The Stories of John Cheever (49 page)

While Mr. Bruce was waiting for Katherine to put her coat on, Mrs. Sheridan came in from the foyer. They shook hands. “Can I take you home?” he asked.

She said, “Yes,
yes
,” and went in search of her older daughter.

Katherine went up to her hostess and dropped a curtsy. “It was nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Howells,” she said, without mumbling. “And thank you very much.”

“She’s such a dear. It’s such a joy to have her!” Mrs. Howells said to Mr. Bruce, and laid a hand absent-mindedly on Katherine’s head.

Mrs. Sheridan reappeared with her daughter. Louise Sheridan curtsied and recited her thanks, but Mrs. Howells was thinking about something else and did not hear. The little girl repeated her thanks, in a louder voice.

“Why, thank you for coming!” Mrs. Howells exclaimed abruptly.

Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan and the two children went down in the elevator. It was still light when they came out of the building onto Fifth Avenue.

“Let’s walk,” Mrs. Sheridan said. “It’s only a few blocks.”

The children went on ahead. They were in the lower Eighties and their view was broad; it took in the avenue, the Museum, and the Park. As they walked, the double track of lights along the avenue went on with a faint click. There was a haze in the air that made the lamps give off a yellow light, and the colonnades of the Museum, the mansard roof of the Plaza above the trees, and the multitude of yellow lights reminded Stephen Bruce of many pictures of Paris and London (“Winter Afternoon”) that had been painted at the turn of the century. This deceptive resemblance pleased him, and his pleasure in what he could see was heightened by the woman he was with. He felt that she saw it all very clearly. They walked along without speaking most of the way. A block or two from the building where she lived, she took her arm out of his.

“I’d like to talk with you someday about St. James’s School,” Mr. Bruce said. “Won’t you have lunch with me? Could you have lunch with me on Tuesday?”

“I’d love to have lunch with you,” Mrs. Sheridan said.

THE RESTAURANT WHERE
Mrs. Sheridan and Mr. Bruce met for lunch on Tuesday was the kind of place where they were not likely to see anyone they knew. The menu was soiled, and so was the waiter’s tuxedo. There are a thousand places like it in the city. When they greeted one another, they could have passed for a couple that had been married fifteen years. She was carrying bundles and an umbrella. She might have come in from the suburbs to get some clothes for the children. She said she had been shopping, she had taken a taxi, she had been rushed, she was hungry. She took off her gloves, rattled the menu, and looked around. He had a whiskey and she asked for a glass of sherry.

“I want to know what you really think about St. James’s School,” he said, and she began, animatedly, to talk.

They had moved a year earlier from New York to Long Island, she said, because she wanted to send her children to a country school. She had been to country schools herself. The Long Island school had been unsatisfactory, and they had moved back to New York in September. Her husband had gone to St. James’s, and that had determined their choice. She spoke excitedly, as Mr. Bruce had known she would, about the education of her daughters, and he guessed that this was something she couldn’t discuss with the same satisfaction with her husband. She was excited at finding someone who seemed interested in her opinions, and she put herself at a disadvantage, as he intended she should, by talking too much. The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter, and they both looked wonderful. He got her a taxi at the corner. They said goodbye.

“You’ll have lunch with me again?”

“Of course,” she said, “of course.”

She met him for lunch again. Then she met him for dinner—her husband was away. He kissed her in the taxi, and they said good night in front of her apartment house. When he called her a few days later, a nurse or a maid answered the telephone and said that Mrs. Sheridan was ill and could not be disturbed. He was frantic. He called several times during the afternoon, and finally Mrs. Sheridan answered. Her illness was not serious, she said. She would be up in a day or two and she would call him when she was well. She called him early the next week, and they met for lunch at a restaurant in an uptown apartment house. She had been shopping. She took off her gloves, rattled the menu, and looked around another failing restaurant, poorly lighted and with only a few customers. One of her daughters had a mild case of measles, she said, and Mr. Bruce was interested in the symptoms. But he looked, for a man who claimed to be interested in childhood diseases, bilious and vulpine. His color was bad. He scowled and rubbed his forehead as if he suffered from a headache. He repeatedly wet his lips and crossed and recrossed his legs. Presently, his uneasiness seemed to cross the table. During the rest of the time they sat there, the conversation was about commonplace subjects, but an emotion for which they seemed to have no words colored the talk and darkened and enlarged its shapes. She did not finish her dessert. She let her coffee get cold. For a while, neither of them spoke. A stranger, noticing them in the restaurant, might have thought that they were a pair of old friends who had met to discuss a misfortune. His face was gray. Her hands were trembling. Leaning toward her, he said, finally, “The reason I asked you to come here is because the firm I work for has an apartment upstairs.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better. That part of their experience that is distinct and separate, the totality of the years before they met, is changed, is redirected toward this moment. They feel they have reached an identical point of intensity, an ecstasy of rightness that they command in every part, and any recollection that occurs to them takes on this final clarity, whether it be a sweep hand on an airport clock, a snow owl, a Chicago railroad station on Christmas Eve, or anchoring a yawl in a strange harbor while all along the stormy coast strangers are blowing their horns for the yacht-club tender, or running a ski trail at that hour when, although the sun is still in the sky, the north face of every mountain lies in the dark.

“
DO YOU WANT
to go downstairs alone? The elevator men in these buildings—” Stephen Bruce said when they had dressed.

“I don’t care about the elevator men in these buildings,” she said lightly.

She took his arm, and they went down in the elevator together. When they left the building, they were unwilling to part, and they decided on the Metropolitan Museum as a place where they were not likely to be seen by anyone they knew. The nearly empty rotunda looked, at that hour of the afternoon, like a railroad station past train time. It smelled of burning coal. They looked at stone horses and pieces of cloth. In a dark passage, they found a prodigal representation of the Feast of Love. The god—disguised now as a woodcutter, now as a cowherd, a sailor, a prince—came through every open door. Three spirits waited by a holly grove to lift the armor from his shoulders and undo his buckler. A large company encouraged his paramour. The whole creation was in accord—the civet and the bear, the lion and the unicorn, fire and water.

Coming back through the rotunda, Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan met a friend of Lois’s mother. It was impossible to avoid her and they said How-do-you-do and I’m-happy-to-meet-you, and Stephen promised to remember the friend to his mother-in-law. Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan walked over to Lexington and said goodbye. He returned to his office and went home at six. Mrs. Bruce had not come in, the maid told him. Katherine was at a party, and he was supposed to bring her home. The maid gave him the address and he went out again without taking off his coat. It was raining. The doorman, in a white raincoat, went out into the storm, and returned riding on the running board of a taxi. The taxi had orange seats, and as it drove uptown, he heard the car radio playing a tango. Another doorman let him out and he went into a lobby that, like the one in the building where he lived, was meant to resemble the hall of a manor house. Upstairs, there were peanut shells on the rug, balloons on the ceiling; friends and relatives were drinking cocktails in the living room, and at the end of the room, the marionette stage was again being dismantled. He drank a Martini and talked with a friend while he waited for Katherine to put her coat on. “Oh yes,
yes!
” he heard Mrs. Sheridan say, and then he saw her come into the room with her daughters.

Katherine came between them before they spoke, and he went, with his daughter, over to the hostess. Katherine dropped her curtsy and said brightly, “It was very nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Bremont, and thank you very much.” As Mr. Bruce started for the elevator, the younger Sheridan girl dropped her curtsy and said, “It was a very nice party, Mrs. Bremont….”

He waited downstairs, with Katherine, for Mrs. Sheridan, but something or someone delayed her, and when the elevator had come down twice without bringing her, he left.

MR. BRUCE AND MRS. SHERIDAN
met at the apartment a few days later. Then he saw her in a crowd at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, waiting for her children. He saw her again in the lobby of the Chardin Club, among the other parents, nursemaids, and chauffeurs who were waiting for the dancing class to end. He didn’t speak to her, but he heard her at his back, saying to someone, “Yes, Mother’s very well, thank you. Yes, I will give her your love.” Then he heard her speaking to someone farther away from him and then her voice fell below the music. That night, he left the city on business and did not return until Sunday, and he went Sunday afternoon to a football game with a friend. The game was slow and the last quarter was played under lights. When he got home, Lois met him at the door of the apartment. The fire in the living room was lighted. She fixed their drinks and then sat across the room from him in a chair near the fire. “I forgot to tell you that Aunt Helen called on Wednesday. She’s moving from Gray’s Hill to a house nearer the shore.”

He tried to find something to say to this item of news and couldn’t. After five years of marriage he seemed to have been left with nothing to say. It was like being embarrassed by a shortage of money. He looked desperately back to the football game and the trip to Chicago for something that might please her, and couldn’t find a word. Lois felt his struggle and his failure. She stopped talking herself. I haven’t had anyone to talk to since Wednesday, she thought, and now he has nothing to say. “While you were away, I strained my back again, reaching for a hatbox,” she said. “The pain is excruciating, and Dr. Parminter doesn’t seem able to help me, so I’m going to another doctor, named Walsh, who—”

“I’m terribly sorry your back is bothering you,” he said. “I hope Dr. Walsh will be able to help.”

The lack of genuine concern in his voice hurt her feelings. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you—there’s been some
trouble
,” she said crossly. “Katherine spent the afternoon with Helen Woodruff and some other children. There were some boys. When the maid went into the playroom to call them for supper, she found them all undressed. Mrs. Woodruff was very upset and I told her you’d call.”

“Where is Katherine?”

“She’s in her room. She won’t speak to me. I don’t like to be the one to say it, but I think you ought to get a psychiatrist for that girl.”

“I’ll go and speak to her,” Mr. Bruce said.

“Well, will you want any supper?” Lois asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I would like some supper.”

Katherine had a large room on the side of the building. Her furniture had never filled it. When Mr. Bruce went in, he saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, in the dark. The room smelled of a pair of rats that she had in a cage. He turned on the light and gave her a charm bracelet that he had bought at the airport, and she thanked him politely. He did not mention the trouble at the Woodruffs’, but when he put his arm around her shoulders, she began to cry bitterly.

“I didn’t want to do it this afternoon,” she said, “but
she
made me, and she was the hostess, and we always have to do what the hostess says.”

“It doesn’t matter if you wanted to or not,” he said. “You haven’t done anything terribly wrong.”

He held her until she was quiet, and then left her and went into his bedroom and telephoned Mrs. Woodruff. “This is Katherine Bruce’s father,” he said. “I understand that there was some difficulty there this afternoon. I just wanted to say that Katherine has been given her lecture, and as far as Mrs. Bruce and I are concerned, the incident has been forgotten.”

“Well, it hasn’t been forgotten over here,” Mrs. Woodruff said. “I don’t know who started it, but I’ve put Helen to bed without any supper. Mr. Woodruff and I haven’t decided how we’re going to punish her yet, but we’re going to punish her severely.” He heard Lois calling to him from the living room that his supper was ready. “I suppose you know that immorality is sweeping this country,” Mrs. Woodruff went on. “Our child has never heard a dirty word spoken in her life in this household. There is no room for filth here. If it takes fire to fight fire, that’s what I’m going to do!”

The ignorant and ill-tempered woman angered him, but he listened helplessly to her until she had finished, and then went back to Katherine.

Lois looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and called to her husband sharply, a second time. She had not felt at all like making his supper. His lack of concern for her feelings and then her having to slave for him in the kitchen had seemed like an eternal human condition. The ghosts of her injured sex thronged to her side when she slammed open the silver drawer and again when she poured his beer. She set the tray elaborately, in order to deepen her displeasure in doing it at all. She heaped cold meat and salad on her husband’s plate as if they were poisoned. Then she fixed her lipstick and carried the heavy tray into the dining room herself, in spite of her lame back.