The Stories of John Cheever (12 page)

Anne was devoted to her father but she obviously liked her mother, too. In the evenings, when she was tired, she would sit on the sofa beside Mrs. Hartley and rest her head on her mother’s shoulder. It seemed to be only on the mountain, where the environment was strange, that her father would become for her the only person in the world. One evening when the Hartleys were playing bridge—it was quite late and Anne had gone to bed—the child began to call her father. “I’ll go, darling,” Mrs. Hartley said, and she excused herself and went upstairs. “I want my daddy,” those at the bridge table could hear the girl screaming. Mrs. Hartley quieted her and came downstairs again. “Anne had a nightmare,” she explained, and went on playing cards.

The next day was windy and warm. In the middle of the afternoon, it began to rain, and all but the most intrepid skiers went back to their hotels. The bar at the Pemaquoddy filled up early. The radio was turned on for weather reports, and one earnest guest picked up the telephone in the lobby and called other resorts. Was it raining in Pico? Was it raining in Stowe? Was it raining in Ste. Agathe? Mr. and Mrs. Hartley were in the bar that afternoon. She was having a drink for the first time since they had been there, but she did not seem to enjoy it. Anne was playing in the parlor with the other children. A little before dinner, Mr. Hartley went into the lobby and asked Mrs. Butterick if they could have their dinner upstairs. Mrs. Butterick said that this could be arranged. When the dinner bell rang, the Hartleys went up, and a maid took them trays. After dinner, Anne went back to the parlor to play with the other children, and after the dining room had been cleared, the maid went up to get the Hartleys’ trays.

The transom above the Hartleys’ bedroom door was open, and as the maid went down the hall, she could hear Mrs. Hartley’s voice, a voice so uncontrolled, so guttural and full of suffering, that she stopped and listened as if the woman’s life were in danger. “Why do we have to come back?” Mrs. Hartley was crying. “Why do we have to come back? Why do we have to make these trips back to the places where we thought we were happy? What good is it going to do? What good has it ever done? We go through the telephone book looking for the names of people we knew ten years ago, and we ask them for dinner, and what good does it do? What good has it ever done? We go back to the restaurants, the mountains, we go back to the houses, even the neighborhoods, we walk in the slums, thinking that this will make us happy, and it never does. Why in Christ’s name did we ever begin such a wretched thing? Why isn’t there an end to it? Why can’t we separate again? It was better that way. Wasn’t it better that way? It was better for Anne—I don’t care what you say, it was better for her than this. I’ll take Anne again and you can live in town. Why can’t I do that, why can’t I, why can’t I, why can’t I …” The frightened maid went back along the corridor. Anne was sitting in the parlor reading to the younger children when the maid went downstairs.

IT CLEARED UP
that night and turned cold. Everything froze. In the morning, Mrs. Butterick announced that all the trails on the mountain were closed and that the tramway would not run. Mr. Hartley and some other guests broke the crust on the hill behind the inn, and one of the hired hands started the primitive tow. “My son bought the motor that, pulls the tow when he was a senior at Harvard,” Mrs. Butterick said when she heard its humble explosions. “It was in an old Mercer auto, and he drove it up here from Cambridge one night without any license plates!” The slope offered the only skiing in the neighborhood, and after lunch a lot of people came here from other hotels. They wore the snow away under the tow to a surface of rough stone, and snow had to be shoveled onto the tracks. The rope was frayed, and Mrs. Butterick’s son had planned the tow so poorly that it gave the skiers a strenuous and uneven ride. Mrs. Hartley tried to get Anne to use the tow, but she would not ride it until her father led the way. He showed her how to stand, how to hold the rope, bend her knees, and drag her poles. As soon as he was carried up the hill, she gladly followed. She followed him up and down the hill all afternoon, delighted that for once he was remaining in her sight. When the crust on the slope was broken and packed, it made good running, and that odd, nearly compulsive rhythm of riding and skiing, riding and skiing, established itself.

IT WAS
a fine afternoon. There were snow clouds, but a bright and cheerful light beat through them. The country, seen from the top of the hill, was black and white. Its only colors were the colors of spent fire, and this impressed itself upon one—as if the desolation were something more than winter, as if it were the work of a great conflagration. People talk, of course, while they ski, while they wait for their turn to seize the rope, but they can hardly be heard. There is the exhaust of the tow motor and the creak of the iron wheel upon which the tow rope turns, but the skiers themselves seem stricken dumb, lost in the rhythm of riding arid coasting. That afternoon was a continuous cycle of movement. There was a single file to the left of the slope, holding the frayed rope and breaking from it, one by one, at the crown of the hill to choose their way down, going again and again over the same surface, like people who, having lost a ring or a key on the beach, search again and again in the same sand. In the stillness, the child Anne began to shriek. Her arm had got caught in the frayed rope; she had been thrown to the ground and was being dragged brutally up the hill toward the iron wheel. “Stop the tow!” her father roared. “Stop the tow! Stop the tow!” And everyone else on the hill began to shout, “Stop the tow! Stop the tow! Stop the tow!” But there was no one there to stop it. Her screams were hoarse and terrible, and the more she struggled to free herself from the rope, the more violently it threw her to the ground. Space and the cold seemed to reduce the voices—even the anguish in the voices—of the people who were calling to stop the tow, but the girl’s cries were piercing until her neck was broken on the iron wheel.

THE HARTLEYS
left for New York that night after dark. They were going to drive all night behind the local hearse. Several people offered to drive the car down for them, but Mr. Hartley said that he wanted to drive, and his wife seemed to want him to. When everything was ready, the stricken couple walked across the porch, looking around them at the bewildering beauty of the night, for it was very cold and clear and the constellations seemed brighter than the lights of the inn or the village. He helped his wife into the car, and after arranging a blanket over her legs, they started the long, long drive.

D
EBORAH TENNYSON
waited in her nursery on Sunday morning for a signal from her father that would mean she could enter her parents’ bedroom. The signal came late, for her parents had been up the night before with a business friend from Minneapolis and they both had had a good deal to drink, but when Deborah was given the signal she ran clumsily down the dark hall, screaming with pleasure. Her father took her in his arms and kissed her good morning, and then she went to where her mother lay in bed. “Hello, my sweet, my love,” her mother said. “Did Ruby give you your breakfast? Did you have a good breakfast?”

“The weather is lovely out,” Deborah said. “Weather is divine.”

“Be kind to poor Mummy,” Robert said. “Mummy has a terrible hangover.”

“Mummy has a terrible hangover,” Deborah repeated, and she patted her mother’s face lightly.

Deborah was not quite three years old. She was a beautiful girl with wonderful, heavy hair that had lights of silver and gold. She was a city child and she knew about cocktails and hangovers. Both her parents worked and she most often saw them in the early evening, when she was brought in to say good night. Katherine and Robert Tennyson would be drinking with friends, and Deborah would be allowed to pass the smoked salmon, and she had naturally come to assume that cocktails were the axis of the adult world. She made Martinis in the sand pile and thought all the illustrations of cups, goblets, and glasses in her nursery books were filled with Old-Fashioneds.

While the Tennysons waited for breakfast that morning, they read the
Times
. Deborah spread the second news section on the floor and began an elaborate fantasy that her parents had seen performed so often they hardly noticed it. She pretended to pick clothing and jewelry from the advertisements in the paper and to dress herself with these things. Her taste, Katherine thought, was avaricious and vulgar, but there was such clarity and innocence in her monologue that it seemed like a wonderful part of the bright summer morning. “Put on the shoes,” she said, and pretended to put on shoes. “Put on the mink coat,” she said.

“It’s too hot for a mink coat, dear,” Katherine told her. “Why don’t you wear a mink scarf?”

“Put on the mink scarf,” Deborah said. Then the cook came into the bedroom with the coffee and orange juice, and said that Mrs. Harley was there. Robert and Katherine kissed Deborah goodbye and told her to enjoy herself in the park.

The Tennysons had no room for a sleep-in nurse, so Mrs. Harley came to the house every morning and took care of Deborah during the day. Mrs. Harley was a widow. She had lived a hearty and comfortable life until her husband’s death, but he had left her with no money and she had been reduced to working as a nursemaid. She said that she loved children and had always wanted children herself, but this was not true. Children bored and irritated her. She was a kind and ignorant woman, and this, more than any bitterness, showed in her face when she took Deborah downstairs. She was full of old-country blessings for the elevator man and the doorman. She said that it was a lovely morning, wasn’t it, a morning for the gods.

Mrs. Harley and Deborah walked to a little park at the edge of the river. The child’s beauty was bright, and the old woman was dressed in black, and they walked hand in hand, like some amiable representation of winter and spring. Many people wished them good morning. “Where did you get that enchanting child?” someone asked. Mrs. Harley enjoyed these compliments. She was sometimes proud of Deborah, but she had been taking care of her for four months, and the little girl and the old woman had established a relationship that was not as simple as it appeared.

They quarreled a good deal when they were alone, and they quarreled like adults, with a cunning knowledge of each other’s frailties. The child had never complained about Mrs. Harley; it was as though she already understood the evil importance of appearances. Deborah was taciturn about the way in which she spent her days. She would tell no one where she had been or what she had done. Mrs. Harley had found that she could count on this trait, and so the child and the old woman had come to share a number of secrets.

On several late-winter afternoons when the weather had been bitter and dark and Mrs. Harley had been ordered to keep Deborah out until five, she had taken the child to the movies. Deborah had sat beside her in the dark theatre and never complained or cried. Now and then she craned her neck to look at the screen, but most of the time she just sat quiet, listening to the voices and the music. A second secret—and one much less sinful, in Mrs. Harley’s opinion—was that on Sunday mornings, sometimes, and sometimes on weekday afternoons, Mrs. Harley had left the little girl with a friend of the Tennysons. This was a woman named Renée Hall, and there was no harm in it, Mrs. Harley thought. She had never told the Tennysons, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. When Renée took Deborah on Sundays, Mrs. Harley went to the eleven-o’clock Mass, and there was nothing wrong, surely, with an old woman’s going into the house of God to pray for her dead.

Mrs. Harley sat down on one of the benches in the park that morning. The sun was hot and it felt good on her old legs. The air was so clear that the perspective of the river seemed to have changed. You could throw a stone onto Welfare Island, it seemed, and a trick of the light made the downtown bridges look much closer to the center of the city. Boats were going up and down the river, and as they cut the water they left in the air a damp and succinct odor, like the smell of fresh earth that follows a plow. Another nurse and child were the only other people in the park. Mrs. Harley told Deborah to go play in the sand. Then Deborah saw the dead pigeon. “The pigeon is sleeping,” Deborah said. She stooped down to touch its wings.

“That dirty bird is dead, and don’t you dare touch it!” Mrs. Harley shouted.

“The pretty pigeon is sleeping,” Deborah said. Her face clouded suddenly and tears came into her eyes. She stood with her hands folded in front of her and her head bowed, an attitude that was a comical imitation of Mrs. Harley’s reaction to sorrow, but the grief in her voice and her face came straight from her heart.

“Get away from that dirty bird!” Mrs. Harley shouted, and she got up and kicked the dead bird aside. “Go play in the sand,” she told Deborah. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. They must have given twenty-five dollars for that doll carriage you have up in your room, but you’d rather play with a dead bird. Go look at the river. Go look at the boats! And don’t climb up on that railing, either, for you’ll drop in, and with that terrible current that will be the end of you.” Deborah walked obediently over to the river. “Here I am,” Mrs. Harley said to the other nurse, “here I am, a woman going on sixty who lived forty years in a house of her own, sitting on a park bench like any old bum on a Sunday morning while the baby’s parents are up there on the tenth floor sleeping off last night’s liquor.” The other nurse was a well-bred Scotch woman who was not interested in Mrs. Harley. Mrs. Harley turned her attention to the steps leading down to the park from Sutton Place, to watch for Renée Hall. The arrangement between them had been established for about a month.

Renée Hall had met Mrs. Harley and the child at the Tennysons’, where she had frequently been a guest for cocktails that winter. She had been brought there by a business friend of Katherine’s. She was pleasant and entertaining, and Katherine had been impressed with her clothes. She lived around the corner and didn’t object to late invitations and most men liked her. The Tennysons knew nothing about her other than that she was an attractive guest and did some radio acting.