The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  Louise remained in the bar with the Beardens. “Poor Cash is tight,” she said. And then, “He told me this afternoon that he was going to paint the storm windows,” she said. “Well, he mixed the paint and washed the brushes and put on some old fatigues and went into the cellar. There was a telephone call for him at around five, and when I went down to tell him, do you know what he was doing? He was just sitting there in the dark with a cocktail shaker. He hadn’t touched the storm windows. He was just sitting there in the dark, drinking Martinis.”

  “Poor Cash,” Trace said.

  “You ought to get a job,” Lucy said. “That would give you emotional and financial independence.” As she spoke, they all heard the noise of furniture being moved around in the lounge.

  “Oh, my God!” Louise said. “He’s going to run the race. Stop him, Trace, stop him! He’ll hurt himself. He’ll kill himself!”

  They all went to the door of the lounge. Louise again asked Trace to interfere, but she could see by Cash’s face that he was way beyond remonstrating with. A few couples left the dance floor and stood watching the preparations. Trace didn’t try to stop Cash—he helped him. There was no pistol, so he slammed a couple of books together for the start.

  Over the sofa went Cash, over the coffee table, the lamp table, the fire screen, and the hassock. All his grace and strength seemed to have returned to him. He cleared the big sofa at the end of the room and instead of stopping there, he turned and started back over the course. His face was strained. His mouth hung open. The tendons of his neck protruded hideously. He made the hassock, the fire screen, the lamp table, and the coffee table. People held their breath when he approached the final sofa, but he cleared it and landed on his feet. There was some applause. Then he groaned and fell. Louise ran to his side. His clothes were soaked with sweat and he gasped for breath. She knelt down beside him and took his head in her lap and stroked his thin hair.

  CASH had a terrible hangover on Sunday, and Louise let him sleep until it was nearly time for church. The family went off to Christ Church together at eleven, as they always did. Cash sang, prayed, and got to his knees, but the most he ever felt in church was that he stood outside the realm of God’s infinite mercy, and, to tell the truth, he no more believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost than does my bull terrier. They returned home at one to eat the overcooked meat and stony potatoes that were their customary Sunday lunch. At around five, the Parminters called up and asked them over for a drink. Louise didn’t want to go, so Cash went alone. (Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale cocktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those post-mortems and pickup suppers!) It was sultry and overcast. The dog days were beginning. He drank gin with the Parminters for an hour or two and then went over to the Townsends’ for a drink. The Farquarsons called up the Townsends and asked them to come over and bring Cash with them, and at the Farquarsons’ they had some more drinks and ate the leftover party food. The Farquarsons were glad to see that Cash seemed like himself again. It was half past ten or eleven when he got home. Louise was upstairs, cutting out of the current copy of Life those scenes of mayhem, disaster, and violent death that she felt might corrupt her children. She always did this. Cash came upstairs and spoke to her and then went down again. In a little while, she heard him moving the living-room furniture around. Then he called to her, and when she went down, he was standing at the foot of the stairs in his stocking feet, holding the pistol out to her. She had never fired it before, and the directions he gave her were not much help.

  “Hurry up,” he said, “I can’t wait all night.”

  He had forgotten to tell her about the safety, and when she pulled the trigger nothing happened.

  “It’s that little lever,” he said. “Press that little lever.” Then, in his impatience, he hurdled the sofa anyhow.

  The pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead.

  THE DAY THE PIG FELL INTO THE WELL

  In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” Then, as if the opening note of a sextet had been sounded, the others would all rush in to take their familiar parts, like those families who sing Gilbert and Sullivan, and the recital would go on for an hour or more. The perfect days—and there had been hundreds of them—seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.

  The famous pig had belonged to Randy Nudd. He had won it at the fair in Lanchester and brought it home, and he was planning to build a pen for it, but Pamela Blaisdell telephoned, and he put the pig in the tool shed and drove over to the Blaisdell place in the old Cadillac. Russell Young was playing tennis with Esther Nudd. An Irishwoman named Nora Quinn was the cook that year. Mrs. Nudd’s sister, Aunt Martha, had gone to the village of Macabit to get some cuttings from a friend, and Mr. Nudd was planning to take the launch across to Polett’s Landing and bring her back after lunch. A Miss Coolidge was expected for dinner and the weekend. Mrs. Nudd had known her at school in Switzerland thirty years earlier. Miss Coolidge had written Mrs. Nudd to say that she was staying with friends in Glens Falls and could she pay a visit to her old schoolmate? Mrs. Nudd hardly remembered her and did not care about seeing her at all, but she wrote and asked her for the weekend. Though it was the middle of July, from daybreak a blustering northwest wind had been upsetting everything in the house and roaring in the trees like a storm. When you got out of the wind, if you could, the sun was hot.

  In these events of the day the pig fell into the well, there was one other principal who was not a member of the family—Russell Young. Russell’s father owned the hardware store in Macabit, and the Youngs were a respected native family. Mrs. Young worked as a cleaning woman for a month each spring, opening the summer houses, but her position was not menial. Russell met the Nudds through the boys—Hartley and Randall—and when he was quite young, he began to spend a lot of time at their camp. He was a year or two older than the Nudd boys, and in a way Mrs. Nudd entrusted the care of her sons to him. Russell was the same age as Esther Nudd and a year younger than Joan. Esther Nudd, at the beginning of this friendship, was a very fat girl. Joan was pretty and spent most of her time in front of the mirror. Esther and Joan adored Randy and gave him money from their allowances to buy paint for his boat, but otherwise there was not much rapport between the sexes. Hartley Nudd was disgusted with his sisters. “I saw Esther yesterday in the bathhouse, naked,” he would tell anyone, “and she’s got these big rolls of fat around her stomach like I don’t know what. She’s an awful-looking thing. And Joan is dirty. You ought to see her room. I don’t see why anyone wants to take a dirty person like that to a dance.”

  But they were all much older than this on the day they liked to remember. Russell had graduated from the local high school and gone off to college in Albany, and in the summer of his freshman year he had worked for the Nudds, doing odd jobs around the place. The fact that he was paid a salary did not change his relationship to the family, and he remained good friends with Randall and Hartley. In a way, Russell’s character and background seemed to be the dominant ones, and the Nudd boys returned to New York imitating his north-country accent. On the other hand, Russell went with the children on all their picnics to Hewitt’s Point, he climbed the mountains and went fishing with them, he went to the square dances at the Town Hall with them, and in doing these things he learned from the Nudds an interpretation of the summer months that he would not have known as a native. He had no misgivings about so ingenuous and pleasing an influence, and he drove with the Nudds over the mountain roads in the old Cadillac, and shared with them the feeling that the clear light of July and August was imparting something rare to all their minds and careers. If the Nudds never referred to the difference between Russell’s so
cial position and theirs, it was because the very real barriers that they otherwise observed had been let down for the summer months—because the country, with the sky pouring its glare over the mountains onto the lake, seemed a seasonal paradise in which the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, lived together peaceably.

  THE SUMMER the pig fell into the well was also Esther’s tennis summer and the summer that she became so thin. Esther had been very fat when she entered college, but during her freshman year she had begun the arduous—and, in her case, successful—struggle to put on a new appearance and a new personality. She went on a strict diet, and played twelve and fourteen sets of tennis a day, and her chaste, athletic, and earnest manner never relaxed. Russell was her tennis partner that summer. Mrs. Nudd had offered Russell a job again that summer, but instead he had taken a job with a dairy farmer, delivering milk. The Nudds supposed that he wanted to be independent, and they understood, for they all had Russell’s best interests at heart. They took a familial pride in the fact that he had finished his sophomore year on the Dean’s list. As it turned out, the job with the dairy farmer changed nothing. Russell was finished with his milk route at ten in the morning, and he spent most of the summer playing tennis with Esther. He often stayed to supper.

  They were playing tennis that afternoon when Nora came running through the garden and told them that the pig had got out of the tool house and fallen into the well. Someone had left the door of the well shed open. Russell and Esther went over to the well and found the animal swimming in six feet of water. Russell made a slipknot in a clothesline and began fishing for the pig. In the meantime, Mrs. Nudd was waiting for Miss Coolidge to arrive, and Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha were coming back from Polett’s Landing in the launch. There were high waves on the lake, and the boat rolled, and some sediment was dislodged from the gas tank and plugged the feed line. The wind blew the disabled boat onto Gull Rock and put a hole in her bow. Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha put on life jackets and swam the twenty yards or so to shore.

  MR. NUDD’S part in the narration was restrained (Aunt Martha was dead), and he did not join in until he was asked. “Was Aunt Martha really praying?” Joan would ask, and he would clear his throat to say—his manner was extremely dry and deliberate—“She was indeed, Joany. She was saying the Lord’s Prayer. She had never, up until then, been a notably religious woman, but I’m sure that she could be heard praying from the shore.”

  “Was Aunt Martha really wearing corsets?” Joan would ask.

  “Well, I should say so, Joany,” Mr. Nudd would reply. ‘When she and I came up onto the porch where your mother and Miss Coolidge were having their tea, the water was still pouring from our clothes in bucketfuls, and Aunt Martha had on very little that couldn’t be seen.”

  Mr. Nudd had inherited from his father a wool concern, and he always wore a full woolen suit, as if he were advertising the business. He spent the whole summer in the country the year the pig fell into the well—not because his business was running itself but because of quarrels with his partners. “There’s no sense in my going back to New York now,” he kept saying. “I’ll stay up here until September and give those sons of bitches enough rope to hang themselves.” The stupidity of his partners and associates frustrated Mr. Nudd. “You know, Charlie Richmond doesn’t have any principles,” he would say to Mrs. Nudd desperately and yet hopelessly, as if he did not expect his wife to understand business, or as if the impact of stupidity was indescribable. “He doesn’t have any ethics,” he would go on, “he doesn’t have any code of morals or manners, he doesn’t have any principles, he doesn’t think about anything but making money.” Mrs. Nudd seemed to understand. It was her opinion that people like that killed themselves. She had known a man like that. He had worked day and night making money. He ruined his partners and betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children, and then, after making millions and millions of dollars, he went down to his office one Sunday afternoon and jumped out of the window.

  HARTLEY’S PART in the story about the pig centered on a large pike he had caught that day, and Randy didn’t enter into the narrative until close to its end. Randy had been fired out of college that spring. He and six friends had gone to a lecture on Socialism, and one of them had thrown a grapefruit at the speaker. Randy and the others refused to name the man who had thrown the grapefruit, and they were all expelled. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd were disheartened by this, but they were pleased with the way Randy had behaved. In the end, this experience made Randy feel like a celebrity and increased his already substantial self-respect. The fact that he had been expelled from college, that he was going to work in Boston in the fall, made him feel superior to the others.

  The story did not begin to take on weight until a year after the pig incident, and already in this short time alterations had been made in its form. Esther’s part changed in Russell’s favor. She would interrupt the others to praise Russell. “You were so wonderful, Russell. How did you ever learn to make a slipknot? By Jupiter, if it hadn’t been for Russell, I’ll bet that pig would still be in the well.” The year before, Esther and Russell had kissed a few times, and had decided that even if they fell in love they could never marry. He would not leave Macabit. She could not live there. They had reached these conclusions during Esther’s tennis summer, when her kisses, like everything else, were earnest and chaste. The following summer, she seemed as anxious to lose her virginity as she had been to lose her corpulence. Something—Russell never knew what—had happened in the winter to make her ashamed of her inexperience.

  She talked about sex when they were alone. Russell had got the idea that her chastity was of great value, and he was the one who had to be persuaded, but then he lost his head quickly and went up the back stairs to her room. After they had become lovers, they continued to talk about how they could never marry, but the impermanence of their relationship did not seem to matter, as if this, like everything else, had been enlightened by the innocent and transitory season. Esther refused to make love in any place but her own bed, but her room was at the back of the house and could be reached by the kitchen stairs, and Russell never had any trouble in getting there without being seen. Like all the other rooms of the camp, it was unfinished. The pine boards were fragrant and darkened, a reproduction of a Degas and a photograph of Zermatt were tacked to the walls, the bed was lumpy, and on those summer nights, with the June bugs making the screens resound, with the heat of the day still caught in the boards of the old camp, with the parched smell of her light-brown hair, with her goodness and her slenderness in his arms, Russell felt that this happiness was inestimable.

  They thought that everyone would find out, and that they were lost. Esther did not regret what she had done, but she didn’t know how it would end. They kept waiting for trouble, and when nothing happened, they were perplexed. Then she decided one night that everyone must know about it, but that everyone understood. The thought that her parents were young enough at heart to understand this passion as innocent and natural made Esther cry. “Aren’t they wonderful people, darling?” she asked Russell. “Did you ever know such wonderful people. I mean, they were brought up so strictly, and all of their friends are stuffy, and isn’t it wonderful that they understand?” Russell agreed. His respect for the Nudds was deepened by the thought that they could overlook convention for something larger. But both Esther and Russell were mistaken, of course. No one spoke to them about their meetings because no one knew about them. It never once occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Nudd that anything like that was going on.

  THE FALL BEFORE, Joan had married suddenly, and gone out to Minneapolis to live. The marriage did not last. She was in Reno by April, and had her divorce in time to return to Whitebeach Camp for the summer. She was still a pretty girl, with a long face and fair hair. No one had expected her to return, and the things in her room had been scattered. She kept looking for her pictures and her books, her rugs and her chairs. When she joined the others on the porch after supper, she would
ask a lot of questions. “Has anyone a match?”

  “Is there an ashtray over there?”

  “Is there any coffee left?”

  “Are we going to have drinks?”

  “Is there an extra pillow around?” Hartley was the only one to answer her questions kindly.

  Randy and his wife were there for two weeks. Randy still borrowed money from his sisters. Pamela was a slight, dark girl who did not get on with Mrs. Nudd at all. She had been brought up in Chicago, and Mrs. Nudd, who had spent all her life in the East, sometimes thought that this might account for their differences. “I want the truth,” Pamela often said to Mrs. Nudd, as if she suspected her mother-in-law of telling lies. “Do you think pink looks well on me?” she would ask. “I want the truth.” She disapproved of Mrs. Nudd’s management of Whitebeach Camp, and on one occasion tried to do something about the waste that she saw everywhere. Behind Mrs. Nudd’s garden there was a large currant patch, which the hired man mulched and pruned every year, although the Nudds disliked currants and never picked them. One morning, a truck came up the driveway and four men, strangers, went into the patch. The maid told Mrs. Nudd, and she was on the point of asking Randy to drive the strangers away when Pamela came in and explained everything. “The currants are rotting,” she said, “so I told the man in the grocery store that he could pick them if he’d pay us fifteen cents a quart. I hate to see waste…” This incident troubled Mrs. Nudd and everyone else, although they could not have said why.