The Stories of John Cheever (40 page)

ALL THE LONG DISCUSSIONS
that Russell had had with Esther about the impermanence of their relationship did not help him that autumn when the Nudds went away. He missed the girl and the summer nights in her room painfully. He began to write long letters to Esther when he got back to Albany. He was troubled and lonely as he had never been before. Esther did not answer his letters, but this did not change the way he felt. He decided that they should become engaged. He would stay on at college and get a Master’s degree, and with a teaching job they could live in some place like Albany. Esther did not even answer his proposal of marriage, and in desperation Russell telephoned her at college. She was out. He left a message to call him back. When she had not called him by the next evening, he telephoned her again, and when he got her this time, he asked her to marry him. “I can’t marry you, Russell,” she said impatiently. “I don’t
want
to marry you.” He hung up miserably and was lovesick for a week. Then he decided that Esther’s refusal was not her decision, that her parents had forbidden her to marry him—a conjecture that was strengthened when none of the Nudds returned to Macabit the next summer. But Russell was mistaken. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd took Joan and Esther to California that summer, not to keep Esther away from Russell but because Mrs. Nudd had received a legacy and had decided to spend it on the trip. Hartley took a job in Maine at a summer camp. Randy and Pamela—Randy had lost his job in Boston and had taken one in Worcester—were having a baby in July, and so Whitebeach Camp was not opened at all.

THEN THEY ALL
came back. A year later, on a June day when a horse van was bringing the bays up to the Macabit Riding Stable and there were a lot of motorboats on trailers along the road, the Nudds returned. Hartley had a teaching job, so he was there all summer. Randy took two weeks without pay so that he and Pamela and their baby could be there for a month. Joan had not planned to come back; she had gone into partnership with a woman who owned a tearoom at Lake George, but she quarreled with her partner early in this venture, and in June Mr. Nudd drove to the lake and brought her home. Joan had been to a doctor that winter because she had begun to suffer from depressions, and she talked freely about her unhappiness. “You know, I think the trouble with me,” she would say at breakfast, “is that I was so jealous of Hartley when he first went to boarding school. I could have killed him when he came home that year for Christmas, but I repressed all of my animosity …” “Remember that nursemaid, O’Brien?” she would ask at lunch. “Well, I think O’Brien warped my whole outlook on sex. She used to get undressed in the closet, and she beat me once for looking at myself in a mirror when I didn’t have any clothes on. I think she warped my whole outlook …” “I think the trouble with me is that Grandmother was always so strict,” she would say at dinner. “I never had the feeling that I gratified her. I mean, I got such bad marks at school, and she always made me feel so guilty. I think it’s colored my attitude toward other women …” “You know,” she would say on the porch after supper, “I think the whole turning point in my life was that awful Trenchard boy who showed me those pictures when I was only ten …” These recollections brought her a momentary happiness, but half an hour later she would be biting her fingernails. Surrounded all her life by just and kindly people, she was having a hard time finding the causes of her irresolution, and, one by one, she blamed the members of her family, and their friends, and the servants.

Esther had married Tom Dennison the previous fall, when she returned from California. This match pleased everyone in the family. Tom was pleasant, industrious, and intelligent. He had a freshman job with a firm that manufactured cash registers. His salary was small, and he and Esther began their marriage in a cold-water tenement in the East Sixties. Speaking of this arrangement, people sometimes added, “That Esther Nudd is so
courageous!
” When the summer came around, Tom had only a short vacation, and he and Esther went to Cape Cod in June. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd hoped that Esther would then come to Whitebeach Camp, but Esther said no, she would stick it out in the city with Tom. She changed her mind in August, and Mr. Nudd drove to the junction and met her train. She would only stay for ten days, she said, and this would be her last summer at Whitebeach Camp. Tom and she were going to buy a summer place of their own on Cape Cod. When it was time for her to go, she telephoned Tom, and he told her to stay in the country; the heat was awful. She telephoned him once a week and stayed at Whitebeach Camp until the middle of September.

Mr. Nudd spent two or three days of every week that summer in New York, flying down from Albany. For a change, he was pleased with the way his business was going. He had been made chairman of the board. Pamela had her baby with her, and she complained about the room they were given. Once, Mrs. Nudd overheard her in the kitchen, saying to the cook, “Things will be very different around here when Randy and I run this place, let me tell you …” Mrs. Nudd spoke to her husband about this, and they agreed to leave Whitebeach Camp to Hartley. “That ham only came to the table once,” Pamela would say, “and I saw her dumping a dish of good shell beans into the garbage last night. I’m not in a position to correct her, but I hate to see waste. Don’t you?”

Randy worshipped his thin wife, and she took full advantage of his protection. She came out onto the porch one evening when they were drinking before dinner, and sat down beside Mrs. Nudd. She had the baby in her arms.

“Do you always have supper at seven, Granny?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid I can’t get to the table at seven,” Pamela said. “I hate to be late for meals, but I have to think of the baby first, don’t I?”

“I’m afraid I can’t ask them to hold dinner,” Mrs. Nudd said.

“I don’t want you to hold dinner for me,” Pamela said, “but that little room we’re in is terribly hot, and we’re having trouble getting Binxey to sleep. Randy and I love being here, and we want to do everything we can to make it easy for you to have us here, but I do have to think of Binxey, and as long as he finds it hard to get to sleep, I won’t be able to be on time for meals. I hope you don’t mind. I want to know the truth.”

“If you’re late, it won’t matter,” Mrs. Nudd said.

“That’s a beautiful dress,” Pamela said, to end the conversation pleasantly. “Is it new?”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Nudd said. “Yes, it is new.”

“It’s a beautiful color,” Pamela said, and she got up to feel the material, but some sudden movement made by her or by the baby in her arms or by Mrs. Nudd brought Pamela’s cigarette against the new dress and burned a hole in it. Mrs. Nudd caught her breath, smiled awkwardly, and said that it didn’t matter.

“But it does matter!” Pamela exclaimed. “I feel awfully about it. I feel awfully. It’s all my fault, and if you’ll give me the dress, I’ll send it to Worcester and have it rewoven. I know a place in Worcester where they do wonderful reweaving.”

Mrs. Nudd said again that it didn’t matter, and tried to change the subject by asking if it hadn’t been a beautiful day.

“I insist that you let me have it rewoven,” Pamela said. “I want you to take it off after dinner and give it to me.” Then she went to the door and turned and held the baby up. “Wave bye-bye to Granny, Binxey,” she said. “Wave bye-bye, Binxey do it. Baby do it. Baby wave bye-bye to Granny. Binxey wave bye-bye. Wave bye-bye to Granny. Baby wave bye-bye …”

But none of these disturbances changed the rites of summer. Hartley took the maid and the cook to Mass at St. John’s early every Sunday morning and waited for them on the front steps of the feed store. Randy froze the ice cream at eleven. It seemed as if the summer were a continent, harmonious and self-sufficient, with a peculiar range of sensation that included the feel of driving the old Cadillac barefoot across a bumpy pasture, and the taste of water that came out of the garden hose near the tennis court, and the pleasure of pulling on a clean woolen sweater in a mountain hut at dawn, and sitting on the porch in the dark, conscious and yet not resentful of a sensation of being caught up in a web of something as tangible and fragile as thread, and the clean feeling after a long swim.

THE NUDDS
didn’t ask Russell to Whitebeach Camp that year, and they carried on the narration without his help. After his graduation, Russell had married Myra Hewitt, a local girl. He had given up his plans for getting a Master’s degree when Esther refused to marry him. He now worked for his father in the hardware store. The Nudds saw him when they bought a steak grill or some fishing line, and they all agreed that he looked poorly. He was pale. His clothes, Esther noticed, smelled of chicken feed and kerosene. They felt that by working in a store Russell had disqualified himself as a figure in their summers. This feeling was not strong, however, and it was largely through indifference and the lack of time that they did not see him. But the next summer they came to hate Russell; they took Russell off their list.

Late that next spring, Russell and his father-in-law had begun to cut and sell the timber on Hewitt’s Point and to slash a three-acre clearing along the lake front in preparation for a large tourist-camp development, to be called Young’s Bungalow City. Hewitt’s Point was across the lake and three miles to the south of Whitebeach Camp, and the development would not affect the Nudds’ property, but Hewitt’s Point was the place where they had always gone for their picnics, and they did not like to see the grove cut and replaced with tourist hutches. They were all bitterly disappointed in Russell. They had thought of him as a native who loved his hills. They had expected him, as a kind of foster son, to share their summery lack of interest in money and it was a double blow to have him appear mercenary and to have the subject of his transactions the grove on Hewitt’s Point, where they had enjoyed so many innocent picnics.

But it is the custom of that country to leave the beauties of nature to women and ministers. The village of Macabit stands on some high land above a pass and looks into the mountains of the north country. The lake is the floor of this pass, and on all but the hottest mornings clouds lie below the front steps of the feed store and the porch of the Federated Church. The weather in the pass is characterized by what is known on the coast as a sea turn. Across the heart of a hot, still day will be drawn a shadow as deep as velvet, and a bitter rain will extinguish the mountains; but this continuous displacement of light and dark, the thunder and the sunsets, the conical lights that sometimes end a storm and that have been linked by religious artists to godly intercession, have only accentuated the indifference of the secular male to his environment. When the Nudds passed Russell on the road without waving to him, he didn’t know what he had done that was wrong.

That year, Esther left in September. She and her husband had moved to a suburb, but they had not been able to swing the house on Cape Cod, and she had spent most of the summer at Whitebeach Camp without him. Joan, who was going to take a secretarial course, went back to New York with her sister. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd stayed on until the first of November. Mr. Nudd had been deceived about his success in business. His position as chairman of the board, he discovered much too late, amounted to retirement with a small pension. There was no reason for him to go back, and he and Mrs. Nudd spent the fall taking long walks in the woods. Gasoline rationing had made that summer a trying one, and when they closed the house, they felt that it would be a long time before they opened it again. Shortages of building materials had stopped construction on Young’s Bungalow City. After the trees had been cut and the concrete posts set for twenty-five tourist cabins, Russell hadn’t been able to get nails or lumber or roofing to build with.

* * *

WHEN THE WAR
was over, the Nudds returned to Whitebeach Camp for their summers. They had all been active in the war effort; Mrs. Nudd had worked for the Red Cross, Mr. Nudd had been a hospital orderly, Randy had been a mess officer in Georgia, Esther’s husband had been a lieutenant in Europe, and Joan had gone to Africa with the Red Cross, but she had quarreled with her superior, and had hastily been sent home on a troopship. But their memories of the war were less lasting than most memories, and, except for Hartley’s death (Hartley had drowned in the Pacific), it was easily forgotten. Now Randy took the cook and the maid to Mass at St. John’s early on Sunday morning. They played tennis at eleven, went swimming at three, drank gin at six. “The children”—lacking Hartley and Russell—went to Sherill’s Falls, climbed Macabit Mountain, fished in Bates’s Pond, and drove the old Cadillac barefoot across the pasture.

The new vicar of the Episcopal chapel in Macabit called on the Nudds the first summer after the war and asked them why they hadn’t had services read for Hartley. They couldn’t say. The vicar pressed the point. Some nights later, Mrs. Nudd dreamed that she saw Hartley as a discontented figure. The vicar stopped her on the street later in the week, and spoke to her again about a memorial service, and this time she agreed to it. Russell was the only person in Macabit she thought she should invite. Russell had also been in the Pacific. When he returned to Macabit, he went back to work in the hardware store. The land on Hewitt’s Point had been sold to real-estate developers, who were now putting up one- and two-room summer cottages.

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.