The Stories of John Cheever Read online

  This made for slow work, and by the time they finished, the sun was hot. Paul heard voices from his house as he and Kasiak led the infirm mare back to the cart, and he saw his children, still in their nightclothes, feeding their rabbits in the lettuce patch. When Kasiak harnessed the mare to the cart, Paul again asked him her name.

  “She has no name,” Kasiak said.

  “I’ve never heard of a farm horse without a name.”

  “To name animals is bourgeois sentimentality,” Kasiak said, and he started to drive away.

  Paul laughed.

  “You never come back!” Kasiak called over his shoulder. It was the only meanness at hand; he knew how deeply Paul loved the hill. His face was dark. “You never come back next year. You wait and see.”

  There is a moment early on Sunday when the tide of the summer day turns inexorably toward the evening train. You can swim, play tennis, or take a nap or a walk, but it doesn’t make much difference. Immediately after lunch, Paul was faced with his unwillingness to leave. This became so strong that he was reminded of the intensity and the apprehensiveness he had felt on furloughs. At six, he put on his tight business suit and had a drink with Virginia in the kitchen. She asked him to buy nail scissors and candy in New York. While they were there, he heard that noise that he lived in dread of above all others—his innocent and gentle children screaming in pain.

  He ran out, letting the screen door slam in Virginia’s face. Then he turned back and held the door open for her, and she came out and ran up the hill at his side. The children were coming down the road, under the big trees. Lost in their crystalline grief, blinded with tears, they stumbled and ran toward their mother and searched in her dark skirts for a shape to press their heads against. They were howling. But it was nothing serious, after all. Their rabbits were dead.

  “There, there, there, there…” Virginia drew the children down toward the house. Paul went on up the road and found the limp rabbits in the hutch. He carried them to the edge of the garden and dug a hole. Kasiak came by, carrying water for the chickens, and when he had sized up the situation, he spoke mournfully. “Why you dig a grave?” he asked. “The skunks will dig them up tonight. Throw them in Cavis’s pasture. They’ll dig them up again…” He went on toward the chicken house. Paul stamped down the grave. Dirt got into his low shoes. He went back to the rabbit house to see if he could find any trace of what had killed them, and in the feeding trough, below some wilted vegetables that the children had uprooted, he saw the crystals of a mortal poison that they used to kill rats in the winter.

  Paul made a serious effort to remember whether he could have left the poison there himself. The stifling heat in the hutch raised and sent the sweat rolling down his face. Could Kasiak have done it? Could Kasiak have been so mean, so perverse? Could he, through believing that on some fall evening fires on the mountain would signal the diligent and the reliable to seize power from the hands of those who drank Martinis, have become shrewd enough to put his finger on the only interest in the future Paul had?

  Kasiak was in the chicken house. Shadow had begun to cover the ground, and some of the happy and stupid fowl were roosting. “Did you poison the rabbits, Kasiak?” Paul called. “Did you? Did you?” His loud voice maddened the fowl. They spread their heavy wings and cawed. “Did you, Kasiak?” Kasiak didn’t speak. Paul put his hands on the man’s shoulders and shook him. “Don’t you know how strong the poison is? Don’t you know that the children might have got into it? Don’t you know that it might have killed them?” The fowl involved themselves in the fracas. Signals went from the house to the yard; they pushed one another off the congested gangway and thumped their wings. As if the life in Kasiak hid slyly from violence behind cartilage and bone, there was no apparent resistance in him, and Paul shook him until he creaked. “Did you, Kasiak?” Paul shouted. “Did you? Oh, Kasiak, if you touch my children, if you harm them in any way—in any way—I’ll cut your head open.” He pushed the man away from him and he sprawled in the dirt.

  When Paul got back to the kitchen, there was no one there, and he drank two glasses of water. From the living room he could hear his mourning children, and his sister Ellen, who had no children of her own, struggling awkwardly to distract them with a story about a cat she had once owned. Virginia came into the kitchen and closed the door after her. She asked if the rabbits had been poisoned, and he said yes. She sat in a chair by the kitchen table. “I put it there,” she said. “I put it there last fall. I never thought we’d use that house again, and I wanted to keep the rats out of it. I forgot. I never thought we’d use that house again. I completely forgot.”

  It is true of even the best of us that if an observer can catch us boarding a train at a way station; if he will mark our faces, stripped by anxiety of their self-possession; if he will appraise our luggage, our clothing, and look out of the window to see who has driven us to the station; if he will listen to the harsh or tender things we say if we are with our families, or notice the way we put our suitcase onto the rack, check the position of our wallet, our key ring, and wipe the sweat off the back of our necks; if he can judge sensibly the self-importance, diffidence, or sadness with which we settle ourselves, he will be given a broader view of our lives than most of us would intend.

  Paul barely made the train that Sunday night. When he pulled himself up the high steps of the coach, he was short-winded. There was still some straw on his shoes from the violence in the chicken house. The drive had not completely cooled his temper, and his face was red. No harm had been done, he thought. “No harm,” he said under his breath as he swung his suitcase onto the rack—a man of forty with signs of mortality in a tremor of his right hand, signs of obsoleteness in his confused frown, a summer farmer with blistered hands, a sunburn, and lame shoulders, so visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle. TORCH SONG

  After Jack Lorey had known Joan Harris in New York for a few years, he began to think of her as the Widow. She always wore black, and he was always given the feeling, by a curious disorder in her apartment, that the undertakers had just left. This impression did not stem from malice on his part, for he was fond of Joan. They came from the same city in Ohio and had reached New York at about the same time in the middle thirties. They were the same age, and during their first summer in the city they used to meet after work and drink Martinis in places like the Brevoort and Charles’, and have dinner and play checkers at the Lafayette.

  Joan went to a school for models when she settled in the city, but it turned out that she photographed badly, so after spending six weeks learning how to walk with a book on her head she got a job as a hostess in a Longchamps. For the rest of the summer she stood by the hat-rack, bathed in an intense pink light and the string music of heartbreak, swinging her mane of dark hair and her black skirt as she moved forward to greet the customers. She was then a big, handsome girl with a wonderful voice, and her face, her whole presence, always seemed infused with a gentle and healthy pleasure at her surroundings, whatever they were. She was innocently and incorrigibly convivial, and would get out of bed and dress at three in the morning if someone called her and asked her to come out for a drink, as Jack often did. In the fall, she got some kind of freshman executive job in a department store. They saw less and less of each other and then for quite a while stopped seeing each other altogether. Jack was living with a girl he had met at a party, and it never occurred to him to wonder what had become of Joan.

  Jack’s girl had some friends in Pennsylvania, and in the spring and summer of his second year in town he often went there with her for weekends. All of this—the shared apartment in the Village, the illicit relationship, the Friday-night train to a country house—was what he had imagined life in New York to be, and he was intensely happy. He was returning to New York with his girl one Sunday night on the Lehigh line. It was one of those trains that move slowly across the face of New Jersey, bringing back to the city hundreds of people, like
the victims of an immense and strenuous picnic, whose faces are blazing and whose muscles are lame. Jack and his girl, like most of the other passengers, were overburdened with vegetables and flowers. When the train stopped in Pennsylvania Station, they moved with the crowd along the platform, toward the escalator. As they were passing the wide, lighted windows of the diner, Jack turned his head and saw Joan. It was the first time he had seen her since Thanksgiving, or since Christmas. He couldn’t remember.

  Joan was with a man who had obviously passed out. His head was in his arms on the table, and an overturned highball glass was near one of his elbows. Joan was shaking his shoulders gently and speaking to him. She seemed to be vaguely troubled, vaguely amused. The waiters had cleared off all the other tables and were standing around Joan, waiting for her to resurrect her escort. It troubled Jack to see in these straits a girl who reminded him of the trees and the lawns of his home town, but there was nothing he could do to help. Joan continued to shake the man’s shoulders, and the crowd pressed Jack past one after another of the diner’s windows, past the malodorous kitchen, and up the escalator.

  He saw Joan again, later that summer, when he was having dinner in a Village restaurant. He was with a new girl, a Southerner. There were many Southern girls in the city that year. Jack and his belle had wandered into the restaurant because it was convenient, but the food was terrible and the place was lighted with candles. Halfway through dinner, Jack noticed Joan on the other side of the room, and when he had finished eating, he crossed the room and spoke to her. She was with a tall man who was wearing a monocle. He stood, bowed stiffly from the waist, and said to Jack, “We are very pleased to meet you.” Then he excused himself and headed for the toilet. “He’s a count, he’s a Swedish count,” Joan said. “He’s on the radio, Friday afternoons at four-fifteen. Isn’t it exciting?” She seemed to be delighted with the count and the terrible restaurant.

  Sometime the next winter, Jack moved from the Village to an apartment in the East Thirties. He was crossing Park Avenue one cold morning on his way to the office when he noticed, in the crowd, a woman he had met a few times at Joan’s apartment. He spoke to her and asked about his friend. “Haven’t you heard?” she said. She pulled a long face. “Perhaps I’d better tell you. Perhaps you can help.” She and Jack had breakfast in a drugstore on Madison Avenue and she unburdened herself of the story.

  The count had a program called “The Song of the Fjords,” or something like that, and he sang Swedish folk songs. Everyone suspected him of being a fake, but that didn’t bother Joan. He had met her at a party and, sensing a soft touch, had moved in with her the following night. About a week later, he complained of pains in his back and said he must have some morphine. Then he needed morphine all the time. If he didn’t get morphine, he was abusive and violent. Joan began to deal with those doctors and druggists who peddle dope, and when they wouldn’t supply her, she went down to the bottom of the city. Her friends were afraid she would be found some morning stuffed in a drain. She got pregnant. She had an abortion. The count left her and moved to a flea bag near Times Square, but she was so impressed by then with his helplessness, so afraid that he would die without her, that she followed him there and shared his room and continued to buy his narcotics. He abandoned her again, and Joan waited a week for him to return before she went back to her place and her friends in the Village.

  It shocked Jack to think of the innocent girl from Ohio having lived with a brutal dope addict and traded with criminals, and when he got to his office that morning, he telephoned her and made a date for dinner that night. He met her at Charles’. When she came into the bar, she seemed as wholesome and calm as ever. Her voice was sweet, and reminded him of elms, of lawns, of those glass arrangements that used to be hung from porch ceilings to tinkle in the summer wind. She told him about the count. She spoke of him charitably and with no trace of bitterness, as if her voice, her disposition, were incapable of registering anything beyond simple affection and pleasure. Her walk, when she moved ahead of him toward their table, was light and graceful. She ate a large dinner and talked enthusiastically about her job. They went to a movie and said goodbye in front of her apartment house.

  That winter, Jack met a girl he decided to marry. Their engagement was announced in January and they planned to marry in July. In the spring, he received, in his office mail, an invitation to cocktails at Joan’s. It was for a Saturday when his fiancée was going to Massachusetts to visit her parents, and when the time came and he had nothing better to do, he took a bus to the Village. Joan had the same apartment. It was a walk-up. You rang the bell above the mailbox in the vestibule and were answered with a death rattle in the lock. Joan lived on the third floor. Her calling card was in a slot in the mailbox, and above her name was written the name Hugh Bascomb.

  Jack climbed the two flights of carpeted stairs, and when he reached Joan’s apartment, she was standing by the open door in a black dress. After she greeted Jack, she took his arm and guided him across the room. “I want you to meet Hugh, Jack,” she said.

  Hugh was a big man with a red face and pale-blue eyes. His manner was courtly and his eyes were inflamed with drink. Jack talked with him for a little while and then went over to speak to someone he knew, who was standing by the mantelpiece. He noticed then, for the first time, the indescribable disorder of Joan’s apartment. The books were in their shelves and the furniture was reasonably good, but the place was all wrong, somehow. It was as if things had been put in place without thought or real interest, and for the first time, too, he had the impression that there had been a death there recently.

  As Jack moved around the room, he felt that he had met the ten or twelve guests at other parties. There was a woman executive with a fancy hat, a man who could imitate Roosevelt, a grim couple whose play was in rehearsal, and a newspaperman who kept turning on the radio for news of the Spanish Civil War. Jack drank Martinis and talked with the woman in the fancy hat. He looked out of the window at the back yards and the ailanthus trees and heard, in the distance, thunder exploding off the cliffs of the Hudson.

  Hugh Bascomb got very drunk. He began to spill liquor, as if drinking, for him, were a kind of jolly slaughter and he enjoyed the bloodshed and the mess. He spilled whiskey from a bottle. He spilled a drink on his shirt and then tipped over someone else’s drink. The party was not quiet, but Hugh’s hoarse voice began to dominate the others. He attacked a photographer who was sitting in a corner explaining camera techniques to a homely woman. “What did you come to the party for if all you wanted to do was to sit there and stare at your shoes?” Hugh shouted. “What did you come for? Why don’t you stay at home?”

  The photographer didn’t know what to say. He was not staring at his shoes. Joan moved lightly to Hugh’s side. “Please don’t get into a fight now, darling,” she said. “Not this afternoon.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Let me alone. Mind your own business.” He lost his balance, and in struggling to steady himself he tipped over a lamp.

  “Oh, your lovely lamp, Joan,” a woman sighed.

  “Lamps!” Hugh roared. He threw his arms into the air and worked them around his head as if he were bludgeoning himself. “Lamps. Glasses. Cigarette boxes. Dishes. They’re killing me. They’re killing me, for Christ’s sake. Let’s all go up to the mountains and hunt and fish and live like men, for Christ’s sake.”

  People were scattering as if a rain had begun to fall in the room. It had, as a matter of fact, begun to rain outside. Someone offered Jack a ride uptown, and he jumped at the chance. Joan stood at the door, saying goodbye to her routed friends. Her voice remained soft, and her manner, unlike that of those Christian women who in the face of disaster can summon new and formidable sources of composure, seemed genuinely simple. She appeared to be oblivious of the raging drunk at her back, who was pacing up and down, grinding glass into the rug, and haranguing one of the survivors of the party with a story of how he, Hugh, had once gone without food for three weeks.

/>   In July, Jack was married in an orchard in Duxbury, and he and his wife went to West Chop for a few weeks. When they returned to town, their apartment was cluttered with presents, including a dozen after-dinner coffee cups from Joan. His wife sent her the required note, but they did nothing else.

  Late in the summer, Joan telephoned Jack at his office and asked if he wouldn’t bring his wife to see her; she named an evening the following week. He felt guilty about not having called her, and accepted the invitation. This made his wife angry. She was an ambitious girl who liked a social life that offered rewards, and she went unwillingly to Joan’s Village apartment with him.

  Written above Joan’s name on the mailbox was the name Franz Denzel. Jack and his wife climbed the stairs and were met by Joan at the open door. They went into her apartment and found themselves among a group of people for whom Jack, at least, was unable to find any bearings.

  Franz Denzel was a middle-aged German. His face was pinched with bitterness or illness. He greeted Jack and his wife with that elaborate and clever politeness that is intended to make guests feel that they have come too early or too late. He insisted sharply upon Jack’s sitting in the chair in which he himself had been sitting, and then went and sat on a radiator. There were five other Germans sitting around the room, drinking coffee. In a corner was another American couple, who looked uncomfortable. Joan passed Jack and his wife small cups of coffee with whipped cream. “These cups belonged to Franz’s mother,” she said. “Aren’t they lovely? They were the only things he took from Germany when he escaped from the Nazis.”