The Stories of John Cheever (101 page)

“Well,” said Cora, “we can’t expect to be comfortable, can we, if we hide in broom closets?”

I hung on to my chair, picked at my food, made some small talk, and got through the meal. Now and then she gave me a serene and wicked smile. After dinner I went into the garden. I desperately needed help, and thought then of my daughter. I should explain that Flora graduated from the Villa Mimosa in Florence, and left Smith College in the middle of her freshman year to live in a Lower East Side tenement with a sexual freak. I send her an allowance each month and have promised to leave her alone, but, considering the dangerousness of my position, I felt free to break my promise. I felt that if I could see her I could persuade her to come home. I telephoned her then and said that I must see her. She seemed quite friendly and asked me to come to tea.

I had lunch in town the next day and spent the afternoon at my club, playing cards and drinking whiskey. Flora had given me directions, and I went downtown on the subway for the first time in I don’t know how many years. It was all very strange. I’ve often thought of going to visit my only daughter and her own true love, and now at last I was making this journey. In my reveries the meeting would take place in some club. He would come from a good family. Flora would be happy; she would have the shining face of a young girl first in love. The boy would be serious, but not too serious; intelligent, handsome, and with the winning posture of someone who stands literally at the threshold of a career. I could see the fatuity in these reveries, but had they been so vulgar and idle that I deserved to have them contravened at every point—the scene changed from a club to the city’s worst slum and the substitution of a freak with a beard for an earnest young man? I had friends whose daughters married suitable young men from suitable families. Envy struck me in the crowded subway, then petulance. Why had I been singled out for this disaster? I loved my daughter. The power of love I felt for her seemed pure, strong, and natural. Suddenly I felt like crying. Every sort of door had been open for her, she had seen the finest landscapes, she had enjoyed, I thought, the company of those people who were most free to develop their gifts.

It was raining when I left the subway. I followed her directions through a slum to a tenement. I guessed the building to be about eighty years old. Two polished marble columns supported a Romanesque arch. It even had a name. It was called the Eden. I saw the angel with the flaming sword, the naked couple, stooped, their hands over their privates. Masaccio? That was when we went to visit her in Florence. So I entered Eden like an avenging angel, but once under the Romanesque arch I found a corridor as narrow as the companionway in a submarine, and the power of light over my spirits—always considerable—was in this case very depressing, the lights in the hall were so primitive and sorry. Flights of stairs often appear in my dreams, and the stairs I began to climb had a galling look of unreality. I heard Spanish spoken, the roar of water from a toilet, music, and the barking of dogs.

Moved by anger, or perhaps by the drinks I had had at the club, I went up three or four flights at a brisk clip and then found myself suddenly winded; forced to stop short in my climb and engage in a humiliating struggle for breath. It was several minutes before I could continue, and I went the rest of the way slowly. Flora had tacked one of her calling cards to the door. I knocked. “Hi, Daddy,” she said brightly, and I kissed her on the brow. Oh, this much of it was good, fresh, and strong. I felt a burst of memory, a recollection of all the happiness we had shared. The door opened onto a kitchen and beyond this was another room. “I want you to meet Peter,” she said.

“Hi,” said Peter.

“How do you do,” I said.

“See what we’ve made,” said Flora. “Isn’t it divine? We’ve just finished it. It was Peter’s idea.”

What they had made, what they had done was to purchase a skeleton with an armature from a medical supply house and glue butterflies here and there to the polished bone. I recognized some of the specimens from my youth and recognized that I would not at that time have been able to afford them. There was a Catagramme Astarte on the shoulder bone, a Sapphira in one eye socket, and a large cluster of Appia Zarinda at the pubis. “Marvelous,” I said, “marvelous,” trying to conceal my distaste. Compared to the useful tasks of life, the thought of these two grown people gluing expensive butterflies to the polished bones of some poor stranger made me intensely irritable. I sat in a canvas chair and smiled at Flora. “How are you, my dear?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Daddy,” she said. “I’m
fine
.”

I kept myself from remarking on either her clothing or her hair. She was dressed all in black, and her hair was straight. The purpose of this costume or uniform escaped me. It was not becoming. It did not appeal to the senses. It seemed to reflect on her self-esteem; it seemed like a costume of mourning or penance, a declaration of her indifference to the silks that I enjoy on women; but what were her reasons for despising finery? His costume was much more bewildering. Was its origin Italian? I wondered. The shoes were effeminate, and the jacket was short, but he looked more like a street boy in nineteenth-century London than someone on the Corso. That would be excepting his hair. He had a beard, a mustache, and long dark curls that reminded me of some minor apostle in a third-rate Passion Play. His face was not effeminate, but it was delicate, and seemed to me to convey a marked lack of commitment.

“Would you like some coffee, Daddy?” Flora asked.

“No, thank you, dear,” I said. “Is there anything to drink?”

“We don’t have anything,” she said.

“Would Peter be good enough to go out and get me something?” I asked.

“I guess so,” Peter said glumly, and I told myself that he was probably not intentionally rude. I gave him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to get me some bourbon.

“I don’t think they have bourbon,” he said.

“Well, then, Scotch,” I said.

“They drink mostly wine in the neighborhood,” Peter said.

Then I settled on him a clear, kindly gaze, thinking that I would have him murdered. From what I know of the world there are still assassins to be hired, and I would pay someone to put a knife in his back or push him off a roof. My smile was broad, clear, and genuinely murderous, and the boy slipped into a green coat—another piece of mummery—and went out.

“You don’t like him?” Flora asked.

“I despise him,” I said.

“But, Daddy, you don’t
know
him,” Flora said.

“My dear, if I knew him any better I would wring his neck.”

“He’s very kind and sensitive—he’s very generous.”

“I can see that he’s very sensitive,” I said.

“He’s the kindest person I’ve ever known,” Flora said.

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, “but let’s talk about you now, shall we? I didn’t come here to talk about Peter.”

“But we’re living together, Daddy.”

“So I’ve been told. But the reason I came here, Flora, is to find out about you—what your plans are and so forth. I won’t disapprove of your plans, whatever they are. I simply want to know what they are. You can’t spend the rest of your life gluing butterflies to skeletons. All I want to know is what you plan to do with your life.”

“I don’t know, Daddy.” She raised her face. “Nobody my age knows.”

“I’m not taking a consensus of your generation. I am asking you. I am asking you what you would like to make of your life. I am asking you what ideas you have, what dreams you have, what hopes you have for yourself.”

“I don’t know, Daddy. Nobody my age knows.”

“I wish you would eliminate the rest of your generation. I am acquainted with at least fifty girls your age who know precisely what they want to do. They want to be historians, editors, doctors, housewives, and mothers. They want to do something useful.”

Peter came back with a bottle of bourbon but he did not return any change. Was this cupidity, I wondered, or absent-mindedness? I said nothing. Flora brought me a glass and some water, and I asked if they would join me in a drink.

“We don’t drink much,” Peter said.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “While you were out, I talked with Flora about her plans. That is, I discovered that she doesn’t have any plans, and since she doesn’t I’m going to take her back to Bullet Park with me until her thinking is a little more decisive.”

“I’m going to stay with Peter,” Flora said.

“But supposing Peter had to go away?” I asked. “Suppose Peter had some interesting offer, such as six months or a year abroad—what would you do then?”

“Oh, Daddy,” she asked, “you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Oh yes I would, I most certainly would,” I said. “I would do anything on heaven or earth that I thought might bring you to your senses. Would you like to go abroad, Peter?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His face could not be said to have brightened, but for a moment his intelligence seemed engaged. “I’d like to go to East Berlin,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’d like to go to East Berlin and give my American passport to some great creative person,” he said, “some writer or musician, and let him escape to the free world.”

“Why,” I asked, “don’t you paint Peace on your arse and jump off a twelve-story building?”

This was a mistake, a disaster, a catastrophe, and I poured myself some more bourbon. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm tired. However, my offer still stands. If you want to go to Europe, Peter, I’ll be happy to pay your bills.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Peter said. “I’ve been. I mean, I’ve seen most of it.”

“Well, keep it in mind,” I said. “And as for you, Flora, I want you to come home with me. Come home for a week or two, anyhow. That’s all I ask. Ten years from now you will reproach me for not having guided you out of this mess. Ten years from now you’ll ask me, ‘Daddy, Daddy, oh, Daddy, why didn’t you teach me not to spend the best years of my life in a slum?’ I can’t bear the thought of you coming to me ten years from now, to blame me for not having forced you to take my advice.”

“I won’t go home.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“I can if I want.”

“I will stop your allowance.”

“I can get a job.”

“What kind of a job? You can’t type, you can’t take shorthand, you don’t know the first thing about any sort of business procedure, you can’t even run a switchboard.”

“I can get a job as a filing clerk.”

“Oh my God!” I roared. “Oh my God! After the sailing lessons and the skiing lessons, after the get-togethers and the cotillion, after the year in Florence and the long summers at the sea—after all this it turns out that what you really want is to be a spinster filing clerk with a low civil-service rating, whose principal excitement is to go once or twice a year to a fourth-rate Chinese restaurant with a dozen other spinster filing clerks and get tipsy on two sweet Manhattans.”

I fell back into my chair and poured myself some more whiskey. There was a sharp pain in my heart, as if that lumpy organ had weathered every abuse, only to be crippled by misery. The pain was piercing, and I thought I would die—not at that moment, in the canvas chair, but a few days later, perhaps in Bullet Park, or in some comfortable hospital bed. The idea did not alarm me; it was a consolation. I would die, and with those areas of tension that I represented finally removed, my only, only daughter would at last take up her life. My sudden disappearance from the scene would sober her with sorrow and misgiving. My death would mature her. She would go back to Smith, join the glee club, edit the newspaper, befriend girls of her own class, and marry some intelligent and visionary young man, who seemed, at the moment, to be wearing spectacles, and raise three or four sturdy children. She would be sorry. That was it, and overnight sorrow would show her the inutility of living in a slum with a stray.

“Go home, Daddy,” she said. She was crying. “Go home, Daddy, and leave us alone! Please go home, Daddy!”

“I’ve always tried to understand you,” I said. “You used to put four or five records on the player at Bullet Park, and as soon as the music began you’d walk out of the house. I never understood why you did this, but one night I went out of the house to see if I could find you, and, walking down the lawn, with the music coming from all the open windows, I thought I did understand. I mean, I thought you put the records on and left the house because you liked to hear the music pouring out of the windows. I mean, I thought you liked at the end of your walk to come back to a house where music was playing. I was right, wasn’t I? I understand that much?”

“Go home, Daddy,” she said. “Please go home.”

“And it isn’t only you, Flora,” I said. “I need you. I need you terribly.”

“Go home, Daddy,” she said, and so I did.

I HAD SOME SUPPER
in town and came home at around ten. I could hear Cora drawing a bath upstairs, and I took a shower in the bathroom off the kitchen. When I went upstairs, Cora was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair. Now, I have neglected to say that Cora is beautiful, and that I love her. She has ash-blond hair, dark brows, full lips, and eyes that are so astonishingly large, volatile, and engaging, so strikingly set, that I sometimes think she might take them off and put them between the pages of a book; leave them on a table. The white is a light blue and the blue itself is of unusual depth. She is a graceful woman, not tall. She smokes continuously and has for most of her life, but she handles her cigarettes with a charming clumsiness, as if this entrenched habit were something she had just picked up. Her arms, legs, front, everything is beautifully proportioned. I love her, and, loving her, I know that love is not a reasonable process. I had not expected or wanted to fall in love when I first saw her at a wedding in the country. Cora was one of the attendants. The wedding was in a garden. A five-piece orchestra in tuxedos was half hidden in the rhododendrons. From the tent on the hill you could hear the caterer’s men icing wine in wash buckets. She was the second to come, and was wearing one of those outlandish costumes that are designed for bridal parties, as if holy matrimony had staked out some unique and mysterious place for itself in sumptuary history. Her dress was blue, as I remember, with things hanging off it, and she wore over her pale hair a broad-brimmed hat that had no crown at all. She wobbled over the lawn in her high-heeled shoes, staring shyly and miserably into a bunch of blue flowers, and when she had reached her position she raised her face and smiled shyly at the guests, and I saw for the first time the complexity and enormousness of her eyes; felt for the first time that she might take them off and put them into a pocket. “Who is she?” I asked aloud. “Who
is
she?” “Sh-h-h,” someone said. I was enthralled. My heart and my spirit leaped. I saw absolutely nothing of the rest of the wedding, and when the ceremony was over I raced up the lawn and introduced myself to her. I was not content with anything until she agreed to marry me, a year later.