Star Dust,'" the stranger said. "But I guess you know. It was written by a friend of mine. Hoagy Carmichael. He makes six, seven thousand dollars a year on royalties from that song alone. He's a good friend of mine. I've never met him, but I've corresponded with him. I guess it must seem funny to you that I have a friend I've never met, but Hoagy's a real friend of mine."

  This statement seemed much more melodic and expressive to Anne than the music. Its juxtaposition, its apparent pointlessness, and the rhythm with which it was spoken seemed to her like the music of her own country, and she remembered walking, as a girl, past the piles of sawdust at the spoon factory to the house of her best friend. If she made the walk in the afternoon, she would sometimes have to wait at the grade crossing for a freight to pass. First there would be a sound in the distance like a cave of winds, and then the iron thunder, the clangor of the wheels. The freights went through there at full speed; they stormed through. But reading the lettering on the cars used to move her; used to remind her not of any glamorous promise at the end of the line but of the breadth and vastness of her own country, as if the states of the Union—wheat states, oil states, coal states, maritime states—were being drawn down the track near where she stood and where she read Southern Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio, Nickel Plate, New York Central, Great Western, Rock Island, Santa Fe, Lackawanna, Pennsylvania, clackety-clack and out of sight.