The Stories of John Cheever (109 page)

Now he did what his father had done—unlaced his shoes, tore at the buttons of his shirt, and knowing that a mossy stone or the force of the water could be the end of him he stepped naked into the torrent, bellowing like his father. He could stand the cold for only a minute but when he stepped away from the water he seemed at last to be himself. He went on down to the main road, where he was picked up by some mounted police, since Maria had sounded the alarm and the whole province was looking for the maestro. His return to Monte Carbone was triumphant and in the morning he began a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that, while it would not get him the Nobel Prize, would grace the last months of his life.

P
AINT ME A WALL
in Verona, then, a fresco above a door. There is a flowery field in the foreground, some yellow houses or palaces, and in the distance the towers of the city. A messenger in a crimson mantle is running down some stairs on the right. Through an open door one sees an old woman lying in bed. The bed is surrounded by court attendants. Higher up the stairs two men are dueling. In the center of the field, a princess is crowning a saint or a hero with flowers. A circle of hunting dogs and other animals, including a lion, is watching the ceremony with reverence. On the far left there is a stretch of green water on which a fleet of sailing ships—five—is heading for port. High against the sky two men in court dress hang from a gibbet. My friend was a prince and Verona his home, but commuting trains, white houses planted with yews, the streets and offices of New York were his landscape, and he wore a green plush hat and a shabby, tightly belted raincoat with a cigarette burn on the sleeve.

Marcantonio Parlapiano—or Boobee, as he was called—was a poor prince. He sold sewing machines for a firm in Milan. His father had lost the last of his patrimony at the casino in Venice, and there had been a good deal of it to lose. There was a Parlapiano castle outside Verona, but the only privilege the family retained was the privilege of being buried in the crypt. Boobee loved his father in spite of this senseless loss of a fortune. He took me to tea in Verona with the old man one day, and his manners with the gambler were reverent and serene. One of Boobee’s grandmothers was English, and he had light hair and blue eyes. He was a tall, slender man with an immense nose, and he moved as if he wore Renaissance trappings. He pulled on his gloves finger by finger, tightened the belt of his raincoat as if a sword depended from it, and cocked his plush hat as if it were covered with plumes. When I first knew him, he had a mistress—a stunning and intelligent Frenchwoman. He traveled for his firm, and on a trip to Rome he met and fell in love with Grace Osborn, who was working at the American Consulate. She was a beautiful woman. There was in her character a trace of intransigence that someone shrewder would have concealed. Her politics were reactionary, and she was terribly neat. A drunken enemy once said that she was the sort of woman for whom the water glasses and toilet seats of motels and hotels are sealed. Boobee loved her for a variety of reasons, but he particularly loved the fact that she was an American. He loved America, and was the only Italian I have ever known whose favorite restaurant in Rome was the Hilton. They were married on the Campidoglio and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton. Some time later, he was transferred to the United States, and he wrote to ask if I could help find him a place to live. A house was for rent in our neighborhood, and the Parlapianos arranged to take it.

I WAS AWAY
when Boobee and Grace arrived from Italy. The setting for our reunion was the station platform at Bullet Park, at seven-forty one Tuesday morning. It was very much a setting. Around a hundred commuters, mostly men, made up the cast. Here were tracks and ties and the sounds of engines, but the sense was much more of a ceremony than of journeys and separations. Our roles seemed fixed in the morning light, and since we would all return before dark, there was no sense of travel. It was the fixedness, the rectitude, of the scene that made Boobee’s appearance in his green plush hat and belted raincoat seem very alien. He shouted my name, bent down and gave me a bone-cracking embrace, and kissed me loudly on both cheeks. I could not have imagined how strange, wild, and indecent such a salutation would appear to be on the station platform at seven-forty. It was sensational. I think no one laughed. Several people looked away. One friend turned pale. Our loud conversation in a language other than English caused as much of a sensation. I suppose it was thought to be affected, discourteous, and unpatriotic, but I couldn’t tell Boobee to shut up or explain to him that in America if we talked in the morning we aimed at a sort of ritual banality. While my friends and neighbors talked about rotary lawn mowers and chemical fertilizers, Boobee praised the beauty of the landscape, the immaculateness of American women, and the pragmatism of American politics, and spoke of the horrors of a war with China. He kissed me goodbye on Madison Avenue. I think no one I knew was looking.

We had the Parlapianos for dinner soon after this, to introduce them to our friends. Boobee’s English was terrible. “May I drop onto you for staying together?” he would ask a woman, intending merely to sit at her side. He was, however, charming, and his spontaneity and his good looks carried him along. We were unable to introduce him to any Italians, since we knew none. In Bullet Park, the bulk of the small Italian population consisted of laborers and domestics. At the top of the heap was the DeCarlo family, who were successful and prosperous contractors, but whether perforce or by chance, they seemed never to have left the confines of the Italian colony. Boobee’s position was therefore ambiguous.

One Saturday morning he called to ask if I would help him with some shopping. He wanted to buy some blue jeans. He pronounced them “blugins,” and it was some time before I understood what he meant. He stopped at my house a few minutes later and drove me in to the village Army and Navy store. He had a large air-conditioned car covered with chromium, and he drove like a Roman. We were speaking Italian when we entered the store. At the sound of this language the clerk scowled as if he sensed shoplifting or check kiting.

“We want some blue jeans,” I said.

“Blugins,” said Boobee.

“What size?”

Boobee and I discussed the fact that we did not know his measurement in inches. The clerk took a tape measure from a drawer and passed it to me. “Measure him yourself,” he said. I measured Boobee and told the clerk the size. The clerk threw a pair of blue jeans on the counter, but they were not what Boobee had in mind. He explained at length and with gestures that he wanted something softer and paler. Then the proprietor, from the back of the store, shouted down the canyon of boxed work boots and denim shirts to his clerk, “Tell them it’s all we got. Where they come from they wear goatskins.”

Boobee understood. His nose seemed to get longer, as it did in every emotional crisis. He sighed. It had never occurred to me that in America a sovereign prince might be penalized for his foreignness. I had seen some anti-American feeling in Italy but nothing as crude as this, and anyhow I wasn’t a prince. In America, Prince Parlapiano was a wop.

“Thank you very much,” I said, and started for the door.

“Where you from, mister?” the clerk asked me.

“I live on Chilmark Lane,” I said.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean where you from in Italy.”

We left the store and found what Boobee wanted in another place, but I saw that his life as an alien was hazardous. He might be Prince Parlapiano at some place like the Hotel Plaza, but struggling with the menu at Chock Full O’Nuts he would be an untouchable.

I DIDN’T SEE
the Parlapianos for about a month, and when I did see Boobee again, on the station platform, he seemed to have made a good many friends, although his English showed no improvement. Then Grace called to say that her parents were paying a visit and would we come for cocktails. This was on a Saturday afternoon, and when we got there we found perhaps a dozen neighbors sitting around uncomfortably. Boobee had not caught on to the American cocktail hour. He was serving warm Campari and gumdrops. When I asked, in English, if I could have a Scotch, he asked what kind of Scotch I wanted. I said any Scotch would do. “Good!” he exclaimed. “Then I am giving you rye. Rye is the best Scotch, yes?” I only mention this to show that his grasp of our language and our customs was spotty.

Grace’s parents were an ungainly middle-aged couple from Indiana. “We come from Indiana,” said Mrs. Osborn, “but we are directly descended from the Osborns who settled in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the seventeenth century. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was an officer in the Confederate Army and was decorated by General Lee. We have this club in Florida. We’re all scientists.”

“Is it Cape Kennedy?” I asked.

“Christian Scientists.”

I shifted to Mr. Osborn, who was a retired used-car dealer. He went on about their club. There were many millionaires among the members. The club had an eighteen-hole golf course, a marina, a college-educated dietitian, and an exacting admissions committee. He lowered his voice and, shielding his mouth with one hand, said, “We try to keep out the Jews and Italians.”

Boobee, standing in front of my wife, asked, “I am dropping down onto you for staying together?”

His mother-in-law, across the room, asked, “What did you say, Anthony?”

Boobee lowered his head. He seemed helpless. “I am asking Mrs. Duclose,” he said shyly, “if I could drop onto her.”

“If you can’t speak English,” Mrs. Osborn said, “it’s better to keep quiet. You sound like a fruit peddler.”

“I am sorry,” Boobee said.

“Please sit down,” my wife said, and he did, but his nose seemed to get very long. He had been injured. The awkward party lasted not much over an hour.

THEN BOOBEE CALLED
me one night, one late-summer night, and said that he had to see me, and I invited him over. He wore his gloves and his green plush hat. My wife was upstairs, and since she didn’t especially like Boobee, I didn’t call her down. I made some drinks, and we sat in the garden.

“Listen!” Boobee said. He used the imperative
ascolta
. “Listen to me. Grace is insane…. Tonight, dinner is late. I was very hungry, and if I do not have my dinner punctually I lose my appetite. Grace knows this well, but when I arrived at the house there is no dinner. There is nothing to eat. She is in the kitchen burning something in a pan. I explain to her with courtesy that I must have a punctual dinner. Then you know what happens?”

I knew, but it seemed tactless to say that I knew. I said, “No.”

“You could not imagine,” he said. He put a hand to his heart. “Listen,” he said. “She
cries
.”

“Women cry easily, Boobee,” I said.

“Not European women.”

“But you didn’t marry a European.”

“That is not all. The madness now comes. She cries, and when I ask her why she cries, she explains that she is crying because in becoming my wife she has given up a great career as a soprano in opera.”

I don’t suppose there is much difference between the sounds of a summer night—a late-summer night—in my country and Italy, and yet it seemed so then. All the softness had gone out of the night air—fireflies and murmuring winds—and the insects in the grass around me made a sound as harsh and predatory as the sharpening of burglar’s tools. It made the distance he had come from Verona seem immense. “Opera!” he cried. “La Scala! It is because of me that she is not performing tonight in La Scala. She used to take singing lessons, that is so, but she was never invited to perform. Now she is seized with this madness.”

“A great many American women, Boobee, feel that in marriage they have given up a career.”

“Madness,” he said. He wasn’t listening. “Complete madness. But what can one do? Will you speak to her?”

“I don’t know what good it will do, Boobee, but I’ll try.”

“Tomorrow. I’ll be late. Will you speak to her tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

He stood and pulled on his gloves, finger by finger. Then he tossed on his plush hat with its imaginary feathers and asked, “What is the secret of my charm—my incredible ebullience?”

“I don’t know, Boobee,” I said, but a warm feeling of sympathy for Grace spread through my chest.

“It is because my philosophy of life includes a grasp of consequences and limitations. She has no such philosophy.”

He then got into his car and started it up so abruptly that he scattered gravel all over the lawn.

I turned off the lights on the first floor and went up to our bedroom, where my wife was reading. “Boobee was here,” I said. “I didn’t call you.”

“I know. I heard you talking in the garden.” Her voice was tremulous, and then I saw there were tears on her cheek.

“What’s the matter, darling?”

“Oh, I feel that I’ve wasted my life,” she said. “I have the most terrible feeling of waste. I know it isn’t your fault, but I’ve really given too much of myself to you and the children. I want to go back to the theatre.”

I should explain about my wife’s theatrical career. Some years ago a company of amateurs in the neighborhood performed Shaw’s
Saint Joan
. Margaret had the lead. I was in Cleveland on business, through no choice of my own, and I didn’t see the performance, but I am convinced that it was outstanding. There were to be two performances, and when the curtain came down at the end of the first there was a standing ovation. Margaret’s performance has been described to me as brilliant, radiant, magnetic, and unforgettable. There was so much excitement that several directors and producers in New York were urged to come out for the second night. Several of them accepted. I was, as I have said, not there, but Margaret has told me what happened. It was a blindingly bright, cold morning. She drove the children to school and then returned and tried to rehearse her lines, but the telephone kept ringing. Everyone felt that a great actress had been discovered. It clouded over at ten, and a north wind began to blow. It began to snow at half past ten, and by noon the storm developed into a blizzard. The schools closed at one and the children were sent home. More than half the roads were closed by four. The trains were running late or not at all. Margaret was unable to get her car out of the garage, so she walked the two miles to the theatre. None of the producers or directors could make it, of course, and only half the cast showed up, so the performance was canceled. Plans were made to repeat the performance later, but the Dauphin had to go to San Francisco, the theatre was booked for other things, and the producers and directors who had agreed to come seemed, on second thought, to be suspicious about going so far afield. Margaret never played Joan again. She had the most natural regrets. The praise that had been poured into her ears rang there for months. A thrilling promise had been broken and, as anyone would, she felt that her disappointment was legitimate and deep.