The Stories of John Cheever Part 33

I plucked the viper from her foot, lanced the wound with my pocket-knife, and sucked the poison from her bloodstream. Then I took off my humble s.h.i.+rt, st.i.tched together for me by my dear mother from some discarded blueprint linen that she had found, during her daily foraging, in an architect's ash can. When the wound was cleansed and bound, I gathered Emily in my arms and ran up the lawn towards the great doors of Wallowyck, which rumbled open at my ring. A butler stood there, pallid at the sight.

"What have you done to our Emily?" he cried.

"He has done nothing but save my life," said Emily.

Then from the dusk of the hall emerged the bearded and ruthless Mr. Wallow. "Thank you for saving the life of my daughter," he said gruffly. Then he looked at me more closely, and I saw tears in his eyes. "Someday you will be rewarded," he said. "That day will come."

The ruin of my linen s.h.i.+rt obliged me to tell my parents that evening about my adventure. My father was drunk, as usual. "You will receive no reward from that beast!" he roared. "Neither in this world nor in heaven nor in h.e.l.l!"

"Please, Ernest," my mother sighed, and I went to her and held her hands, dry with fever.

Drunk as he was, it seemed that my father possessed the truth, for, in the years that followed, no sign of grat.i.tude, no courtesy, no trifling remembrance, no hint of indebtedness came to me from the great house on the hill.

In the stern winter of 19-, the mills were shut down by Mr. Wallow, in a retaliative gesture at my struggle to organize a labor union. The stillness of the mills-those smokeless chimneys-was a blow at the heart of X-burgh. My mother lay dying. My father sat in the kitchen drinking Sterno. Sickness, hunger, cold, and disease dominated every hovel. The snow in the streets, unbesmirched by the mill smoke, had an accusatory whiteness. It was on the day before Christmas that I led the union delegation, many of them scarcely able to walk, up to the great doors of Wallowyck and rang. It was Emily who stood there when the doors were opened. "You!" she cried. "You who saved my life, why are you killing my father?" Then the doors rumbled shut.

I managed that evening to gather a little grain, and made some porridge of this for my mother. I was spooning this into her thin lips when our door opened and in stepped Jeffrey Ashmead, Mr. Wallow's advocate.

"If you have come," I said, "to persecute me for my demonstration at Wallowyck this afternoon, you have come in vain. There is no pain on earth greater than that which I suffer now, as I watch my mother die."

"I have come about other business," he said. "Mr. Wallow is dead."

"Long live Mr. Wallow!" shouted my father from the kitchen. "Please come with me," said Mr. Ashmead.

"What business can I have with you, sir?"

"You are the heir to Wallowyck-its mines, its mills, its moneys."

"I do not understand."

There was a piercing sob from my mother. She seized my hands in hers and said, "The truth of the past is no harsher than the truth of our sad lives! I have wanted to shelter you all these years from the truth but you are his only son. As a girl, I waited on table at the great house, and was taken advantage of on a summer's night. It has contributed to your father's destruction."

"I will go with you, sir," I said to Mr. Ashmead. "Miss Emily knows of this?"

"Miss Emily," he said, "has fled."

I returned that evening, and entered the great doors of Wallowyck as its master. But there was no Miss Emily. Before the New Year had come, I had buried both of my parents, reopened the mills on a profit-sharing basis, and brought prosperity to X-burgh, but I, living alone in Wallowyck, knew a loneliness that I had never tasted before.

I was appalled, of course, I felt sick. The matter-of-factness of my surroundings made the puerility of this tale nauseating. I hurried back to the n.o.ble waiting room, with its limpid panels of colored light, and sat down near a rack of paperback books. Their lurid covers and their promise of graphic descriptions of s.e.xual commerce seemed to tie in with what I had just read. What had happened, I supposed, was that, as p.o.r.nography moved into the public domain, those marble walls, those immemorial repositories of such sport, had been forced, in self-defense, to take up the more refined task of literature. I found the idea revolutionary and disconcerting, and wondered if in a year or two I would be able to read the poetry of Sara Teasdale in a public toilet, while the King of Sweden honored some dirty-minded brute. Then my train came in, and I was happy to get out of Indianapolis and leave, as I hoped, my discovery with the Middle West.

I went up to the club car and had a drink. We belted eastward over Indiana, scaring the cows and the chickens, the horses and the pigs. People waved at the train as it pa.s.sed-a little girl holding a doll upside down, an old man in a wheelchair, a woman standing in a kitchen doorway with her hair in pin curls, a young man sitting on a freight truck. You could feel the train leap forward in the straightaway, the whistle blew, the warning bells at the grade crossings went off like a coronary thrombosis, and the track joints beat out a jazz ba.s.s, versatile, exhilarating, and fleet, like some brilliant improvisation on the beating of a heart, and the wind in the brake boxes sounded like the last, hoa.r.s.e recordings poor Billie Holiday ever made. I had two more drinks. When I opened the door of the lavatory in the next sleeping car and saw that the walls were covered with writing, it seemed to me like a piece of very bad news.

I didn't want to read any more-not then. Wallowyck had been enough for one day. I wanted only to go back to the club car and have another drink and a.s.sert my healthy indifference to the fancies of strangers. But the writing was there, and it was irresistible-it seemed to be some part of my destiny-and, although I read it with bitter unwillingness, I read through the first paragraph. The penmans.h.i.+p was the most commanding of all.

Why does not everyone who can afford it have a geranium in his window? It is very cheap. Its cheapness is next to nothing if you raise it from seed or from a slip. It is a beauty and a companion. It sweetens the air, rejoices the eye, links you with nature and innocence, and is something to love. And if it cannot love you in return, it cannot hate you, it cannot utter a hateful thing even for your neglecting it, for though it is all beauty, it has no vanity, and such being the case, and living as it does purely to do you good and afford pleasure, how will you be able to neglect it? But, pray, if you choose a geranium. Back in the club car, it was getting dark. I was disturbed by these tender sentiments and depressed by the general gloom of the countryside at that time of day. Was what I had read the expression of some irrepressible love of quaintness and innocence? Whatever it was, I felt then a manifest responsibility to declare what I had discovered. Our knowledge of ourselves and of one another, in a historical moment of mercurial change, is groping. To hedge our observation, curiosity, and reflection with indifference would be sheer recklessness. My three chance encounters proved that this kind of literature was widespread. If these fancies were recorded and diagnosed, they might throw a brilliant illumination onto our psyche and bring us closer to the secret world of the truth. My search had its unconventional aspects, but if we are any less than shrewd, courageous, and honest with ourselves we are contemptible. I had six friends who worked for foundations, and I decided to call their attention to the phenomenon of the writing in public toilets. I knew they had financed poetry, research in zoology, studies of the history of stained gla.s.s and of the social significance of high heels, and, at that moment, the writing in public toilets appeared to be an avenue of truth that demanded exploration.

When I got back to New York, I arranged a lunch for my friends, in a restaurant in the Sixties that has a private dining room. At the end of the meal, I made my speech. My best friend there was the first to answer. "You've been away too long," he said. "You're out of touch. We don't go for that kind of thing over here. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I think the idea is repulsive." I glanced down and saw that I was wearing a brocade double-breasted vest and pointed yellow shoes, and I suppose I had spoken in the flat and affected accent of most expatriates. His accusation that my thinking was alien, strange, and indecent seemed invincible. I felt then, I feel now, that it was not the impropriety of my discovery but its explosiveness that disconcerted him, and that he had, in my absence, joined the ranks of those new men who feel that the truth is no longer usable in solving our dilemmas. He said goodbye, and one by one the others left, all on the same note-I had been away too long; I was out of touch with decency and common sense.

I returned to Europe a few days later. The plane for Orly was delayed, and I killed some time in the bar and then looked around for the men's room. The message this time was written on tile. "Bright Star!" I read, "would I were stedfast as thou art-Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night..." That was all. My flight was announced, and I sailed through the eaves of heaven back to the city of light.

MONTRALDO.

The first time I robbed Tiffany's, it was raining. I bought an imitation-diamond ring at a costume-jewelry place in the Forties. Then I walked up to Tiffany's in the rain and asked to look at rings. The clerk had a haughty manner. I looked at six or eight diamond rings. They began at eight hundred and went up to ten thousand. There was one priced at three thousand that looked to me like the paste in my pocket. I was examining this when an elderly woman-an old customer, I guessed-appeared on the other side of the counter. The clerk rushed over to greet her, and I switched rings. Then I called, "Thank you very much. I'll think it over."

"Very well," the clerk said haughtily, and I went out of the store. It was as simple as pie. I walked down to the diamond market in the Forties and sold the ring for eighteen hundred. No questions were asked. Then I went to Thomas Cook and found that the Conte di Salvini was sailing for Genoa at five. This was in August, and there was plenty of s.p.a.ce on the eastbound crossing. I took a cabin in first cla.s.s and was standing at the bar when she sailed. The bar was not officially open, of course, but the bar Jack gave me a Martini in a tumbler to hold me until we got into international waters. The Salvini had an exceptionally percussive whistle, and you may have heard it if you were anywhere near midtown, although who ever is at five o'clock on an August afternoon?

That night I met Mrs. Winwar and her elderly husband at the horse races. He promptly got seasick, and we plunged into the marvelous skulduggery of illicit love. The pa.s.sed notes, the phony telephone calls, the affected indifference, and what happened when we were behind the closed door of my cabin made my theft of a ring seem guileless. Mr. Winwar recovered in Gibraltar, but this only seemed like a challenge, and we carried on under his nose. We said goodbye in Genoa, where I bought a second-hand Fiat and started down the coast.

I got to Montraldo late one afternoon. I stopped there because I was tired of driving. There was a semi-circular bay, set within high stone cliffs, and one of those beaches that are lined with cafes and bathing houses. There were two hotels, a Grand and a National, and I didn't care for either one of them, and a waiter in a cafe told me I could rent a room in the villa on the cliff. It could be reached, he said, either by a steep and curving road or by a flight of stone steps-one hundred and twenty-seven, I discovered later-that led from the back garden down into the village. I took my car up the curving road. The cliff was covered with rosemary, and the rosemary was covered with the village laundry, drying in the sun. There were signs on the door in five languages, saying that rooms were for rent. I rang, and a thick-set, bellicose servant opened the door. I learned that her name was a.s.sunta. I never saw any relaxation of her bellicosity. In church, when she plunged up the aisle to take Holy Communion, she looked as if she were going to knock the priest down and mess up the acolyte. She said I could have a room if I paid a week's rent in advance, and I had to pay her before I was allowed to cross the threshold.

The place was a ruin, but the white-washed room she showed me into was in a little tower, and through a broken window the room had a broad view of the sea. The one luxury was a gas ring. There was no toilet, and there was no running water; the water I washed in had to be hauled out of a well in a leaky marmalade can. I was obviously the only guest. That first afternoon, while a.s.sunta was praising the healthfulness of the sea air, I heard a querulous and elegant voice calling to us from the courtyard. I went down the stairs ahead of the servant, and introduced myself to an old woman standing by the well. She was short, frail, and animated, and spoke such a flowery Roman that I wondered if this wasn't a sort of cultural or social dust thrown into one's eyes to conceal the fact that her dress was ragged and dirty. "I see you have a gold wrist.w.a.tch," she said. "I, too, have a gold wrist.w.a.tch. We will have this in common."

The servant turned to her and said, "Go to the devil!"

"But it is a fact. The gentleman and I do both have gold wrist.w.a.tches," the old lady said. "It will make us sympathetic."

"Bore," the servant said. "Rot in h.e.l.l."

"Thank you, thank you, treasure of my house, light of my life," the old lady said, and made her way toward an open door.

The servant put her hands on her hips and screamed, "Witch! Frog! Pig!"

"Thank you, thank you, thank you infinitely," the old lady said, and went in at the door.

That night, at the cafe, I asked about the signorina and her servant, and the waiter was fully informed. The signorina, he said, came from a n.o.ble Roman family, from which she had been expelled because of a romantic and unsuitable love affair. She had lived as a hermit in Montraldo for fifty years. a.s.sunta had been brought here from Rome to be her donna di servizio, but all she did for the old lady these days was to go into the village and buy her some bread and wine. She had robbed the old woman of all her possessions-she had even taken the bed from her room-and she now kept her a prisoner in the villa. Both the Grand Hotel and the National were luxurious and commodious. Why did I stay in such a place?

I stayed because of the view, because I had paid my rent in advance, and because I was curious about the eccentric old spinster and her cranky servant. They began quarreling early the next morning. a.s.sunta opened up with obscenity and abuse. The signorina countered with elaborate sarcasm. It was a depressing performance. I wondered if the old lady was really a prisoner, and later in the morning, when I saw her alone in the courtyard, I asked her if she would like to drive with me to Tambura, the next village up the coast. She said, in her flowery Roman, that she would be delighted to join me. She wanted to have her watch, her gold watch, repaired. The watch was of great value and beauty and there was only one man she dared entrust it to. He was in Tambura. While we were talking, a.s.sunta joined us.

"Why do you want to go to Tambura?" she asked the old lady.

"I want to have my gold watch repaired," the old lady said.

"You don't have a gold watch," a.s.sunta said.

"That is true," the old lady said. "I no longer have a gold watch, but I used to have a gold watch. I used to have a gold watch, and I used to have a gold pencil."

"You can't go to Tambura to have your watch repaired if you don't have a watch," a.s.sunta said.

"That is true, light of my life, treasure of my house," the old lady said, and she went in at her door.

I spent most of my time on the beach and in the cafes. The fortunes of the resort seemed to be middling. The waiters complained about business, but then they always do. The smell of the sea was riggish but unfresh, and I used to think with homesickness of the wild and magnificent beaches of my own country. Gay Head is, I know, sinking into the sea, but the sinkage at Montraldo seemed to be spiritual-as if the waves were eroding the vitality of that place. The sea was incandescent; the light was clear but not brilliant. The flavor of Montraldo, as I member it, was immutable, intimate, depleted-everything I detest; for shouldn't the soul of man be as limpid and cutting as a diamond? The waves spoke in French or Italian-now and then a word of dialect-but they seemed to speak without force.

One afternoon a remarkably beautiful woman came down the beach, followed by a boy of about eight, I should say, and an Italian woman dressed in black-a maid. They carried sandwich bags from the Grand Hotel, and my guess was that the boy lived mostly in hotels. He was pitiful. The maid took some toys from an a.s.sortment she carried in a string bag. They seemed to be all wrong for his age. There was a sand bucket, a shovel, some molds, a whiffle ball, and an old-fas.h.i.+oned pair of water wings. I suspected that the mother, stretched out on a blanket with an American novel, was a divorcee, and that she would presently have a drink with me in the cafe. With this in mind, I got to my feet and offered to play whiffle ball with the boy. He was delighted to have some company, but he could neither throw nor catch a ball, and, making a guess at his tastes, I asked, with one eye on the mother, if he would like me to build him a sand castle. He would. I built a water moat, then an escarpment with curved stairs, a dry moat, a crenelated wall with cannon positions, and a cl.u.s.ter of round towers with parapets. I worked as if the impregnability of the place was a reality, and when it was completed I set flags, made of candy wrappers, flying from every tower. I thought naively that it was beautiful, and so did the boy, but when I called his mother's attention to my feat she said, "Andiamo." The maid gathered up the toys, and off they went, leaving me, a grown man in a strange country, with a sand castle.

At Montraldo, the high point of the day came at four, when there was a band concert. This was the largesse of the munic.i.p.ality. The bandstand was wooden, Turkish in inspiration, and weathered by sea winds. The musicians sometimes wore uniforms, sometimes bathing suits, and their number varied from day to day, but they always played Dixieland. I don't think they were interested in the history of jazz. I just think they'd found some old arrangements in a trunk and were stuck with them. The music was comical, accelerated-they seemed to be playing for some ancient ballroom team. "Clarinet Marmalade," "China Boy," "Tiger Rag," "Careless Love"-how stirring it was to hear this old, old jazz explode in the salty air. The concert ended at five, when most of the musicians packed up their instruments and went out to sea with the sardine fleet and the bathers returned to the cafes and the village. Men, women, and children on a beach, band music, sea gra.s.s, and sandwich hampers remind me much more forcibly than cla.s.sical landscapes of our legendary ties to paradise. So I would go up with the others to the cafe, where, one day, I befriended Lord and Lady Rockwell, who asked me for c.o.c.ktails. You may wonder why I put these t.i.tles down so breathlessly, and the reason is that my father was a waiter.

He wasn't an ordinary waiter; he used to work at a dinner-dance spot in one of the big hotels. One night he lost his temper at a drunken brute, pushed his face into a plate of cannelloni, and left the premises. The union suspended him for three months, but he was, in a way, a hero, and when he went back to work they put him on the banquet s.h.i.+ft, where he pa.s.sed mushrooms to Kings and Presidents. He saw a lot of the world, but I sometimes wonder if the world ever saw much more of him than the sleeve of his red coat and his suave and handsome face, a little above the candlelight. It must have been like living in a world divided by a sheet of one-way gla.s.s. Sometimes I am reminded of him by those pages and guards in Shakespeare who come in from the left and stand at a door, establis.h.i.+ng by their costumes the fact that this is Venice or Arden. You scarcely see their faces, they never speak a line; nor did my father, and when the after-dinner speeches began he would vanish like the pages on stage. I tell people that he was in the administrative end of the hotel business, but actually he was a waiter, a banquet waiter.

The Rockwells' party was large, and I left at about ten. A hot wind was blowing off the sea. I was later told that this was the sirocco. It was a desert wind, and so oppressive that I got up several times during the night to drink some mineral water. A boat offsh.o.r.e was sounding its foghorn. In the morning, it was both foggy and suffocating. While I was making some coffee, a.s.sunta and the signorina began their morning quarrel. a.s.sunta started off with the usual "Pig! Dog! Witch! Dirt of the streets!" Leaning from an open window, the whiskery old woman sent down her flowery replies: "Dear one. Beloved. Blessed one. Thank you, thank you." I stood in the door with my coffee, wis.h.i.+ng they would schedule their disputes for some other time of day. The quarrel was suspended while the signorina came down the stairs to get her bread and wine. Then it started up again: "Witch! Frog! Frog of frogs! Witch of witches!" etc. The old lady countered with "Treasure! Light! Treasure of my house! Light of my life!" etc. Then there was a scuffle-a tug-of-war over the loaf of bread. I saw a.s.sunta strike the old woman cruelly with the edge of her hand. She fell on the steps and began to moan "Aiee! Aieee!" Even these cries of pain seemed florid. I ran across the courtyard to where she lay in a disjointed heap. a.s.sunta began to scream at me, "I am not culpable, I am not culpable!" The old lady was in great pain. "Please, signore," she asked, "please find the priest for me!" I picked her up. She weighed no more than a child, and her clothing smelled of soil. I carried her up the stairs into a high-ceilinged room festooned with cobwebs and put her onto a couch. a.s.sunta was on my heels, screaming, "I am not culpable!" Then I started down the one hundred and twenty-seven steps to the village.

The fog streamed through the air, and the African wind felt like a furnace draft. No one answered the door at the priest's house, but I found him in the church, sweeping the floor with a broom made of twigs. I was excited and impatient, and the more excited I became, the more slow-moving was the priest. First, he had to put his broom in a closet.

The closet door was warped and wouldn't shut, and he spent an unconscionable amount of time trying to close it. I finally went outside and waited on the porch. It took him half an hour to get collected, and then, instead of starting for the villa, we went down into the village to find an acolyte. Presently a young boy joined us, pulling on a soiled lace soutane, and we started up the stairs. The priest negotiated ten steps and then sat down to rest. I had time to smoke a cigarette. Then ten more steps and another rest, and when we were halfway up the stairs, I began to wonder if he would ever make it. His face had turned from red to purple, and the noises from his respiratory tract were harsh and desperate. We finally arrived at the door of the villa. The acolyte lit his censer. Then we made our way into that ruined place. The windows were open. There was sea fog in the air. The old woman was in great pain, but the notes of her voice remained genteel, as I expect they truly were. "She is my daughter," she said. "a.s.sunta. She is my daughter, my child."

Then a.s.sunta screamed, "Liar! Liar!"

"No, no, no," the old lady said, "you are my child, my only child. That is why I have cared for you all my life."

a.s.sunta began to cry, and stamped down the stairs. From the window, I saw her crossing the courtyard. When the priest began to administer the last rites, I went out.

I kept a sort of vigil in the cafe. The church bells tolled at three, and a little later news came down from the villa that the signorina was dead. No one in the cafe seemed to suspect that they were anything but an eccentric old spinster and a cranky servant. At four o'clock the band concert opened up with "Tiger Rag." I moved that night from the villa to the Hotel National, and left Montraldo in the morning.

THE OCEAN.

I am keeping this journal because I believe myself to be in some danger and because I have no other way of recording my fears. I cannot report them to the police, as you will see, and I cannot confide in my friends. The losses I have recently suffered in self-esteem, reasonableness, and charity are conspicuous, but there is always some painful ambiguity about who is to blame. I might be to blame myself. Let me give you an example. Last night I sat down to dinner with Cora, my wife, at half past six. Our only daughter has left home, and we eat, these days, in the kitchen, off a table ornamented with a goldfish bowl. The meal was cold ham, salad, and potatoes. When I took a mouthful of salad I had to spit it out. "Ah, yes," my wife said. "I was afraid that would happen. You left your lighter fluid in the pantry, and I mistook it for vinegar."

As I say, who was to blame? I have always been careful about putting things in their places, and had she meant to poison me she wouldn't have done anything so clumsy as to put lighter fluid in the salad dressing. If I had not left the fluid in the pantry, the incident wouldn't have taken place. But let me go on-for a minute. During dinner a thunderstorm came up. The sky got black. Suddenly there was a soaking rain. As soon as dinner was over, Cora dressed herself in a raincoat and a green shower cap and went out to water the lawn. I watched her from the window. She seemed oblivious of the ragged walls of rain in which she stood, and she watered the lawn carefully, lingering over the burnt spots. I was afraid that she would compromise herself in the eyes of our neighbors. The woman in the house next door would telephone the woman on the corner to say that Cora Fry was watering her lawn in a downpour. My wish that she not be ridiculed by gossip took me to her side, although as I approached her, under my umbrella, I realized that I lacked the tact to get through this gracefully. What should I say? Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends. Come in, dear," I said. "You might get struck."

"Oh, I doubt that very much," she said in her most musical voice. She speaks these days in the octave above middle C.

"Won't you wait until the rain is over?" I asked.

"It won't last long," she said sweetly. "Thunderstorms never do."

Under my umbrella, I returned to the house and poured myself a drink. She was right. A minute later the storm blew off, and she went on watering the gra.s.s. She had some rightness on her side in both of these incidents, but this does not change my feeling that I am in some danger.

Oh, world, world, world, wondrous and bewildering, when did my troubles begin? This is being written in my house in Bullet Park. The time is 10 A. M. The day is Tuesday. You might well ask what I am doing in Bullet Park on a weekday morning. The only other men around are three clergymen, two invalids, and an old codger on Turner Street who has lost his marbles. The neighborhood has the serenity, the stillness of a terrain where all s.e.xual tensions have been suspended-excluding mine, of course, and those of the three clergymen. What is my business? What do I do? Why didn't I catch the train? I am forty-six years old, hale, well-dressed, and have a more thorough knowledge of the manufacture and merchandising of Dynaflex than any other man in the entire field. One of my difficulties is my youthful looks. I have a thirty-inch waistline and jet-black hair, and when I tell people that I used to be vice-president in charge of merchandising and executive a.s.sistant to the president of Dynaflex-when I tell this to strangers in bars and on trains-they never believe me, because I look so young.

Mr. Estabrook, the president of Dynaflex and in some ways my protector, was an enthusiastic gardener. While admiring his flowers one afternoon, he was stung by a b.u.mblebee, and he died before they could get him to the hospital. I could have had the presidency, but I wanted to stay in merchandising and manufacture. Then the directors-including myself, of course-voted a merger with Milltonium Ltd., putting Eric Penumbra, Milltonium's chief, at the helm. I voted for the merger with some misgivings, but I concealed these and did the most important part of the groundwork for this change. It was my job to bring in the approval of conservative and reluctant stockholders, and one by one I brought them around. The fact that I had worked for Dynaflex since I had left college, that I had never worked for anyone else, inspired their trust. A few days after the merger was a fact, Penumbra called me into his office. "Well," he said, "you've had it."

"Yes, I have," I said. I thought he was complimenting me on having brought in the approvals. I had traveled all over the United States and made two trips to Europe. No one else could have done it.

"You've had it," Penumbra said harshly. "How long will it take you to get out of here?"

"I don't understand," I said.

"How the h.e.l.l long will it take you to get out of here!" he shouted. "You're obsolete. We can't afford people like you in the shop. I'm asking how long it will take you to get out of here."

"It will take about an hour," I said.

"Well, I'll give you to the end of the week," he said. "If you want to send your secretary up, I'll fire her. You're really lucky. With your pension, severance pay, and the stock you own, you'll have d.a.m.ned near as much money as I take home, without having to lift a finger." Then he left his desk and came to where I stood. He put an arm around my shoulders. He gave me a hug. "Don't worry," Penumbra said. "Obsolescence is something we all have to face. I hope I'll be as calm about it as you when my time comes."

"I certainly hope you will," I said, and I left the office.

I went to the men's room. I locked myself up in a cubicle and wept. I wept at Penumbra's dishonesty, wept for the destinies of Dynaflex, wept for the fate of my secretary-an intelligent spinster, who writes short stories in her spare time-wept bitterly for my own naivete, for my own lack of guile, wept that I should be overwhelmed by the plain facts of life. At the end of a half hour I dried my tears and washed my face. I took everything out of my office that was personal, took a train home, and broke the news to Cora. I was angry, of course, and she seemed frightened. She began to cry. She retired to her dressing table, which has served as a wailing wall for all the years of our marriage.

"But there's nothing to cry about," I said. "I mean, we've got plenty of money. We've got loads of money. We can go to j.a.pan. We can go to India. We can see the English cathedrals." She went on crying, and after dinner I called our daughter Flora, who lives in New York. "I'm sorry, Daddy," she said, when I told her the news. "I'm very sorry, I know how you must feel, and I'd like to see you later but not right now. Remember your promise-you promised to leave me alone."

The next character to enter the scene is my mother-in-law, whose name is Minnie. Minnie is a harsh-voiced blonde of about seventy, with four scars on the side of her face, from cosmetic surgery. You may have seen Minnie rattling around Neiman-Marcus or the lobby of practically any Grand Hotel. Minnie uses the word "fas.h.i.+onable" with great versatility. Of her husband's suicide in 1932. Minnie says, "Jumping out of windows was quite fas.h.i.+onable." When her only son was fired out of secondary school for improper conduct and went to live in Paris with an older man, Minnie said, "I know it's revolting, but it seems to be terribly fas.h.i.+onable." Of her own outrageous plumage she says, "It's hideously uncomfortable but it's divinely fas.h.i.+onable." Minnie is cruel and idle, and Cora, who is her only daughter, hates her. Cora has drafted her nature along lines that are the opposite of Minnie's. She is loving, serious-minded, sober, and kind. I think that in order to safeguard her virtues-her hopefulness, really-Cora has been forced to evolve a fantasy in which her mother is not Minnie at all but is instead some sage and gracious lady, working at an embroidery hoop. Everybody knows how persuasive and treacherous fantasies can be.

I spent the day after I was cas.h.i.+ered by Penumbra hanging around the house. With the offices of Dynaflex shut to me, I was surprised to find that I had almost no place else to go. My club is a college adjunct where they serve a cafeteria lunch, and it is not much of a sanctuary. I have always wanted to read good books, and this seemed to be my chance. I took a copy of Chaucer into the garden and read half a page, but it was hard work for a businessman. I spent the rest of the morning hoeing the lettuce, which made the gardener cross. Lunch with Cora was for some reason strained. After lunch Cora took a nap. So did the maid, I discovered, when I stepped into the kitchen to get a gla.s.s of water. She was sound asleep with her head on the table. The stillness of the house at that hour gave me a most peculiar feeling. But the world with all its diversions and entertainments was available to me, and I called New York and booked some theatre tickets for that evening. Cora doesn't much enjoy the theatre, but she came with me. After the theatre we went to the St. Regis to get some supper. When we entered the place, the band was knocking out the last number of a set-all horns up, flags flying, and the toothy drummer whacking crazily at everything he could reach. In the middle of the dance floor was Minnie, shaking her backside, stamping her feet, and popping her thumbs. She was with a broken-winded gigolo, who kept looking desperately over his shoulder, as if he expected his trainer to throw in the sponge. Minnie's plumage was exceptionally brilliant, her face seemed exceptionally haggard, and a lot of people were laughing at her. As I say, Cora seems to have invented a dignified parent, and these encounters with Minnie are cruel. We turned and went away. Cora said nothing during the long drive home.

Minnie must have been beautiful many years ago. It was from Minnie that Cora got her large eyes and her fine nose. Minnie comes to visit us two or three times a year. There is no question about the fact that if she announced her arrivals we would lock up the house and go away. Her ability to make her daughter miserable is consummate and voracious, and so, with some cunning, she makes her arrivals at our house a surprise. I spent the next afternoon trying to read Henry James in the garden. At about five I heard a car stop in front of the house. A little while later it began to rain, and I stepped into the living room and saw Minnie standing by a window. It was quite dark, but no one had bothered to turn on a light. "Why, Minnie," I exclaimed, "how nice to see you, what a pleasant surprise. Let me get you a drink..

I turned on a lamp and saw that it was Cora.

She turned on me slowly a level and eloquent look of utter misgiving. It might have been a smile had I not known that I had wounded her painfully; had I not felt from her a flow of emotion like the flow of blood from a wound. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, darling," I said. "I'm terribly sorry. I couldn't see." She went out of the room, "It was the dark," I said. "It got so dark all of a sudden, when it began to rain. I'm terribly sorry, but it was just the dark and the rain." I heard her climb the dark stairs and close the door to our room.

When I saw Cora in the morning-and I didn't see her again until morning-I could tell by the pained look on her face that she thought I had wickedly pretended to mistake her for Minnie. I suppose she was as deeply and lastingly hurt as I had been hurt when Penumbra called me obsolete. It was at this point that her voice became an octave higher, and she spoke to me-when she spoke to me at all-in notes that were weary and musical, and her looks were accusing and dark. Now, I might not have noticed any of this had I been absorbed in my work and tired in the evening. To strike a healthy balance between motion and scrutiny was nearly impossible with my opportunities for motion so suddenly curtailed. I went on with my program of serious reading, but more than half my time was spent in observing Cora's sorrows and the disorganized workings of my house. A part-time maid came four times a week, and when I saw her sweeping dust under the rugs and taking catnaps in the kitchen, I got irritable. I said nothing about this, but a vexatious relations.h.i.+p quickly sprang up between us. It was the same with the gardener. If I sat on the terrace to read, he would cut the gra.s.s under my chair, and he took a full day, at four dollars an hour, to cut the lawns, although I knew from experience that this could be done in a much shorter time. As for Cora, I saw how empty and friendless her life was. She never went out to lunch. She never played cards. She arranged flowers, went to the hairdresser, gossiped with the maid, and rested. The smallest things began to irritate and offend me, and I was doubly offended by my unreasonable irritability. The sound of Cora's light and innocent footstep as she wandered aimlessly around the house made me cross. I was even offended at her manner of speaking. "I must try to arrange the flowers," she would say. "I must try to buy a hat. I must try to have my hair done. I must try to find a yellow pocketbook." Leaving the lunch table she would say, "Now I shall try to lie in the sun." But why try? The sun poured from the heavens down onto the terrace, where there was a large a.s.sortment of comfortable furniture, and a few minutes after she had stretched herself out in a long chair she was asleep. Rising from her nap she would say, "I must try not to get a sunburn," and entering the house she would say, "Now I am going to try to take a bath."

I drove down to the station one afternoon to watch the six-thirty-two come in. It was the train I used to return home on. I stopped my car in a long line of cars driven mostly by housewives. I was terribly excited. I was waiting for no one, and the women around me were merely waiting for their husbands, but it seemed to me that we were all waiting for much more. The stage, it seemed, was set. Pete and Harry, the two cab drivers, stood by their cars. With them was the Bruxtons' Airedale, who wanders. Mr. Winters, the station agent, was talking with Louisa Balcolm, the postmistress, who lives two stops up the line. These, then, were the attendant players, the porters and gossips who would put down the groundwork for the spectacle. I kept an eye on my wrist.w.a.tch. Then the train pulled in, and a moment later an eruption, a jackpot of humanity, burst through the station doors-so numerous and eager, so like sailors home from the sea, so hurried, so loving, that I laughed with pleasure. There they all were, the short and the tall, the rich and the poor, the sage and the foolish, my enemies and friends, and they all headed out the door with such a light step, so bright an eye, that I knew I must rejoin them. I would simply go back to work. This decision made me feel cheerful and magnanimous, and when I came home my cheer seemed for a moment to be infectious. Cora spoke for the first time in days in a voice that was full and warm, but when I replied, she said, musically, "I was speaking to the goldfish." She was indeed. The beautiful smile that she had withheld from me was aimed at the goldfish bowl, and I wondered if she had not left the world, its lights, cities, and the clash of things, for this sphere of gla.s.s and its foolish castle. Watching her bend lovingly over the goldfish bowl, I got the distinct impression that she looked longingly into this other world.

I went to New York in the morning and called the friend who has always been most complimentary about my work with Dynaflex. He told me to come to his office at around noon-I guessed for lunch. "I want to go back to work," I told him. "I want your help."

"Well, it isn't simple," he said. "It isn't as simple as it might seem. To begin with, you can't expect much in the way of sympathy. Everybody in the business knows how generous Penumbra was to you. Most of us would be happy to change places. I mean, there's a certain amount of natural envy. People don't like to help a man who's in a more comfortable position than they. And another thing is that Penumbra wants you to stay in retirement. I don't know why this is, but I know it's a fact, and anybody who took you on would be in trouble with Milltonium. And, to get on with the unpleasant facts, you're just too d.a.m.ned old. Our president is twenty-seven. Our biggest compet.i.tor has a chief in his early thirties. So why don't you enjoy yourself? Why don't you take it easy? Why don't you go around the world?" Then I asked, very humbly, if I made an investment in his firm-say fifty thousand dollars-could he find me a responsible post. He smiled broadly. It all seemed so easy. "I'll be happy to take your fifty thousand," he said lightly, "but as for finding you anything to do, I'm afraid..." Then his secretary came in to say that he was late for lunch.

I stood on a street corner, appearing to wait for the traffic light to change, but I was just waiting. I was staggered. What I wanted to do was to make a sandwich board on which I would list all my grievances. On it I would describe Penumbra's dishonesty, Cora's sorrow, the indignities I had suffered from the maid and gardener, and how cruelly I had been hurled out of the stream of things by a vogue for youth and inexperience. I would hang this sign from my shoulders and march up and down in front of the public library from nine until five, pa.s.sing out more detailed literature to those who were interested. Throw in a snowstorm, gale winds, and the crash of thunder; I wanted it to be a spectacle.

I then stepped into a side-street restaurant to get a drink and some lunch. It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious. The headwaiter was a brisk character off the Corso di Roma. He duckfooted, banging down the heels of his Italian shoes, and hunched his shoulders as if his suit jacket bound. He spoke sharply to the bartender, who then whispered to a waiter, "I'll kill him! Someday I'll kill him!"

"You and me," whispered the waiter, "we'll kill him together." The hat-check girl joined the whispering. She wanted to kill the manager. The conspirators scattered when the headwaiter returned, but the atmosphere remained mutinous. I drank a c.o.c.ktail and ordered a salad, and then I overheard the impa.s.sioned voice of a man in the booth next to mine. I had nothing better to do than listen. "I go to Minneapolis," he said. "I have to go to Minneapolis, and as soon as I check into the hotel the telephone's ringing. She wants to tell me that the hot-water heater isn't working. There I am in Minneapolis and she's on Long Island and she calls me long-distance to say that the hot-water heater isn't working. So then I ask her why doesn't she call the plumber, and then she begins to cry. She cries over long-distance for about fifteen minutes, just because I suggest that she might call the plumber. Well, anyhow, in Minneapolis there's this very good jewelry store, and so I bought her a pair of earrings. Sapphires. Eight hundred dollars. I can't afford this kind of thing, but I can't afford not to buy her presents. I mean, I can make eight hundred dollars in ten minutes, but as the tax lawyer says, I don't take away more than a third of what I make, and so a pair of eight-hundred-dollar earrings cost me around two thousand. Anyway, I get the earrings, and I give them to her when I get home, and we go off to a party at the Barnstables. When we come home, she's lost one of the earrings. She doesn't know where she lost it. She doesn't care. She won't even call the Barnstables to see if it's lying around on the floor. She doesn't want to disturb them. So then I say it's just like throwing money into the fire, and she begins to cry and says that sapphires are cold stones-that they express my inner coldness toward her. She says there wasn't any love in the present-it wasn't a loving present. All I had to do was to step into a jewelry store and buy them, she says. They didn't cost me anything in thoughtfulness and affection. So then I ask her does she expect me to make her some earrings-does she want me to go to night school and learn how to make one of those crummy silver bracelets they make? Hammered. You know. Every little hammer blow a sign of love and affection. Is that what she wants, for Christ's sake? That's another night when I slept in the guest room..."

I went on eating and listening. I waited for the stranger's companion to enter into the conversation, to make some sound of sympathy or a.s.sent, but there was none, and I wondered for a moment if he wasn't talking to himself. I craned my neck around the edge of the booth, but he was too far into the corner for me to see. "She has this money of her own," he went on. "I pay the tax on it, and she spends it all on clothes. She's got hundreds and hundreds of dresses and shoes, and three fur coats, and four wigs. Four. But if I buy a suit she tells me I'm being wasteful. I have to buy clothes once in a while. I mean, I can't go to the office looking like a b.u.m. If I buy anything, it's very wasteful. Last year, I bought an umbrella, just so I wouldn't get wet. Wasteful. The year before, I bought a light coat. Wasteful. I can't even buy a phonograph record, because I know I'll catch h.e.l.l for being so wasteful. On my salary-imagine, on my salary, we can't afford to have bacon for breakfast excepting on Sundays. Bacon is wasteful. But you ought to see her telephone bills. She has this friend, this college roommate. I guess they were very close. She lives in Rome. I don't like her. She was married to this very nice fellow, a good friend of mine, and she just ran him into the ground. She just disposed of him. He's a wreck. Well, now she lives in Rome, and Vera keeps calling her on the telephone. Last month my telephone bills to Rome were over eight hundred dollars. So I said, 'Vera,' I said, 'if you want to talk with your girl chum so much, why don't you just get on a plane and fly to Rome? It would be a lot cheaper. 'I don't want to go to Rome,' she said. 'I hate Rome. It's noisy and dirty.'

"But you know when I think back over my past, and her past, too, it seems to me that this is a situation with a very long taproot. My grandmother was a very emanc.i.p.ated woman, she was very strong on women's rights. When my mother was thirty-two years old, she went to law school and got her degree. She never practiced. She said she went to law school so she'd have more things in common with Dad, but what she actually did was to destroy, really destroy the little tenderness that remained between them. She was almost never at home, and when she was she was always studying for her exams. It was always 'Sh-h-h! Your mother's studying law...' My father was a lonely man, but there's an awful lot of lonely men around. They won't say so, of course. Who tells the truth? You meet an old friend on the street. He looks like h.e.l.l. It's frightening. His face is gray, and his hair's all falling out, and he's got the shakes. So you say, 'Charlie, Charlie, you're looking great.' So then he says, shaking all over, 'I never felt better in my life, never.' So then you go your way, and he goes his way.

"I can see that it isn't easy for Vera, but what can I do? Honest to G.o.d sometimes I'm afraid she'll hurt me-brain me with a hammer while I'm asleep. Not because it's me, but just because I'm a man. Sometimes I think women today are the most miserable creatures in the history of the world. I mean, they're right in the middle of the ocean. For instance, I caught her smooching with Pete Barnstable in the pantry. That was the night she lost the earring, the night when I came back from Minneapolis. So then when I got home, before I noticed the earring was gone, I said what is this, what is this smooching around with Pete Barnstable? So then she said-very emanc.i.p.ated-that no woman could be expected to limit herself to the attentions of one man. So then I said what about me, did that work for me, too? I mean, if she could smooch around with Pete Barnstable, didn't it follow that I could take Mildred Renny out to the parking lot? So then she said I was turning everything she said into filth. She said I had such a dirty mind she couldn't talk with me. After that I noticed she'd lost the earring, and after that we had the scene about how sapphires are such cold stones, and after that..

His voice dropped to a whisper, and at the same time some women in the booth on the other side of me began a noisy and savage attack on a friend they all shared. I was very anxious to see the face of the man behind me, and I called for the check, but when I left the booth he was gone, and I would never know what he looked like.

When I got home, I put the car in the garage and came into the house by the kitchen door. Cora was at the table, bending over a dish of cutlets. In one hand she held a can of lethal pesticide. I couldn't be sure because I'm so nearsighted, but I think she was sprinkling pesticide on the meat. She was startled when I came in, and by the time I had my gla.s.ses on she had put the pesticide on the table. Since I had already made one bad mistake because of my eyesight, I was reluctant to make another, but there was the pesticide on the table beside the dish, and that was not where it belonged. It contained a high percentage of nerve poison. "What in the world are you doing?" I asked.

"What does it look as if I were doing?" she asked, still speaking in the octave above middle C.