The Stories of John Cheever Part 30

He went into the living room and poured himself a whiskey. He saw his hands, blackened by the trains and the banisters, the doork.n.o.bs and the papers, of a long day, and in the mirror he saw that his hair was soaked with rain. He went out of the living room and through the library to the downstairs bathroom. She made a little noise, scarcely a cry. When he opened the bathroom door, he found himself face to face with an absolutely naked stranger.

He shut the door, and then there was that nearly metronomic stillness that precedes a howling confrontation. It was she who broke the silence. "I do not know who he is, and I have been trying to make him go away... I know what you are thinking, and I do not care. It is my house, after all, and I did not invite you into it, and I do not have to explain everything that goes on to you."

"Get away from me," he said. "Get away from me or I'll break your neck."

He drove home through the rain. When he let himself in, he noticed the noise and the smell of cooking from the kitchen. He supposed that these signs and odors must have been one of the first signs of life on the planet, and might be one of the last. The evening paper was in the living room, and, giving it a shake, he shouted, "Throw a little nuclear hardware at them! Show them who's boss!" And then, falling into a chair, he asked softly, "Dear Jesus, when will it ever end?"

"I've been waiting for you to say that," said Mrs. Pastern quietly, coming in from the pantry. "I've been waiting nearly three months now to hear just that. I first began to worry when I saw that you'd sold your cuff links and your studs. I wondered what was the matter then. Then, when you signed the contract for the shelter without a penny to pay for it, I began to see your plan. You want the world to end, don't you? Don't you, Charlie, don't you? I've known it all along, but I couldn't admit it to myself, it seemed so ruthless-but then one learns something new every day." She walked past him into the hallway and started up the stairs. "There's a hamburger in the frying pan," she said, "and some potatoes in the oven. If you want a green vegetable, you can heat up the leftover broccoli. I'm going to telephone the children."

We travel with such velocity these days that the most we can do is to remember a few place names. The freight of metaphysical speculation will have to catch up with us by slow train, if it catches up with us at all. The rest of the story was recounted by my mother, whose letter caught up with me in Kitzbuhel, where I sometimes stay. "There have been so many changes in the last six weeks," she wrote, "that I hardly know where to begin. First, the Pasterns are gone and I mean gone. He's in the county jail serving a two-year sentence for grand larceny. Sally's left college and is working at Macy's, and the boy's still looking for a job, I hear. He's living with his mother somewhere in the Bronx. Someone said they were on home relief. It seems that Charlie ran through all of that money his mother left him about a year ago and they were just living on credit. The bank took everything and they moved to a motel in Tansford. Then they moved from motel to motel, traveling in a rented car and never paying their bills. The motel and the car-rental people were the first ones to catch up with them. Some nice people named Willoughby bought the house from the bank. And the Flannagans have divorced. Remember her? She used to walk around her garden with a silk parasol. He didn't have to give her a settlement or anything and someone saw her on Central Park West in a thin coat on a cold night. But she did come back. It was very strange. She came back last Thursday. It had just begun to snow. It was a little while after lunch. What an old fool your mother is but as old as I am I never cease to thrill at the miracle of a snowstorm. I had a lot of work to do but I decided to let it go and stand by the window awhile and watch it snow. The sky was very dark. It was a fine, dry snow and covered everything quickly like a spread of light. Then I saw Mrs. Flannagan walking up the street. She must have come out on the two-thirty-three and walked up from the station. I don't suppose she can have much money if she can't afford a cab, do you? She was not very warmly dressed and she had on high heels and no rubbers. Well, she walked up the street and she walked right across the Pasterns' lawn, I meant what used to be the Pasterns' lawn, to their bomb shelter and just stood there looking at it. I don't know what in the world she was thinking of but the shelter looks a little like a tomb, you know, and she looked like a mourner standing there with the snow falling on her head and shoulders and it made me sad to think she hardly knew the Pasterns. Then Mrs. Willoughby telephoned me and said there was this strange woman standing in front of her bomb shelter and did I know who it was and I said that I did, that it was Mrs. Flannagan who used to live up on the hill, and then she asked what I thought she should do and I said the only thing to do I guessed was to send her away. So then Mrs. Willoughby sent her maid down and I saw the maid telling Mrs. Flannagan to go away and then in a little while Mrs. Flannagan walked back through the snow to the station..

A VISION OF THE WORLD.

His is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. The light is dim. On the wall there is a colored lithograph of a kitten wearing a flowered hat, a silk dress, and white gloves. The air is musty, but I think it is a pleasant smell-heartening and carnal, like bilge water or the land wind. The tide is high, and the sea below the bluff slams its bulkheads, its doors, and shakes its chains with such power that it makes the lamp on my table jump. I am here alone to rest up from a chain of events that began one Sat.u.r.day afternoon when I was spading up my garden. A foot or two below the surface I found a small round can that might have contained shoe polish. I pried the can open with a knife. Inside I found a piece of oilcloth, and within this a note on lined paper. It read, "I, Nils Jugstrum, promise myself that if I am not a member of the Gory Brook Country Club by the time I am twenty-five years old I will hang myself." I knew that twenty years ago the neighborhood where I live had been farmland, and I guessed that some farmer's boy, gazing off to the green fairways of Gory Brook, had made his vow and buried it in the ground. I was moved, as I always am, by these broken lines of communication in which we express our most acute feelings. The note seemed, like some impulse of romantic love, to let me deeper into the afternoon.

The sky was blue. It seemed like music. I had just cut the gra.s.s, and the smell of it was in the air. This reminded me of those overtures and promises of love we know when we are young. At the end of a foot race you throw yourself onto the gra.s.s by the cinder track, gasping for breath, and the ardor with which you embrace the schoolhouse lawn is a promise you will follow all the days of your life. Thinking then of peaceable things, I noticed that the black ants had conquered the red ants and were taking the corpses off the field. A robin flew by, pursued by two jays. The cat was in the currant hedge, scouting a sparrow. A pair of orioles pa.s.sed, pecking each other, and then I saw, a foot or so from where I stood, a copperhead working itself out of the last length of its dark winter skin. What I experienced was not fright or dread; it was shock at my unpreparedness for this branch of death. Here was lethal venom, as much a part of the earth as the running water in the brook, but I seemed to have no s.p.a.ce for it in my considerations. I went back to the house to get the shotgun, but I had the misfortune then to meet up with the older of my two dogs, a gun-shy b.i.t.c.h. At the sight of the gun she began to bark and whimper, torn unmercifully by her instincts and anxieties. Her barking brought the second dog, a natural hunter, bounding down the stairs, ready to retrieve a rabbit or a bird, and, followed by two dogs, one barking in joy and the other in horror, I returned to the garden in time to see the viper disappear into a stone wall.

After this I drove into the village and bought some gra.s.s seed and then went out to the supermarket on Route 27, to get some brioches my wife had ordered. I think you may need a camera these days to record a supermarket on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Our language is traditional, the accrual of centuries of intercourse. Except for the shapes of the pastry, there was nothing traditional to be seen at the bakery counter where I waited. We were six or seven, delayed by an old man with a long list, a scroll of groceries. Looking over his shoulder I read, eggs, hors d'oeuvres. He saw me reading his doc.u.ment and held it against his chest like a prudent card player. Then suddenly the piped-in music changed from a love song to a cha-cha, and the woman beside me began to move her shoulders shyly and to execute a few steps. "Would you like to dance, madam?" I asked. She was very plain, but when I held out my arms she stepped into them, and we danced for a minute or two. You could see that she loved to dance, but with a face like that she couldn't have had many chances. She then blushed a deep red, stepped out of my arms, and went over to the gla.s.s case, where she studied the Boston cream pies. I felt that we had made a step in the right direction, and when I got my brioches and drove home I was elated. A policeman stopped me at the corner of Alewives Lane, to let a parade go by. First to come was a young girl in boots and shorts that emphasized the fineness of her thighs. She had an enormous nose, wore a busby, and pumped an aluminum baton. She was followed by another girl, with finer and more ample thighs, who marched with her pelvis so far in advance of the rest of her that her spine was strangely curved. She wore bifocals and seemed terribly bored by this forwardness of her pelvis. A band of boys, with here and there a gray-haired ringer, brought up the rear, playing "The Caissons Go Rolling Along." They carried no banners, they had no discernible purpose or destination, and it all seemed to me terribly funny. I laughed all the way home.

But my wife was sad.

"What's the matter, darling?" I asked.

"I just have this terrible feeling that I'm a character in a television situation comedy," she said. "I mean, I'm nice-looking, I'm well-dressed, I have humorous and attractive children, but I have this terrible feeling that I'm in black-and-white and that I can be turned off by anybody. I just have this terrible feeling that I can be turned off." My wife is often sad because her sadness is not a sad sadness, sorry because her sorrow is not a crus.h.i.+ng sorrow. She grieves because her grief is not an acute grief, and when I tell her that this sorrow over the inadequacies of her sorrow may be a new hue in the spectrum of human pain, she is not consoled. Oh, I sometimes think of leaving her. I could conceivably make a life without her and the children, I could get along without the companions.h.i.+p of my friends, but I could not bring myself to leave my lawns and gardens, I could not part from the porch screens that I have repaired and painted, I cannot divorce myself from the serpentine brick walk I have laid between the side door and the rose garden; and so, while my chains are forged of turf and house paint, they will still bind me until I die. But I was grateful to my wife then for what she had said, for stating that the externals of her life had the quality of a dream. The uninhibited energies of the imagination had created the supermarket, the viper, and the note in the shoe-polish can. Compared to these, my wildest reveries had the literalness of double-entry bookkeeping. It pleased me to think that our external life has the quality of a dream and that in our dreams we find the virtues of conservatism. I then went into the house, where I found the cleaning woman smoking a stolen Egyptian cigarette and piecing together the torn letters in the wastebasket.

We went to Gory Brook that night for dinner. I checked the list of members, looking for Nils Jugstrum, but he wasn't there, and I wondered if he had hanged himself. And for what? It was the usual. Gracie Masters, the only daughter of a millionaire funeral director, was dancing with Pinky Townsend. Pinky was out on fifty thousand dollars' bail for stock market manipulation. When bail was set, he took the fifty thousand out of his wallet. I danced a set with Millie Surcliffe. The music was "Rain,"

"Moonlight on the Ganges,"

"When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along,"

"Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,"

"Carolina in the Morning," and "The Sheik of Araby." We seemed to be dancing on the grave of social coherence. But while the scene was plainly revolutionary, where was the new day, the world to come? The next set was "Lena from Palesteena,"

"I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles,"

"Louisville Lou,"

"Smiles," and "The Red Red Robin" again. That last one really gets us jumping. but when the band blew the spit out of their instruments I saw them shaking their heads in deep moral disapproval of our antics. Millie went back to her table, and I stood by the door, wondering why my heart should heave when I see people leave a dance floor at the end of a set-heave as it heaves when I see a crowd pack up and leave a beach as the shadow of the cliff falls over the water and the sand, heave as if I saw in these gentle departures the energies and the thoughtlessness of life itself.

Time, I thought, strips us rudely of the privileges of the bystander, and in the end that couple chatting loudly in bad French in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne (Athens) turns out to be us. Someone else has got our post behind the potted palms, our quiet corner in the bar, and, exposed, perforce we cast around for other avenues of observation. What I wanted to identify then was not a chain of facts but an essence-something like that indecipherable collision of contingencies that can produce exaltation or despair. What I wanted to do was to grant my dreams, in so incoherent a world, their legitimacy. None of this made me moody, and I danced, drank, and told stories at the bar until about one, when we went home. I turned on the television set to a commercial that, like so much else I had seen that day, seemed terribly funny. A young woman with a boarding-school accent was asking, "Do you offend with wet-fur-coat odor? A fifty-thousand-dollar sable cape caught in a thundershower can smell worse than an old hound dog who's been chasing a fox through a swamp. Nothing smells worse than wet mink. Even a light mist can make lamb, opossum, civet, baum marten, and other less costly and serviceable furs as malodorous as a badly ventilated lion house in a zoo. Safeguard yourself from embarra.s.sment and anxiety by light applications of Elixircol before you wear your furs..." She belonged to the dream world, and I told her so before I turned her off. I fell asleep in the moonlight and dreamed of an island.

I was with some other men, and seemed to have reached the place on a sailing boat. I was sunburned, I remember, and, touching my jaw, I felt a three-or four-day stubble. The island was in the Pacific. There was a smell of rancid cooking oil in the air-a sign of the China coast. It was in the middle of the afternoon when we landed, and we seemed to have nothing much to do. We wandered through the streets. The place either had been occupied by the Army or had served as a military way station, because many of the signs in the windows were written in an approximation of English. "Crews Cutz," I read on a sign in an Oriental barbershop. Many of the stores had displays of imitation American whiskey. Whiskey was spelled "Whikky." Because we had nothing better to do, we went into a local museum. There were bows, primitive fishhooks, masks, and drums. From the museum we went to a restaurant and ordered a meal. I had a struggle with the local language, but what surprised me was that it seemed to be an informed struggle. I seemed to have studied the language before coming ash.o.r.e. I distinctly remembered putting together a sentence when the waiter came up to the table. "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego," I said. The waiter smiled and complimented me, and, when I woke from the dream, the fact of the language made the island in the sun, its population, and its museum real, vivid, and enduring. I thought with longing of the quiet and friendly natives and the easy pace of their lives.

Sunday pa.s.sed swiftly and pleasantly in a round of c.o.c.ktail parties, but that night I had another dream. I dreamed that I was standing at the bedroom window of the cottage in Nantucket that we sometimes rent. I was looking south along the fine curve of the beach. I have seen finer, whiter, and more splendid beaches, but when I look at the yellow of the sand and the arc of the curve, I always have the feeling that if I look at the curve long enough it will reveal something to me. The sky was cloudy. The water was gray. It was Sunday-although I couldn't have said how I knew this. It was late, and from the inn I could hear that most pleasant sound of dishes being handled, while families would be eating their Sunday-night suppers in the old matchboard dining room. Then I saw a single figure coming down the beach. It seemed to be a priest or a bishop. He carried a crozier, and wore the miter, cope, soutane, chasuble, and alb for high votive Ma.s.s. His vestments were heavily worked with gold, and now and then they were lifted by the sea wind. His face was clean-shaven. I could not make out his features in the fading light. He saw me at my window, raised his hand, and called. "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego." Then he hurried along the sand, striking his crozier down like a walking stick, his stride impeded by the voluminousness of his vestments. He pa.s.sed the window where I stood and disappeared where the curve of the bluff overtakes the curve of the sh.o.r.e.

I worked on Monday, and on Tuesday morning woke at about four from a dream in which I had been playing touch football. I was on the winning team. The score was six to eighteen. It was a scrub Sunday-afternoon game on somebody's lawn. Our wives and daughters watched from the edge of the gra.s.s, where there were chairs and tables and things to drink. The winning play was a long end run, and when the touchdown had been scored a big blonde named Helene Farmer got up and organized the women into a cheering section. "Rah, rah, rah," they said. "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego. Rah, rah, rah." I found none of this disconcerting. It was what I had wanted, in a way. Isn't the unconquerable force in man the love of discovery? The repet.i.tion of this sentence had the excitement of discovery for me. The fact that I had been on the winning team made me feel happy, and I went cheerfully down to breakfast, but our kitchen, alas, is a part of dreamland. With its pink, washable walls, chilling lights, built-in television (where prayers were being said), and artificial potted plants, it made me nostalgic for my dream, and when my wife pa.s.sed me the stylus and Magic Tablet on which we write our breakfast orders, I wrote, "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego." She laughed and asked me what I meant. When I repeated the sentence-it seemed, indeed, to be the only thing I wanted to say-she began to cry, and I saw in the bitterness of her tears that I had better take a rest. Dr. Howland came over to give me a sedative, and I took a plane to Florida that afternoon.

Now it is late. I drink a gla.s.s of milk and take a sleeping pill. I dream that I see a pretty woman kneeling in a field of wheat. Her light-brown hair is full and so are the skirts of her dress. Her clothing seems old-fas.h.i.+oned-it seems before my time-and I wonder how I can know and feel so tenderly toward a stranger who is dressed in clothing that my grandmother might have worn. And yet she seems real-more real than the Tamiami Trail four miles to the east, with its Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands, more real than the back streets of Sarasota. I do not ask her who she is. I know what she will say. But then she smiles and starts to speak before I can turn away. "Porpozec ciebie..." she begins. Then either I awake in despair or am waked by the sound of rain on the palms. I think of some farmer who, hearing the noise of rain, will stretch his lame bones and smile, feeling that the rain is falling into his lettuce and his cabbages, his hay and his oats, his parsnips and his corn. I think of some plumber who, waked by the rain, will smile at a vision of the world in which all the drains are miraculously cleansed and free. Right-angle drains, crooked drains, root-choked and rusty drains all gurgle and discharge their waters into the sea. I think that the rain will wake some old lady, who will wonder if she has left her copy of Dombey and Son in the garden. Her shawl? Did she cover the chairs? And I know that the sound of the rain will wake some lovers, and that its sound will seem to be a part of that force that has thrust them into one another's arms. Then I sit up in bed and exclaim aloud to myself, "Valor! Love! Virtue! Compa.s.sion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!" The words seem to have the colors of the earth, and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night.

REUNION.

The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station. I was going from my grandmother's in the Adirondacks to a cottage on the Cape that my mother had rented, and I wrote my father that I would be in New York between trains for an hour and a half, and asked if we could have lunch together. His secretary wrote to say that he would meet me at the information booth at noon, and at twelve o'clock sharp I saw him coming through the crowd. He was a stranger to me-my mother divorced him three years ago and I hadn't been with him since-but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations. He was a big, good-looking man, and I was terribly happy to see him again. He struck me on the back and shook my hand. "Hi, Charlie," he said. "Hi, boy. I'd like to take you up to my club, but it's in the Sixties, and if you have to catch an early train I guess we'd better get something to eat around here." He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together.

We went out of the station and up a side street to a restaurant. It was still early, and the place was empty. The bartender was quarreling with a delivery boy, and there was one very old waiter in a red coat down by the kitchen door. We sat down, and my father hailed the waiter in a loud voice. "Keilner!" he shouted. "Garcon! Cameriere! You!" His boisterousness in the empty restaurant seemed out of place. "Could we have a little service here!" he shouted. "Chop-chop." Then he clapped his hands. This caught the waiter's attention, and he shuffled over to our table.

"Were you clapping your hands at me?" he asked.

"Calm down, calm down, sommelier," my father said. "If it isn't too much to ask of you-if it wouldn't be too much above and beyond the call of duty, we would like a couple of Beefeater Gibsons."

"I don't like to be clapped at," the waiter said.

"I should have brought my whistle," my father said. "I have a whistle that is audible only to the ears of old waiters. Now, take out your little pad and your little pencil and see if you can get this straight: two Beefeater Gibsons. Repeat after me: two Beefeater Gibsons."

"I think you'd better go somewhere else," the waiter said quietly.

"That," said my father, "is one of the most brilliant suggestions I have ever heard. Come on, Charlie, let's get the h.e.l.l out of here."

I followed my father out of that restaurant into another. He was not so boisterous this time. Our drinks came, and he cross-questioned me about the baseball season. He then struck the edge of his empty gla.s.s with his knife and began shouting again. "Garcon! Keliner! Cameriere! You! Could we trouble you to bring us two more of the same."

"How old is the boy?" the waiter asked.

"That," my father said, "is none of your G.o.d-d.a.m.ned business."

"I'm sorry, sir," the waiter said, "but I won't serve the boy another drink."

"Well, I have some news for you," my father said. "I have some very interesting news for you. This doesn't happen to be the only restaurant in New York. They've opened another on the corner. Come on, Charlie."

He paid the bill, and I followed him out of that restaurant into another. Here the waiters wore pink jackets like hunting coats, and there was a lot of horse tack on the walls. We sat down, and my father began to shout again. "Master of the hounds! Tallyhoo and all that sort of thing. We'd like a little something in, the way of a stirrup cup. Namely, two Bibson Geefeaters."

"Two Bibson Geefeaters?" the waiter asked, smiling.

"You know d.a.m.ned well what I want," my father said angrily. "I want two Beefeater Gibsons, and make it snappy. Things have changed in jolly old England. So my friend the duke tells me. Let's see what England can produce in the way of a c.o.c.ktail."

"This isn't England," the waiter said.

"Don't argue with me," my father said. "Just do as you're told."

"I just thought you might like to know where you are," the waiter said.

"If there is one thing I cannot tolerate," my father said, "it is an impudent domestic. Come on, Charlie."

The fourth place we went to was Italian. "Buon giorno," my father said. "Per favore, possiamo avere clue c.o.c.ktail americani, forti, forti. Molto gin, poco vermut."

"I don't understand Italian," the waiter said.

"Oh, come off it," my father said. "You understand Italian, and you know d.a.m.ned well you do. Voglianio due c.o.c.ktail americani. Subito."

The waiter left us and spoke with the captain, who came over to our table and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but this table is reserved."

"All right," my father said. "Get us another table."

"All the tables are reserved," the captain said.

"I get it," my father said. "You don't desire our patronage. Is that it? Well, the h.e.l.l with you. Vacla all' inferno. Let's go, Charlie."

"I have to get my train," I said.

"I'm sorry, sonny," my father said. "I'm terribly sorry." He put his arm around me and pressed me against him. "I'll walk you back to the station. If there had only been time to go up to my club."

"That's all right, Daddy," I said.

"I'll get you a paper," he said. "I'll get you a paper to read on the train."

Then he went up to a newsstand and said, "Kind sir, will you he good enough to favor me with one of your G.o.dd.a.m.ned, no-good, ten-cent afternoon papers?" The clerk turned away from him and stared at a magazine cover. "Is it asking too much, kind sir," my father said, "is it asking too much for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimens of yellow journalism?"

"I have to go, Daddy," I said. "It's late."

"Now, just wait a second, sonny," he said. "Just wait a second. I want to get a rise out of this chap."

"Goodbye, Daddy," I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.

AN EDUCATED AMERICAN WOMAN.

Item: "I remain joined in holy matrimony to my unintellectual 190-pound halfback, and keep myself busy chauffeuring my son Bibber to and from a local private school that I helped organize. I seem, at one time or another, to have had the presidency of every civic organization in the community, and last year I ran the local travel agency for nine months. A New York publisher (knock on wood) is interested in my critical biography of Gustave Flaubert, and last year I ran for town supervisor on the Democratic ticket and got the largest Democratic plurality in the history of the village. Polly Coulter Mellowes stayed with us for a week on her way home from Paris to Minneapolis and we talked, ate, drank, and thought in French during her visit. Shades of Mlle. de Gra.s.se! I still find time to band birds and knit Argyle socks."

This report, for her college alumnae magazine, might have suggested an aggressive woman, but she was not that at all. Jill Chidchester Madison held her many offices through competence, charm, and intellect, and she was actually quite shy. Her light-brown hair, at the time of which I'm writing, was dressed simply and in a way that recalled precisely how she had looked in boarding school twenty years before. Boarding school may have shaded her taste in clothing; that and the fact that she had a small front and was one of those women who took this deprivation as if it was something more than the loss of a leg. Considering her comprehensive view of life, it seemed strange that such a thing should have bothered her, but it bothered her terribly. She had pretty legs. Her coloring was fresh and high. Her eyes were brown and set much too close together, so that when she was less than vivacious she had a mousy look.

Her mother, Amelia Faxon Chidchester, was a vigorous, stocky woman with splendid white hair, a red face, and an emphatic accent whose roots seemed more temperamental than regional. Mrs. Chidchester's words were shaped to express her untiring vigor, her triumph over pain, her cultural enthusiasm, and her trust in mankind. She was the author of seventeen unpublished books. Jill's father died when she was six days old. She was born in San Francisco, where her father had run a small publis.h.i.+ng house and administered a small estate. He left his wife and daughter with enough money to protect them from any sort of hards.h.i.+p and any sort of financial anxiety, but they were a good deal less rich than their relatives. Jill appeared to be precocious, and when she was three her mother took her to Munich, where she was entered in the Gymnasium fur Kinder, run by Dr. Stock for the purpose of observing gifted children. The compet.i.tion was fierce, and her reaction tests were only middling, but she was an amiable and a brilliant girl. When she was five, they s.h.i.+fted to the Scuola Pantola in Florence, a similar inst.i.tution. They moved from there to England, to the famous Tower Hill School, in Kent. Then Amelia, or Melee, as she was called, decided that the girl should put down some roots, and so she rented a house in Nantucket, where Jill was entered in the public school.

I don't know why it is that expatriate children should seem underfed, but they often do, and Jill, with her mixed clothing, her mixed languages, her bare legs and sandals, gave the impression that the advantages of her education had worked out in her as a kind of pathos. She was the sort of child who skipped a lot. She skipped to school. She skipped home. She was shy. She was not very practical, and her mother encouraged her in this. "You shall not wash the dishes, my dear," she said. "A girl of your intelligence is not expected to waste her time was.h.i.+ng dishes." They had a devoted servant-all of Melee's servants wors.h.i.+pped the ground she walked on-and Jill's only idea about housework was that it was work she was not expected to do. She did, when she was about ten, learn to knit Argyle socks and was allowed this recreation. She was romantic. Entered in her copybook was the following: "Mrs. Amelia Faxon Chidchester requests the honor of your company at the wedding of her daughter Jill to Viscount Ludley-Huntington, Earl of Ashmead, in Westminster Abbey. White tie. Decorations." The house in Nantucket was pleasant, and Jill learned to sail. It was in Nantucket that her mother spoke to her once about that subject for which we have no vocabulary in English-about love. It was late afternoon. A fire was burning and there were flowers on a table. Jill was reading and her mother was writing. She stopped writing and said, over her shoulder, "I think I should tell you, my dear, that during the war I was in charge of a canteen at the Embarcadero, and I gave myself to many lonely soldiers."

The remark was crus.h.i.+ng. It seemed to the girl emotionally and intellectually incomprehensible. She wanted to cry. She could not imagine her mother giving herself, as she put it, to a string of lonely soldiers. Her mother's manner firmly and authoritatively declared her indifference to this side of things. There seemed to be no way of getting around what had been said. It stuck up in the girl's consciousness like a fallen meteor. Perhaps it was all a lie, but her mother had never lied. Then, for once, she faced up to the limitations of her only parent. Her mother was not a liar, but she was a fraud. Her accent was a fraud, her tastes were fraudulent, and the seraphic look she a.s.sumed when she listened to music was the look of someone trying to recall an old telephone number. With her indomitable good cheer, her continual aches and pains, her implacable sn.o.bbism, her cultural squatter's rights, her lofty friends, and her forceful and meaningless utterances, she seemed, for a moment, to ill.u.s.trate a supreme lack of discernment in nature. But was Jill meant to fabricate, single-handed, some cord of love and wisdom between this stranger who had given her life and life itself as she could see it, spread out in terms of fields and woods, wondrous and fair, beyond the windows? Could she not instead-But she felt too young, too thin, too undefended to make a life without a parent, and so she decided that her mother had not said what she said, and sealed the denial with a light kiss.

Jill went away to boarding school when she was twelve, and took all the prizes. Her scholastic, social, and athletic record was unprecedented. During her second year in college, she visited her relatives in San Francisco, and met and fell in love with Georgie Madison. He was not, considering her intelligence, the sort of man she would have been expected to choose, but it may have been sensible of her to pick a man whose interests were so different. He was a quiet, large-boned man with black hair and those gentle looks that break the hearts of the fatherless of all ages; and she was, after all, fatherless. He worked as a junior executive in a San Francisco s.h.i.+pyard. He had graduated from Yale, but when Melee once asked him if he liked Thackeray he said sincerely and politely that he had never tasted any. This simmered down to a family joke. They got engaged in her junior year, and were married a week after she graduated from college, where she again took all the prizes. He was transferred to a Brooklyn s.h.i.+pyard, and they moved to New York, where she got a public-relations job in a department store.

In the second or third year of their marriage, she had a son, whom they called Bibber. The birth was difficult, and she would not be able to have more children. When the boy was still young, they moved to Gordenville. She was happier in the country than she had been in town, since the country seemed to present more opportunities for her talents. The presidencies of the civic organizations followed one after the other, and when the widow who ran the local travel agency got sick, Jill took over and ran this successfully. Their only problem in the country was to find someone to stay with Bibber. A stream of unsatisfactory old women drifted through the house, augmented by high-school girls and cleaning women. Georgie loved his son intemperately. The boy was bright enough, but his father found this brightness blinding. He walked with the boy, played with him, gave him his bath at bedtime, and told him his story. Georgie did everything for his son when he was at home, and this was just as well, since Jill often came in later than he.

When Jill put down the reins of the travel agency, she decided to organize a European tour. She had not been abroad since their marriage, and if she wrote her own ticket she could make the trip at a profit. This, at least, was what she claimed. Georgie's s.h.i.+pyard was doing well, and there was no real reason for her to angle for a free trip, but he could see that the idea of conducting a tour stimulated and challenged her, and in the end he gave her his approval and his encouragement. Twenty-eight customers signed up, and early in July Georgie saw Jill and her lambs, as she called them, take off in a jet for Copenhagen. Their itinerary was to take them as far south as Naples, where Jill would put her dependents aboard a home-bound plane. Then Georgie would meet her in Venice, where they would spend a week. Jill sent her husband postcards each day, and several of her customers were so enthusiastic about her leaders.h.i.+p that they wrote Georgie themselves to tell him what a charming, competent, and knowledgeable wife he possessed. His neighbors were friendly, and he mostly dined with them. Bibber, who was not quite four, had been put into a summer camp.

Before Georgie left for Europe, he drove to New Hamps.h.i.+re to check on Bibber. He had missed the little boy painfully and had seen him much oftener in his reveries than he had seen his wife's vivacious face. To put himself to sleep, he imagined some implausible climbing tour through the Dolomites with Bibber when the boy was older. Night after night, he helped his son up from ledge to ledge. Overhead, the thin snow on the peaks sparkled in the summer sunlight. Carrying packs and ropes, they came down into Cortina a little after dark. The bare facts of his trip north contrasted sharply with this Alpine reverie.

The drive took him most of a day. He spent a restless night in a motel and scouted out the camp in the morning. The weather was mixed, and he was in the mountains. There were showers and then pale clearings-an atmosphere not so much of gloom as of bleakness. Most of the farms that he pa.s.sed were abandoned. As he approached the camp, he felt that it and the surrounding countryside had the authority of a remote creation; or perhaps this was a reprise of his own experience of summers and camps as interludes unconnected with the rest of time. Then, from a rise of ground, he saw the place below him. There was a small lake-a pond, really: one of those round ponds whose tea-colored waters and pine groves leave with you an impression of geological fatigue. His own recollections of camp were sunny and brilliant, and this rueful water hole, with its huddle of rotting matchboard shanties, collided violently with his robust memories. He guessed-he insisted to himself-that things would look very different when the sun shone. Arrows pointed the way to the administration building, where the directress was waiting for him. She was a blue-eyed young woman whose efficiency had not quite eclipsed her good looks. "We've had a bit of trouble with your son," she said. "He's not gotten along terribly well. It's quite unusual. We seldom if ever have cases of homesickness. The exception is when we take children from divided families, and we try never to do this. We can cope with normal problems, but we cannot cope with a child who brings more than his share of misery with him. As a rule, we turn down applications from children of divorce."

"But Mrs. Madison and I are not divorced," Georgie said.

"Oh, I didn't know. You are separated?"

"No," Georgie said, "we are not. Mrs. Madison is traveling in Europe, but I am going to join her tomorrow."

"Oh, I see. Well, in that case, I don't understand why Bibber has been so slow to adjust. But here is Bibber to tell us all about it himself!"

The boy threw off the hand of the woman with him and ran to his father. He was crying.

"There, there," said the directress. "Daddy hasn't come all this way to see a weeper, has he, Bibber?"

Georgie felt his heart heave in love and confusion. He kissed the tears from the boy's face and held him against his chest.

"Perhaps you'd like to take a little walk with Bibber," the directress suggested. "Perhaps Bibber would like to show you the sights."

Georgie, with the boy clinging to his hand, had to face certain responsibilities that transcended the love he felt for his son. His instinct was to take the boy away. His responsibility was to hearten and encourage him to shoulder the burdens of life. "What is your favorite place, Bibber?" he asked enthusiastically, keenly aware of the fatuity in his tone, and convinced of the necessity for it. "I want you to show me your favorite place in the whole camp."

"I don't have any favorite place," Bibber said. He was trying successfully to keep from crying. "That's the mess hall," he said, pointing to a long, ugly shed. Fresh pieces of yellow lumber had replaced those that had rotted.

"Is that where you have your plays?" Georgie asked.

"We don't have any plays," Bibber said. "The lady in charge of plays got sick and she had to go home."

"Is that where you sing?"

"Please take me home, Daddy," Bibber said.

"But I can't, Bibber. Mummy's in Europe, and I'm flying over tomorrow afternoon to join her."