The Stories of John Cheever (95 page)

He woke one summer Sunday morning to feel such love for his wife that he called out her name: “Victoria, Victoria!” He went to church, dismissed the housekeeper after lunch, and late in the afternoon went for a walk. It was inhumanly hot, and the high temperature seemed to draw the city closer to the heart of time; the smell of hot pavings seemed to belong to history. From an open car window he heard himself singing a song about peanut butter. Traffic was heavy on the East River Drive, and this respiratory and melancholy sound came up to where he walked. Traffic would be heavy on all the approaches to the city—and the thought of these lines of cars at Sunday’s end made it seem as if the day conformed to some rigid script, part of which was the traffic, part the golden light that poured through the city’s parallel streets, part a distant rumble of thunder, as if some leaf had been peeled away from the bulk of sound, and part the unendurable spiritual winter of his months alone. He was overwhelmed by the need for his only love. He got his car and started north a little after dark.

He spent the night in Albany and got to the town of Lake St. Francis in the middle of the morning. It was a small and pleasant resort town, neither booming nor dead. He asked at the boat livery how he could get out to Temple Island. “She comes over once a week,” the boatman said. “She comes over to get groceries and medicine, but I don’t expect she’ll be over today.” He pointed across the water to where the island lay, a mile or so distant. Betman rented an outboard and started across the lake. He circled the island and found a landing in a cove, where he made the boat fast. The house above him was a preposterous and old-fashioned cottage, highly inflammable, black with creosote and ornamented with outrageous medieval fancies. There was a round tower of shingles and a wooden parapet that wouldn’t have withstood the fire of a .22. Tall firs surrounded the wooden castle and covered it in darkness. It was so dark on that bright morning that lights were burning in most of the rooms.

He crossed the porch and saw, through a glass panel in the door, a long hall ending in a staircase with newel posts. Venus stood on one, a lusterless bronze. In one hand she held a branch of two electric candles, lighted against the gloom of the firs. There was no trace of modesty in her stance, and that her legs were apart made her seem utterly defenseless and a little pathetic, as is sometimes the case with Venus. On the other newel post was Hermes; Hermes in flight. He, too, carried a pair of lighted electric candles. The stairs, carpeted in dark green, led up to a stained-glass window. The colors of the glass, even in the gloom, were of astonishing brilliance and discord. After he had rung, an elderly maid came down the stairs, keeping one hand on the banister. She limped. She came up to the door and, looking out at him through the glass panel, simply shook her head.

He opened the door; it opened easily. “I’m Mr. Betman,” he said softly. “I want to see my wife.”

“You can’t see her now. Nobody can. She’s with
him
.”

“I must see her.”

“You can’t. Please go. Please go away.” Her pleading seemed frightened.

Beyond the firs he could see the lake, flat as glass, but the wind in the trees made a sound so like the sea that had he been blindfold he would have guessed that the house stood on a headland. Then he thought or felt that this was that instant where death enters the terrain of love. These were not the bare facts of life but its ancient and invisible storms, and they moved him like the weight of water. Then he sang:

The elderly maid, too courteous perhaps to interrupt or moved perhaps by Handel’s air and the words, said nothing. Upstairs he heard a door close and footsteps on the carpet. She hastened past the brilliant, ugly window down to where he waited. There was nothing in all the world so sweet to him as her kiss.

“Come back with me now,” he said.

“I can’t, darling, my darling. He’s dying.”

“How many times have you thought this before?”

“Oh, I know, but now he
is
dying.”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t. He’s dying.”

“Come.”

He took her hand and led her out the door, down over the treacherous, pungent carpet of pine needles, to the landing. They crossed the lake without speaking but in such a somberness of feeling that the air, the hour, and the light seemed solid. He paid for the boat, opened the car door for her, and they started south. He did not look at her until they were on the main highway, and then he turned to bask in her freshness, her radiance. It was because he loved her too well that her white arms, the color of her hair, her smile distracted him. He veered from one lane into another and the car was crushed by a truck.

She died, of course. He was in the hospital eight months, but when he was able to walk again he found that the persuasiveness of his voice had not been injured. You can still hear him singing about table polish, bleaches, and vacuum cleaners. He always sings of inessentials, never about the universality of suffering and love, but thousands of men and women go off to the stores as if he had, as if this was his song.

TO WATCH MRS. PERANGER
enter the club was a little like choosing up sides for a sandlot ball game; it was exciting. On her way toward the dining room she would give Mrs. Bebe, who had worked with her on the hospital committee, a fleeting and absent-minded smile. She would cut Mrs. Binger, who was waving and calling her name loudly, dead. She would kiss Mrs. Evans lightly on both cheeks, but she would seem to have forgotten poor Mrs. Budd, at whose house she sometimes dined. She would also seem to have forgotten the Wrights, the Hugginses, the Frames, the Logans, and the Halsteads. A white-haired woman, beautifully dressed, she wielded the power of rudeness so adroitly that she was never caught in an exposed position, and when people asked one another how she got away with it they only increased her advantage. She had been a beauty, and had been painted by Paxton in the twenties. She stood in front of a mirror. The wall was luminous, an imitation of Vermeer, and, as in a Vermeer, the light was put on without its source. There were the usual appurtenances—the ginger jar, the gilt chair, and in the farther room, seen in the glass, a harp on a rug. Her hair had been the color of fire. But this static portrait was only half a world. She had introduced the maxixe to Newport, played golf with Bobby Jones, closed speakeasies at dawn, played strip poker at a Baltimore house party, and even now—an old woman—should she hear on the aromatic summer air the music of a Charleston, she would get up from the sofa and begin to dance with a vigorous pivot step, throwing first one leg out in front of her and then the other, cracking her thumbs and singing, “Charleston! Charleston!”

Mr. Peranger and her only son, Patrick, were dead. Of her only daughter, the nymphlike Nerissa, she would say, “Nerissa is giving me a few days of her time. I don’t feel that I can ask her for more. She is
so
sought after that I sometimes think she has never married because she has never found the time. She showed her dogs last week in San Francisco, and hopes to take them to Rome for the dog show there. Everyone
loves
Nerissa. Everyone
adores
her. She is
too
attractive for
words
.”

Enter Nerissa then, into her mother’s drawing room. She is a thin and wasted spinster of thirty. Her hair is gray. Her slip shows. Her shoes are caked with mud. She is plainly one of those children who, without bitterness or rancor, seem burdened with the graceless facts of life. It is their destiny to point out that the elegance and chic of the world their mothers have mastered is not, as it might appear to be, the end of bewilderment and pain. They are a truly pure and innocent breed, and it would never cross their minds or their hearts to upset or contravene the plans, the dreams, the worldly triumphs that their elders hold out for them. It seems indeed to be the hand of God that leads them to take a pratfall during the tableaux at the débutante cotillion. Stepping from a gondola to the water stairs of some palace in Venice where they are expected for dinner, they will lose their balance and fall into the Grand Canal. They spill food and wine, they knock over vases, they step into dog manure, they shake hands with butlers, they have coughing fits during the chamber music, their taste for disreputable friends is unerring, and yet they are like Franciscans in their goodness and simplicity. Thus, enter Nerissa. In the process of being introduced, she savages an end table with her hipbone, tracks mud onto the rug, and drops a lighted cigarette into a chair. By the time the fire is extinguished, she seems to have satisfactorily ruffled the still waters of her mother’s creation. But this is not perversity; it is not even awkwardness. It is her nearly sacred call to restate the pathos and clumsiness of mankind.

The nymphlike Nerissa bred Townsend terriers. Her mother’s descriptions of the claims upon her time were, of course, transparent and pathetic. Nerissa was a shy and a lonely woman, mostly occupied with her dogs. Her heart was not unsusceptible, but she always fell in love with gardeners, deliverymen, waiters, and janitors. Late one evening, when her best bitch (Ch. Gaines-Clansman) was about to whelp, she asked the help of a new veterinary, who had just opened a dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14. He came to the kennels at once, and had been there only a few minutes when the bitch threw the first of her litter. He opened the sack and put the dog to suck. His touch with animals, Nerissa thought, was quick and natural, and, standing above him as he knelt at the whelping box, Nerissa felt a strong compulsion to touch his dark hair. She asked if he was married, and when he said that he was not she let herself luxuriate in the fact that she was in love again. Now, Nerissa never anticipated her mother’s censure. When she announced her engagement to a garage mechanic or a tree surgeon, she was always surprised at her mother’s rage. It never occurred to her that her mother might not like her new choice. She beamed at the veterinary, brought him water, towels, whiskey, and sandwiches. The whelping took most of the night, and it was dawn when they were done. The puppies were sucking; the bitch was proud and requited. All of the litter were well favored and well marked. When Nerissa and the veterinary left the kennels, a cold white light was beating up beyond the dark trees of the estate. “Would you like some coffee?” Nerissa asked, and then, hearing in the distance the sound of running water, she asked, “Or would you like to swim? I sometimes swim in the morning.”

“You know, I would,” he said. “That’s what I’d like. I’d like a swim. I have to go back to the hospital, and a swim would wake me up.”

The pool, built by her grandfather, was of marble and had a deep and graceful curb, curved like the frame of a mirror. The water was limpid, and here and there a sunken leaf threw a shadow, edged with the strong colors of the spectrum. It was the place on her mother’s estate that had always seemed to Nerissa—more than any room or garden—her home. When she was away, it was the pool she missed, and when she came back it was to the pool—this watery home-sweet-home—that she returned. She found a pair of trunks in the bathhouse, and they took an innocent swim. They dressed and walked back across the lawns to his car. “You know, you’re awfully nice,” he said. “Did anyone ever tell you that?” Then he kissed her lightly and tenderly and drove away.

Nerissa didn’t see her mother until four the next afternoon, when she went down to tea wearing two left shoes, one brown and one black. “Oh, Mother, Mother,” she said, “I’ve found the man I want to marry.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Peranger. “Who is this paragon?”

“His name is Dr. Johnson,” said Nerissa. “He runs the new dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14.”

“But you cannot marry a veterinary, sweet love,” said Mrs. Peranger.

“He calls himself an animal hygienist,” said Nerissa.

“How revolting!” said Mrs. Peranger.

“But I love him, Mother. I love him, and I’m going to marry him.”

“Go to hell!” said Mrs. Peranger.

That night, Mrs. Peranger called the Mayor and asked to speak with his wife. “This is Louisa Peranger,” she said. “I am going to put someone up for the Tilton Club this fall, and I was thinking of you.” There was a sigh of excitement from the wife of the Mayor. Her head would be swimming. But why? But why? The clubrooms were threadbare, the maids were surly, and the food was bad. Why was there a ferocious waiting list of thousands? “I drive a hard bargain,” said Mrs. Peranger, “as everyone knows. There is a dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14 that I would like to have shut down. I'm sure your husband can discover that some sort of zoning violation is involved. It must be some sort of nuisance. If you will speak to your husband about the dog-and-cat hospital, I will get the membership list to you so that you can decide on your other sponsors. I will arrange a luncheon party for the middle of September. Goodbye.”

Nerissa pined away, died, and was buried in the little Episcopal church whose windows had been given in memory of her grandfather. Mrs. Peranger looked imperious and patrician in her mourning, and as she left the church she was heard to sob loudly, “She was
so
attractive—she was so
frightfully
attractive.”

Mrs. Peranger rallied from her loss, and kept up with her work, which, at that time of year, consisted of screening candidates for a débutante cotillion. Three weeks after Nerissa’s funeral, a Mrs. Pentason and her daughter were shown into the drawing room.

Mrs. Peranger knew how hard Mrs. Pentason had worked for this interview. She had done hospital work; she had organized theatre parties, strawberry festivals, and antique fairs. But Mrs. Peranger looked at her callers harshly. They would have learned their manners from a book. They would have studied the chapter on how to drink tea. They were the sort who dreamed in terms of invitations that would never be received.
Mr. and Mrs. William Paley request the honor
… Their mail, instead, would consist of notices of private sales, trial offers from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and embarrassing letters from Aunt Minnie, who lived in Waco, Texas, and used a spittoon. Nora passed the tea and Mrs. Peranger kept a sharp eye on the girl. The noise of water from the swimming pool sounded very loud, and Mrs. Peranger asked Nora to close the window.