The Stories of John Cheever

The Day the Pig Fell into the Well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was Aunt Martha really wearing corsets?” Joan would ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FALL BEFORE, Joan had married suddenly, and gone out to Minneapolis to live. The marriage did not last. She was in Reno by April, and had her divorce in time to return to Whitebeach Camp for the summer. She was still a pretty girl, with a long face and fair hair. No one had expected her to return, and the things in her room had been scattered. She kept looking for her pictures and her books, her rugs and her chairs. When she joined the others on the porch after supper, she would ask a lot of questions. “Has anyone a match?” “Is there an ashtray over there?” “Is there any coffee left?” “Are we going to have drinks?” “Is there an extra pillow around?” Hartley was the only one to answer her questions kindly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THEN THEY ALL came back. A year later, on a June day when a horse van was bringing the bays up to the Macabit Riding Stable and there were a lot of motorboats on trailers along the road, the Nudds returned. Hartley had a teaching job, so he was there all summer. Randy took two weeks without pay so that he and Pamela and their baby could be there for a month. Joan had not planned to come back; she had gone into partnership with a woman who owned a tearoom at Lake George, but she quarreled with her partner early in this venture, and in June Mr. Nudd drove to the lake and brought her home. Joan had been to a doctor that winter because she had begun to suffer from depressions, and she talked freely about her unhappiness. “You know, I think the trouble with me,” she would say at breakfast, “is that I was so jealous of Hartley when he first went to boarding school. I could have killed him when he came home that year for Christmas, but I repressed all of my animosity …” “Remember that nursemaid, O’Brien?” she would ask at lunch. “Well, I think O’Brien warped my whole outlook on sex. She used to get undressed in the closet, and she beat me once for looking at myself in a mirror when I didn’t have any clothes on. I think she warped my whole outlook …” “I think the trouble with me is that Grandmother was always so strict,” she would say at dinner. “I never had the feeling that I gratified her. I mean, I got such bad marks at school, and she always made me feel so guilty. I think it’s colored my attitude toward other women …” “You know,” she would say on the porch after supper, “I think the whole turning point in my life was that awful Trenchard boy who showed me those pictures when I was only ten …” These recollections brought her a momentary happiness, but half an hour later she would be biting her fingernails. Surrounded all her life by just and kindly people, she was having a hard time finding the causes of her irresolution, and, one by one, she blamed the members of her family, and their friends, and the servants.

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“I’m afraid I can’t ask them to hold dinner,” Mrs. Nudd said.

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

“If you’re late, it won’t matter,” Mrs. Nudd said.

“That’s a beautiful dress,” Pamela said, to end the conversation pleasantly. “Is it new?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had not seen him for years. He was wearing a suit that was too small for him. His face was red. In her shame at having wished a living man dead (for she had never experienced malevolence or bitterness without hurrying to cover it with love, and, among her friends and her family, those who received her warmest generosity were those who excited her impatience and her shame), she went to Russell impulsively and took his hand. Her face shone with tears. “Oh, it was so good of you to come; you were one of his best friends. We’ve missed you, Russell. Come see us. Can you come tomorrow? We’re leaving on Saturday. Come for supper. It will make it seem like old times. Come for supper. We can’t ask Myra and the children because we don’t have a maid this year, but we’d love to see you. Please come.” Russell said that he would.

The next day was windy and clear, with a heartening lightness, a multiplicity of changes in its moods and its lights—a day that belonged half to summer, half to autumn, precisely like the day when the pig had drowned. After lunch, Mrs. Nudd and Pamela went to an auction. The two women had reached a reasonable truce, although Pamela still interfered in the kitchen and looked on Whitebeach Camp impatiently as her just inheritance. Randy, with the best will in the world, had begun to find his wife’s body meager and familiar, his desires as keen as ever, and so he had been unfaithful to her once or twice. There had been accusations, a confession, and a reconciliation, and Pamela liked to talk all this over with Mrs. Nudd, searching, as she said, for “the truth” about men.

Randy had been left with the children that afternoon and had taken them to the beach. He was a loving but impatient father, and from the house he could be heard scolding Binxey. “When I speak to you, Binxey, I don’t speak to you because I want to hear the sound of my own voice, I speak to you because I want you to do what I say!” As Mrs. Nudd had told Russell, they had no maid that summer. Esther was doing the housework. Whenever anyone suggested getting a cleaning woman, Esther would say, “We can’t afford a cleaning woman, and anyhow I don’t have anything to do. I don’t mind doing the housework, only I just wish you all would remember not to track sand into the living room …” Esther’s husband had spent his vacation at Whitebeach Camp, but he had returned to work long since.

Mr. Nudd was sitting on the porch in the hot sun that afternoon when Joan came out to him with a letter in her hand. She smiled uneasily and began to speak in an affected singsong that always irritated her father. “I’ve decided that I won’t drive down with you tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve decided that I’ll stay here for a little while longer, Daddy. After all, there’s nothing for me to do in New York. I have no reason to go down, have I? I wrote to Helen Parker, and she’s going to come up and stay with me, so that I won’t be alone. I have her letter right here. She says that she’d like to come. I thought we would stay here until Christmas. I’ve never been here in the winter before in all these years. We’re going to write a book for children, Helen and I. She’s going to draw the pictures, and I’m going to write the story. Her brother knows a publisher, and he said—”

“Joan, dear, you can’t stay here in the winter.” Mr. Nudd spoke gently.

“Oh, yes I can, yes I can, Daddy,” Joan said. “Helen understands that it isn’t comfortable. I’ve written her all about that. We’re willing to rough it. We can get our own groceries in Macabit. We’ll take turns walking into the village. I’m going to buy some firewood and a lot of canned goods and some—”

“But, Joan, dear, this house wasn’t built to be lived in during the winter. The walls are thin. The water will be turned off.”

“Oh, we don’t care about the water—we’ll get our water out of the lake.”

“Now, Joan, dear, listen to me,” Mr. Nudd said firmly. “You cannot stay here in the winter. You would last about a week. I would have to come up here and get you, and I don’t want to close this house twice.” He had spoken with an edge of impatience, but now reason and affection surged into his voice. “Think of how it would be, dear, with no heat and no water and none of your family.”

“Daddy, I want to stay!” Joan cried. “I want to stay! Please let me stay! I’ve planned it for so long.”

“You’re being ridiculous, Joan,” Mr, Nudd cut in. “This is a summer house.”

“But, Daddy, I’m not asking very much!” Joan cried. “I’m not a child any more. I’m nearly forty years old. I’ve never asked you for anything. You’ve always been so strict. You never let me do what I want.”

“Joan, dear, please try to be reasonable, please at least try to be reasonable, please try and imagine—”

“Esther got everything she wanted. She went to Europe twice; she had that car in college; she had that fur coat.” Suddenly, Joan got down on her knees, and then sat on the floor. The movement was ugly, and it was meant to enrage her father.

“I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay!” she cried.

“Joan, you’re acting like a child!” he shouted. “Get up.”

“I want to act like a child!” she screamed. “I want to act like a child for a little while! Is there anything so terrible about wanting to act like a child for a little while? I don’t have any joy in my life any more. When I’m unhappy, I try to remember a time when I was happy, but I can’t remember a time any more.”

“Joan, get up. Get up on your feet. Get up on your two feet.”

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “It hurts me to stand up—it hurts my legs.”

“Get up, Joan.” He stooped down, and it was an effort for the old man to raise his daughter to her feet. “Oh, my baby, oh, my poor baby!” he said, and he put his arm around her. “Come into the bathroom and I’ll wash your face, you poor baby.” She let him wash her face, and then they had a drink and sat down to a game of checkers.

RUSSELL got to Whitebeach Camp at half past six, and they drank some gin on the porch. The liquor made him garrulous, and he began to talk about his war experiences, but the atmosphere was elastic and forgiving, and he knew that nothing he did there that night would be considered wrong. They went outside again after supper, although it was cool. The clouds had not colored. In the glancing light, the hillside shone like a bolt of velvet. Mrs. Nudd covered her legs with a blanket and looked at the scene. It was the most enduring pleasure of these years. There had been the boom, the crash, the depression, the recession, the malaise of imminent war, the war itself, the boom, the inflation, the recession, the slump, and now there was the malaise again, but none of this had changed a stone or a leaf in the view she saw from her porch.

“You know, I’m thirty-seven years old,” Randy said. He spoke importantly, as if the passage of time over his head was singular, interesting, and a dirty trick. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue. “If I’d gone back to Cambridge for my reunion this year, it would have been my fifteenth.”

“That’s nothing,” Esther said.

“Did you know that the Teeters have bought the old Henderson place?” Mr. Nudd asked. “There’s a man who made a fortune in the war.” He stood, turned the chair he was sitting in upside down, and pounded at the legs with his fist. His cigarette was wet. When he sat down again, the long ash spilled onto his vest.

“Do I look thirty-seven?” Randy asked.

“Do you know that you’ve mentioned the fact that you’re thirty-seven eight times today?” Esther said. “I’ve counted them.”

“How much does it cost to go to Europe in an airplane?” Mr. Nudd asked.

The conversation went from ocean fares to whether it was pleasanter to come into a strange city in the morning or the evening. Then they recalled odd names among the guests who had been at Whitebeach Camp; there had been Mr. and Mrs. Peppercorn, Mr. and Mrs. Starkweather, Mr. and Mrs. Freestone, the Bloods, the Mudds, and the Parsleys.

That late in the season, the light went quickly. It was sunny one minute and dark the next. Macabit and its mountain range were canted against the afterglow, and for a while it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond the mountains, that this was not the end of the world. The wall of pure and brassy light seemed to beat up from infinity. Then the stars came out, the earth rumbled downward, the illusion of an abyss was lost. Mrs. Nudd looked around her, and the time and the place seemed strangely important. This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done well made her sink back in her chair. She squinted the tears out of her eyes. What had made the summer always an island, she thought; what had made it such a small island? What mistakes had they made? What had they done wrong? They had loved their neighbors, respected the force of modesty, held honor above gain. Then where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people who surrounded her seem like the figures in a tragedy?

“Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” she asked. The sky was discolored. Below the black mountains, the lake ran a rough and deadly gray. “Weren’t you playing tennis with Esther, Russell? That was Esther’s tennis summer. Didn’t you win the pig at the fair in Lanchester, Randy? You won it at one of those things where you throw baseballs at a target. You were always such a good athlete.”

They all waited graciously for their turn. They recalled the drowned pig, the launch on Gull Rock, Aunt Martha’s corsets hanging in the window, the fire in the clouds, and the blustering northwest wind. They laughed helplessly at the place where Nora fell down the stairs. Pamela cut in to recall the announcement of her engagement. After this, they recalled how Miss Coolidge had gone upstairs and returned with a briefcase full of music, and, standing by the open door, so that she could get the light, had performed the standard repertoire of the rural Protestant Church. She had sung for more than an hour. They couldn’t stop her. During her recital, Esther and Russell left the porch and went up to the field to bury the drowned pig. It was cool. Esther held a lantern while Russell dug the grave. They had decided then that even if they were in love they could never marry, because he wouldn’t leave Macabit and she would never live there. When they got back to the porch, Miss Coolidge was singing her last selection, and then Russell left and they all went to bed.

The story restored Mrs. Nudd and made her feel that all was well. It had exhilarated the rest, and, talking loudly and laughing, they went into the house. Mr. Nudd lighted a fire and sat down to play checkers with Joan. Mrs. Nudd passed a box of stale candy. It had begun to blow outside, and the house creaked gently, like a hull when the wind takes up the sail. The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone.