by John Cheever
Nailles finished his drink and looked lovingly at his mysterious son. Tony was born in Rome, where Nailles had worked as a chemist for FAOU. Nailles had taken Nellie to the international hospital across the river late one afternoon. The doctor was a very fat man. He timed Nellie’s pains and told Nailles to return to the hospital at half past ten. When Nailles returned he was taken into an office to have his blood typed. There was no explanation. Later a friend appeared with a bottle of scotch and a package of American cigarettes, both of which were difficult to get at the time. The nuns seemed to have no objection to their drinking; in fact they brought them glasses and ice. Nailles’s friend left at midnight. The doctor came in at three. He was sweating and seemed worried. “Is she in danger,” Nailles asked. “Yes,” the doctor said harshly, “she is in danger. Life is dangerous. Why do Americans want to be immortal?”
“Please tell me,” Nailles said.
“I will tell you that when this is over I would advise her not to have any more children.”
There were some peacocks in a park across the street. They began to shriek as the sun rose. This sounded to Nailles portentous. The doctor came in again at eight. “Take a walk,” he said to Nailles. “Divert yourself. Breathe some fresh air.” Nailles walked down the hill to St. Peter’s and said his prayers. Then he climbed the stairs to the roof where all the gigantic saints and apostles stood with their backs to him. He had liked the city of Rome. Now it seemed sinister; the city of the wolf. Rome would kill Nellie. The bloody history of the place seemed to have some bearing on her life. Rome would murder Nellie.
He walked across the city on foot, trying to sweat out his pain. In some back street he encountered an old man selling phallic symbols and death’s heads. He walked to the zoo and had a Campari at the café. Beside the café was a cage of carnivorous birds, tearing at raw meat. Leaving the café he saw a hyena; then a cage of wolves. When he got back to the hospital a nun told him that he had an eight-pound son and that his wife was out of danger. He howled with relief and banged drunkenly around the waiting room. He saw Nellie and his son that night and Tony seemed to him then to be brilliant, impetuous and strong. Much later they had discussed the possibility of adopting a brother or sister for Tony, but a foundling would have challenged Tony’s sovereignty and this was something they did not want.
He had no way of judging his worth as a father. They had quarreled. When Tony was nine. He had suddenly given up all his athletics and friendships and settled down in front of the television set. The night of the quarrel was rainy. Nailles came into the house by the kitchen door. Nellie was cooking. Nailles kissed her on the back of the neck and raised her skirts but she demurred. “Please darling,” she said. “It makes me feel as if I were in a burlesque skit. Tony’s report card is on the table. You might want to take a look at it.” Nailles mixed a drink and read the report. The marks were all C’s and D’s. Nailles walked through the dining room, crossed the dark hall to the living room where Tony was watching a show. The tube was the only light, shifting and submarine, and with the noise of the rain outside the room seemed like some cavern in the sea.
“Do you have any homework,” Nailles asked.
“A little,” Tony said.
“Well I think you’d better do it before you watch television,” Nailles said. On the tube some cartoon figures were dancing a jig.
“I’ll just watch to the end of this show,” Tony said. “Then I’ll do my homework.”
“I think you’d better do your homework now,” Nailles said.
“But Mummy said I could see this show,” Tony said.
“How long has it been,” said Nailles, “that you’ve asked permission to watch television?” He knew that in dealing with his son sarcasm would only multiply their misunderstandings but he was tired and headstrong. “You never ask permission. You come home at half past three, pull your chair up in front of the set and watch until supper. After supper you settle down in front of that damned engine and stay there until nine. If you don’t do your homework how can you expect to get passing marks in school?”
“I learn a lot of things on television,” Tony said shyly. “I learn about geography and animals and the stars.”
“What are you learning now?” Nailles asked.
The cartoon figures were having a tug of war. A large bird cut the rope with his beak and all the figures fell down.
“This is different,” Tony said. “This isn’t educational. Some of it is.”
“Oh leave him alone, Eliot, leave him alone,” Nellie called from the kitchen. Her voice was soft and clear. Nailles wandered back into the kitchen.
“But don’t you think,” he asked, “that from half past three to nine with a brief interlude for supper is too much time to spend in front of a television set?”
“It is a lot of time,” Nellie said, “but it’s terribly important to him right now and I think he’ll grow out of it.”
“I know it’s terribly important,” Nailles said. “I realize that. When I took him Christmas shopping he wasn’t interested in anything but getting back to the set. He didn’t care about buying presents for you or his cousins or his aunts and uncles. All he wanted to do was to get back to the set. He was just like an addict. I mean he had withdrawal symptoms. It was just like me at cocktail hour but I’m thirty-four years old and I try to ration my liquor and my cigarettes.”
“He isn’t quite old enough to start rationing things,” Nellie said.
“He won’t go coasting, he won’t play ball, he won’t do his homework, he won’t even take a walk because he might miss a program.”
“I think he’ll grow out of it,” Nellie said.
“But you don’t grow out of an addiction. You have to make some exertion or have someone make an exertion for you. You just don’t outgrow serious addictions.”
He went back across the dark hall with its shifty submarine lights and outside the noise of rain. On the tube a man with a lisp, dressed in a clown suit, was urging his friends to have Mummy buy them a streamlined, battery-operated doll carriage. He turned on a light and saw how absorbed his son was in the lisping clown.
“Now I’ve been talking with your mother,” he said, “and we’ve decided that we have to do something about your television time.” (The clown was replaced by the cartoon of an elephant and a tiger dancing the waltz.) “I think an hour a day is plenty and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which hour you want.”
Tony had been threatened before but either his mother’s intervention or Nailles’s forgetfulness had saved him. At the thought of how barren, painful and meaningless the hours after school would be the boy began to cry.
“Now crying isn’t going to do any good,” Nailles said. The elephant and the tiger were joined by some other animals in their waltz.
“Skip it,” Tony said. “It isn’t your business.”
“You’re my son,” Nailles said, “and it’s my business to see you do at least what’s expected of you. You were tutored last summer in order to get promoted and if your marks don’t improve you won’t be promoted this year. Don’t you think it’s my business to see that you get promoted? If you had your way you wouldn’t even go to school. You’d wake up in the morning, turn on the set and watch it until bedtime.”
“Oh please skip it, please leave me alone,” Tony said. He turned off the set, went into the hall and started to climb the stairs.
“You come back here, Sonny,” Nailles shouted. “You come back here at once or I’ll come and get you.”
“Oh please don’t roar at him,” Nellie asked, coming out of the kitchen. “I’m cooking veal birds and they smell nice and I was feeling good and happy that you’d come home and now everything is beginning to seem awful.”
“I was feeling good too,” Nailles said, “but we have a problem here and we can’t evade it just because the veal birds smell good.”
He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted: “You come down here, Sonny, you come down here this instant or yo
u won’t have any television for a month. Do you hear me? You come down here at once or you won’t have any television for a month.”
The boy came slowly down the stairs. “Now you come here and sit down,” Nailles said, “and we’ll talk this over. I’ve said that you can have an hour each day and all you have to do is to tell me which hour you want.”
“I don’t know,” Tony said. “I like the four-o’clock show and the six-o’clock show and the seven-o’clock show …”
“You mean you can’t confine yourself to an hour, is that it?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said.
“I guess you’d better make me a drink,” Nellie said. “Scotch and soda.”
Nailles made a drink and returned to Tony. “Well if you can’t decide,” Nailles said, “I’m going to decide for you. First I’m going to make sure that you do your homework before you turn on the set.”
“I don’t get home until half past three,” Tony said, “and sometimes the bus is late and if I do my homework I’ll miss the four-o’clock show.”
“That’s just too bad,” Nailles said, “that’s just too bad.”
“Oh leave him alone,” Nellie said. “Please leave him alone. He’s had enough for tonight.”
“It isn’t tonight we’re talking about, it’s every single night in the year including Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. Since no one around here seems able to reach any sort of agreement I’m going to make a decision myself. I’m going to throw that damned thing out the back door.”
“Oh no, Daddy, no,” Tony cried. “Please don’t do that. Please, please, please. I’ll try. I’ll try to do better.”
“You’ve been trying for months without any success,” Nailles said. “You keep saying that you’ll try to cut down and all you do is to watch more and more. Your intentions may have been good but there haven’t been any noticeable results. Out it goes.”
“Oh please don’t, Eliot,” Nellie cried. “Please don’t. He loves his television. Can’t you see that he loves it?”
“I know that he loves it,” Nailles said. “That’s why I’m going to throw it out the door. I love my gin and I love my cigarettes but this is the fourteenth cigarette I’ve had today and this is only my fourth drink. If I sat down to drink at half past three and drank steadily until nine I’d expect someone to give me some help.” He unplugged the television set with a yank and picked the box up in his arms. The box was heavy for his strength, and an awkward size, and in order to carry it he had to arch his back a little like a pregnant woman. With the cord trailing behind him he started for the kitchen door.
“Oh, Daddy, Daddy,” Tony cried. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” and he fell to his knees with his hands joined in a conventional, supplicatory position that he might have learned from watching some melodrama on the box.
“Eliot, Eliot,” Nellie screamed. “Don’t, don’t. You’ll be sorry, Eliot. You’ll be sorry.”
Tony ran to his mother and she took him in her arms. They were both crying.
“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Nailles shouted. “After all I like watching football and baseball when I’m home and I paid for the damned thing. I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing this because I have to.”
“Don’t look, don’t look,” Nellie said to Tony and she pressed his face into her skirts.
The back door was shut and Nailles had to put the box on the floor to open this. The rain sounded loudly in the yard. Then, straining, he picked up the box again, kicked open the screen door and fired the television out into the dark. It landed on a cement paving and broke with the rich, glassy music of an automobile collision. Nellie led Tony up the stairs to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto the bed, sobbing. Tony joined her. Nailles closed the kitchen door on the noise of the rain and poured another drink. Fifth, he said.
All of this was eight years ago.
VI
Tony had gone out for football and had made the second squad in his junior year. He had never been a good student—he got mostly C’s—but in French his marks were so low they were scarcely worth recording. One afternoon when he was about to join the squad for practice it was announced over the squawk box that he should report to the principal. He was not afraid of the principal but he was disturbed at the thought of missing any of the routines of football practice. When he stepped into the outer office a secretary asked him to sit down.
“But I’m late,” Tony said, “I’m late for practice already.”
“He’s busy,” the secretary said.
“Couldn’t I come back some other time? Couldn’t I do it tomorrow?”
“You’d be late for practice tomorrow.”
“Couldn’t I see him during class time?”
“No.”
Tony glanced at the office. In spite of the stubborn and obdurate facts of learning, the place had for him a galling sense of unreality. A case of athletic trophies stood against one wall but this seemed to be the only note of permanence. Presently he was let into the principal’s office and given a chair.
“You’ve failed first-year French twice, Tony,” the principal said, “and it looks as if you’re going to fail it again. Your parents expect you to go on to college and you know you have to have a modern-language credit. Your intelligence quotient is very high and neither Miss Hoe nor I can understand why you fail.”
“It’s just that I can’t say French, sir,” Tony said. “I just can’t say any French. My father can’t either. I just can’t say French. It sounds phony.”
The principal switched on the squawk box and said into it: “Could you see Tony now, Miss Hoe?” Her affirmative came through loud and clear. “Certainly.” “You go down and see Miss Hoe now,” said the principal.
“Couldn’t I see her after class tomorrow, sir? I’m missing football practice.”
“I think Miss Hoe will have something to say about that. She’s waiting.”
Miss Hoe was waiting in a room whose bright lights and pure colors did nothing to cheer him. It would soon be getting dark on the playing field and he had already missed passing and tackle. Miss Hoe sat before a large poster showing the walls of Carcassonne. It was the only traditional surface in the room. The brilliant, fluorescent lights in the ceiling made the place seem to be a cavern of incandescence, authoritative in its independence from the gathering dark of an autumn afternoon; and the power to light the room came from another county, well to the north, where snow had already fallen. The chairs and desks were made of brightly colored plastic. The floor was waxed Vinylite.
“Sit down, Tony,” she said. “Please sit down. It’s time that we had a little talk.”
She might have been a pretty woman—small-featured and slender—but her skin was sallow and in the brightness of the light one saw that she had a few chinwhiskers. Her waist was very slender and she seemed to take some pride in this. She always wore belts, cinctures, chains or ribbons around her middle and she sometimes wore a girlish ribbon in her brown hair. Her mouth, considering the strenuous exercise it got in French vowels, was very small. She wore no perfume and exhaled the faint unfreshness of humanity at the end of the day.
She lived alone, of course, but we will grant her enough privacy not to pry into the clinical facts of her virginity or to catalogue the furniture, souvenirs, etc. with which her one-room apartment was stuffed. As a lonely and defenseless spinster she was prey to the legitimate anxieties of her condition. There were four locks on the door to her apartment and she carried a vial of ammonia in her handbag to throw into the eyes of assailants. She had read somewhere that anxiety was a manifestation of sexual guilt and she could see, sensibly, that her aloneness and her virginity would expose her to guilt and repression. However, the burden of guilt must, she felt, be somewise divided between her destiny and the news in the evening paper. It was not her guilt that had caused the increase in sexual brutality. She had come to feel that some disorganized conspiracy of psychopaths was developing. Weekly, sometimes daily, wome
n who resembled her were debauched, mutilated and strangled. Alone in the dark she was always afraid. Since she frequently dreamed that she was being debauched by some brute in a gutter she had to include guilt along with terror.
“When were you born, Tony,” she asked.
“May twenty-seventh.”
“Oh, I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. You’re Gemini.”
“What’s that?”
“Gemini is the constellation under which you were born. Gemini determines many of your characteristics and one might say your fate; but Gemini men are invariably good linguists. The fact that you are Gemini proves to me that you can do your work and do it brilliantly. You can’t dispute your stars, can you?”
He looked past her through the window to the playing field. There was still enough light in the air, enough color in the trees to compete with the incandescence of their cavern; but in another ten minutes there would be nothing to see in the window but a reflection of Miss Hoe and himself. He knew nothing about astrology beyond the fact that he thought it to be a sanctuary for fools. He supposed that she might have read in the stars (and he was right) that it was her manifest destiny to be unloved, unmarried, childless and lonely. She sighed and he was suddenly conscious of her breathing, its faint sibilance and the rise and fall of her meager front. It seemed intimate—sexual—as if they lay in one another’s arms, and he moved his chair back suddenly, scraping the legs on the Vinylite. The noise restored him.