The Stories of John Cheever (5 page)

He dressed and softly drew the blinds, so that the light wouldn’t wake his wife. Ellen’s days in the country, unlike his, were not limited. She had been here all summer and would remain until the first of September, when she would return to the city with the cook, the ice crusher, and the Persian rug.

The first floor of his mother-in-law’s big house was still and clean when he went downstairs. Emma Boulanger, the French housemaid, was dusting the hall. He crossed the gloomy dining room and pushed open the pantry door, but another of the servants, Agnes Shay, was there to keep him from going any farther into her preserves. “You just tell me what you want for breakfast, Mr. Brown,” she said unpleasantly. “Greta will make it for you.”

He wanted to have his breakfast in the kitchen with his five-year-old son, but Agnes had no intention of letting him pass from the front of the house into those quarters that were reserved for servants and children. He told her what he wanted to eat and went back through the dining room and out onto the terrace. The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn. It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. Jim looked at the terrace, at the gardens, at the house, with a fatuous possessiveness. He could hear Mrs. Garrison—his widowed mother-in-law and the rightful owner of everything he saw—talking animatedly to herself in the distant cutting bed.

While Jim was eating his breakfast, Agnes said that Nils Lund wanted to see him. This information flattered Jim. He was in New Hampshire for only ten days and he was there merely as a guest, but he liked to be consulted by the gardener. Nils Lund had worked for Mrs. Garrison for many years. He lived in a cottage on the place and his wife, who was now dead, had worked in the kitchen. Nils resented the fact that none of Mrs. Garrison’s sons interested themselves in the place and he often told Jim how happy he was to have a man around with whom he could discuss his problems.

Nils’s gardens no longer bore any relationship to the needs of the house. Each spring he plowed and planted acres of vegetables and flowers. The coming up of the asparagus shoots was the signal for a hopeless race between the vegetables and Mrs. Garrison’s table. Nils, embittered by the waste that he himself was the author of, came each evening to the kitchen door to tell the cook that unless they ate more peas, more strawberries, more beans, more lettuce, more cabbages, the magnificent vegetables that he had watered with his sweat would rot.

When Jim had finished his breakfast, he went around to the back of the house and Nils told him, with a long face, that something was eating the corn, which had just begun to ripen. They had discussed the pest in the corn patch before. At first they had thought it was deer. Nils had changed his guess that morning to raccoons. He wanted Jim to come with him and view the damage that had been done.

“Those traps in the tool house ought to do the job for us if it’s raccoons,” Jim said. “And I think there’s a rifle around. I’ll set the traps tonight.”

They walked along a driveway that ran up the hill to the gardens. The fields at the edge of the drive were eroded with moss and spotted with juniper. From the fields came an indescribable perfume, pungent and soporific. “See,” Nils said when they reached the corn patch. “See, see …” Leaves, silk, and half-eaten ears were strewn and trampled into the dirt. “I plant it,” Nils said, like the husband of a shrew recounting instances of unrewarded patience. “Then there’s crows after the seed. I cultivate it. Now there’s no corn.”

They heard Greta, the cook, singing as she came up the drive, bringing garbage to the chickens. They turned to watch her. She was a big, strong woman with a magnificent voice and the breasts of an operatic contralto. A second after they heard Greta, the wind carried Mrs. Garrison’s voice to them from the cutting bed. Mrs. Garrison talked to herself continually. Her cultivated and emphatic words sounded across that clear morning like the notes of a trumpet. “Why does he plant this hideous purple verbena every year? He knows I can’t use purple. Why
does
he plant this loathsome purple verbena? … And I’m going to have him move the arums again. I’m going to have the lilies down by the pool again …”

Nils spat in the dirt. “God damn that woman!” he said. “God damn her!” Greta had reminded him of his dead wife and Mrs. Garrison’s rich voice had reminded him of that other binding marriage, between mistress and gardener, which would last until death dissolved it. He made no effort to contain his anger, and Jim was caught in the cross fire of his mother-in-law’s soliloquy and her gardener’s rage. He said he would go and take a look at the traps.

He found the traps in the tool house and a rifle in the cellar. As he was crossing the lawn, he met Mrs. Garrison. She was a thin, white-haired woman, and she was dressed in a torn maid’s uniform and a broken straw hat. Her arms were full of flowers. She and her son-in-law wished one another good morning, exclaimed on the beauty of the day, and went on in opposite directions. Jim carried the traps and the rifle behind the house. His son, Timmy, was there, playing hospital with Ingrid, the cook’s daughter, a pale, skinny girl of eleven. The children watched him briefly and then went back to their game.

Jim oiled the traps and filed their catches so that they slammed shut at the least touch. While he was testing the traps, Agnes Shay came out, leading Carlotta Bronson, another of Mrs. Garrison’s grandchildren. Carlotta was four years old. Her mother had gone West to get a divorce that summer, and Agnes had been elevated from the position of housemaid to that of nurse. She was almost sixty and she made an intense nurse. From morning until dark, she gripped Carlotta’s hand in hers.

She peered over Jim’s shoulder at the traps and said, “You know you shouldn’t put out those traps until after the children have gone to bed, Mr. Brown…. Don’t you go near those traps, Carlotta. Come here.”

“I won’t put the traps out until late,” Jim said.

“Why, one of the children might get caught in one of those traps and break a leg,” Agnes said. “And you’ll be careful of that gun, too, won’t you, Mr. Brown? Guns are made to kill with. I’ve never seen one yet where there wasn’t an accident…. Come along, Carlotta, come along. I’ll put on your fresh pinafore and then you can play in the sand before you have your fruit juice and your crackers.”

The little girl followed her into the house, and together they climbed the back stairs to the nursery. When they were alone, Agnes kissed the child on the top of the head timidly, as if she were afraid of troubling Carlotta with her affection.

“Don’t touch me, Agnes,” Carlotta said.

“No, dear, I won’t.”

Agnes Shay had the true spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and mild eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in back passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants’ halls that remind one of a prison, her soul had grown docile and bleak. The ranks of service appeared to her as just and inflexible as the rings of hell. She would no more have yielded Mrs. Garrison a place at the servants’ table in the kitchen than Mrs. Garrison would have yielded her one in the gloomy dining room. Agnes loved the ceremonies of a big house. She drew the curtains in the living room at dark, lighted the candles on the table, and struck the dinner chimes like an eager altar boy. On fine evenings, when she sat on the back porch between the garbage pails and the woodbins, she liked to recall the faces of all the cooks she had known. It made her life seem rich.

Agnes had never been as happy as she was that summer. She loved the mountains, the lake, and the sky, and she had fallen in love with Carlotta as a youth falls in love. She worried about her own appearance. She worried about her fingernails, her handwriting, her education. Am I worthy? she wondered. The irascible and unhappy child was her only link with the morning, with the sun, with everything beautiful and exciting. To touch Carlotta, to lay her cheek against the child’s warm hair, overpowered her with a sense of recaptured youth. Carlotta’s mother would return from Reno in September and Agnes had prepared the speech she would make to her: “Let me take care of Carlotta, Mrs. Bronson! While you were away, I read all those articles in the
Daily News
about taking care of children. I love Carlotta. She’s used to me. I know what she wants….”

Mrs. Garrison was indifferent to children, and with Mrs. Bronson in Reno, Agnes had no rivals, but she was in continual torment lest something happen to Carlotta. She would not let her wear a scarf around her neck for fear it would catch on a nail or in some door and strangle the child. Every steep staircase, every deep body of water, the distant barking of every watchdog frightened Agnes. She dreamed at night that the house caught fire and, unable to save Carlotta, she threw herself into the flames. Now, added to her other anxieties, were the steel traps and the rifle. She could see Jim from the nursery window. The traps were not set, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous, lying there on the ground where anyone could step on them. He had the rifle apart and was cleaning it with a rag, but Agnes felt as if the rifle were loaded and aimed at Carlotta’s heart.

JIM HEARD
his wife’s voice, and he carried the parts of the rifle around to the terrace, where Ellen was sitting in a deck chair, having her breakfast from a tray. He kissed her, and thought how young, slender, and pretty she looked. They had spent very little of their married life in the country, and to be together on a bright, still morning made them both feel as if they had recaptured the excitement of their first meetings. The warmth of the sun, like a state of continuous and intense desire, blinded them to each other’s imperfections.

They had planned to drive up Black Hill and see the Emerson place that morning. Ellen liked to visit abandoned farms with the idea of someday buying a house in the country. Jim humored her in this, although he wasn’t really interested; and she, in turn, thought that she was deceiving him and that someday, somewhere, on some dismal hill they would find a farmhouse that would strike directly at his heart.

They drove up Black Hill as soon as Ellen had finished her breakfast. These excursions to abandoned homesteads had taken them over many neglected back roads, but the one up Black Hill was as bad as anything Jim had seen yet. It would be impassable between October and May.

When they reached the Emerson place, Ellen looked from the modest, weathered farmhouse to Jim’s face, to see what his reaction would be. Neither of them spoke. Where she saw charm and security, he saw advanced dilapidation and imprisonment.

The farm lay high on the hill but in a fold of the land, and Jim noticed that while the contour sheltered the house from the lake winds, it also deprived it of any view of the water or the mountains. He noticed, too, that every fair-sized tree within a thousand yards of the granite doorstep had been felled. The sun beat on the tin roof. In one of the front windows, like a talisman, he thought, of the meager rural life he detested, was a faded Red Cross sticker.

They left the car and walked across the dooryard. The grass there was waist high and filled with sweet clover. Briars tore at Jim’s pants. The rusted latch came off in his hands when he tried the door. He followed Ellen impatiently through the dark, smelly rooms as he had followed her through rooms in a similar state of dilapidation in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland. Ellen was a woman with many inexpressible fears—of traffic, of poverty, and, particularly, of war—and these remote, improbable houses represented safety and security to her.

“Of course, if we bought the place,” she said, “we’d have to put at least ten thousand dollars into it. We’d just be buying the land. I realize that.”

“Well, I’ll admit six thousand is a good price for that much land,” he said tactfully. He lit a cigarette and looked through a broken window at a pile of rusted farm machinery.

“You see, we could tear down all these partitions,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I feel more and more that we’ve got to get some base away from New York,” she said. “If there was a war, we’d be caught like rats. Of course, if we left the city altogether I’m not sure how we could make a living. We could open a deep-freeze locker.”

“I don’t know much about freezers,” he said.

This dialogue was as much a part of his visits to the country, he thought, as the swimming and the drinking; and it would be brief. “Then you don’t like the place?” she asked, and when he said no, she sighed and stepped from the dark hallway into the sun. He followed her and closed the door. She looked behind her as if he had closed the door on her salvation, and then she took his arm and walked beside him to the car.

MRS. GARRISON
, Ellen, and Jim ate their lunch that day on the terrace. Ingrid and Timmy ate in the kitchen, and Agnes Shay fed Carlotta in the nursery. Then she undressed the child, drew the blinds, and put her to bed. She lay on the floor beside the bed and fell into a sound sleep herself. At three, she woke and roused Carlotta. The child was sweaty and cross.

When Carlotta was dressed, Agnes took her down to the living room. Mrs. Garrison was waiting there. It was one of the rituals of that summer that she should spend an hour with Carlotta each afternoon. Left alone with her grandmother, the child sat stiffly in a chair. Mrs. Garrison and the little girl bored one another.

Mrs. Garrison had led an unusually comfortable life, so well sustained by friends and by all sorts of pleasures that she retained a striking buoyancy. She was impulsive, generous, and very kind. She was also restless. “What shall we do, Carlotta?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the child said.

“Shall I make you a necklace of daisies, Carlotta?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you wait here, then. Don’t touch the candy or the things on my desk, will you?”

Mrs. Garrison went into the hall and got a basket and some shears. The lawn below the terrace ended abruptly in a field that was covered with white-and-yellow daisies. She filled her basket with them. When she returned to the living room, Carlotta was still sitting stiffly in her chair. Mrs. Garrison did not trust the child and she inspected the desk before she settled herself on the sofa. She began to push a threaded needle through the hairy flowers. “I’ll make you a necklace and a bracelet and a crown,” she said.