by John Cheever
The prayers for Hartley were read on a hot day at the end of the season, three years after he had drowned. To the relatively simple service, the vicar added a verse about death at sea. Mrs. Nudd derived no comfort whatever from the reading of the prayers. She had no more faith in the power of God than she had in the magic of the evening star. Nothing was accomplished by the service so far as she was concerned. When it was over, Mr. Nudd took her arm, and the elderly couple started for the vestry. Mrs. Nudd saw Russell waiting to speak to her outside the church, and thought: Why did it have to be Hartley? Why not Russell?
She had not seen him for years. He was wearing a suit that was too small for him. His face was red. In her shame at having wished a living man dead (for she had never experienced malevolence or bitterness without hurrying to cover it with love, and, among her friends and her family, those who received her warmest generosity were those who excited her impatience and her shame), she went to Russell impulsively and took his hand. Her face shone with tears. “Oh, it was so good of you to come; you were one of his best friends. We’ve missed you, Russell. Come see us. Can you come tomorrow? We’re leaving on Saturday. Come for supper. It will make it seem like old times. Come for supper. We can’t ask Myra and the children because we don’t have a maid this year, but we’d love to see you. Please come.” Russell said that he would.
The next day was windy and clear, with a heartening lightness, a multiplicity of changes in its moods and its lightsa day that belonged half to summer, half to autumn, precisely like the day when the pig had drowned. After lunch, Mrs. Nudd and Pamela went to an auction. The two women had reached a reasonable truce, although Pamela still interfered in the kitchen and looked on Whitebeach Camp impatiently as her just inheritance. Randy, with the best will in the world, had begun to find his wife’s body meager and familiar, his desires as keen as ever, and so he had been unfaithful to her once or twice. There had been accusations, a confession, and a reconciliation, and Pamela liked to talk all this over with Mrs. Nudd, searching, as she said, for “the truth” about men.
Randy had been left with the children that afternoon and had taken them to the beach. He was a loving but impatient father, and from the house he could be heard scolding Binxey. “When I speak to you, Binxey, I don’t speak to you because I want to hear the sound of my own voice, I speak to you because I want you to do what I say!” As Mrs. Nudd had told Russell, they had no maid that summer. Esther was doing the housework. Whenever anyone suggested getting a cleaning woman, Esther would say, “We can’t afford a cleaning woman, and anyhow I don’t have anything to do. I don’t mind doing the housework, only I just wish you all would remember not to track sand into the living room…” Esther’s husband had spent his vacation at Whitebeach Camp, but he had returned to work long since.
Mr. Nudd was sitting on the porch in the hot sun that afternoon when Joan came out to him with a letter in her hand. She smiled uneasily and began to speak in an affected singsong that always irritated her father. “I’ve decided that I won’t drive down with you tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve decided that I’ll stay here for a little while longer, Daddy. After all, there’s nothing for me to do in New York. I have no reason to go down, have I? I wrote to Helen Parker, and she’s going to come up and stay with me, so that I won’t be alone. I have her letter right here. She says that she’d like to come. I thought we would stay here until Christmas. I’ve never been here in the winter before in all these years. We’re going to write a book for children, Helen and I. She’s going to draw the pictures, and I’m going to write the story. Her brother knows a publisher, and he said”
“Joan, dear, you can’t stay here in the winter.” Mr. Nudd spoke gently.
“Oh, yes I can, yes I can, Daddy,” Joan said. “Helen understands that it isn’t comfortable. I’ve written her all about that. We’re willing to rough it. We can get our own groceries in Macabit. We’ll take turns walking into the village. I’m going to buy some firewood and a lot of canned goods and some”
“But, Joan, dear, this house wasn’t built to be lived in during the winter. The walls are thin. The water will be turned off.”
“Oh, we don’t care about the waterwe’ll get our water out of the lake.”
“Now, Joan, dear, listen to me,” Mr. Nudd said firmly. “You cannot stay here in the winter. You would last about a week. I would have to come up here and get you, and I don’t want to close this house twice.” He had spoken with an edge of impatience, but now reason and affection surged into his voice. “Think of how it would be, dear, with no heat and no water and none of your family.”
“Daddy, I want to stay!” Joan cried. “I want to stay! Please let me stay! I’ve planned it for so long.”
“You’re being ridiculous, Joan,” Mr. Nudd cut in. “This is a summer house.”
“But, Daddy, I’m not asking very much!” Joan cried. “I’m not a child any more. I’m nearly forty years old. I’ve never asked you for anything. You’ve always been so strict. You never let me do what I want.”
“Joan, dear, please try to be reasonable, please at least try to be reasonable, please try and imagine”
“Esther got everything she wanted. She went to Europe twice; she had that car in college; she had that fur coat.” Suddenly, Joan got down on her knees, and then sat on the floor. The movement was ugly, and it was meant to enrage her father.
“I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay!” she cried.
“Joan, you’re acting like a child!” he shouted. “Get up.”
“I want to act like a child!” she screamed. “I want to act like a child for a little while! Is there anything so terrible about wanting to act like a child for a little while? I don’t have any joy in my life any more. When I’m unhappy, I try to remember a time when I was happy, but I can’t remember a time any more.”
“Joan, get up. Get up on your feet. Get up on your two feet.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “It hurts me to stand upit hurts my legs.”
“Get up, Joan.” He stooped down, and it was an effort for the old man to raise his daughter, to her feet. “Oh, my baby, oh, my poor baby!” he said, and he put his arm around her. “Come into the bathroom and I’ll wash your face, you poor baby.” She let him wash her face, and then they had a drink and sat down to a game of checkers.
RUSSELL got to Whitebeach Camp at half past six, and they drank some gin on the porch. The liquor made him garrulous, and he began to talk about his war experiences, but the atmosphere was elastic and forgiving, and he knew that nothing he did there that night would be considered wrong. They went outside again after supper, although it was cool. The clouds had not colored. In the glancing light, the hillside shone like a bolt of velvet. Mrs. Nudd covered her legs with a blanket and looked at the scene. It was the most enduring pleasure of these years. There had been the boom, the crash, the depression, the recession, the malaise of imminent war, the war itself, the boom, the inflation, the recession, the slump, and now there was the malaise again, but none of this had changed a stone or a leaf in the view she saw from her porch.
“You know, I’m thirty-seven years old,” Randy said. He spoke importantly, as if the passage of time over his head was singular, interesting, and a dirty trick. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue. “If I’d gone back to Cambridge for my reunion this year, it would have been my fifteenth.”
“That’s nothing,” Esther said.
“Did you know that the Teeters have bought the old Henderson place?” Mr. Nudd asked. “There’s a man who made a fortune in the war.” He stood, turned the chair he was sitting in upside down, and pounded at the legs with his fist. His cigarette was wet. When he sat down again, the long ash spilled onto his vest.
“Do I look thirty-seven?” Randy asked.
“Do you know that you’ve mentioned the fact that you’re thirty-seven eight times today?” Esther said. “I’ve counted them.”
“How much does it c
ost to go to Europe in an airplane?” Mr. Nudd asked.
The conversation went from ocean fares to whether it was pleasanter to come into a strange city in the morning or the evening. Then they recalled odd names among the guests who had been at Whitebeach Camp; there had been Mr. and Mrs. Peppercorn, Mr. and Mrs. Starkweather, Mr. and Mrs. Freestone, the Bloods, the Mudds, and the Parsleys.
That late in the season, the light went quickly. It was sunny one minute and dark the next. Macabit and its mountain range were canted against the afterglow, and for a while it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond the mountains, that this was not the end of the world. The wall of pure and brassy light seemed to beat up from infinity. Then the stars came out, the earth rumbled downward, the illusion of an abyss was lost. Mrs. Nudd looked around her, and the time and the place seemed strangely important. This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done well made her sink back in her chair. She squinted the tears out of her eyes. What had made the summer always an island, she thought; what had made it such a small island? What mistakes had they made? What had they done wrong? They had loved their neighbors, respected the force of modesty, held honor above gain. Then where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people who surrounded her seem like the figures in a tragedy?
“Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” she asked. The sky was discolored. Below the black mountains, the lake ran a rough and deadly gray. “Weren’t you playing tennis with Esther, Russell? That was Esther’s tennis summer. Didn’t you win the pig at the fair in Lawchester, Randy? You won it at one of those things where you throw baseballs at a target. You were always such a good athlete.”
They all waited graciously for their turn. They recalled the drowned pig, the launch on Gull Rock, Aunt Martha’s corsets hanging in the window, the fire in the clouds, and the blustering northwest wind. They laughed helplessly at the place where Nora fell down the stairs. Pamela cut in to recall the announcement of her engagement. After this, they recalled how Miss Coolidge had gone upstairs and returned with a briefcase full of music, and, standing by the open door, so that she could get the light, had performed the standard repertoire of the rural Protestant Church. She had sung for more than an hour. They couldn’t stop her. During her recital, Esther and Russell left the porch and went up to the field to bury the drowned pig. It was cool. Esther held a lantern while Russell dug the grave. They had decided then that even if they were in love they could never marry, because he wouldn’t leave Macabit and she would never live there. When they got back to the porch, Miss Coolidge was singing her last selection, and then Russell left and they all went to bed.
The story restored Mrs. Nudd and made her feel that all was well. It had exhilarated the rest, and, talking loudly and laughing, they went into the house. Mr. Nudd lighted a fire and sat down to play checkers with Joan. Mrs. Nudd passed a box of stale candy. It had begun to blow outside, and the house creaked gently, like a hull when the wind takes up the sail. The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone. THE FIVE-FORTY-EIGHT
When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her. A few people, mostly men waiting for girls, stood in the lobby watching the elevator doors. She was among them. As he saw her, her face took on a look of such loathing and purpose that he realized she had been waiting for him. He did not approach her. She had no legitimate business with him. They had nothing to say. He turned and walked toward the glass doors at the end of the lobby, feeling that faint guilt and bewilderment we experience when we bypass some old friend or classmate who seems threadbare, or sick, or miserable in some other way. It was five-eighteen by the clock in the Western Union office. He could catch the express. As he waited his turn at the revolving doors, he saw that it was still raining. It had been raining all day, and he noticed now how much louder the rain made the noises of the street. Outside, he started walking briskly east toward Madison Avenue. Traffic was tied up, and horns were blowing urgently on a cross-town street in the distance. The sidewalk was crowded. He wondered what she had hoped to gain by a glimpse of him coming out of the office building at the end of the day. Then he wondered if she was following him.
Walking in the city, we seldom turn and look back. The habit restrained Blake. He listened for a minutefoolishlyas he walked, as if he could distinguish her footsteps from the worlds of sound in the city at the end of a rainy day. Then he noticed, ahead of him on the other side of the street, a break in the wall of buildings. Something had been torn down; something was being put up, but the steel structure had only just risen above the sidewalk fence and daylight poured through the gap. Blake stopped opposite here and looked into a store window. It was a decorator’s or an auctioneer’s. The window was arranged like a room in which people live and entertain their friends. There were cups on the coffee table, magazines to read, and flowers in the vases, but the flowers were dead and the cups were empty and the guests had not come. In the plate glass, Blake saw a clear reflection of himself and the crowds that were passing, like shadows, at his back. Then he saw her imageso close to him that it shocked him. She was standing only a foot or two behind him. He could have turned then and asked her what. she wanted, but instead of recognizing her, he shied away abruptly from the reflection of her contorted face and went along the street. She might be meaning to do him harmshe might be meaning to kill him.
The suddenness with which he moved when he saw the reflection of her face tipped the water out of his hat brim in such a way that some of it ran down his neck. It felt unpleasantly like the sweat of fear. Then the cold water falling into his face and onto his bare hands, the rancid smell of the wet gutters and paving, the knowledge that his feet were beginning to get wet and that he might catch coldall the common discomforts of walking in the rainseemed to heighten the menace of his pursuer and to give him a morbid consciousness of his own physicalness and of the ease with which he could be hurt. He could see ahead of him the corner of Madison Avenue, where the lights were brighter. He felt that if he could get to Madison Avenue he would be all right. At the corner, there was a bakery shop with two entrances, and he went in by the door on the cross-town street, bought a coffee ring, like any other commuter, and went out the Madison Avenue door. As he started down Madison Avenue, he saw her waiting for him by a hut where newspapers were sold.
She was not clever. She would be easy to shake. He could get into a taxi by one door and leave by the other. He could speak to a policeman. He could runalthough he was afraid that if he did run, it might precipitate the violence he now felt sure she had planned. He was approaching a part of the city that he knew well and where the maze of street-level and underground passages, elevator banks, and crowded lobbies made it easy for a man to lose a pursuer. The thought of this, and a whiff of sugary warmth from the coffee ring, cheered him. It was absurd to imagine being harmed on a crowded street. She was foolish, misled, lonely perhapsthat was all it could amount to. He was an insignificant man, and there was no point in anyone’s following him from his office to the station. He knew no secrets of any consequence. The reports in his briefcase had no bearing on war, peace, the dope traffic, the hydrogen bomb, or any of the other international skullduggeries that he associated with pursuers, men in trench coats, and wet sidewalks. Then he saw ahead of him the door of a men’s bar. Oh, it was so simple!
He ordered a Gibson and shouldered his way in between two other men at the bar, so that if she should be watching from the window she would lose sight of him. The place was crowded with commuters putting down a drink before the ride home. They had brought in on their clotheson their shoes and umbrellasthe rancid smell of the wet dusk outside, but Blake began to relax as soon as he tasted his Gibson. He glanced around at the common, mostly not-young faces that surrounded him
and that were worried, if they were worried at all, about tax rates and who would be put in charge of merchandising. He tried to remember her nameMiss Dent, Miss Bent, Miss Lentand he was surprised to find that he could not remember it, although he was proud of the retentiveness and reach of his memory and it had only been six months ago.
Personnel had sent her up one afternoonhe was looking for a secretary. He saw a dark womanin her twenties, perhapswho was slender and shy. Her dress was simple, her figure was not much, one of her stockings was crooked, but her voice was soft and he had been willing to try her out. After she had been working for him a few days, she told him that she had been in the hospital for eight months and that it had been hard after this for her to find work, and she wanted to thank him for giving her a chance. Her hair was dark, her eyes were dark; she left with him a pleasant impression of darkness. As he got to know her better, he felt that she was oversensitive and, as a consequence, lonely. Once, when she was speaking to him of what she imagined his life to befull of friendships, money, and a large and loving familyhe had thought he recognized a peculiar feeling of deprivation. She seemed to imagine the lives of the rest of the world to be more brilliant than they were. Once, she had put a rose on his desk, and he had dropped it into the wastebasket. “I don’t like roses,” he told her.
She had been competent, punctual, and a good typist, and he had found only one thing in her that he could object toher handwriting. He could not associate the crudeness of her handwriting with her appearance. He would have expected her to write a rounded backhand, and in her writing there were intermittent traces of this, mixed with clumsy printing. Her writing gave him the feeling that she had been the victim of some innersome emotional conflict that had in its violence broken the continuity of the lines she was able to make on paper. When she had been working for him three weeksno longerthey stayed late one night and he offered, after work, to buy her a drink. “If you really want a drink,” she said, “I have some whiskey at my place.”