The Stories of John Cheever (65 page)

“You’re drinking too much, darling,” she said. “You’ve been drinking too much for three weeks.”

“My drinking,” he said, “is my own God-damned business. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”

It got worse and worse, and she had to do something. She finally went to their rector—a good-looking young bachelor who practiced both psychology and liturgy—for advice. He listened sympathetically. “I stopped at the rectory this afternoon,” she said when she got home that night, “and I talked with Father Hemming. He wonders why you haven’t been in church, and he wants to talk to you. He’s such a good-looking man,” she added, trying to make what she had just, said sound less like a planned speech, “that I wonder why he’s never married.” Charlie—drunk, as usual—went to the telephone and called the rectory. “Look, Father,” he said. “My wife tells me that you’ve been entertaining her in the afternoons. Well, I don’t like it. You keep your hands off my wife. You hear me? That damned black suit you wear doesn’t cut any ice with me. You keep your hands off my wife or I’ll bust your pretty little nose.”

In the end, he lost his job, and they had to move, and began their wanderings, like Gee-Gee and Peaches, in the scarlet-and-gold van.

* * *

AND WHAT HAPPENED
to Gee-Gee—what ever became of him? That boozy guardian angel, her hair disheveled and the strings of her harp broken, still seemed to hover over where he lay. After telephoning Charlie that night, he telephoned the fire department. They were there in eight minutes flat, with bells ringing and sirens blowing. They got him into bed, made him a fresh drink, and one of the firemen, who had nothing better to do, stayed on until Peaches got back from Nassau. They had a fine time, eating all the steaks in the deep freeze and drinking a quart of bourbon every day. Gee-Gee could walk by the time Peaches and the children got back, and he took up that disorderly life for which he seemed so much better equipped than his neighbor, but they had to move at the end of the year, and, like the Folkestones, vanished from the hill towns.

W
ILL PYM WAS
a self-made man; that is, he had started his adult life without a nickel or a connection, other than the general friendliness of man to man, and had risen to a vice-presidency in a rayon-blanket firm. He made a large annual contribution to the Baltimore settlement house that had set his feet upon the right path, and he had a few anecdotes to tell about working as a farmhand long, long ago, but his appearance and demeanor were those of a well-established member of the upper middle class, with hardly a trace—hardly a trace of the anxieties of a man who had been through a grueling struggle to put some money into the bank. It is true that beggars, old men in rags, thinly dressed men and women eating bad food in the penitential lights of a cafeteria, slums and squalid mill towns, the faces in rooming-house windows—even a hole in his daughter’s socks—could remind him of his youth and make him uneasy. He did not ever like to see the signs of poverty. He took a deep pleasure in the Dutch Colonial house where he lived—in its many lighted windows, in the soundness of his roof and his heating plant—in the warmth of his children’s clothing, and in the fact that he had been able to make something plausible and coherent in spite of his mean beginnings. He was always conscious and sometimes mildly resentful of the fact that most of his business associates and all of his friends and neighbors had been skylarking on the turf at Groton or Deerfield or some such school while he was taking books on how to improve your grammar and vocabulary out of the public library. But he recognized this dim resentment of people whose development had been along easier lines than his own as some meanness in his character. Considering merely his physical bulk, it was astonishing that he should have preserved an image of himself as a hungry youth standing outside a lighted window in the rain. He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream.

Will had not married until he was past forty and had moved to New York. He had not had the money or the time, and the destitution of his youth had not been sweetened by much natural love. His stepmother—wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks—had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore drinking sherry out of a coffee cup. She was not a jolly old toper, and what she had to say was usually bitter. The picture she presented may have left with Will some skepticism about the emotional richness of human involvements. It may have delayed his marriage. When he finally did marry, he picked a woman much younger than he—a sweet-tempered girl with red hair and green eyes. She sometimes called him Daddy. Will was so proud of her and spoke so extravagantly of her beauty and her wit that when people first met her they were always disappointed. But Will had been poor and cold and alone, and when he came home at the end of the day to a lovely and loving woman, when he took off his hat and coat in the front hall, he would literally groan with joy. Every stick of furniture that Maria bought seemed to him to be hallowed by her taste and charm. A footstool or a set of pots would so delight him that he would cover her face and throat with kisses. She was extravagant, but he seemed to want a childish and capricious wife, and the implausible excuses that she made for having bought something needless and expensive aroused in him the deepest tenderness. Maria was not much of a cook, but when she put a plate of canned soup in front of him on the maid’s night out, he would get up from his end of the table and embrace her with gratitude.

At first, they had a big apartment in the East Seventies. They went out a good deal. Will disliked parties, but he concealed this distaste for the sake of his young wife. At dinners, he would look across the table at her in the candlelight—laughing, talking, and flashing the rings he had bought her—and sigh deeply. He was always impatient for the party to end, so that they would be alone again, in a taxi or in an empty street where he could kiss her. When Maria first got pregnant, he couldn’t describe his happiness. Every development in her condition astonished him. He was captivated by the preparations she made for the baby. When their first child was born, when milk flowed from her breasts, when their daughter excited in her a most natural tenderness, he was amazed.

The Pyms had three girls. When their third child was born, they moved to the suburbs. Will was past fifty then, but he carried Maria over the threshold, lighted a fire in the hearth, and observed all kinds of sentimental and amorous rites in taking possession of the house. To tell the truth, he did seem, once in a while, to talk about Maria too much. He was anxious to have her shine. At parties, he would stop the general conversation and announce, “Maria will now tell us something very funny that happened at the Women’s Club this afternoon.” Riding into town on the commuting train, he would ring in her opinions on the baseball season or the excise tax. Eating dinner alone in a hotel in Rochester or Toledo—for he often traveled on business—he would show the waitress a picture of Maria. When he served on the grand jury, all the other members of the panel knew about Maria long before the session ended. When he went salmon fishing in Newfoundland, he wondered constantly if Maria was all right.

On a Saturday in the early spring, they celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary with a party at their house in Shady Hill. Twenty-five or thirty people came to drink their health in champagne. Most of the guests were Maria’s age. Will did not like her to be surrounded by young men, and he supervised her comings and goings with a nearly paternal scrutiny. When she wandered out onto the terrace, he was not far behind. But he was a good host, and he held in admirable equilibrium the pleasure he took in his guests and the pleasure he took in thinking that they soon would all be gone. He watched Maria talking with Henry Bulstrode across the room. He supposed that ten years of marriage must have left lines on her face and wasted her figure, but he could see only that her beauty had improved. A pretty young woman was talking with him, but his admiration of Maria made him absent-minded. “You must get Maria to tell you what happened at the florist’s this morning,” he said.

Late on Sunday afternoon, the Pyms took a walk with their children, as they usually did when the weather was fair. It was that time of year when the woods are still bleak, and mixed with the smells of rotted and changing things is an unaccountable sweetness—a perfume as heavy as roses—although nothing is in flower. The children went on ahead. Will and Maria walked arm in arm. It was nearly dusk. Crows were calling hoarsely to one another in some tall pines. It was that hour of a spring day—or evening—when the dark of the woods and the cold and damp from any nearby pond or brook are suddenly felt, when you realize that the world was lighted, until a minute ago, merely by the sun’s fire, and that your clothes are thin.

Will stopped and took a knife from his pocket and began to cut their initials in the bark of a tree. What sense would there be in pointing out that his hair was thin? He meant to express love. It was Maria’s youth and beauty that had informed his senses and left his mind so open that the earth seemed spread out before his eyes like a broad map of reason and sensuality. It was her company that made the singing of the crows so fine to hear. For his children, whose voices sounded down the path, he held out the most practical and abundant hopes. All that he had ever been deprived of was now his.

But Maria was cold and tired and hungry. They had not gone to bed until two, and it had been an effort for her to keep her eyes open while they walked in the woods. When they got home, she would have to fix the supper. Cold cuts or lamb chops, she wondered while she watched Will enclose their initials in the outline of a heart and pierce it with an arrow. “Oh, you’re so lovely!” she heard him murmur when he had finished. “You’re so young and beautiful!” He groaned; he took her in his arms and kissed her wildly. She went on worrying about the supper.

ON A MONDAY NIGHT
not long after this, Maria sat in the living room tying paper apple blossoms to branches. She was on the committee in charge of decorations for the Apple Blossom Fete, a costume ball given for charity at the country club each year. Will was reading a magazine while he waited for her to finish her work. He wore bedroom slippers and a red brocade smoking jacket—a present from Maria—which bunched in thick folds around his stomach, making him look portly. Maria’s hands moved quickly. When she had covered a branch with blossoms, she would hold it up and say, “Isn’t that pretty?” Then she would stand it in a corner where there was the beginning of a forest of flowering branches. Upstairs, the three children slept.

The decorations-committee job was the kind of thing Maria did best. She did not like to go to early-morning meetings on the reform of the primary system, or to poke her nose into dirty hospital kitchens, or to meet with other women in the late afternoons to discuss trends in modern fiction. She had tried being secretary of the Women’s Club, but her minutes were so garbled that she had had to be replaced—not without some hard feeling. On the evening of the day when she was relieved of her position, Will had found her in tears, and it had taken him hours to console her. He relished these adversities. She was young and beautiful, and anything that turned her to him for succor only made his position more secure. Later, when Maria was put in charge of the mink-stole raffle to raise some money for the hospital, she had kept such poor records that Will had had to stay home from the office for a day to straighten things out. She cried and he comforted her, where a younger husband might have expressed some impatience. Will did not encourage her inefficiency, but it was a trait that he associated with the fineness of her eyes and her pallor.

While she tied flowers she talked about the fete. There was going to be a twelve-piece orchestra. The decorations had never been so beautiful. They hoped to raise ten thousand dollars. The dressmaker had delivered her costume. Will asked what her costume was, and she said she would go upstairs and put it on. She usually went to the Apple Blossom Fete as a figure from French history, and Will’s interest was not intense.

Half an hour later, she came down, and went to the mirror by the piano. She was wearing gold slippers, pink tights, and a light velvet bodice, cut low enough to show the division of her breasts. “Of course, my hair will be all different,” she said. “And I haven’t decided what jewels to wear.”

A terrible sadness came over Will. The tight costume—he had to polish his eyeglasses to see it better—displayed all the beauty he worshipped, and it also expressed her perfect innocence of the wickedness of the world. The sight filled poor Will with lust and dismay. He couldn’t bear to disappoint her, and yet he couldn’t let her flagrantly provoke his neighbors—a group of men who seemed at that moment, to his unsettled mind, to be voracious, youthful, bestial, and lewd. Watching her pose happily in front of the mirror, he thought that she looked like a child—a maiden, at least—approaching some obscene doom. In her sweet and gentle face and her half-naked bosom he saw all the sadness of life.

“You can’t wear that, Mummy,” he said.

“What?” She turned away from the mirror.

“Mummy, you’ll get pinched to death.”

“Everybody else is going to wear tights, Willy. Helen Benson and Grace Heatherstone are going to wear tights.”

“They’re different, Mummy,” he said sadly. “They’re very different. They’re tough, hardheaded, cynical, worldly women.”

“What am I?”

“You’re lovely and you’re innocent,” he said. “You don’t understand what a bunch of dogs men are.”

“I don’t want to be lovely and innocent all the time.”

“Oh, Mummy, you don’t mean that! You can’t mean that! You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I only want to have a good time.”

“Don’t you have a good time with me?”