The Stories of John Cheever (72 page)

IT WOULD
have been raining on the night I imagined; no other sound transports Richard with such velocity backward in time. At last everything was perfect—the pitcher, the polish on the heavy brasses, the carpet. The chest of drawers would seem not to have been lifted into the present but to have moved the past with it into the room. Wasn’t that what he wanted? He would admire the dark ring in the varnish and the fragrance of the empty drawers, and under the influence of two liquids—rain and whiskey—the hands of those who had touched the lowboy, polished it, left their drinks on it, arranged the flowers in the pitcher and stuffed odds and ends of string into the drawers would seem to reach out of the dark. As he watched, their dull fingerprints clustered on the polish, as if this were their means of clinging to life. By recalling them, by going a step further, he evoked them, and they came down impetuously into the room—they flew—as if they had been waiting in pain and impatience all those years for his invitation.

First to come back from the dead was Grandmother DeLancey, all dressed in black and smelling of ginger. Handsome, intelligent, victorious, she had broken with the past, and the thrill of this had borne her along with the force of a wave through all the days of her life and, so far as one knew, had washed her up into the very gates of heaven. Her education, she said scornfully, had consisted of learning how to hem a pocket handkerchief and speak a little French, but she had left a world where it was improper for a lady to hold an opinion and come into one where she could express her opinions on a platform, pound the lectern with her fist, walk alone in the dark, and cheer (as she always did) the firemen when the red wagon came helling up the street. Her manner was firm and oracular, for she had traveled as far west as Cleveland lecturing on women’s rights. A lady could be anything! A doctor! A lawyer! An engineer! A lady could, like Aunt Louisa, smoke cigars.

Aunt Louisa was smoking a cigar as she flew in to join the gathering. The fringe of a Spanish shawl spread out behind her in the air, and her hoop earrings rocked as she made, as always, a forceful, a pressing entrance, touched the lowboy, and settled on the blue chair. She was an artist. She had studied in Rome. Crudeness, flamboyance, passion, and disaster attended her. She tackled all the big subjects—the Rape of the Sabines, and the Sack of Rome. Naked men and women thronged her huge canvases, but they were always out of drawing, the colors were dim, and even the clouds above her battlefields seemed despondent. Her failure was not revealed to her until it was too late. She poured her ambitions onto her oldest son, Timothy, who walked in sullenly from the grave, carrying a volume of the Beethoven sonatas, his face dark with rancor.

Timothy would be a great pianist. It was her decision. He was put through every suffering, deprivation, and humiliation known to a prodigy. It was a solitary and bitter life. He had his first recital when he was seven. He played with an orchestra when he was twelve. He went on tour the next year. He wore strange clothes, and used grease on his long curls, and killed himself when he was fifteen. His mother had pushed him pitilessly. And why should this passionate and dedicated woman have made such a mistake? She may have meant to heal or avenge a feeling that, through birth or misfortune, she had been kept out of the blessed company of contented men and women. She may have believed that fame would end all this—that if she were a famous painter or he a famous pianist, they would never again taste loneliness or know scorn.

Richard could not have kept Uncle Tom from joining them if he had wanted to. He was powerless. He had been too late in realizing that the fascination of the lowboy was the fascination of pain, and he had committed himself to it. Uncle Tom came in with the grace of an old athlete. He was the amorous one. No one had been able to keep track of his affairs. His girls changed weekly—they sometimes changed in midweek. There were tens, there were hundreds, there may have been thousands. He carried in his arms his youngest son, Peter, whose legs were in braces. Peter had been crippled just before his birth, when, during a quarrel between his parents, Uncle Tom pushed Aunt Louisa down the stairs.

Aunt Mildred came stiffly through the air, drew her blue skirt down over her knees as she settled herself, and looked uneasily at Grandmother. The old lady had passed on to Mildred her emancipation, as if it were a nation secured by treaties and compacts, flags and anthems. Mildred knew that passivity, needlepoint, and housework were not for her. To decline into a contented housewife would have meant handing over to the tyrant those territories that her mother had won for eternity with the sword. She knew well enough what it was that she must not do, but she had never decided what it was that she should do. She wrote pageants. She wrote verse. She worked for six years on a play about Christopher Columbus. Her husband, Uncle Sidney, pushed the perambulator and sometimes the carpet sweeper. She watched him angrily at his housework. He had usurped her rights, her usefulness. She took a lover and, going for the first three or four times to the hotel where they met, she felt that she had found herself. This was not one of the opportunities that her mother had held out to her, but it was better than Christopher Columbus. Furtive love was the contribution she was meant to make. The affair was sordid and came to a sordid end, with disclosures, anonymous letters, and bitter tears. Her lover absconded, and Uncle Sidney began to drink.

Uncle Sidney staggered back from the grave and sat down on the sofa beside Richard, stinking of liquor. He had been drunk ever since he discovered his wife’s folly. His face was swollen. His belly was so enlarged that it had burst a shirt button. His mind and his eyes were glazed. In his drunkenness he dropped a lighted cigarette onto the sofa, and the velvet began to smoke. Richard’s position seemed confined to observation. He could not speak or move. Then Uncle Sidney noticed the fire and poured the contents of his whiskey glass onto the upholstery. The whiskey and the sofa burst into flame. Grandmother, who was sitting on the old pegged Windsor chair, sprang to her feet, but the pegs caught her clothing and tore the seat of her dress. The dogs began to bark, and Peter, the young cripple, began to sing in a thin voice—obscenely sarcastic—“Joy to the world! the Lord is come. Let Heaven and nature sing,” for it was a Christmas dinner that Richard had reconstructed.

AT SOME POINT
—perhaps when he purchased the silver pitcher—Richard committed himself to the horrors of the past, and his life, like so much else in nature, took the form of an arc. There must have been some felicity, some clearness in his feeling for Wilma, but once the lowboy took a commanding position in his house, he seemed driven back upon his wretched childhood. We went there for dinner—it must have been Thanksgiving. The lowboy stood in the dining room, on its carpet of mysterious symbols, and the silver pitcher was full of chrysanthemums. Richard spoke to his wife and children in a tone of vexation that I had forgotten. He quarreled with everyone; he even quarreled with my children. Oh, why is it that life is for some an exquisite privilege and others must pay for their seats at the play with a ransom of cholers, infections, and nightmares? We got away as soon as we could.

When we got home, I took the green glass epergne that belonged to Aunt Mildred off the sideboard and smashed it with a hammer. Then I dumped Grandmother’s sewing box into the ash can, burned a big hole in her lace tablecloth, and buried her pewter in the garden. Out they go—the Roman coins, the sea horse from Venice, and the Chinese fan. We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another. Down with the stuffed owl in the upstairs hall and the statue of Hermes on the newel post! Hock the ruby necklace, throw away the invitation to Buckingham Palace, jump up and down on the perfume atomizer from Murano and the Canton fish plates. Dismiss whatever molests us and challenges our purpose, sleeping or waking. Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.

I
T ALL SEEMED
to have been arranged—Seton sensed this when he opened the door of his house that evening and walked down the hall into the living room. It all seemed to have been set with as much care as, in an earlier period of his life, he had known girls to devote to the flowers, the candles, and the records for the phonograph. This scene was not arranged for his pleasure, nor was it arranged for anything so simple as reproach. “Hello,” he said loudly and cheerfully. Sobbing and moaning rent the air. In the middle of the small living room stood an ironing board. One of his shirts was draped over it, and his wife, Jessica, wiped away a tear as she ironed. Near the piano stood Jocelin, the baby. Jocelin was howling. Sitting in a chair near her little sister was Millicent, his oldest daughter, sobbing and holding in her hands the pieces of a broken doll. Phyllis, the middle child, was on her hands and knees, prying the stuffing out of an armchair with a beer-can opener. Clouds of smoke from what smelled like a burning leg of lamb drifted out of the open kitchen door into the living room.

He could not believe that they had passed the day in such disorder. It must all have been planned, arranged—including the conflagration in the oven—for the moment of his homecoming. He even thought he saw a look of inner tranquility on his wife’s harassed face as she glanced around the room and admired the effectiveness of the scene. He felt routed but not despairing and, standing on the threshold, he made a quick estimate of his remaining forces and settled on a kiss as his first move; but as he approached the ironing board his wife waved him away, saying, “Don’t come near me. You’ll catch my cold. I have a
terrible
cold.” He then got Phyllis away from the armchair, promised to mend Millicent’s doll, and carried the baby into the bathroom and changed her diapers. From the kitchen came loud oaths as Jessica fought her way through the clouds of smoke and took the meat out of the stove.

It was burned. So was almost everything else—the rolls, the potatoes, and the frozen apple tart. There were cinders in Seton’s mouth and a great heaviness in his heart as he looked past the plates of spoiled food to Jessica’s face, once gifted with wit and passion but now dark and lost to him. After supper he helped with the dishes and read to the children, and the purity of their interest in what he read and did, the power of trust in their love, seemed to make the taste of burned meat sad as well as bitter. The smell of smoke stayed in the air long after everyone but Seton had gone up to bed. He sat alone in the living room, recounting his problems to himself. He had been married ten years, and Jessica still seemed to him to possess an unusual loveliness of person and nature, but in the last year or two something grave and mysterious had come between them. The burned roast was not unusual; it was routine. She burned the chops, she burned the hamburgers, she even burned the turkey at Thanksgiving, and she seemed to burn the food deliberately, as if it was a means of expressing her resentment toward him. It was not rebellion against drudgery. Cleaning women and mechanical appliances—the lightening of her burden—made no difference. It was not, he thought, even resentment. It was like some subterranean sea change, some sexual campaign or revolution stirring—unknown perhaps to her—beneath the shining and common appearance of things.

He did not want to leave Jessica, but how much longer could he cope with the tearful children, the dark looks, and the smoky and chaotic house? It was not discord that he resisted but a threat to the most healthy and precious part of his self-esteem. To be long-suffering under the circumstances seemed to him indecent. What could he do? Change, motion, openings seemed to be what he and Jessica needed, and it was perhaps an indication of his limitations that, in trying to devise some way of extending his marriage, the only thing he could think of was to take Jessica to dinner in a restaurant where they had often gone ten years ago, when they were lovers. But even this, he knew, would not be simple. A point-blank invitation would only get him a point-blank, bitter refusal. He would have to be wary. He would have to surprise and disarm her.

This was in the early autumn. The days were clear. The yellow leaves were falling everywhere. From all the windows of the house and through the glass panes in the front door, one saw them coming down. Seton waited for two or three days. He waited for an unusually fine day, and then he called Jessica from his office, in the middle of the morning. There was a cleaning woman at the house, he knew. Millicent and Phyllis would be in school, and Jocelin would be asleep. Jessica would not have too much to do. She might even be idle and reflective. He called her and told her—he did not invite her—to come to town and to have dinner with him. She hesitated; she said it would be difficult to find someone to stay with the children; and finally she succumbed. He even seemed to hear in her voice when she agreed to come a trace of the gentle tenderness he adored.

It was a year since they had done anything like dining together in a restaurant, and when he left his office that night and turned away from the direction of the station he was conscious of the mountainous and deadening accrual of habit that burdened their relationship. Too many circles had been drawn around his life, he thought; but how easy it was to overstep them. The restaurant where he went to wait for her was modest and good—polished, starched, smelling of fresh bread and sauces, and in a charming state of readiness when he reached it that evening. The hat-check girl remembered him, and he remembered the exuberance with which he had come down the flight of steps into the bar when he was younger. How wonderful everything smelled. The bartender had just come on duty, freshly shaved and in a white coat. Everything seemed cordial and ceremonious. Every surface was shining, and the light that fell onto his shoulders was the light that had fallen there ten years ago. When the headwaiter stopped to say good evening, Seton asked to have a bottle of wine—
their
wine—iced. The door into the night was the door he used to watch in order to see Jessica come in with snow in her hair, to see her come in with a new dress and new shoes, to see her come in with good news, worries, apologies for being late. He could remember the way she glanced at the bar to see if he was there, the way she stopped to speak with the hat-check girl, and then lightly crossed the floor to put her hand in his and to join lightly and gracefully in his pleasure for the rest of the night.