The Stories of John Cheever

The Children

MR. HATHERLY had many old-fashioned tastes. He wore high yellow boots, dined at Lüchow’s in order to hear the music, and slept in a woolen nightshirt. His urge to establish in business a patriarchal liaison with some young man who would serve as his descendant, in the fullest sense of the word, was another of these old-fashioned tastes. Mr. Hatherly picked for his heir a young immigrant named Victor Mackenzie, who had made the crossing from England or Scotland—a winter crossing, I think—when he was sixteen or seventeen. The winter crossing is a guess. He may have worked his way or borrowed passage money or had some relation in this country to help him, but all this was kept in the dark, and his known life began when he went to work for Mr. Hatherly. As an immigrant, Victor may have cherished an obsolete vision of the American businessman. Here and there one saw in Mr. Hatherly a touch of obsolescence. His beginnings were obscure, and, as everyone knows, he got rich enough to be an ambassador. In business, he was known as a harsh and unprincipled trader. He broke wind when he felt like it and relished the ruin of a competitor. He was very short—nearly a dwarf. His legs were spindly and his large belly had pulled his spine out of shape. He decorated his bald skull by combing across it a few threads of gray hair, and he wore an emerald fob on his watch chain. Victor was a tall man, with the kind of handsomeness that is sooner or later disappointing. His square jaw and all his other nicely proportioned features might at first have led you to expect a man of exceptional gifts of character, but you felt in the end that he was merely pleasant, ambitious, and a little ingenuous. For years, this curmudgeon and the young immigrant walked side by side confidently, as if they might have been accepted in the ark.

Of course, it all took a long time; it took years and years. Victor began as an office boy with a hole in his sock. Like the immigrants of an earlier generation, he had released great stores of energy and naïveness through the act of expatriation. He worked cheerfully all day. He stayed cheerfully at night to decorate the showcases in the waiting room. He seemed to have no home to go to. His eagerness reminded Mr. Hatherly, happily, of the apprentices of his own youth. There was little enough in business that did remind him of the past. He kept Victor in his place for a year or two, speaking to him harshly if he spoke to him at all. Then in his crabbed and arbitrary way he began to instruct Victor in the role of an heir. Victor was sent on the road for six months. After this he worked in the Rhode Island mills. He spent a season in the advertising department and another in the sales division. His position in the business was difficult to assess, but his promotions in Mr. Hatherly’s esteem were striking. Mr. Hatherly was sensitive about the odd figure he cut, and disliked going anywhere alone. When Victor had worked with him for a few years, he was ordered to get to the old man’s apartment, on upper Fifth Avenue, at eight each morning and walk him to work. They never talked much along the way, but then Hatherly was not loquacious. At the close of the business day, Victor either put him into a taxi or walked him home. When the old man went off to Bar Harbor without his eyeglasses, it was Victor who got up in the middle of the night and put the glasses on the early-morning plane. When the old man wanted to send a wedding present, it was Victor who bought it. When the old man was ailing, it was Victor who got him to take his medicine. In the gossip of the trade Victor’s position was naturally the target for a lot of jocularity, criticism, and downright jealousy. Much of the criticism was unfair, for he was merely an ambitious young man who expressed his sense of business enterprise by feeding pills to Mr. Hatherly. Running through all his amenability was an altogether charming sense of his own identity. When he felt that he had grounds for complaint, he said so. After working for eight years under Mr. Hatherly’s thumb, he went to the old man and said that he thought his salary was inadequate. The old man rallied with a masterful blend of injury, astonishment, and tenderness. He took Victor to his tailor and let him order four suits. A few months later, Victor again complained—this time about the vagueness of his position in the firm. He was hasty, the old man said, in objecting to his lack of responsibility. He was scheduled to make a presentation, in a week or two, before the board of directors. This was more than Victor had expected, and he was content. Indeed, he was grateful. This was America! He worked hard over his presentation. He read it aloud to the old man, and Mr. Hatherly instructed him when to raise and when to lower his voice, whose eye to catch and whose to evade, when to strike the table and when to pour himself a glass of water. They discussed the clothing that he would wear. Five minutes before the directors’ meeting began, Mr. Hatherly seized the papers, slammed the door in Victor’s face, and made the presentation himself.

He called Victor into his office at the end of that trying day. It was past six, and the secretaries had locked up their teacups and gone home. “I’m sorry about the presentation,” the old man mumbled. His voice was heavy. Then Victor saw that he had been crying. The old man slipped off the high desk chair that he used to increase his height and walked around the large office. This was, in itself, a demonstration of intimacy and trust. “But that isn’t what I want to talk about,” he said. “I want to talk about my family. Oh, there’s no misery worse than bad blood in a family! My wife”—he spoke with disgust—“is a stupid woman. The hours of pleasure I’ve had from my children I can count on the fingers of one hand. It may be my fault,” he said, with manifest insincerity. “What I want you to do now is to help me with my boy, Junior. I’ve brought Junior up to respect money. I made him earn every nickel he got until he was sixteen, so it isn’t my fault that he’s a damn fool with money, but he is. I just don’t have the time to bother with his bad checks any more. I’m a busy man. You know that. What I want you to do is act as Junior’s business adviser. I want you to pay his rent, pay his alimony, pay his maid, pay his household expenses, and give him a cash allowance once a week.”

For a moment, anyhow, Victor seemed to breathe the freshness of a considerable skepticism. He had been cheated, that afternoon, out of a vital responsibility and was being burdened now with a foolish one. The tears could be hypocritical. The fact that this request was made to him in a building that had been emptied and was unnaturally quiet and at a time of day when the fading light outside the windows might help to bend his decision were all tricks in the old man’s hand. But, even seen skeptically, the hold that Hatherly had on him was complete. “Mr. Hatherly told me to tell you,” Victor could always say. “I come from Mr. Hatherly.” “Mr. Hatherly …” Without this coupling of names his own voice would sound powerless. The comfortable and becoming shirt whose cuffs he shot in indecision had been given to him by Mr. Hatherly. Mr. Hatherly had introduced him into the 7th Regiment. Mr. Hatherly was his only business identity, and to separate himself from this source of power might be mortal. He didn’t reply.

“I’m sorry about the presentation,” the old man repeated. “I’ll see that you make one next year. Promise.” He gave his shoulders a hitch to show that he was moving on from this subject to another. “Meet me at the Metropolitan Club tomorrow at two,” he said briskly. “I have to buy out Worden at lunch. That won’t take long. I hope he brings his lawyer with him. Call his lawyer in the morning and make sure that his papers are in order. Give him hell for me. You know how to do it. You’ll help me a great deal by taking care of Junior,” he said with great feeling. “And take care of yourself, Victor. You’re all I have.”

After lunch the next day, the old man’s lawyer met them at the Metropolitan Club and went with them to an apartment, where Junior was waiting. He was a thickset man a good ten years older than Victor, and he seemed resigned to having his income taken out of his hands. He called Mr. Hatherly Poppa and sadly handed over to his father a bundle of unpaid bills. With Victor and the lawyer, Mr. Hatherly computed Junior’s income and his indebtedness, took into consideration his alimony payments, and arrived at a reasonable estimate for his household expenses and the size of his allowance, which he was to get at Victor’s office each Monday morning. Junior’s goose was cooked in half an hour.

He came around for his allowance every Monday morning and submitted his household bills to Victor. He sometimes hung around the office and talked about his father—uneasily, as if he might be overheard. All the minutiae of Mr. Hatherly’s life—that he was sometimes shaved three times a day and that he owned fifty pairs of shoes—interested Victor. It was the old man who cut these interviews short. “Tell him to come in and get his money and go,” the old man said. “This is a business office. That’s something he’s never understood.”

Meanwhile, Victor had met Theresa and was thinking of getting married. Her full name was Theresa Mercereau; her parents were French but she had been born in the United States. Her parents had died when she was young, and her guardian had put her into fourth-string boarding schools. One knows what these places are like. The headmaster resigns over the Christmas holidays. He is replaced by the gymnastics instructor. The heating plant breaks down in February and the water pipes freeze. By this time, most of the parents who are concerned about their children have transferred them to other schools, and by spring there are only twelve or thirteen boarders left. They wander singly or in pairs around the campus, killing time before supper. It has been apparent to them for months that Old Palfrey Academy is dying, but in the first long, bleakly lighted days of spring this fact assumes new poignancy and force. The noise of a quarrel comes from the headmaster’s quarters, where the Latin instructor is threatening to sue for back wages. The smell from the kitchen windows indicates that there will be cabbage again. A few jonquils are in bloom, and the lingering light and the new ferns enjoin the stranded children to look ahead, ahead, but at the back of their minds there is a suspicion that the jonquils and the robins and the evening star imperfectly conceal the fact that this hour is horror, naked horror. Then a car roars up the driveway. “I am Mrs. Hubert Jones,” a woman exclaims, “and I have come to get my daughter …” Theresa was always one of the last to be rescued, and these hours seemed to have left some impression on her. It was the quality of an especial sadness, a delicacy that was never forlorn, a charming air of having been wronged, that one remembered about her.

That winter, Victor went to Florida with Mr. Hatherly to hoist his beach umbrella and play rummy with him, and while they were there he said that he wanted to get married. The old man yelled his objections. Victor stood his ground. When they returned to New York, the old man invited Victor to bring Theresa to his apartment one evening. He greeted the young woman with great cordiality and then introduced her to Mrs. Hatherly—a wasted and nervous woman who kept her hands at her mouth. The old man began to prowl around the edges of the room. Then he disappeared. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Hatherly whispered. “He’s going to give you a present.” He returned in a few minutes and hung a string of amethysts around Theresa’s beautiful neck. Once the old man had accepted her, he seemed happy about the marriage. He made all the arrangements for the wedding, of course, told them where to go for a honeymoon, and rented and furnished an apartment for them one day between a business lunch and a plane to California. Theresa seemed, like her husband, to be able to accommodate his interference. When her first child was born, she named it Violet—this was her own idea—after Mr. Hatherly’s sainted mother.

When the Mackenzies gave a party, in those years, it was usually because Mr. Hatherly had told them to give a party. He would call Victor into his office at the end of the day, tell him to entertain, and set a date. He would order the liquor and the food, and overhaul the guest list with the Mackenzies’ business and social welfare in mind. He would rudely refuse an invitation to come to the party himself, but he would appear before any of the guests, carrying a bunch of flowers that was nearly as tall as he was. He would make sure that Theresa put the flowers in the right vase. Then he would go into the nursery and let Violet listen to his watch. He would go through the apartment, moving a lamp here or an ashtray there and giving the curtains a poke. By this time the Mackenzies’ guests would have begun to arrive, but Mr. Hatherly would show no signs of going. He was a distinguished old man and everyone liked to talk with him. He would circle the room, making sure that all the glasses were filled, and if Victor told an anecdote the chances were that Mr. Hatherly had drilled him in how to tell it. When the supper was served, the old man would be anxious about the food and the way the maid looked.

He was always the last to go. When the other guests had said good night, he would settle down and all three would have a glass of milk and talk about the evening. Then the old man would seem happy—with a kind of merriment that his enemies would never have believed him capable of. He would laugh until the tears rolled down his cheeks. He sometimes took off his boots. The small room seemed to be the only room in which he was content, but it must always have been at the back of Mr. Hatherly’s mind that these young people were in substance nothing to him, and that it was because his own flesh and blood had been such a bitter disappointment that he found himself in so artificial a position. At last he would get up to go. Theresa would straighten the knot in his tie, brush the crumbs off his vest, and bend down to be kissed. Victor would help him into his fur coat. All three of them would be deep in the tenderness of a family parting. “Take good care of yourselves,” the old man would mumble. “You’re all I have.”

One night, after a party at the Mackenzies, Mr. Hatherly died in his sleep. The funeral was in Worcester, where he was born. The family seemed inclined to keep the arrangements from Victor, but he found out what they were easily enough, and went, with Theresa, to the church and the cemetery. Old Mrs. Hatherly and her unhappy children gathered at the edge of the grave. They must have watched the old man’s burial with such conflicting feelings that it would be impossible to extricate from the emotional confusion anything that could be named. “Goodbye, goodbye,” Mrs. Hatherly called, halfheartedly, across the earth, and her hands flew to her lips—a habit that she had never been able to break, although the dead man had often threatened to strike her for it. If the full taste of grief is a privilege, this was now the privilege of the Mackenzies. They were crushed. Theresa had been too young when her parents died for her to have, as a grown person, any clear memories of grieving for them, and Victor’s parents—whoever they were—had died a few years back, in England or Scotland, and it seemed at Hatherly’s grave that she and Victor were in the throes of an accrual of grief and that they were burying more than the bones of one old man. The real children cut the Mackenzies.

The Mackenzies were indifferent to the fact that they were not mentioned in Mr. Hatherly’s will. A week or so after the funeral, the directors elected Junior to the presidency of the firm, and one of the first things he did was to fire Victor. He had been compared with this industrious immigrant for years, and his resentment was understandable and deep. Victor found another job, but his intimate association with Mr. Hatherly was held against him in the trade. The old man had a host of enemies, and Victor inherited them all. He lost his new job after six or eight months, and found another that he regarded as temporary—an arrangement that would enable him to meet his monthly bills while he looked around for something better. Nothing better turned up. He and Theresa gave up the apartment that Mr. Hatherly had taken for them, sold all their furniture, and moved around from place to place, but all this—the ugly rooms they lived in, the succession of jobs that Victor took—is not worth going into. To put it simply, the Mackenzies had some hard times; the Mackenzies dropped out of sight.

THE SCENE CHANGES to a fund-raising party for the Girl Scouts of America, in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It is a black-tie dance in a large house—Salisbury Hall—that has been picked by the dance committee with the hope that idle curiosity about this edifice will induce a lot of people to buy the twenty-five-dollar tickets. Mrs. Brownlee, the nominal hostess, is the widow of a pioneer steel magnate. Her house is strung for half a mile along the spine of one of the Allegheny hills. Salisbury Hall is a castle, or, rather, a collection of parts of castles and houses. There is a tower, a battlement, and a dungeon, and the postern gate is a reproduction of the gate at Château Gaillard. The stones and timber for the Great Hall and the armory were brought from abroad. Like most houses of its kind, Salisbury Hall presents insuperable problems of maintenance. Touch a suit of chain mail in the armory and your hand comes away black with rust. The copy of a Mantegna fresco in the ballroom is horribly stained with water. But the party is a success. A hundred couples are dancing. The band is playing a rhumba. The Mackenzies are here.

Theresa is dancing. Her hair is still fair—it may be dyed by now—and her arms and her shoulders are still beautiful. The air of sadness, of delicacy, still clings to her. Victor is not on the dance floor. He is in the orangery, where watery drinks are being sold. He pays for four drinks, walks around the edge of the crowded dance floor, and goes through the armory, where a stranger stops to ask him a question. “Why, yes,” Victor says courteously, “I do happen to know about it. It’s a suit of mail that was made for the coronation of Philip II. Mr. Brownlee had it copied …” He continues along another quarter of a mile of halls and parlors, through the Great Hall, to a small parlor, where Mrs. Brownlee is sitting with some friends. “Here’s Vic with our drinks!” she cries. Mrs. Brownlee is an old lady, plucked and painted and with her hair dyed an astonishing shade of pink. Her fingers and her forearms are loaded with rings and bracelets. Her diamond necklace is famous. So, indeed, are most of her jewels—most of them have names. There are the Taphir emeralds, the Bertolotti rubies, and the Demidoff pearls, and, feeling that a look at this miscellany should be included in the price of admission, she has loaded herself unsparingly for the benefit of the Girl Scouts. “Everybody’s having a good time, aren’t they, Vic?” she asks. “Well, they should be having a good time. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. Sit down, Vic,” she says. “Sit down. Give yourself a little rest. I don’t know what I’d do without you and Theresa.” But Victor doesn’t have time to sit down. He has to run the raffle. He goes back through the Great Hall, the Venetian Salon, and the armory, to the ballroom. He climbs onto a chair. There is a flourish of music. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he calls through a megaphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention for a few minutes …” He raffles off a case of Scotch, a case of bourbon, a Waring mixer, and a power lawn mower. When the raffle is over and the dancing begins again, he goes out onto the terrace for a breath of air, and we follow him and speak to him there.

“Victor?”

“Oh, how nice to see you again,” he exclaims. “What in the world are you doing in Pittsburgh?” His hair has grayed along conventionally handsome lines. He must have had some work done on his teeth, because his smile is whiter and more dazzling than ever. The talk is the conversation of acquaintances who have not met for ten or fifteen years—it has been that long—about this and that, then about Theresa, then about Violet. At the mention of Violet, he seems very sad. He sets the megaphone on the stone terrace and leans on its metal rim. He bows his head. “Well, Violet is sixteen now, you know,” he says. “She’s given me a lot to worry about. She was suspended from school about six weeks ago. Now I’ve got her into a new school in Connecticut. It took a lot of doing.” He sniffs.

“How long have you been in Pittsburgh, Victor?”

“Eight years,” he says. He swings the megaphone, into the air and peers through it at a star. “Nine, actually,” he says.

“What are you doing, Victor?”

“I’m between jobs now.” He lets the megaphone fall.

“Where are you living, Victor?”

“Here,” he says.

“I know. But where in Pittsburgh?”

“Here,” he says. He laughs. “We live here. At Salisbury Hall. Here’s the head of the dance committee, and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll make my report on the raffle. It’s been very nice to see you again.”

ANYONE—ANYONE, that is, who did not eat peas off a knife—might have been invited to Salisbury Hall when the Mackenzies first went there. They had only just arrived in Pittsburgh, and were living in a hotel. They drove out with some friends for a weekend. There were fourteen or fifteen guests in the party, and Prescott Brownlee, the old lady’s eldest son. There was some trouble before dinner. Prescott got drunk at a roadhouse near the estate, and the bartender called Mrs. Brownlee and told her to have him removed before he called the police. The old lady was used to this kind of trouble. Her children were in it most of the time, but that afternoon she did not know where to turn for help. Nils, the houseman, hated Prescott. The gardener had gone home. Ernest, the butler, was too old. Then she remembered Victor’s face, although she had only glimpsed it in the hall when they were introduced. She found him in the Great Hall and called him aside. He thought he was going to be asked to mix the cocktails. When she made her request, he said that he would be glad to help. He drove to the roadhouse, where he found Prescott sitting at a table. Someone had given him a bloody nose, and his clothing was splattered with blood, but he was still pugnacious, and when Victor told him to come home, he got up swinging. Victor knocked him down. This subdued Prescott, who began to cry and stumbled obediently out to the car. Victor returned to Salisbury Hall by a service driveway. Then, supporting Prescott, who could not walk, he got him into a side door that opened into the armory. No one saw them. The air in the unheated room was harsh and bitter. Victor pushed the sobbing drunk under the rags of royal battle flags and pennants that hung from the rafters and past a statue of a man on horseback that displayed a suit of equestrian armor. He got Prescott up a marble staircase and put him to bed. Then he brushed the sawdust off his own evening clothes and went down to the Great Hall and made the cocktails.

He didn’t mention this incident to anyone—not even to Theresa—and on Sunday afternoon Mrs. Brownlee took him aside again, to thank him. “Oh, bless your heart, Mr. Mackenzie!” she said. “You’re a good Samaritan. When that man called me up yesterday, I didn’t know where to turn.” They heard someone approaching across the Great Hall. It was Prescott. He had shaved, dressed his wounds, and soaked his hair down with water, but he was drunk again. “Going to New York,” he mumbled to his mother. “Ernest’s going to drive me to the plane. See you.” He turned and wandered back across the library into the Venetian Salon and out of sight, and his mother set her teeth as she watched him go. Then she seized Victor’s hand and said, “I want you and your lovely wife to come and live at Salisbury Hall. I know that you’re living in a hotel. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. You’ll be doing me a favor. That’s what it amounts to,”

The Mackenzies gracefully declined her offer and returned to Pittsburgh on Sunday night. A few days later, the old lady, hearing that Theresa was sick in bed, sent flowers, and a note repeating her invitation. The Mackenzies discussed it that night. “We must think of it as a business arrangement, if we think of it at all,” Victor said. “We must think of it as the practical answer to a practical problem.” Theresa had always been frail, and living in the country would be good for her. This was the first thing they thought of. Victor had a job in town, but he could commute from the railroad station nearest Salisbury Hall. They talked with Mrs. Brownlee again and got her to agree to accept from them what they would have paid for rent and food, so that the arrangement would be kept impersonal. Then they moved into a suite of rooms above the Great Hall.

It worked out very well. Their rooms were large and quiet, and the relationship with Mrs. Brownlee was easygoing. Any sense of obligation they may have felt was dispelled by their knowing that they were useful to their hostess in a hundred ways. She needed a man around the place, and who else would want to live in Salisbury Hall? Except for gala occasions, more than half the rooms were shut, and there were not enough servants to intimidate the rats that lived in the basement. Theresa undertook the herculean task of repairing Mrs. Brownlee’s needlepoint; there were eighty-six pieces. The tennis court at Salisbury Hall had been neglected since the war, and Victor, on his weekends, weeded and rolled it and got it in shape again. He absorbed a lot of information about Mrs. Brownlee’s house and her scattered family, and when she was too tired to take interested guests around the place, he was always happy to. “This hall,” he would say, “was removed panel by panel and stone by stone from a Tudor house near the cathedral in Salisbury…. The marble floor is part of the lobby floor of the old First National Bank…. Mr. Brownlee gave Mrs. Brownlee the Venetian Salon as a birthday present, and these four columns of solid onyx came from the ruins of Herculaneum. They were floated down Lake Erie from Buffalo to Ashtabula….” Victor could also point out the scar on a tree where Spencer Brownlee had wrecked his car, and the rose garden that had been planted for Hester Brownlee when she was so sick. We have seen how helpful he was on occasions like the dance for the Girl Scout fund.

Violet was away in camps and schools. “Why do you live here?” she asked the first time she came to visit her parents in Salisbury Hall. “What a moldy old wreck! What a regular junk heap!” Mrs. Brownlee may have heard Violet laughing at her house. In any event, she took a violent dislike to the Mackenzies’ only child, and Violet’s visits were infrequent and brief. The only one of Mrs. Brownlee’s children who returned from time to time was Prescott. Then, one evening not long after the Girl Scout dance, Mrs. Brownlee got a wire from her daughter Hester, who had been living in Europe for fifteen years. She had arrived in New York and was coming on to Pittsburgh the following day.

Mrs. Brownlee told the Mackenzies the good news at dinner. She was transported. “Oh, you’ll love Hester,” she said. “You’ll both love her! She was always just like Dresden china. She was sickly when she was a child and I guess that’s why she’s always been my favorite. Oh, I hope she’ll stay! I wish there was time to have her rooms painted! You must urge her to stay, Victor. It would make me so happy. You urge her to stay. I think she’ll like you.”

Mrs. Brownlee’s words echoed through a dining room that had the proportions of a gymnasium; their small table was pushed against a window and separated from the rest of the room by a screen, and the Mackenzies liked to have dinner there. The window looked down the lawns and stairways to the ruin of a formal garden. The iron lace on the roof of the broken greenhouses, the noise of the fountains whose basins were disfigured and cracked, the rattle of the dumbwaiter that brought their tasteless dinner up from the basement kitchens, where the rats lived—the Mackenzies regarded all this foolishness with the deepest respect, as if it had some genuine significance. They may have suffered from an indiscriminate sense of the past or from an inability to understand that the past plays no part in our happiness. A few days earlier, Theresa had stumbled into a third-floor bedroom that was full of old bon-voyage baskets—gilded, and looped with dog-eared ribbons—that had been saved from Mrs. Brownlee’s many voyages.

While Mrs. Brownlee talked about Hester that evening, she kept her eye on the garden and saw, in the distance, a man climbing over one of the marble walls. Then a girl handed him down a blanket, a picnic hamper, and a bottle, and jumped into his arms. They were followed by two more couples. They settled themselves in the Temple of Love and, gathering a pile of broken latticework, built a little fire.

“Drive them away, Victor,” Mrs. Brownlee said.

Victor left the table and crossed the terrace and went down to the garden and told the party to go.

“I happen to be a very good friend of Mrs. Brownlee’s,” one of the men said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Victor said. “You’ll have to get out.”

“Who says so?”

“I say so.”

“Who are you?”

Victor didn’t answer. He broke up their fire and stamped out the embers. He was outnumbered and outweighed, and he knew that if it came to a fight, he would probably get hurt, but the smoke from the extinguished fire drove the party out of the temple and gave Victor an advantage. He stood on a flight of steps above them and looked at his watch. “I’ll give you five minutes to get over the wall and out,” he said.

“But I’m a friend of Mrs. Brownlee’s!”

“If you’re a friend of Mrs. Brownlee’s,” Victor said, “come in the front way. I give you five minutes.” They started down the path toward the wall, and Victor waited until one of the girls—they were all pretty—had been hoisted over it. Then he went back to the table and finished his dinner while Mrs. Brownlee talked on and on about Little Hester.

The next day was Saturday, but Victor spent most of it in Pittsburgh, looking for work. He didn’t get out to Salisbury Hall until about four, and he was hot and dirty. When he stepped into the Great Hall, he saw that the doors onto the terrace were open and the florist’s men were unloading a truck full of tubbed orange trees. A maid came up to him excitedly. “Nils is sick and can’t drive!” she exclaimed. “Mrs. Brownlee wants you to go down to the station and meet Miss Hester. You’d better hurry. She’s coming on the four-fifteen. She doesn’t want you to take your car. She wants you to take the Rolls-Royce. She says you have permission to take the Rolls-Royce.”

The four-fifteen had come and gone by the time Victor arrived at the station. Hester Brownlee was standing in the waiting room, surrounded by her luggage. She was a middle-aged woman who had persevered with her looks, and might at a distance have seemed pretty. “How do you do, Miss Brownlee?” Victor said. “I’m Victor Mackenzie. I’m—”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve heard all about you from Prescott.” She looked past his shoulder. “You’re late.”

“I’m sorry,” Victor said, “but your mother—”

“These are my bags,” she said. She walked out to the Rolls-Royce and got into the back seat.

Victor lighted a cigarette and smoked it halfway down. Then he carried her bags out to the car and started home to Salisbury Hall along a back road.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Miss Brownlee called. “Don’t you even know the way?”

“I’m not going the usual way,” Victor said patiently, “but a few years ago they built a factory down the road, and the traffic is heavy around closing time. It’s quicker this way. But I expect that you’ll find a good many changes in the neighborhood. How long has it been, Miss Brownlee, since you’ve seen Salisbury Hall?” There was no answer to his question, and, thinking that she might not have heard him, he asked again, “How long has it been, Miss Brownlee, since you’ve seen Salisbury Hall?”

They made the rest of the trip in silence. When they got to the house, Victor unloaded her bags and stood them by the door. Miss Brownlee counted them aloud. Then she opened her purse and handed Victor a quarter. “Why, thank you!” Victor said. “Thank you very much!” He went down into the garden to walk off his anger. He decided not to tell Theresa about this meeting. Finally, he went upstairs. Theresa was at work on one of the needlepoint stools. The room they used for a parlor was cluttered with half-repaired needlepoint. She embraced Victor tenderly, as she always did when they had been separated for a day. Victor had dressed when a maid knocked on the door. “Mrs. Brownlee wants to see you, both of you,” she said. “She’s in the office. At once.”

Theresa clung to Victor’s arm as they went downstairs. The office, a cluttered and dirty room beside the elevator, was brightly lighted. Mrs. Brownlee, in grande tenue, sat at her husband’s desk. “You’re the straw that broke the camel’s back—both of you,” she said harshly when they came in. “Shut the door. I don’t want everybody to hear me. Little Hester has come home for the first time in fifteen years, and the first thing she gets off the train, you have to insult her. For nine years, you’ve had the privilege of living in this beautiful house—a wonder of the world—and how do you repay me? Oh, it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back! Prescott’s told me often enough that you weren’t any good, either of you, and Hester feels the same way, and gradually I’m beginning to see it myself.”

The harried and garishly painted old lady wielded over the Mackenzies the power of angels. Her silver dress glittered like St. Michael’s raiment, and thunder and lightning, death and destruction, were in her right hand. “Everybody’s been warning me about you for years,” she said. “And you may not mean to do wrong—you may just be unlucky—but one of the first things Hester noticed is that half the needlepoint is missing. You’re always repairing the chair that I want to sit down in. And you, Victor—you told me that you fixed the tennis court, and, of course, I don’t know about that because I can’t play tennis, but when I asked the Beardons over to play tennis last week, they told me that the court wasn’t fit to play on, and you can imagine how embarrassed I was, and those people you drove out of the garden last night turned out to be the children of a very dear friend of the late Mr. Brownlee’s. And you’re two weeks behind with your rent.”

“I’ll send you the rent,” Victor said. “We will go.”

Theresa had not taken her arm out of his during the interview, and they left the office together. It was raining, and Ernest was putting out pails in the Venetian Salon, where the domed ceiling had sprung a leak. “Could you help me with some suitcases?” Victor asked. The old butler must have overheard the interview, because he didn’t answer.

There was in the Mackenzies’ rooms an accumulation of sentimental possessions—photographs, pieces of silver, and so forth. Theresa hastily began to gather these up. Victor went down to the basement and got their bags. They packed hurriedly—they did not even stop to smoke a cigarette—but it took them most of the evening. When they had finished, Theresa stripped the bed and put the soiled towels into a hamper, and Victor carried the bags down. He wrote a postcard to Violet’s school, saying that his address was no longer Salisbury Hall. He waited for Theresa by the front door. “Oh, my darling, where will we go?” she murmured when she met him there. She waited in the rain for him to bring their car around, and they drove away, and God knows where they did go after that.

GOD KNOWS where they went after that, but for our purposes they next appeared, years later, at a resort on the coast of Maine called Horsetail Beach. Victor had some kind of job in New York, and they had driven to Maine for his vacation. Violet was not with them. She had married and was living in San Francisco. She had a baby. She did not write to her parents, and Victor knew that she thought of him with bitter resentment, although he did not know why. The waywardness of their only child troubled Victor and Theresa, but they could seldom bring themselves to discuss it. Helen Jackson, their hostess at Horsetail Beach, was a spirited young woman with four children. She was divorced. Her house was tracked with sand, and most of the furniture was broken. The Mackenzies arrived there on a stormy evening when the north wind blew straight through the walls of the house. Their hostess was out to dinner, and as soon as they arrived, the cook put on her hat and coat and went off to the movies, leaving them in charge of the children. They carried their bags upstairs, stepping over several wet bathing suits, put the four children to bed, and settled themselves in a cold guest room.

In the morning, their hostess asked them if they minded if she drove into Camden to get her hair washed. She was giving a cocktail party for the Mackenzies that afternoon, although it was the cook’s day off. She promised to be back by noon, and when she had not returned by one, Theresa cooked lunch. At three, their hostess telephoned from Camden to say that she had just left the hairdresser’s and would Theresa mind getting a head start with the canapés? Theresa made the canapés. Then she swept the sand out of the living room and picked up the wet bathing suits. Helen Jackson finally returned from Camden, and the guests began to arrive at five. It was cold and stormy. Victor shivered in his white silk suit. Most of the guests were young, and they refused cocktails and drank ginger ale, gathered around the piano, and sang. It was not the Mackenzies’ idea of a good party. Helen Jackson tried unsuccessfully to draw them into the circle of hearty, if meaningless, smiles, salutations, and handshakes upon which that party, like every other, was rigged. The guests all left at half past six, and the Mackenzies and their hostess made a supper of leftover canapés. “Would you mind dreadfully taking the children to the movies?” Helen Jackson asked Victor. “I promised them they could go to the movies if they were good about the party, and they’ve been perfect angels, and I hate to disappoint them, and I’m dead myself.”

The next morning, it was still raining. Victor could see by his wife’s face that the house and the weather were a drain on her strength. Most of us are inured to the inconveniences of a summer house in a cold rain, but Theresa was not. The power that the iron bedsteads and the paper window curtains had on her spirit was out of proportion, as if these were not ugly objects in themselves but threatened to overwhelm her common sense. At breakfast, their hostess suggested that they take a drive in the rain. “I know that it’s vile out,” she said, “but you could drive to Camden, and it’s a way of killing time, isn’t it, and you go through a lot of enchanting little villages, and if you did go down to Camden, you could go to the rental library and get The Silver Chalice. They’ve been reserving it for days and days, and I never find the time to get it. The rental library is on Estrella Lane.” The Mackenzies drove to Camden and got The Silver Chalice. When they returned, there was another chore for Victor. The battery in Helen Jackson’s car was dead. He took it to the garage and got a rental battery and installed it. Then, in spite of the weather, he tried to go swimming, but the waves were high and full of gravel, and after diving once he gave up and went back to the house. When he walked into the guest room in his wet bathing trunks, Theresa raised her face and he saw that it was stained with tears. “Oh, my darling,” she said, “I’m homesick.”

It was, even for Victor, a difficult remark to interpret. Their only home then was a one-room apartment in the city, which, with its kitchenette and studio couch, seemed oddly youthful and transitory for these grandparents. If Theresa was homesick, it could only be for a collection of parts of houses. She must have meant something else.

“Then we’ll go,” he said. “We’ll leave the first thing in the morning.” And then, seeing how happy his words had made her, he went on. “We’ll get into the car and we’ll drive and we’ll drive and we’ll drive. We’ll go to Canada.”

When they told Helen Jackson, at dinner, that they were leaving in the morning, she seemed relieved. She got out a road map and marked with a pencil the best route up through the mountains to Ste. Marie and the border. The Mackenzies packed after dinner and left early in the morning. Helen came out to the driveway to say goodbye. She was wearing her wrapper and carrying a silver coffeepot. “It’s been perfectly lovely to have you,” she said, “even if the weather has been so vile and disagreeable and horrid, and since you’ve decided to go through Ste. Marie, would you mind terribly stopping for a minute and returning Aunt Marly’s silver coffeepot? I borrowed it years ago, and she’s been writing me threatening letters and telephoning, and you can just leave it on the doorstep and run. Her name is Mrs. Sauer. The house is near the main road.” She gave the Mackenzies some sketchy directions, kissed Theresa, and handed her the coffeepot. “It’s been simply wonderful having you,” she called as they drove away.

The waves at Horsetail Beach were still high and the wind was cold when the Mackenzies turned their back on the Atlantic Ocean. The noise and the smell of the sea faded. Inland, the sky seemed to be clearing. The wind was westerly and the overcast began to be displaced with light and motion. The Mackenzies came into hilly farmland. It was country they had never seen before, and as the massive clouds broke and the dilated light poured onto it, Theresa felt her spirits rising. She felt as if she were in a house on the Mediterranean, opening doors and windows. It was a house that she had never been in. She had only seen a picture of it, years ago, on a postcard. The saffron walls of the house continued straight down into the blue water, and all the doors and windows were shut. Now she was opening them. It was at the beginning of summer. She was opening doors and windows, and, leaning into the light from one of the highest, she saw a single sail, disappearing in the direction of Africa, carrying the wicked King away. How else could she account for the feeling of perfect contentment that she felt? She sat in the car with her arm and her shoulder against her husband’s, as she always did. As they came into the mountains, she noticed that the air seemed cooler and lighter, but the image of opening doors and windows—doors that stuck at the sill, shuttered windows, casement windows, windows with sash weights, and all of them opening onto the water—stayed in her mind until they came down, at dusk, into the little river resort of Ste. Marie.

“God damn that woman,” Victor said; Mrs. Sauer’s house was not where Helen Jackson had said it would be. If the coffeepot had not looked valuable, he would have thrown it into a ditch and driven on. They turned up a dirt road that ran parallel to the river, and stopped at a gas station and got out of the car to ask directions. “Sure, sure,” the man said. “I know where the Sauers’ place is. Their landings right across the road, and the boatman was in here a minute ago.” He threw open the screen door and shouted through his hands. “Perley! There’s some people here want to get over to the island.”

“I want to leave something,” Victor said.

“He’ll take you over. It makes a pretty ride this time of day. He don’t have nothing to do. He’s in here talking my ear off most of the time. Perley! Perley!”

The Mackenzies crossed the road with him to where a crooked landing reached into the water. An old man was polishing the brass on a launch. “I’ll take you over and bring you right back,” he said.

“I’ll wait here,” Theresa said.

Trees grew down to the banks on both shores; they touched the water in places. The river at this point was wide, and as it curved between the mountains she could see upstream for miles. The breadth of the view pleased her, and she hardly heard Victor and the boatman talking. “Tell the lady to come,” the old man said.

“Theresa?”

She turned, and Victor gave her a hand into the boat. The old man put a dirty yachting cap on his head, and they started upstream. The current was strong, and the boat moved against it slowly, and at first they could not make out any islands, but then they saw water and light separate from the mainland what they had thought was a peninsula. They passed through some narrows and, swinging around abruptly—it was all strange and new to them—came up to a landing in a cove. Victor followed a path that led from the landing up to an old-fashioned frame camp stained the color of molasses. The arbor that joined the house to the garden was made of cedar posts, from which the bark hung in strips among the roses. Victor rang the bell. An old servant opened the door and led him through the house and out to the porch, where Mrs. Sauer was sitting with some sewing in her lap. She thanked him for bringing the coffeepot and, as he was about to leave, asked him if he were alone.

“Mrs. Mackenzie is with me,” Victor said. “We’re driving to Quebec.”

“Well, as Talbot used to say, the time has come for the drinking to begin,” the old lady said. “If you and your wife would stop long enough to have a cocktail with me, you would be doing me a great favor. That’s what it amounts to.”

Victor got Theresa, who was waiting in the arbor, and brought her to the porch.

“I know how rushed you children always are,” the old lady said. “I know what a kindness it is for you to stop, but Mr. Sauer and I’ve been quite lonely up here this season. Here I sit, hemming curtains for the cook’s room. What a bore!” She held up her sewing and let it fall. “And since you’ve been kind enough to stay for a cocktail, I’m going to ask another favor. I’m going to ask you to mix the cocktails. Agnes, who let you in, usually makes them, and she waters the gin. You’ll find everything in the pantry. Go straight through the dining room.”

Navajo rugs covered the floor of the big living room. The fireplace chimney was made of fieldstone, and fixed to it was, of course, a pair of antlers. At the end of a large and cheerless dining room, Victor found the pantry. The old servant brought him the shaker and the bottles.

“Well, I’m glad you’re staying,” she said. “I knew she was going to ask you. She’s been so lonely this season that I’m worried for her. She’s a lovely person—oh, she’s a lovely person—but she hasn’t been like herself. She begins to drink at about eleven in the morning. Sometimes earlier.” The shaker was a sailing trophy. The heavy silver tray had been presented to Mr. Sauer by his business associates.

When Victor returned to the porch, Theresa was hemming the curtains. “How good it is to taste gin again,” old Mrs. Sauer exclaimed. “I don’t know what Agnes thinks she’s accomplishing by watering the cocktails. She’s a most devoted and useful servant, and I would be helpless without her, but she’s growing old, she’s growing old. I sometimes think she’s lost her mind. She hides the soap chips in the icebox and sleeps at night with a hatchet under her pillow.”

“To what good fortune do we owe this charming visitation?” the old gentleman asked when he joined them. He drew off his gardening gloves and slipped his rose shears into the pocket of his checked coat.

“Isn’t it generous of these children to stop and have a drink with us?” Mrs. Sauer said, when they had been introduced. The old man did not seem surprised at hearing the Mackenzies described as children. “They’ve come from Horsetail Beach and they’re on their way to Quebec.”

“Mrs. Sauer and I have always detested Horsetail Beach,” the old gentleman said. “When do you plan to reach Quebec?”

“Tonight,” Victor said.

“Tonight?” Mrs. Sauer asked.

“I doubt that you can reach Quebec tonight,” the old gentleman said.

“I suppose you can do it,” the old lady said, “the way you children drive, but you’ll be more dead than alive. Stay for dinner. Stay the night.”

“Do stay for dinner,” the old man said.

“You will, won’t you?” Mrs. Sauer said. “I will not take no for an answer! I am old and privileged, and if you say no, I’ll claim to be deaf and pretend not to hear you. And now that you’ve decided to stay, make another round of these delicious cocktails and tell Agnes that you are to have Talbot’s room. Tell her tactfully. She hates guests. Remember that she’s very old.”

Victor carried the sailing trophy back into the house, which, in spite of its many large windows, seemed in the early dark like a cave. “Mrs. Mackenzie and I are staying for dinner and the night,” he told Agnes. “She said that we were to have Talbot’s room.”

“Well, that’s nice. Maybe it will make her happy. She’s had a lot of sorrow in her life. I think it’s affected her mind. I knew she was going to ask you, and I’m glad you can stay. It makes me happy. It’s more dishes to wash and more beds to make, but it’s more—it’s more—”

“It’s more merrier?”

“Oh, that’s it, that’s it.” The old servant shook with laughter. “You remind me a little of Mr. Talbot. He was always making jokes with me when he came out here to mix the cocktails. God have mercy on his soul. It’s hard to realize,” she said sadly.

Walking back through the cavelike living room, Victor could hear Theresa and Mrs. Sauer discussing the night air, and he noticed that the cold air had begun to come down from the mountains. He felt it in the room. There were flowers somewhere in the dark, and the night air had heightened their smell and the smell of the boulders in the chimney, so the room smelled like a cave with flowers in it. “Everyone says that the view looks like Salzburg,” Mrs. Sauer said, “but I’m patriotic and I can’t see that views are improved by such comparisons. They do seem to be improved by good company, however. We used to entertain, but now—”

“Yes, yes,” the old gentleman said, and sighed. He uncorked a bottle of citronella and rubbed his wrists and the back of his neck.

“There!” Theresa said. “The cook’s curtains are done!”

“Oh, how can I thank you!” Mrs. Sauer said. “Now if someone would be kind enough to get my glasses, I could admire your needlework. They’re on the mantelpiece.”

Victor found her glasses—not on the mantelpiece but on a nearby table. He gave them to her and then walked up and down the porch a few times. He managed to suggest that he was no longer a chance guest but had become a member of the family. He sat down on the steps, and Theresa joined him there. “Look at them,” the old lady said to her husband. “Doesn’t it do you good to see, for a change, young people who love one another? … There goes the sunset gun. My brother George bought that gun for the yacht club. It was his pride and his joy. Isn’t it quiet this evening?”

But the tender looks and attitudes that Mrs. Sauer took for pure love were only the attitudes of homeless summer children who had found a respite. Oh, how sweet, how precious the hour seemed to them! Lights burned on another island. Stamped on the twilight was the iron lace of a broken greenhouse roof. What poor magpies. Their ways and airs were innocent; their bones were infirm. Indeed, they impersonated the dead. Come away, come away, sang the wind in the trees and the grass, but it did not sing to the Mackenzies. They turned their heads instead to hear old Mrs. Sauer. “I’m going up to put on my green velvet,” she said, “but if you children don’t feel like dressing …”

Waiting on table that night Agnes thought that she had not seen such a gay dinner in a long time. She heard them go off after dinner to play billiards on the table that had been bought for poor, dead Talbot. A little rain fell, but, unlike the rain at Horsetail Beach, this was a gentle and excursive mountain shower. Mrs. Sauer yawned at eleven, and the game broke up. They said good night in the upstairs hall, by the pictures of Talbot’s crew, Talbot’s pony, and Talbot’s class. “Good night, good night,” Mrs. Sauer exclaimed, and then set her face, determined to overstep her manners, and declared, “I am delighted that you agreed to stay. I can’t tell you how much it means. I’m—” Tears started from her eyes.

“It’s lovely to be here,” Theresa said.

“Good night, children,” Mrs. Sauer said.

“Good night, good night,” Mr. Sauer said.

“Good night,” Victor said.

“Good night, good night,” Theresa said.

“Sleep well,” Mrs. Sauer said. “And pleasant dreams.”

Ten days later, the Sauers were expecting some other guests—some young cousins named Wycherly. They had never been to the house before, and they came up the path late in the afternoon. Victor opened the door to them. “I’m Victor Mackenzie,” he said cheerfully. He wore tennis shorts and a pullover, but when he bent down to pick up a suitcase, his knees creaked loudly: “The Sauers are out driving with my wife,” he explained. “They’ll be back by six, when the drinking begins.” The cousins followed him across the big living room and up the stairs. “Mrs. Sauer is giving you Uncle George’s room,” he said, “because it has the best view and the most hot water. It’s the only room that’s been added to the house since Mr. Sauer’s father built the place in 1903….”

The young cousins did not quite know what to make of him. Was he a cousin himself? an uncle, perhaps? a poor relation? But it was a comfortable house and a brilliant day, and in the end they would take Victor for what he appeared to be, and he appeared to be very happy.