The Stories of John Cheever (87 page)

All the symptoms returned, and this time they were much worse than ever. The wind was knocked out of my lungs as by a blow. My equilibrium was so shaken that the car swerved from one lane into another. I drove to the side and pulled on the hand brake. The loneliness of my predicament was harrowing. If I had been miserable with romantic love, racked with sickness, or beastly drunk, it would have seemed more dignified. I remembered my brother’s face, sallow and greasy with sweat in the elevator, and my mother in her red skirt, one leg held gracefully aloft as she coasted backward in the arms of a rink attendant, and it seemed to me that we were all three characters in some bitter and sordid tragedy, carrying impossible burdens and separated from the rest of mankind by our misfortunes. My life was over, and it would never come back, everything that I loved—blue-sky courage, lustiness, the natural grasp of things. It would never come back. I would end up in the psychiatric ward of the county hospital, screaming that the bridges, all the bridges in the world, were falling down.

Then a young girl opened the door of the car and got in. “I didn’t think anyone would pick me up on the bridge,” she said. She carried a cardboard suitcase and—believe me—a small harp in a cracked waterproof. Her straight light-brown hair was brushed and brushed and grained with blondness and spread in a kind of cape over her shoulders. Her face seemed full and merry.

“Are you hitchhiking?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“But isn’t it dangerous for a girl your age?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you travel much?”

“All the time. I sing a little. I play the coffeehouses.”

“What do you sing?”

“Oh, folk music, mostly. And some old things—Purcell and Dowland. But mostly folk music…. ‘I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,’” she sang in a true and pretty voice. “‘I gave my love a chicken that had no bone / I told my love a story that had no end / I gave my love a baby with no cryin’.’”

She sang me across a bridge that seemed to be an astonishingly sensible, durable, and even beautiful construction designed by intelligent men to simplify my travels, and the water of the Hudson below us was charming and tranquil. It all came back—blue-sky courage, the high spirits of lustiness, an ecstatic sereneness. Her song ended as we got to the toll station on the east bank, and she thanked me, said goodbye, and got out of the car. I offered to take her wherever she wanted to go, but she shook her head and walked away, and I drove on toward the city through a world that, having been restored to me, seemed marvelous and fair. When I got home, I thought of calling my brother and telling him what had happened, on the chance that there was also an angel of the elevator banks, but the harp—that single detail—threatened to make me seem ridiculous or mad, and I didn’t call.

I wish I could say that I am convinced that there will always be some merciful intercession to help me with my worries, but I don’t believe in rushing my luck, so I will stay off the George Washington Bridge, although I can cross the Triborough and the Tappan Zee with ease. My brother is still afraid of elevators, and my mother, although she’s grown quite stiff, still goes around and around and around on the ice.

I
WOULD NOT
want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, “O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps?” As I say, I wouldn’t want to begin a day like this, but I often wonder what the dead would have done. But the shelter is as much a part of my landscape as the beech and horse-chestnut trees that grow on the ridge. I can see it from this window where I write. It was built by the Pasterns, and stands on the acre of ground that adjoins our property. It bulks under a veil of thin, new grass, like some embarrassing fact of physicalness, and I think Mrs. Pastern set out the statuary to soften its meaning. It would have been like her. She was a pale woman. Sitting on her terrace, sitting in her parlor, sitting anywhere, she ground an ax of self-esteem. Offer her a cup of tea and she would say, “Why, these cups look just like a set I gave to the Salvation Army last year.” Show her the new swimming pool and she would say, slapping her ankle, “I suppose this must be where you breed your gigantic mosquitoes.” Hand her a chair and she would say, “Why, it’s a nice imitation of those Queen Anne chairs I inherited from Grandmother Delancy.” These trumps were more touching than they were anything else, and seemed to imply that the nights were long, her children ungrateful, and her marriage bewilderingly threadbare. Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement. She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead. He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, “Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let’s throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who’s boss.” He was brigadier of the club’s locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China.

It all began on an autumn afternoon—and who, after all these centuries, can describe the fineness of an autumn day? One might pretend never to have seen one before, or, to more purpose, that there would never be another like it. The clear and searching sweep of sun on the lawns was like a climax of the year’s lights. Leaves were burning somewhere and the smoke smelled, for all its ammoniac acidity, of beginnings. The boundless blue air was stretched over the zenith like the skin of a drum. Leaving her house one late afternoon, Mrs. Pastern stopped to admire the October light. It was the day to canvass for infectious hepatitis. Mrs. Pastern had been given sixteen names, a bundle of literature, and a printed book of receipts. It was her work to go among her neighbors and collect their checks. Her house stood on a rise of ground, and before she got into her car she looked at the houses below. Charity as she knew it was complex and reciprocal, and almost every roof she saw signified charity. Mrs. Balcolm worked for the brain. Mrs. Ten Eyke did mental health. Mrs. Trenchard worked for the blind. Mrs. Horowitz was in charge of diseases of the nose and throat. Mrs. Trempler was tuberculosis, Mrs. Surcliffe was Mothers’ March of Dimes, Mrs. Craven was cancer, and Mrs. Gilkson did the kidney. Mrs. Hewlitt led the birth-control league, Mrs. Ryerson was arthritis, and way in the distance could be seen the slate roof of Ethel Littleton’s house, a roof that signified gout.

Mrs. Pastern undertook the work of going from house to house with the thoughtless resignation of an honest and traditional laborer. It was her destiny; it was her life. Her mother had done it before her, and even her old grandmother had collected money for smallpox and unwed mothers. Mrs. Pastern had telephoned most of her neighbors in advance, and most of them were ready for her. She experienced none of the suspense of some poor stranger selling encyclopedias. Here and there she stayed to visit and drink a glass of sherry. The contributions were ahead of what she had got the previous year, and while the money, of course, was not hers, it excited her to stuff her kit with big checks. She stopped at the Surcliffes’ after dusk, and had a Scotch and soda. She stayed too late, and when she left it was dark and time to go home and cook supper for her husband. “I got a hundred and sixty dollars for the hepatitis fund,” she said excitedly when he walked in. “I did everybody on my list but the Blevins and the Flannagans. I want to get my kit in tomorrow morning—would you mind doing them while I cook the dinner?”

“But I don’t know the Flannagans,” Charlie Pastern said.

“Nobody does, but they gave me ten last year.”

He was tired, he had his business worries, and the sight of his wife arranging pork chops in the broiler only seemed like an extension of a boring day. He was happy enough to take the convertible and race up the hill to the Blevins’, thinking that they might give him a drink. But the Blevins were away; their maid gave him an envelope with a check in it and shut the door. Turning in at the Flannagans’ driveway, he tried to remember if he had ever met them. The name encouraged him, because he always felt that he could
handle
the Irish. There was a glass pane in the front door, and through this he could see into a hallway where a plump woman with red hair was arranging flowers.

“Infectious hepatitis,” he shouted heartily.

She took a good look at herself in the mirror before she turned and, walking with very small steps, started toward the door. “Oh, please come in,” she said. The girlish voice was nearly a whisper. She was not a girl, he could see. Her hair was dyed, and her bloom was fading, and she must have been crowding forty, but she seemed to be one of those women who cling to the manners and graces of a pretty child of eight. “Your wife just called,” she said, separating one word from another, exactly like a child. “And I am not sure that I have any cash—any
money
, that is—but if you will wait just a minute I will write you out a check if I can find my checkbook. Won’t you step into the living room, where it’s cozier?”

A fire had just been lighted, he saw, and things had been set out for drinks, and, like any stray, his response to these comforts was instantaneous. Where was
Mr.
Flannagan? he wondered. Traveling home on a late train? Changing his clothes upstairs? Taking a shower? At the end of the room there was a desk heaped with papers, and she began to riffle these, making sighs and noises of girlish exasperation. “I am terribly sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, “but won’t you make yourself a little drink while you wait? Everything’s on the table.”

“What train does Mr. Flannagan come out on?”

“Mr. Flannagan is away,” she said. Her voice dropped. “Mr. Flannagan has been away for six weeks….”

“I’ll have a drink, then, if you’ll have one with me.”

“If you will promise to make it weak.”

“Sit down,” he said, “and enjoy your drink and look for your checkbook later. The only way to find things is to relax.”

All in all, they had six drinks. She described herself and her circumstances unhesitatingly. Mr. Flannagan manufactured plastic tongue depressors. He traveled all over the world. She didn’t like to travel. Planes made her feel faint, and in Tokyo, where she had gone that summer, she had been given raw fish for breakfast and so she had come straight home. She and her husband had formerly lived in New York, where she had many friends, but Mr. Flannagan thought the country would be safer in case of war. She would rather live in danger than die of loneliness and boredom. She had no children; she had made no friends. “I’ve seen you, though, before,” she said with enormous coyness, patting his knee. “I’ve seen you walking your dogs on Sunday and driving by in the convertible….”

The thought of this lonely woman sitting at her window touched him, although he was even more touched by her plumpness. Sheer plumpness, he knew, is not a vital part of the body and has no pro-creative functions. It serves merely as an excess cushion for the rest of the carcass. And knowing its humble place in the scale of things, why did he, at this time of life, seem almost ready to sell his soul for plumpness? The remarks she made about the sufferings of a lonely woman seemed so broad at first that he didn’t know what to make of them, but after the sixth drink he put his arm around her and suggested that they go upstairs and look for her checkbook there.

“I’ve never done this before,” she said later, when he was arranging himself to leave. Her voice shook with feeling, and he thought it lovely. He didn’t doubt her truthfulness, although he had heard the words a hundred times. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, shaking their dresses down over their white shoulders. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, waiting for the elevator in the hotel corridor. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, pouring another whiskey. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, putting on their stockings. On ships at sea, on railroad trains, in summer hotels with mountain views, they always said, “I’ve never done this before.”

“
WHERE
have you been?” Mrs. Pastern asked sadly, when he came in. “It’s after eleven.”

“I had a drink with the Flannagans.”

“She told me he was in Germany.”

“He came home unexpectedly.”

Charlie ate some supper in the kitchen and went into the TV room to hear the news. “Bomb them!” he shouted. “Throw a little nuclear hardware at them! Show them who’s boss!” But in bed he had trouble sleeping. He thought first of his son and daughter, away at college. He loved them. It was the only meaning of the word that he had ever known. Then he played nine imaginary holes of golf, choosing his handicap, his irons, his stance, his opponents, and his weather in detail, but the green of the links seemed faded in the light of his business worries. His money was tied up in a Nassau hotel, an Ohio pottery works, and a detergent for window washing, and luck had been running against him. His worries harried him up out of bed, and he lighted a cigarette and went to the window. In the starlight he could see the trees stripped of their leaves. During the summer he had tried to repair some of his losses at the track, and the bare trees reminded him that his pari-mutuel tickets would still be lying, like leaves, in the gutters near Belmont and Saratoga. Maple and ash, beech and elm, one hundred to win on Three in the fourth, fifty to win on Six in the third, one hundred to win on Two in the eighth. Children walking home from school would scuff through what seemed to be his foliage. Then, getting back into bed, he thought unashamedly of Mrs. Flannagan, planning where they would next meet and what they would do. There are, he thought, so few true means of forgetfulness in this life that why should he shun the medicine even when the medicine seemed, as it did, a little crude?

A NEW CONQUEST
always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate. There was, of course, the reproachful figure of Mrs. Pastern waiting for him in the evenings, but he had served her well, he thought, for twenty-five years, and if he were to touch her tenderly these days she would likely say, “Ouch. That’s where I bruised myself in the garden.” On the evenings that they spent together, she seemed to choose to display the roughest angles of her personality; to grind her ax. “You know,” she said, “Mary Quested cheats at cards.” Her remarks fell a good deal short of where he sat. If these were indirect expressions of disappointment, it was a disappointment that no longer touched him.