The Stories of John Cheever (79 page)

She was a good wife to him, and in the morning he was so grateful that he bought her a silver dish for the butter and a cover for the ironing board and a pair of red pants, laced with gold. The mother would give her the tail of the devil, she knew, for wearing pants, and in Rome she herself would spit in the eye of a woman who was so badly educated as to wear pants, but this was a new world and it was no sin, and in the afternoon she wore the mink stole and the red pants and went with Joe up and down the wooden walk above the sea. On Saturday they went home, and on Monday they bought the furniture, and on Tuesday it was delivered, and on Friday she put on the red pants and went to the supermarket with Maria Pelluchi, who explained the labels on the boxes to her, and she looked so much like an American that people were surprised when she could not speak the language.

But if she could not speak the language she could do everything else, and she even learned to drink whiskey without coughing and spitting. In the morning, she would turn on all the machines and watch the TV, learning the words of the songs, and in the afternoons Maria Pelluchi came to her house and they watched the TV together, and in the evening she watched it with Joe. She tried to write the mother about the things she had bought—much finer things than the Pope possessed—but she realized that the letter would only bewilder the mother, and in the end she sent her nothing but postcards. No one could describe how diverting and commodious her life had become. In the summer, in the evenings, Joe took her to the races in Baltimore, and she had never seen anything so
carina
—the little horses and the lights and the flowers and the red coat of the marshal with his bugle. That summer, they went to the races every Friday and sometimes oftener, and it was one night there, when she was wearing her red pants and drinking whiskey, that she saw her signore for the first time since they had quarreled.

She asked him how he was, and how was his family, and he said, “We are not together. We are divorced.” Looking into his face then, she saw not the end of his marriage but the end of his happiness. The advantage was hers, because hadn’t she explained to him that he was like a boy with stars in his eyes, but some part of his loss seemed to be hers as well. Then he went away, and, although the race was beginning, she saw instead the white snow and the wolves of Nascosta, the pack coming up the Via Cavour and crossing the piazza as if they were bent on some errand of that darkness that she knew to lie at the heart of life, and, remembering the cold on her skin and the whiteness of the snow and the stealth of the wolves, she wondered why the good God had opened up so many choices and made life so strange and diverse.

I
T IS RAINING
in Rome (the boy wrote) where we live in a palace with a golden ceiling and where the wisteria is in bloom but you can’t hear the noise of the rain in Rome. In the beginning we used to spend the summers in Nantucket and the winters in Rome and in Nantucket you can hear the rain and I like to lie in bed at night and listen to it running in the grass like fire because then you can see in what they call the mind’s eye the number of different things that grow in the sea pastures there like heather and clover and fern. We used to come down to New York in the fall and sail in October and the best record of those trips would be the pictures the ship’s photographer used to take and post in the library after the whoopee: I mean men wearing lady’s hats and old people playing musical chairs and the whole thing lit by flashbulbs so that it looked like a thunderstorm in a forest. I used to play Ping-Pong with the old people and I always won the Ping-Pong tournament on the eastward crossing. I won a pigskin wallet on the Italian Line and a pen and pencil set on American Export and three handkerchiefs from the Home Lines, and once we traveled on a Greek ship where I won a cigarette lighter. I gave the cigarette lighter to my father because in those days I didn’t drink, smoke, swear, or speak Italian.

My father was kind to me and when I was little he took me to the zoo, and let me ride horseback, and always bought me some pastry and an orangeade at a café, and while I drank my orangeade he always had a vermouth with a double shot of gin or later when there were so many Americans in Rome a Martini but I am not writing a story about a boy who sees his father sneaking drinks. The only time I spoke Italian then was when my father and I would visit the raven in the Borghese Gardens and feed him peanuts. When the raven saw us he would say
buon giorno
and I would say
buon giorno
and then when I gave him the peanuts he would say
grazie
and then when we walked away he would say
ciao
. My father died three years ago and he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. There were a lot of people there and at the end of it my mother put an arm around me and she said, “We won’t
ever
leave him alone here, will we, Pietro? We won’t ever,
ever
, leave him alone here, will we, dear?” So some Americans live in Rome because of the income tax and some Americans live in Rome because they’re divorced or oversexed or poetic or have some other reason for feeling that they might be persecuted at home and some Americans live in Rome because they work there, but we live in Rome because my father’s bones lie in the Protestant Cemetery.

My grandfather was a tycoon and I think that is why my father liked to live in Rome. My grandfather started life with nothing at all, but he made plenty and he expected everybody else to do what he did, although this was not possible. The only time I ever saw much of my grandfather was when we used to visit him at his summer house in Colorado. The thing I remember mostly is the Sunday-night suppers which my grandfather used to cook when the maids and the cook were off. He always cooked a steak and even before he got the fire started everybody would be so nervous that you lost your appetite. He always had a terrible time getting the fire started and everyone sat around watching him, but you didn’t dare say a word. There was no drinking because he didn’t approve of drinking, but my parents used to drink plenty in the bathroom. Well, after it took him half an hour to get the fire started, he would put the steak on the grill and we would all go on sitting there. What made everyone nervous was that they knew they were going to be judged. If we had done anything wrong during the week that Grampa disliked, well now we would know about it. He used to practically have a fit just cooking a steak. When the fat caught on fire his face would turn purple and he would jump up and down and run around. When the steak was done we would each get a dinner plate and stand in line and this was the judgment. If Grampa liked you he would give you a nice piece of meat, but if he felt or suspected that you had done something wrong he would give you only a tiny piece of gristle. Well, you’d be surprised how embarrassing it is to find yourself holding this big plate with just a bit of gristle on it. You feel awful.

One week I tried to do everything right so I would not get a piece of gristle. I washed the station wagon and helped Grandma in the garden and brought in wood for the house fires, but all I got on Sunday was a little bit of gristle. So then I said,
Grampa
, I said,
I don’t understand why you cook steak for us every Sunday if it makes you so unhappy. Mother knows how to cook and she could at least scramble some eggs and I know how to make sandwiches. I could make sandwiches. I mean if you want to cook for us that would be nice but it looks to me like you don’t and I think it would be nicer if instead of going through this torture chamber we just had some scrambled eggs in the kitchen. I mean I don’t see why if you ask people to have supper with you it should make you so irritable
. Well, he put down his knife and his fork and I’ve seen his face get purple when the fat was burning, but I’ve never seen it get so purple as it did that night.
You God-damned weak-minded, parasitic ape
, he shouted at me, and then he went into the house and upstairs to his bedroom, slamming about every door he passed, and my mother took me down into the garden and told me I had made an awful mistake, but I couldn’t see that I had done anything wrong. But in a little while I could hear my father and my grandfather yelling and swearing at one another and in the morning we went away and we never came back and when he died he left me one dollar.

It was the next year that my father died and I missed him. It is against everything I believe in and not even the kind of thing I am interested in, but I used to think that he would come back from the kingdom of the dead and give me help. I have the head and shoulders to do a man’s work, but sometimes I am disappointed in my maturity and my disappointment in myself is deepest when I get off a train at the end of the day in a city that isn’t my home like Florence with the
tramontana
blowing and no one in the square in front of the station who doesn’t have to be there because of that merciless wind. Then it seems that I am not like myself or the sum of what I have learned but that I am stripped of my emotional savings by the
tramontana
and the hour and the strangeness of the place and I do not know which way to turn except of course to turn away from the wind. It was like that when I went alone on the train to Florence and the
tramontana
was blowing and there was no one in the piazza. I was feeling lonely and then someone touched me on the shoulder and I thought it was my father come back from the kingdom of the dead and that we would all be happy together again and help one another. Who touched me was a ragged old man who was trying to sell me some souvenir key rings and when I saw the sores on his face I felt worse than ever and it seemed to me that there was a big hole torn in my life and that I was never going to get all the loving I needed and that autumn once in Rome I stayed late in school and was coming home on the trolley car and it was after seven and all the stores and offices were closing and everybody was going home and rushed and someone touched me on the shoulder and I thought it was my father come again from the kingdom of the dead. I didn’t even look around this time because it could have been anybody—a priest or a tart or an old man who had lost his balance—but I had the same feeling that we would all be happy together again and then I knew that I was never going to get all the loving I needed, no, never.

After my father passed away we gave up the trips to Nantucket and lived all the time in the Palazzo Orvieta. This is a beautiful and a somber building with a famous staircase, although the staircase is only lighted with ten-watt bulbs and is full of shadows in the evening. There is not always enough hot water and it is often drafty, for Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues. It might make you angry to hear the men in the dark streets singing melodiously about the roses of eternal spring and the sunny Mediterranean skies. You could sing a song, I guess, about the cold
trattorie
and the cold churches, the cold wine shops and the cold bars, about the burst pipes and the backfired toilets and about how the city lies under the snow like an old man with a stroke and everybody coughing in the streets—even the archdukes and cardinals coughing—but it wouldn’t make much of a song. I go to the Sant’ Angelo di Padova International School for Catholics although I am not a Catholic and take Communion at St. Paul within the Gates every Sunday morning. In the wintertime there are usually only two of us in church, not counting the priest or canon, and the other is a man I don’t like to sit beside because he smells of Chinese Temple Incense although it has occurred to me that when I have not had a bath for three or four days because of the shortage of hot water in the palace he may not want to sit beside me. When the tourists come in March there are more people in church.

In the beginning most of my mother’s friends were Americans and she used to give a big American party at Christmas each year. There was champagne and cake and my mother’s friend Tibi would play the piano and they would all stand around the piano and sing “Silent Night” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and other carols from home. I never liked these parties because all the divorcées used to cry. There are hundreds of American divorcées in Rome and they are all friends of my mother’s and after the second verse of “Silent Night” they would all begin to bawl, but once I was on the street on Christmas Eve, walking down the street in front of our palace, when the windows were open because it was warm or perhaps to let the smoke out from those high windows, and I heard all these people singing “Silent Night” in this foreign city with its ruins and its fountains and it gave me gooseflesh. My mother stopped giving this party when she got to know so many titled Italians. My mother likes the nobility and she doesn’t care what they look like. Sometimes the old Princess Tavola-Calda comes to our house for tea. She is either a dwarf or shrunk with age. Her clothes are thin and held together with darns and she always explains that her best clothes, the court dresses and so forth, are in a big trunk but that she has lost the key. She has chin whiskers and a mongrel dog named Zimba on a piece of clothesline. She comes to our house to fill up on tea cakes, but my mother doesn’t care because she is a real princess and has the blood of Caesars in her veins.

My mother’s best friend is an American writer named Tibi who lives in Rome. There are plenty of these but I don’t think they do much writing. Tibi is usually very tired. He wants to go to the opera in Naples but he is too tired to make the trip. Tibi wants to go to the country for a month and finish his novel but all you can get to eat in the country is roast lamb and roast lamb makes Tibi tired. Tibi has never seen the Castel Sant’ Angelo because just the thought of walking across the river makes Tibi tired. Tibi is always going here or going there but he never gets anywhere because he is so tired. At first you might think someone should put him into a cold shower or light a firecracker under his chair and then you realize that Tibi really is tired or that this tiredness gets him what he wants out of life such as my mother’s affections and that he lies around our palace with a purpose just as I expect to get what I want out of life by walking around the streets as if I had won a prize fight or a tennis match.