The Stories of John Cheever (88 page)

He met Mrs. Flannagan for lunch in the city, and they spent the afternoon together. Leaving the hotel, Mrs. Flannagan stopped at a display of perfume. She said that she liked perfume, worked her shoulders, and called him “Monkey.” Considering her girlishness and her claims to fidelity, there was, he thought, a distinct atmosphere of practice about her request, but he bought her a bottle of perfume. The second time they met, she admired a peignoir in a store window and he bought this. On their third meeting, she got a silk umbrella. Waiting for her in the restaurant for their fourth meeting, he hoped that she wasn’t going to ask for jewelry, because his reserves of cash were low. She had promised to meet him at one, and he basked in his circumstances and the smells of sauce, gin, and red floor carpets. She was always late, and at half past one he ordered a second drink. At a quarter to two, he saw his waiter whispering to another waiter—whispering, laughing, and nodding his head in Charlie’s direction. It was his first intimation of the chance that she might stand him up. But who was she—who did she think she was that she could do this to him? She was nothing but a lonely housewife; she was nothing but that. At two, he ordered his lunch. He was crushed. What had his emotional life been these last years but a series of sometimes shabby one-night stands, but without them his life would be unendurable.

There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two—a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts. The waiter knew, and the laughter and lighthearted conversations at the tables around Charlie honed his feelings. He seemed to be helplessly elevated on his disappointment like a flagpole sitter, his aloneness looming larger and larger in the crowded room. Then he saw his own swollen image in a mirror, his gray hair clinging to his pate like the remains of a romantic landscape, his heavy body shaped a little like a firehouse Santa Claus, the paunch enlarged by one or two of Mrs. Kelly’s second-best sofa cushions. He pushed his table away and started for a telephone booth in the hall.

“Is there anything wrong with your lunch, monsieur?” the waiter asked.

She answered the phone, and in her most girlish voice said, “We cannot go on like this. I have thought it over, and we cannot go on. It is not because I do not want to, because you are a very virile man, but my conscience will not let me.”

“Can I stop by tonight and talk it over?”

“Well …” she said.

“I’ll come straight up from the station.”

“If you’ll do me a favor.”

“What?”

“I will tell you when I see you tonight. But please park your car behind the house and come in the back door. I do not want to give these old gossips here anything to talk about. You must remember that I have never done this before.”

Of course she was right, he thought. She had her self-esteem to maintain. Her pride, he thought, was so childish, so sterling! Sometimes, driving through a New Hampshire mill town late in the day, he thought, you will see in some alley or driveway, down by the river, a child dressed in a tablecloth, sitting on a broken stool, waving her scepter over a kingdom of weeds and cinders and a few skinny chickens. It is the purity and the irony of their pride that touches one; and he felt that way about Mrs. Flannagan.

SHE LET HIM IN
at the back door that night, but in the living room the scene was the same. The fire was burning, she made him a drink, and in her company he felt as if he had just worked his shoulders free of a heavy pack. But she was coy, in and out of his arms, tickling him and then tripping across the room to look at herself in the mirror. “I want my favor first,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Guess.”

“I can’t give you money. I’m not rich, you know.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of taking money.” She was indignant.

“Then what is it?”

“Something you wear.”

“But my watch is worthless, my cuff links are brass.”

“Something else.”

“But what?”

“I won’t tell you unless you promise to give it to me.”

He pushed her away from him then, knowing that he could easily be made a fool of. “I can’t make a promise unless I know what it is you want.”

“It’s something very small.”

“How small?”

“Tiny. Weeny.”

“Please tell me what it is.” Then he seized her in his arms, and this was the moment he felt most like himself: solemn, virile, wise, and imperturbable.

“I won’t tell you unless you promise.”

“But I can’t promise.”

“Then go away,” she said. “Go away and never, never, come back.”

She was too childish to give the command much force, and yet it was not wasted on him. Could he go back to his own house, empty but for his wife, who would be grinding her ax? Go there and wait until time and chance turned up another friend?

“Please tell me.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“I want,” she said, “a key to your bomb shelter.”

The demand struck at him like a sledge-hammer blow, and suddenly he felt in all his parts the enormous weight of chagrin. All his gentle speculations on her person—the mill-town girl ruling her chickens—backfired bitterly. This must have been on her mind from the beginning, when she first lit the fire, lost her checkbook, and gave him a drink. The demand abraded his lust, but only for a moment, for now she was back in his arms, marching her fingers up and down his rib cage, saying, “Creepy, creepy, creepy mouse, come to live in Charlie’s house.” His need for her was crippling; it seemed like a cruel blow at the back of his knees. And yet in some chamber of his thick head he could see the foolishness and the obsolescence of his hankering skin. But how could he reform his bone and muscle to suit this new world; instruct his meandering and greedy flesh in politics, geography, holocausts, and cataclysms? Her front was round, fragrant, and soft, and he took the key off its ring—a piece of metal one and one-half inches long, warmed by the warmth of his hands, a genuine talisman of salvation, a defense against the end of the world—and dropped it into the neck of her dress.

THE PASTERNS’ BOMB SHELTER
had been completed that spring. They would have liked to keep it a secret; would have liked at least to soft-pedal its existence; but the trucks and bulldozers going in and out of their driveway had informed everyone. It had cost thirty-two thousand dollars, and it had two chemical toilets, an oxygen supply, and a library, compiled by a Columbia professor, consisting of books meant to inspire hopefulness, humor, and tranquillity. There were stores of survival food to last three months, and several cases of hard liquor. Mrs. Pastern had bought the plaster-of-Paris ducks, the birdbath, and the gnomes in an attempt to give the lump in her garden a look of innocence; to make it acceptable—at least to herself. For, bulking as it did in so pretty and domestic a scene and signifying as it must the death of at least half the world’s population, she had found it, with its grassy cover, impossible to reconcile with the blue sky and the white clouds. She liked to keep the curtains drawn at that side of the house, and they were drawn the next afternoon, when she served gin to the bishop.

The bishop had come unexpectedly. Her minister had telephoned and said that the bishop was in the neighborhood and would like to thank her for her services to the church, and could he bring the bishop over now? She threw together some things for tea, changed her dress, and came down into the hall just as they rang the bell.

“How do you do, Your Grace,” she said. “Won’t you come in, Your Grace? Would you like some tea, Your Grace—or would you sooner have a drink, Your Grace?”

“I would like a Martini,” said the bishop.

He had the gift of a clear and carrying voice. He was a well-built man, with hair as black as dye, firm and sallow skin deeply creased around a wide mouth, and eyes as glittering and haggard, she thought, as someone drugged. “If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace …”

This request for a cocktail confused her; Charlie always mixed the drinks. She dropped ice on the pantry floor, poured a pint or so of gin into the shaker, and tried to correct what appeared to her to be a lethal drink with more vermouth.

“Mr. Ludgate here has been telling me how indispensable you are to the life of the parish,” the bishop said, taking his drink.

“I do try,” said Mrs. Pastern.

“You have two children.”

“Yes. Sally’s at Smith. Carkie’s at Colgate. The house seems so empty now. They were confirmed by the old bishop. Bishop Tomlinson.”

“Ah, yes,” the bishop said. “Oh, yes.”

The presence of the bishop made her nervous. She wished she could give the call a more natural air; she wished at least to make her presence in her own parlor seem real. She was suffering from an intense discomfort that sometimes attacked her during committee meetings, when the parliamentary atmosphere had a disintegrating effect on her personality. She would, sitting in her folding chair, seem to go around the room on her hands and knees, gathering the fragments of herself and cementing them together with some virtue, such as, I am a Good Mother, or, I am a Patient Wife.

“Are you two old friends?” she asked the bishop.

“No!” the bishop exclaimed.

“The bishop was just driving through,” the minister said weakly.

“Could I see your garden?” the bishop asked.

Taking his Martini glass with him, he followed her out the side door onto the terrace. Mrs. Pastern was an ardent gardener, but the scene was disappointing. The abundant cycle of bloom was nearly over; there was nothing to see but chrysanthemums. “I wish you could see it in the spring, especially in the
late
spring,” she said. “The star magnolia is the first to bloom. Then we have the flowering cherries and plums. Just as they finish, we have the azalea, the laurel, and the hybrid rhododendron. I have bronze tulips under the wisteria. The lilac is white.”

“I see that you have a shelter,” the bishop said.

“Yes.” She had been betrayed by her ducks and gnomes. “Yes, we have, but it’s really nothing to see. This bed is all lily of the valley, all this bed. I feel that roses make a better cutting than an ornamental garden, so I keep the roses behind the house. The border is
fraises des bois
. So sweet, so winy.”

“Have you had the shelter long?”

“We had it built in the spring,” said Mrs. Pastern. “That hedge is flowering quince. Over there is our little salad garden. Lettuce and herbs. That sort of thing.”

“I would like to see the shelter,” the bishop said.

She was hurt—a hurt that seemed to reverberate all the way back to her childhood, when she had been wounded by the discovery that the friends who came to call on rainy days had not come because they liked her but to eat her cookies and hog her toys. She had never been able to put a good countenance on selfishness, and she scowled as they passed the birdbath and the painted ducks. The gnomes with their mobcaps looked down on the three of them as she unlocked the fire door with a key that she wore around her neck.

“Charming,” the bishop said. “Charming. Why, I see you even have a library.”

“Yes,” she said. “The books were chosen for their humor, tranquillity, and hopefulness.”

“It is an unfortunate characteristic of ecclesiastical architecture,” said the bishop, “that the basement or cellar is confined to a small space under the chancel. This gives us very little room for the salvation of the faithful—a characteristic, I should perhaps add, of our denomination. Some churches have commodious basements. But I shan’t take up any more of your time.” He strode back across the lawn toward the house, put his cocktail glass on the terrace wall, and gave her his blessing.

She sat down heavily on her terrace steps and watched the car drive off. He had not come to praise her, she knew that. Was it impious of her to suspect that he was traveling around his domain picking and choosing sanctuaries? Was it possible that he meant to exploit his holiness in this way? The burden of modern life, even if it smelled of plastics—as it seemed to—bore down cruelly on the supports of God, the Family, and the Nation. The burden was top-heavy, and she seemed to hear the foundations give. She had believed all her life in the holiness of the priesthood, and if this belief was genuine, why hadn’t she offered the bishop the safety of her shelter at once? But if he believed in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, why was a shelter anything that he might need?

The telephone rang, and she answered its ringing with a forced lightheartedness. It was a woman named Beatrice, who came to clean Mrs. Pastern’s house two days a week.

“This is Beatrice, Mrs. Pastern,” she said, “and there is something I think you ought to know. As you know, I’m not a gossip. I’m not like that Adele, who goes around from lady to lady telling that the So-and-Sos aren’t sleeping together, and that So-and-So had six empty whiskey bottles in his wastebaskets, and that nobody came to So-and-So’s cocktail party. I’m not like that Adele. I’m not a gossip, and you know that, Mrs. Pastern. But there is something I think you ought to know. I worked for Mrs. Flannagan today, and she showed me a key, and she said it was a key to your bomb shelter, and that your husband gave it to her. I don’t know whether it was the truth or not, but I thought you ought to know.”

“Thank you, Beatrice.”

He had dragged her good name through a hundred escapades, debauched her excellence, and thrown away her love, but she had never imagined that he would betray her in their plans for the end of the world. She poured what was left of the bishops cocktail into a glass. She hated the taste of gin, but her accumulated troubles had grown to seem like the pain of an illness, and gin dimmed this, although it inflamed her indignation. Outside, the sky darkened, the wind changed, it began to rain. What could she do? She couldn’t go back to Mother. Mother didn’t have a shelter. She couldn’t pray for guidance. The bishop’s apparent worldliness had reduced the comforts of heaven. She couldn’t contemplate her husband’s foolish profligacy without drinking more gin. And then she remembered the night—the night of judgment—when they had agreed to let Aunt Ida and Uncle Ralph burn, when she had sacrificed her three-year-old niece and he his five-year-old nephew; when they had conspired like murderers and had decided to deny mercy even to his old mother.