The Stories of John Cheever Part 14

AT THE TAG END of nearly every long, large Sat.u.r.day-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low, and here and there a woman who was sitting out her husband would have begun to drink milk; when everybody had lost track of time, and the baby-sitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long since stretched out on the sofa and fallen into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the c.r.a.pshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves; when every proposal-to go to the Farquarsons' for breakfast, to go swimming, to go and wake up the Townsends, to go here and go there-died as soon as it was made, then Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair. The chiding was preliminary to moving the living-room furniture. Trace and Cash moved the tables and the chairs, the sofas and the fire screen, the woodbox and the footstool; and when they had finished, you wouldn't know the place. Then if the host had a revolver, he would be asked to produce it. Cash would take off his shoes and a.s.sume a starting crouch behind a sofa. Trace would fire the weapon out of an open window, and if you were new to the community and had not understood what the preparations were about, you would then realize that you were watching a hurdle race. Over the sofa went Cash, over the tables, over the fire screen and the woodbox. It was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully. There was not a piece of furniture in Shady Hill that Cash could not take in his stride. The race ended with cheers, and presently the party would break up.

Cash was, of course, an old track star, but he was never aggressive or tiresome about his brilliant past. The college where he had spent his youth had offered him a paying job on the alumni council, but he had refused it, realizing that that part of his life was ended. Cash and his wife, Louise, had two children, and they lived in a medium-cost ranch house on Alewives Lane. They belonged to the country club, although they could not afford it, but in the case of the Bentleys n.o.body ever pointed this out, and Cash was one of the best-liked men in Shady Hill. He was still slender-he was careful about his weight-and he walked to the train in the morning with a light and vigorous step that marked him as an athlete. His hair was thin, and there were mornings when his eyes looked bloodshot, but this did not detract much from a charming quality of stubborn youthfulness.

In business Cash had suffered reverses and disappointments, and the Bentleys had many money worries. They were always late with their tax payments and their mortgage payments, and the drawer of the hall table was stuffed with unpaid bills; it was always touch and go with the Bentleys and the bank. Louise looked pretty enough on Sat.u.r.day night, but her life was exacting and monotonous. In the pockets of her suits, coats, and dresses there were little wads and sc.r.a.ps of paper on which was written: "Oleomargarine, frozen spinach, Kleenex, dog biscuit, hamburger, pepper, lard..." When she was still half awake in the morning, she was putting on the water for coffee and diluting the frozen orange juice. Then she would be wanted by the children. She would crawl under the bureau on her hands and knees to find a sock for Toby. She would lie flat on her belly and wiggle under the bed (getting dust up her nose) to find a shoe for Rachel. Then there were the housework, the laundry, and the cooking, as well as the demands of the children. There always seemed to be shoes to put on and shoes to take off, snowsuits to be zipped and unzipped, bottoms to be wiped, tears to be dried, and when the sun went down (she saw it set from the kitchen window) there was the supper to be cooked, the baths, the bedtime story, and the Lord's Prayer. With the sonorous words of the Our Father in a darkened room the children's day was over, but the day was far from over for Louise Bentley. There were the darning, the mending, and some ironing to do, and after sixteen years of housework she did not seem able to escape her ch.o.r.es even while she slept. Snowsuits, shoes, baths, and groceries seemed to have permeated her subconscious. Now and then she would speak in her sleep-so loudly that she woke her husband. "I can't afford veal cutlets," she said one night. Then she sighed uneasily and was quiet again.

By the standards of Shady Hill, the Bentleys were a happily married couple, but they had their ups and downs. Cash could be very touchy at times. When he came home after a bad day at the office and found that Louise, for some good reason, had not started supper, he would be ugly. "Oh, for Christ sake!" he would say, and go into the kitchen and heat up some frozen food. He drank some whiskey to relax himself during this ordeal, but it never seemed to relax him, and he usually burned the bottom out of a pan, and when they sat down for supper the dining s.p.a.ce would be full of smoke. It was only a question of time before they were plunged into a bitter quarrel. Louise would run upstairs, throw herself onto the bed and sob. Cash would grab the whiskey bottle and dose himself. These rows, in spite of the vigor with which Cash and Louise entered into them, were the source of a great deal of pain for both of them. Cash would sleep downstairs on the sofa, but sleep never repaired the damage, once the trouble had begun, and if they met in the morning, they would be at one another's throats in a second. Then Cash would leave for the train, and, as soon as the children had been taken to nursery school, Louise would put on her coat and cross the gra.s.s to the Beardens' house. She would cry into a cup of warmed-up coffee and tell Lucy Bearden her troubles. What was the meaning of marriage? What was the meaning of love? Lucy always suggested that Louise get a job. It would give her emotional and financial independence, and that, Lucy said, was what she needed.

The next night, things would get worse. Cash would not come home for dinner at all, but would stumble in at about eleven, and the whole sordid wrangle would be repeated, with Louise going to bed in tears upstairs and Cash again stretching out on the living-room sofa. After a few days and nights of this, Louise would decide that she was at the end of her rope. She would decide to go and stay with her married sister in Mamaroneck. She usually chose a Sat.u.r.day, when Cash would be at home, for her departure. She would pack a suitcase and get her War Bonds from the desk. Then she would take a bath and put on her best slip. Cash, pa.s.sing the bedroom door, would see her. Her slip was transparent, and suddenly he was all repentance, tenderness, charm, wisdom, and love. "Oh, my darling!" he would groan, and when they went downstairs to get a bite to eat about an hour later, they would be sighing and making cow eyes at one another; they would be the happiest married couple in the whole eastern United States. It was usually at about this time that Lucy Bearden turned up with the good news that she had found a job for Louise. Lucy would ring the doorbell, and Cash, wearing a bathrobe, would let her in. She would be brief with Cash, naturally, and hurry into the dining room to tell poor Louise the good news. "Well, that's very nice of you to have looked," Louise would say wanly, "but I don't think that I want a job any more. I don't think that Cash wants me to work, do you, sweetheart?" Then she would turn her big dark eyes on Cash, and you could practically smell smoke. Lucy would excuse herself hurriedly from this scene of depravity, but never left with any hard feelings, because she had been married for nineteen years herself and she knew that every union has its ups and downs. She didn't seem to leave any wiser, either; the next time the Bentleys quarreled, she would be just as intent as ever on getting Louise a job. But these quarrels and reunions, like the hurdle race, didn't seem to lose their interest through repet.i.tion.

ON A SAt.u.r.dAY NIGHT in the spring, the Farquarsons gave the Bentleys an anniversary party. It was their seventeenth anniversary. Sat.u.r.day afternoon, Louise Bentley put herself through preparations nearly as arduous as the Monday wash. She rested for an hour, by the clock, with her feet high in the air, her chin in a sling, and her eyes bathed in some astringent solution. The clay packs, the too tight girdle, and the plucking and curling and painting that went on were all aimed at rejuvenation. Feeling in the end that she had not been entirely successful, she tied a piece of veiling over her eyes-but she was a lovely woman, and all the cosmetics that she had struggled with seemed, like her veil, to be drawn transparently over a face where mature beauty and a capacity for wit and pa.s.sion were undisguisable. The Farquarsons' party was nifty, and the Bentleys had a wonderful time. The only person who drank too much was Trace Bearden. Late in the party, he began to chide Cash about his thinning hair and Cash good-naturedly began to move the furniture around. Harry Farquarson had a pistol, and Trace went out onto the terrace to fire it up at the sky. Over the sofa went Cash, over the end table, over the arms of the wing chair and the fire screen. It was a piece of carving on a chest that brought him down, and down he came like a ton of bricks.

Louise screamed and ran to where he lay. He had cut a gash in his forehead, and someone made a bandage to stop the flow of blood. When he tried to get up, he stumbled and fell again, and his face turned a terrible green. Harry telephoned Dr. Parminter, Dr. Hopewell, Dr. Altman, and Dr. Barnstable, but it was two in the morning and none of them answered. Finally, a Dr. Yerkes-a total stranger-agreed to come. Yerkes was a young man-he did not seem old enough to be a doctor-and he looked around at the disordered room and the anxious company as if there was something weird about the scene. He got off on the wrong foot with Cash. "What seems to be the matter, old-timer?" he asked.

Cash's leg was broken. The doctor put a splint on it, and Harry and Trace carried the injured man out to the doctor's car. Louise followed them in her own car to the hospital, where Cash was bedded down in a ward. The doctor gave Cash a sedative, and Louise kissed him and drove home in the dawn.

CASH was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he came home he walked with a crutch and his broken leg was in a heavy cast. It was another ten days before he could limp to the morning train. "I won't be able to run the hurdle race any more, sweetheart," he told Louise sadly. She said that it didn't matter, but while it didn't matter to her, it seemed to matter to Cash. He had lost weight in the hospital. His spirits were low. He seemed discontented. He did not himself understand what had happened. He, or everything around him, seemed subtly to have changed for the worse. Even his senses seemed to conspire to damage the ingenuous world that he had enjoyed for so many years. He went into the kitchen late one night to make himself a sandwich, and when he opened the icebox door he noticed a rank smell. He dumped the spoiled meat into the garbage, but the smell clung to his nostrils. A few days later he was in the attic, looking for his varsity sweater. There were no windows in the attic and his flashlight was dim. Kneeling on the floor to unlock a trunk, he broke a spider web with his lips. The frail web covered his mouth as if a hand had been put over it. He wiped it impatiently, but also with the feeling of having been gagged. A few nights later, he was walking down a New York side street in the rain and saw an old wh.o.r.e standing in a doorway. She was so s.l.u.ttish and ugly that she looked like a cartoon of Death, but before he could appraise her-the instant his eyes wore an impression of her crooked figure-his lips swelled, his breathing quickened, and he experienced all the other symptoms of erotic excitement. A few nights later, while he was reading Time in the living room, he noticed that the faded roses Louise had brought in from the garden smelled more of earth than of anything else. It was a putrid, compelling smell. He dropped the roses into a wastebasket, but not before they had reminded him of the spoiled meat, the wh.o.r.e, and the spider web.

He had started going to parties again, but without the hurdle race to run, the parties of his friends and neighbors seemed to him interminable and stale. He listened to their dirty jokes with an irritability that was hard for him to conceal. Even their countenances discouraged him, and, slumped in a chair, he would regard their skin and their teeth narrowly, as if he were himself a much younger man.

The brunt of his irritability fell on Louise, and it seemed to her that Cash, in losing the hurdle race, had lost the thing that had preserved his equilibrium. He was rude to his friends when they stopped in for a drink. He was rude and gloomy when he and Louise went out. When Louise asked him what was the matter, he only murmured, "Nothing, nothing, nothing," and poured himself some bourbon. May and June pa.s.sed, and then the first part of July, without his showing any improvement.

THEN IT is a summer night, a wonderful summer night. The pa.s.sengers on the eight-fifteen see Shady Hill-if they notice it at all-in a bath of placid golden light. The noise of the train is m.u.f.fled in the heavy foliage, and the long car windows look like a string of lighted aquarium tanks before they flicker out of sight. Up on the hill, the ladies say to one another, "Smell the gra.s.s! Smell the trees!" The Farquarsons are giving another party, and Harry has hung a sign, WHISKEY GULCH, from the rose arbor, and is wearing a chef's white hat and an ap.r.o.n. His guests are still drinking, and the smoke from his meat fire rises, on this windless evening, straight up into the trees.

In the clubhouse on the hill, the first of the formal dances for the young people begins around nine. On Alewives Lane sprinklers continue to play after dark. You can smell the water. The air seems as fragrant as it is dark-it is a delicious element to walk through-and most of the windows on Alewives Lane are open to it. You can see Mr. and Mrs. Bearden, as you pa.s.s, looking at their television. Joe Lockwood, the young lawyer who lives on the corner, is practicing a speech to the jury before his wife. "I intend to show you," he says, "that a man of probity, a man whose reputation for honesty and reliability..." He waves his bare arms as he speaks. His wife goes on knitting. Mrs. Carver-Harry Farquarson's mother-in-law-glances up at the sky and asks, "Where did all the stars come from?" She is old and foolish, and yet she is right: Last night's stars seem to have drawn to themselves a new range of galaxies, and the night sky is not dark at all, except where there is a tear in the membrane of light. In the unsold house lots near the track a hermit thrush is singing.

The Bentleys are at home. Poor Cash has been so rude and gloomy that the Farquarsons have not asked him to their party. He sits on the sofa beside Louise, who is sewing elastic into the children's underpants. Through the open window he can hear the pleasant sounds of the summer night. There is another party, in the Rogerses' garden, behind the Bentleys'. The music from the dance drifts down the hill. The band is sketchy-saxophone, drums, and piano-and all the selections are twenty years old. The band plays "Valencia," and Cash looks tenderly toward Louise, but Louise, tonight, is a discouraging figure. The lamp picks out the gray in her hair. Her ap.r.o.n is stained. Her face seems colorless and drawn. Suddenly, Cash begins frenziedly to beat his feet in time to the music. He sings some gibberish-Jabajabajabajaba-to the distant saxophone. He sighs and goes into the kitchen.

Here a faint, stale smell of cooking clings to the dark. From the kitchen window Cash can see the lights and figures of the Rogerses' party. It is a young people's party. The Rogers girl has asked some friends in for dinner before the dance, and now they seem to be leaving. Cars are driving away. "I'm covered with gra.s.s stains," a girl says. "I hope the old man remembered to buy gasoline," a boy says, and a girl laughs. There is nothing on their minds but the pa.s.sing summer nights. Taxes and the elastic in underpants-all the unbeautiful facts of life that threaten to crush the breath out of Cash-have not touched a single figure in this garden. Then jealousy seizes him-such savage and bitter jealousy that he feels ill.

He does not understand what separates him from these children in the garden next door. He has been a young man. He has been a hero. He has been adored and happy and full of animal spirits, and now he stands in a dark kitchen, deprived of his athletic prowess, his impetuousness, his good looks-of everything that means anything to him. He feels as if the figures in the next yard are the specters from some party in that past where all his tastes and desires lie, and from which he has been cruelly removed. He feels like a ghost of the summer evening. He is sick with longing. Then he hears voices in the front of the house. Louise turns on the kitchen light. "Oh, here you are," she says. "The Beardens stopped in. I think they'd like a drink."

Cash went to the front of the house to greet the Beardens. They wanted to go up to the club, for one dance. They saw, at a glance, that Cash was at loose ends, and they urged the Bentleys to come. Louise got someone to stay with the children and then went upstairs to change.

When they got to the club, they found a few friends of their age hanging around the bar, but Cash did not stay in the bar. He seemed restless and perhaps drunk. He banged into a table on his way through the lounge to the ballroom. He cut in on a young girl. He seized her too vehemently and jigged her off in an ancient two-step. She signaled openly for help to a boy in the stag line, and Cash was cut out. He walked angrily off the dance floor onto the terrace. Some young couples there withdrew from one another's arms as he pushed open the screen door. He walked to the end of the terrace, where he hoped to be alone, but here he surprised another young couple, who got up from the lawn, where they seemed to have been lying, and walked off in the dark toward the pool.

Louise remained in the bar with the Beardens. "Poor Cash is tight," she said. And then, "He told me this afternoon that he was going to paint the storm windows," she said. "Well, he mixed the paint and washed the brushes and put on some old fatigues and went into the cellar. There was a telephone call for him at around five, and when I went down to tell him, do you know what he was doing? He was just sitting there in the dark with a c.o.c.ktail shaker. He hadn't touched the storm windows. He was just sitting there in the dark, drinking Martinis."

"Poor Cash," Trace said.

"You ought to get a job," Lucy said. "That would give you emotional and financial independence." As she spoke, they all heard the noise of furniture being moved around in the lounge.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" Louise said. "He's going to run the race. Stop him, Trace, stop him! He'll hurt himself. He'll kill himself!"

They all went to the door of the lounge. Louise again asked Trace to interfere, but she could see by Cash's face that he was way beyond remonstrating with. A few couples left the dance floor and stood watching the preparations. Trace didn't try to stop Cash-he helped him. There was no pistol, so he slammed a couple of books together for the start.

Over the sofa went Cash, over the coffee table, the lamp table, the fire screen, and the ha.s.sock. All his grace and strength seemed to have returned to him. He cleared the big sofa at the end of the room and instead of stopping there, he turned and started back over the course. His face was strained. His mouth hung open. The tendons of his neck protruded hideously. He made the ha.s.sock, the fire screen, the lamp table, and the coffee table. People held their breath when he approached the final sofa, but he cleared it and landed on his feet. There was some applause. Then he groaned and fell. Louise ran to his side. His clothes were soaked with sweat and he gasped for breath. She knelt down beside him and took his head in her lap and stroked his thin hair.

CASH had a terrible hangover on Sunday, and Louise let him sleep until it was nearly time for church. The family went off to Christ Church together at eleven, as they always did. Cash sang, prayed, and got to his knees, but the most he ever felt in church was that he stood outside the realm of G.o.d's infinite mercy, and, to tell the truth, he no more believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost than does my bull terrier. They returned home at one to eat the overcooked meat and stony potatoes that were their customary Sunday lunch. At around five, the Parminters called up and asked them over for a drink. Louise didn't want to go, so Cash went alone. (Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale c.o.c.ktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those post-mortems and pickup suppers!) It was sultry and overcast. The dog days were beginning. He drank gin with the Parminters for an hour or two and then went over to the Townsends' for a drink. The Farquarsons called up the Townsends and asked them to come over and bring Cash with them, and at the Farquarsons' they had some more drinks and ate the leftover party food. The Farquarsons were glad to see that Cash seemed like himself again. It was half past ten or eleven when he got home. Louise was upstairs, cutting out of the current copy of Life those scenes of mayhem, disaster, and violent death that she felt might corrupt her children. She always did this. Cash came upstairs and spoke to her and then went down again. In a little while, she heard him moving the living-room furniture around. Then he called to her, and when she went down, he was standing at the foot of the stairs in his stocking feet, holding the pistol out to her. She had never fired it before, and the directions he gave her were not much help.

"Hurry up," he said, "I can't wait all night."

He had forgotten to tell her about the safety, and when she pulled the trigger nothing happened.

"It's that little lever," he said. "Press that little lever." Then, in his impatience, he hurdled the sofa anyhow.

The pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead.

THE DAY THE PIG FELL INTO THE WELL.

In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, "Remember the day the pig fell into the well?" Then, as if the opening note of a s.e.xtet had been sounded, the others would all rush in to take their familiar parts, like those families who sing Gilbert and Sullivan, and the recital would go on for an hour or more. The perfect days-and there had been hundreds of them-seemed to have pa.s.sed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.

The famous pig had belonged to Randy Nudd. He had won it at the fair in Lanchester and brought it home, and he was planning to build a pen for it, but Pamela Blaisdell telephoned, and he put the pig in the tool shed and drove over to the Blaisdell place in the old Cadillac. Russell Young was playing tennis with Esther Nudd. An Irishwoman named Nora Quinn was the cook that year. Mrs. Nudd's sister, Aunt Martha, had gone to the village of Macabit to get some cuttings from a friend, and Mr. Nudd was planning to take the launch across to Polett's Landing and bring her back after lunch. A Miss Coolidge was expected for dinner and the weekend. Mrs. Nudd had known her at school in Switzerland thirty years earlier. Miss Coolidge had written Mrs. Nudd to say that she was staying with friends in Glens Falls and could she pay a visit to her old schoolmate? Mrs. Nudd hardly remembered her and did not care about seeing her at all, but she wrote and asked her for the weekend. Though it was the middle of July, from daybreak a bl.u.s.tering northwest wind had been upsetting everything in the house and roaring in the trees like a storm. When you got out of the wind, if you could, the sun was hot.

In these events of the day the pig fell into the well, there was one other princ.i.p.al who was not a member of the family-Russell Young. Russell's father owned the hardware store in Macabit, and the Youngs were a respected native family. Mrs. Young worked as a cleaning woman for a month each spring, opening the summer houses, but her position was not menial. Russell met the Nudds through the boys-Hartley and Randall-and when he was quite young, he began to spend a lot of time at their camp. He was a year or two older than the Nudd boys, and in a way Mrs. Nudd entrusted the care of her sons to him. Russell was the same age as Esther Nudd and a year younger than Joan. Esther Nudd, at the beginning of this friends.h.i.+p, was a very fat girl. Joan was pretty and spent most of her time in front of the mirror. Esther and Joan adored Randy and gave him money from their allowances to buy paint for his boat, but otherwise there was not much rapport between the s.e.xes. Hartley Nudd was disgusted with his sisters. "I saw Esther yesterday in the bathhouse, naked," he would tell anyone, "and she's got these big rolls of fat around her stomach like I don't know what. She's an awful-looking thing. And Joan is dirty. You ought to see her room. I don't see why anyone wants to take a dirty person like that to a dance."

But they were all much older than this on the day they liked to remember. Russell had graduated from the local high school and gone off to college in Albany, and in the summer of his freshman year he had worked for the Nudds, doing odd jobs around the place. The fact that he was paid a salary did not change his relations.h.i.+p to the family, and he remained good friends with Randall and Hartley. In a way, Russell's character and background seemed to be the dominant ones, and the Nudd boys returned to New York imitating his north-country accent. On the other hand, Russell went with the children on all their picnics to Hewitt's Point, he climbed the mountains and went fis.h.i.+ng with them, he went to the square dances at the Town Hall with them, and in doing these things he learned from the Nudds an interpretation of the summer months that he would not have known as a native. He had no misgivings about so ingenuous and pleasing an influence, and he drove with the Nudds over the mountain roads in the old Cadillac, and shared with them the feeling that the clear light of July and August was imparting something rare to all their minds and careers. If the Nudds never referred to the difference between Russell's social position and theirs, it was because the very real barriers that they otherwise observed had been let down for the summer months-because the country, with the sky pouring its glare over the mountains onto the lake, seemed a seasonal paradise in which the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, lived together peaceably.

THE SUMMER the pig fell into the well was also Esther's tennis summer and the summer that she became so thin. Esther had been very fat when she entered college, but during her freshman year she had begun the arduous-and, in her case, successful-struggle to put on a new appearance and a new personality. She went on a strict diet, and played twelve and fourteen sets of tennis a day, and her chaste, athletic, and earnest manner never relaxed. Russell was her tennis partner that summer. Mrs. Nudd had offered Russell a job again that summer, but instead he had taken a job with a dairy farmer, delivering milk. The Nudds supposed that he wanted to be independent, and they understood, for they all had Russell's best interests at heart. They took a familial pride in the fact that he had finished his soph.o.m.ore year on the Dean's list. As it turned out, the job with the dairy farmer changed nothing. Russell was finished with his milk route at ten in the morning, and he spent most of the summer playing tennis with Esther. He often stayed to supper.

They were playing tennis that afternoon when Nora came running through the garden and told them that the pig had got out of the tool house and fallen into the well. Someone had left the door of the well shed open. Russell and Esther went over to the well and found the animal swimming in six feet of water. Russell made a slipknot in a clothesline and began fis.h.i.+ng for the pig. In the meantime, Mrs. Nudd was waiting for Miss Coolidge to arrive, and Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha were coming back from Polett's Landing in the launch. There were high waves on the lake, and the boat rolled, and some sediment was dislodged from the gas tank and plugged the feed line. The wind blew the disabled boat onto Gull Rock and put a hole in her bow. Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha put on life jackets and swam the twenty yards or so to sh.o.r.e.

MR. NUDD'S part in the narration was restrained (Aunt Martha was dead), and he did not join in until he was asked. "Was Aunt Martha really praying?" Joan would ask, and he would clear his throat to say-his manner was extremely dry and deliberate-"She was indeed, Joany. She was saying the Lord's Prayer. She had never, up until then, been a notably religious woman, but I'm sure that she could be heard praying from the sh.o.r.e."

"Was Aunt Martha really wearing corsets?" Joan would ask.

"Well, I should say so, Joany," Mr. Nudd would reply. 'When she and I came up onto the porch where your mother and Miss Coolidge were having their tea, the water was still pouring from our clothes in bucketfuls, and Aunt Martha had on very little that couldn't be seen."

Mr. Nudd had inherited from his father a wool concern, and he always wore a full woolen suit, as if he were advertising the business. He spent the whole summer in the country the year the pig fell into the well-not because his business was running itself but because of quarrels with his partners. "There's no sense in my going back to New York now," he kept saying. "I'll stay up here until September and give those sons of b.i.t.c.hes enough rope to hang themselves." The stupidity of his partners and a.s.sociates frustrated Mr. Nudd. "You know, Charlie Richmond doesn't have any principles," he would say to Mrs. Nudd desperately and yet hopelessly, as if he did not expect his wife to understand business, or as if the impact of stupidity was indescribable. "He doesn't have any ethics," he would go on, "he doesn't have any code of morals or manners, he doesn't have any principles, he doesn't think about anything but making money." Mrs. Nudd seemed to understand. It was her opinion that people like that killed themselves. She had known a man like that. He had worked day and night making money. He ruined his partners and betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children, and then, after making millions and millions of dollars, he went down to his office one Sunday afternoon and jumped out of the window.

HARTLEY'S PART in the story about the pig centered on a large pike he had caught that day, and Randy didn't enter into the narrative until close to its end. Randy had been fired out of college that spring. He and six friends had gone to a lecture on Socialism, and one of them had thrown a grapefruit at the speaker. Randy and the others refused to name the man who had thrown the grapefruit, and they were all expelled. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd were disheartened by this, but they were pleased with the way Randy had behaved. In the end, this experience made Randy feel like a celebrity and increased his already substantial self-respect. The fact that he had been expelled from college, that he was going to work in Boston in the fall, made him feel superior to the others.

The story did not begin to take on weight until a year after the pig incident, and already in this short time alterations had been made in its form. Esther's part changed in Russell's favor. She would interrupt the others to praise Russell. "You were so wonderful, Russell. How did you ever learn to make a slipknot? By Jupiter, if it hadn't been for Russell, I'll bet that pig would still be in the well." The year before, Esther and Russell had kissed a few times, and had decided that even if they fell in love they could never marry. He would not leave Macabit. She could not live there. They had reached these conclusions during Esther's tennis summer, when her kisses, like everything else, were earnest and chaste. The following summer, she seemed as anxious to lose her virginity as she had been to lose her corpulence. Something-Russell never knew what-had happened in the winter to make her ashamed of her inexperience.

She talked about s.e.x when they were alone. Russell had got the idea that her chast.i.ty was of great value, and he was the one who had to be persuaded, but then he lost his head quickly and went up the back stairs to her room. After they had become lovers, they continued to talk about how they could never marry, but the impermanence of their relations.h.i.+p did not seem to matter, as if this, like everything else, had been enlightened by the innocent and transitory season. Esther refused to make love in any place but her own bed, but her room was at the back of the house and could be reached by the kitchen stairs, and Russell never had any trouble in getting there without being seen. Like all the other rooms of the camp, it was unfinished. The pine boards were fragrant and darkened, a reproduction of a Degas and a photograph of Zermatt were tacked to the walls, the bed was lumpy, and on those summer nights, with the June bugs making the screens resound, with the heat of the day still caught in the boards of the old camp, with the parched smell of her light-brown hair, with her goodness and her slenderness in his arms, Russell felt that this happiness was inestimable.

They thought that everyone would find out, and that they were lost. Esther did not regret what she had done, but she didn't know how it would end. They kept waiting for trouble, and when nothing happened, they were perplexed. Then she decided one night that everyone must know about it, but that everyone understood. The thought that her parents were young enough at heart to understand this pa.s.sion as innocent and natural made Esther cry. "Aren't they wonderful people, darling?" she asked Russell. "Did you ever know such wonderful people. I mean, they were brought up so strictly, and all of their friends are stuffy, and isn't it wonderful that they understand?" Russell agreed. His respect for the Nudds was deepened by the thought that they could overlook convention for something larger. But both Esther and Russell were mistaken, of course. No one spoke to them about their meetings because no one knew about them. It never once occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Nudd that anything like that was going on.

THE FALL BEFORE, Joan had married suddenly, and gone out to Minneapolis to live. The marriage did not last. She was in Reno by April, and had her divorce in time to return to Whitebeach Camp for the summer. She was still a pretty girl, with a long face and fair hair. No one had expected her to return, and the things in her room had been scattered. She kept looking for her pictures and her books, her rugs and her chairs. When she joined the others on the porch after supper, she would ask a lot of questions. "Has anyone a match?"

"Is there an ashtray over there?"

"Is there any coffee left?"

"Are we going to have drinks?"

"Is there an extra pillow around?" Hartley was the only one to answer her questions kindly.

Randy and his wife were there for two weeks. Randy still borrowed money from his sisters. Pamela was a slight, dark girl who did not get on with Mrs. Nudd at all. She had been brought up in Chicago, and Mrs. Nudd, who had spent all her life in the East, sometimes thought that this might account for their differences. "I want the truth," Pamela often said to Mrs. Nudd, as if she suspected her mother-in-law of telling lies. "Do you think pink looks well on me?" she would ask. "I want the truth." She disapproved of Mrs. Nudd's management of Whitebeach Camp, and on one occasion tried to do something about the waste that she saw everywhere. Behind Mrs. Nudd's garden there was a large currant patch, which the hired man mulched and pruned every year, although the Nudds disliked currants and never picked them. One morning, a truck came up the driveway and four men, strangers, went into the patch. The maid told Mrs. Nudd, and she was on the point of asking Randy to drive the strangers away when Pamela came in and explained everything. "The currants are rotting," she said, "so I told the man in the grocery store that he could pick them if he'd pay us fifteen cents a quart. I hate to see waste..." This incident troubled Mrs. Nudd and everyone else, although they could not have said why.

BUT AT ITS HEART that summer was like all the others. Russell and "the children" went to Sherill's Falls, where the water is gold; they climbed Macabit Mountain; and they went fis.h.i.+ng at Bates's Pond. Because these excursions were yearly, they had begun to seem like rites. After supper, the family would go out onto the open porch. Often there would be pink clouds in the sky. "I just saw the cook throw out a dish of cauliflower," Pamela would say to Mrs. Nudd. "I'm not in a position to correct her, but I hate to see waste. Don't you?" Or Joan would ask, "Has anyone seen my yellow sweater? I'm sure I left it at the bathhouse but I've just been down there and I can't find it. Did anyone bring it back? That's the second sweater I've lost this year." Then for a time no one would speak, as if they had all been unshackled by the evening from the stern laws of conversation, and when the talk began again it would continue to be trifling; it would involve the best ways of caulking a boat, or the difference in comfort between buses and trolley cars, or the shortest ways of driving into Canada. The darkness would come into the soft air as thickly as silt. Then someone speaking of the sky would remind Mrs. Nudd of how red the sky had been the night the pig fell into the well.

"You were playing tennis with Esther, weren't you, Russell? That was Esther's tennis summer. Didn't you win the pig at the fair in Lanchester, Randy? You won it at one of those things where you throw baseb.a.l.l.s at a target. You were always such a good athlete."

The pig, they all knew, had been won in a raffle, but no one corrected Mrs. Nudd for her slight alteration in the narrative. She had recently begun to praise Randy for distinctions that he had never enjoyed. This was not conscious on her part, and she would have been confused if anyone had contradicted her, but now she would often recall how well he had done in German, how popular he had been in boarding school, how important he had been to the football team-all false, good-hearted memories that seemed aimed at Randy, as if they might hearten him. "You were going to build a pen for the pig," she said. "You were always such a good carpenter. Remember that bookcase you built? Then Pamela called you up, and you drove over there in the old Cadillac."

MISS COOLIDGE had arrived on that famous day at four, they all remembered. She was a spinster from the Middle West who made a living as a church soloist. There was nothing remarkable about her, but she was, of course, very different from the easygoing family, and it pleased them to think that they excited her disapproval. When she had been settled, Mrs. Nudd took her out onto the porch and Nora Quinn brought them some tea. After Nora served the tea, she took a bottle of Scotch out of the dining room surrept.i.tiously and went up to her attic and began to drink. Hartley returned from the lake with his seven-pound pike in a pail. He put this in the back hall and joined his mother and Miss Coolidge, attracted by the cookies on the table. Miss Coolidge and Mrs. Nudd were recalling school days in Switzerland when Mr. Nudd and Aunt Martha, fully dressed and soaking wet, came up onto the porch and were introduced. The pig had drowned by this time, and Russell didn't get it out of the well until suppertime. Hartley loaned him a razor and a white s.h.i.+rt, and he stayed for supper. The pig was not mentioned in front of Miss Coolidge, but there was a lot of talk at the table about how salty the water tasted. After supper, they all went out on the porch. Aunt Martha had hung her corsets to dry in her bedroom window, and when she went upstairs to see how they were drying, she noticed the sky and called down to the others to look at it. "Look at the sky, everybody, look at the sky!" A moment earlier, the clouds had been shut; now they began to discharge worlds of fire. The glare then spread over the lake was blinding. "Oh, look at the sky, Nora!" Mrs. Nudd called upstairs to the cook, but by the time Nora, who was drunk, got to the window, the illusion of fire had gone and the clouds were dull, and, thinking that she might have misunderstood Mrs. Nudd, she went to the head of the stairs to ask if there was something they wanted. She fell down the stairs and upset the pail with the live pike in it.

AT THIS POINT in the story, Joan and Mrs. Nudd laughed until they wept. They all laughed happily except Pamela, who was waiting impatiently for her part in the narrative. It came immediately after the fall downstairs. Randy had stayed at the Blaisdells' for supper and had returned to the camp with Pamela while Hartley and Russell were trying to get Nora into bed. They had news for everybody, they said; they had decided to get married. Mrs. Nudd had never wanted Randy to marry Pamela, and their news made her sad, but she kissed Pamela tenderly and went upstairs to get a diamond ring. "Oh, it's beautiful!" Pamela said when she was given the ring. "But don't you need it? Won't you miss it? Are you sure you want me to have it? Tell me the truth..." Miss Coolidge, who had been very quiet until then and who must have felt very much a stranger, asked if she could sing.

ALL THE LONG DISCUSSIONS that Russell had had with Esther about the impermanence of their relations.h.i.+p did not help him that autumn when the Nudds went away. He missed the girl and the summer nights in her room painfully. He began to write long letters to Esther when he got back to Albany. He was troubled and lonely as he had never been before. Esther did not answer his letters, but this did not change the way he felt. He decided that they should become engaged. He would stay on at college and get a Master's degree, and with a teaching job they could live in some place like Albany. Esther did not even answer his proposal of marriage, and in desperation Russell telephoned her at college. She was out. He left a message to call him back. When she had not called him by the next evening, he telephoned her again, and when he got her this time, he asked her to marry him. "I can't marry you, Russell," she said impatiently. "I don't want to marry you." He hung up miserably and was lovesick for a week. Then he decided that Esther's refusal was not her decision, that her parents had forbidden her to marry him-a conjecture that was strengthened when none of the Nudds returned to Macabit the next summer. But Russell was mistaken. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd took Joan and Esther to California that summer, not to keep Esther away from Russell but because Mrs. Nudd had received a legacy and had decided to spend it on the trip. Hartley took a job in Maine at a summer camp. Randy and Pamela-Randy had lost his job in Boston and had taken one in Worcester-were having a baby in July, and so Whitebeach Camp was not opened at all.

THEN THEY ALL came back. A year later, on a June day when a horse van was bringing the bays up to the Macabit Riding Stable and there were a lot of motorboats on trailers along the road, the Nudds returned. Hartley had a teaching job, so he was there all summer. Randy took two weeks without pay so that he and Pamela and their baby could be there for a month. Joan had not planned to come back; she had gone into partners.h.i.+p with a woman who owned a tearoom at Lake George, but she quarreled with her partner early in this venture, and in June Mr. Nudd drove to the lake and brought her home. Joan had been to a doctor that winter because she had begun to suffer from depressions, and she talked freely about her unhappiness. "You know, I think the trouble with me," she would say at breakfast, "is that I was so jealous of Hartley when he first went to boarding school. I could have killed him when he came home that year for Christmas, but I repressed all of my animosity..."

"Remember that nursemaid, O'Brien?" she would ask at lunch. "Well, I think O'Brien warped my whole outlook on s.e.x. She used to get undressed in the closet, and she beat me once for looking at myself in a mirror when I didn't have any clothes on. I think she warped my whole outlook..."

"I think the trouble with me is that Grandmother was always so strict," she would say at dinner. "I never had the feeling that I gratified her. I mean, I got such bad marks at school, and she always made me feel so guilty. I think it's colored my att.i.tude toward other women."

"You know," she would say on the porch after supper, "I think the whole turning point in my life was that awful Trenchard boy who showed me those pictures when I was only ten..." These recollections brought her a momentary happiness, but half an hour later she would be biting her fingernails. Surrounded all her life by just and kindly people, she was having a hard time finding the causes of her irresolution, and, one by one, she blamed the members of her family, and their friends, and the servants.

Esther had married Tom Dennison the previous fall, when she returned from California. This match pleased everyone in the family. Tom was pleasant, industrious, and intelligent. He had a freshman job with a firm that manufactured cash registers. His salary was small, and he and Esther began their marriage in a cold-water tenement in the East Sixties. Speaking of this arrangement, people sometimes added, "That Esther Nudd is so courageous!" When the summer came around, Tom had only a short vacation, and he and Esther went to Cape G.o.d in June. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd hoped that Esther would then come to Whitebeach Camp, but Esther said no, she would stick it out in the city with Tom. She changed her mind in August, and Mr. Nudd drove to the junction and met her train. She would only stay for ten days, she said, and this would be her last summer at Whitebeach Camp. Tom and she were going to buy a summer place of their own on Cape G.o.d. When it was time for her to go, she telephoned Tom, and he told her to stay in the country; the heat was awful. She telephoned him once a week and stayed at Whitebeach Camp until the middle of September.

Mr. Nudd spent two or three days of every week that summer in New York, flying down from Albany. For a change, he was pleased with the way his business was going. He had been made chairman of the board. Pamela had her baby with her, and she complained about the room they were given. Once, Mrs. Nudd overheard her in the kitchen, saying to the cook, "Things will be very different around here when Randy and I run this place, let me tell you..." Mrs. Nudd spoke to her husband about this, and they agreed to leave Whitebeach Camp to Hartley. "That ham only came to the table once," Pamela would say, "and I saw her dumping a dish of good sh.e.l.l beans into the garbage last night. I'm not in a position to correct her, but I hate to see waste. Don't you?"

Randy wors.h.i.+pped his thin wife, and she took full advantage of his protection. She came out onto the porch one evening when they were drinking before dinner, and sat down beside Mrs. Nudd. She had the baby in her arms.

"Do you always have supper at seven, Granny?" she asked.

"I'm afraid I can't get to the table at seven," Pamela said. "I hate to be late for meals, but I have to think of the baby first, don't I?"

"I'm afraid I can't ask them to hold dinner," Mrs. Nudd said.

"I don't want you to hold dinner for me," Pamela said, "but that little room we're in is terribly hot, and we're having trouble getting Binxey to sleep. Randy and I love being here, and we want to do everything we can to make it easy for you to have us here, but I do have to think of Binxey, and as long as he finds it hard to get to sleep, I won't be able to be on time for meals. I hope you don't mind. I want to know the truth."

"If you're late, it won't matter," Mrs. Nudd said.

"That's a beautiful dress," Pamela said, to end the conversation pleasantly. "Is it new?"

"Thank you, dear," Mrs. Nudd said. "Yes, it is new."

"It's a beautiful color," Pamela said, and she got up to feel the material, but some sudden movement made by her or by the baby in her arms or by Mrs. Nudd brought Pamela's cigarette against the new dress and burned a hole in it. Mrs. Nudd caught her breath, smiled awkwardly, and said that it didn't matter.

"But it does matter!" Pamela exclaimed. "I feel awfully about it. I feel awfully. It's all my fault, and if you'll give me the dress, I'll send it to Worcester and have it rewoven. I know a place in Worcester where they do wonderful reweaving."

Mrs. Nudd said again that it didn't matter, and tried to change the subject by asking if it hadn't been a beautiful day.

"I insist that you let me have it rewoven," Pamela said. "I want you to take it off after dinner and give it to me." Then she went to the door and turned and held the baby up. "Wave bye-bye to Granny, Binxey," she said. "Wave bye-bye, Binxey do it. Baby do it. Baby wave bye-bye to Granny. Binxey wave bye-bye. Wave bye-bye to Granny. Baby wave bye-bye..."

But none of these disturbances changed the rites of summer. Hartley took the maid and the cook to Ma.s.s at St. John's early every Sunday morning and waited for them on the front steps of the feed store. Randy froze the ice cream at eleven. It seemed as if the summer were a continent, harmonious and self-sufficient, with a peculiar range of sensation that included the feel of driving the old Cadillac barefoot across a b.u.mpy pasture, and the taste of water that came out of the garden hose near the tennis court, and the pleasure of pulling on a clean woolen sweater in a mountain hut at dawn, and sitting on the porch in the dark, conscious and yet not resentful of a sensation of being caught up in a web of something as tangible and fragile as thread, and the clean feeling after a long swim.

THE NUDDS didn't ask Russell to Whitebeach Camp that year, and they carried on the narration without his help. After his graduation, Russell had married Myra Hewitt, a local girl. He had given up his plans for getting a Master's degree when Esther refused to marry him. He now worked for his father in the hardware store. The Nudds saw him when they bought a steak grill or some fis.h.i.+ng line, and they all agreed that he looked poorly. He was pale. His clothes, Esther noticed, smelled of chicken feed and kerosene. They felt that by working in a store Russell had disqualified himself as a figure in their summers. This feeling was not strong, however, and it was largely through indifference and the lack of time that they did not see him. But the next summer they came to hate Russell; they took Russell off their list.

Late that next spring, Russell and his father-in-law had begun to cut and sell the timber on Hewitt's Point and to slash a three-acre clearing along the lake front in preparation for a large tourist-camp development, to be called Young's Bungalow City. Hewitt's Point was across the lake and three miles to the south of Whitebeach Camp, and the development would not affect the Nudds' property, but Hewitt's Point was the place where they had always gone for their picnics, and they did not like to see the grove cut and replaced with tourist hutches. They were all bitterly disappointed in Russell. They had thought of him as a native who loved his hills. They had expected him, as a kind of foster son, to share their summery lack of interest in money and it was a double blow to have him appear mercenary and to have the subject of his transactions the grove on Hewitt's Point, where they had enjoyed so many innocent picnics.

But it is the custom of that country to leave the beauties of nature to women and ministers. The village of Macabit stands on some high land above a pa.s.s and looks into the mountains of the north country. The lake is the floor of this pa.s.s, and on all but the hottest mornings clouds lie below the front steps of the feed store and the porch of the Federated Church. The weather in the pa.s.s is characterized by what is known on the coast as a sea turn. Across the heart of a hot, still day will be drawn a shadow as deep as velvet, and a bitter rain will extinguish the mountains; but this continuous displacement of light and dark, the thunder and the sunsets, the conical lights that sometimes end a storm and that have been linked by religious artists to G.o.dly intercession, have only accentuated the indifference of the secular male to his environment. When the Nudds pa.s.sed Russell on the road without waving to him, he didn't know what he had done that was wrong.

That year, Esther left in September. She and her husband had moved to a suburb, but they had not been able to swing the house on Cape G.o.d, and she had spent most of the summer at Whitebeach Camp without him. Joan, who was going to take a secretarial course, went back to New York with her sister. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd stayed on until the first of November. Mr. Nudd had been deceived about his success in business. His position as chairman of the board, he discovered much too late, amounted to retirement with a small pension. There was no reason for him to go back, and he and Mrs. Nudd spent the fall taking long walks in the woods. Gasoline rationing had made that summer a trying one, and when they closed the house, they felt that it would be a long time before they opened it again. Shortages of building materials had stopped construction on Young's Bungalow City. After the trees had been cut and the concrete posts set for twenty-five tourist cabins, Russell hadn't been able to get nails or lumber or roofing to build with.

When the war was over, the Nudds returned to Whitebeach Camp for their summers. They had all been active in the war effort; Mrs. Nudd had worked for the Red Cross, Mr. Nudd had been a hospital orderly, Randy had been a mess officer in Georgia, Esther's husband had been a lieutenant in Europe, and Joan had gone to Africa with the Red Cross, but she had quarreled with her superior, and had hastily been sent home on a troops.h.i.+p. But their memories of the war were less lasting than most memories, and, except for Hartley's death (Hartley had drowned in the Pacific), it was easily forgotten. Now Randy took the cook and the maid to Ma.s.s at St. John's early on Sunday morning. They played tennis at eleven, went swimming at three, drank gin at six. "The children"-lacking Hartley and Russell-went to Sherill's Falls, climbed Macabit Mountain, fished in Bates's Pond, and drove the old Cadillac barefoot across the pasture.

The new vicar of the Episcopal chapel in Macabit called on the Nudds the first summer after the war and asked them why they hadn't had services read for Hartley. They couldn't say. The vicar pressed the point. Some nights later, Mrs. Nudd dreamed that she saw Hartley as a discontented figure. The vicar stopped her on the street later in the week, and spoke to her again about a memorial service, and this time she agreed to it. Russell was the only person in Macabit she thought she should invite. Russell had also been in the Pacific. When he returned to Macabit, he went back to work in the hardware store. The land on Hewitt's Point had been sold to real-estate developers, who were now putting up one-and two-room summer cottages.

The prayers for Hartley were read on a hot day at the end of the season, three years after he had drowned. To the relatively simple service, the vicar added a verse about death at sea. Mrs. Nudd derived no comfort whatever from the reading of the prayers. She had no more faith in the power of G.o.d than she had in the magic of the evening star. Nothing was accomplished by the service so far as she was concerned. When it was over, Mr. Nudd took her arm, and the elderly couple started for the vestry. Mrs. Nudd saw Russell waiting to speak to her outside the church, and thought: Why did it have to be Hartley? Why not Russell?