The Stories of John Cheever

The Scarlet Moving Van

GOODBYE to the mortal boredom of distributing a skinny chicken to a family of seven and all the other rites of the hill towns. I don’t mean the real hill towns—Assisi or Perugia or Saracinesco, perched on a three-thousand-foot crag, with walls the dispiriting gray of shirt cardboards and mustard lichen blooming on the crooked roofs. The land, in fact, was flat, the houses frame. This was in the eastern United States, and the kind of place where most of us live. It was the unincorporated township of B_________, with a population of perhaps two hundred married couples, all of them with dogs and children, and many of them with servants; it resembled a hill town only in a manner of speaking, in that the ailing, the disheartened, and the poor could not ascend the steep moral path that formed its natural defense, and the moment any of the inhabitants became infected with unhappiness or discontent, they sensed the hopelessness of existing on such a high spiritual altitude, and went to live in the plain. Life was unprecedentedly comfortable and tranquil. B_________ was exclusively for the felicitous. The housewives kissed their husbands tenderly in the morning and passionately at nightfall. In nearly every house there were love, graciousness, and high hopes. The schools were excellent, the roads were smooth, the drains and other services were ideal, and one spring evening at dusk an immense scarlet moving van with gold lettering on its sides came up the street and stopped in the front of the Marple house, which had been empty then for three months.

The gilt and scarlet of the van, bright even in the twilight, was an inspired attempt to disguise the true sorrowfulness of wandering. “We Carry Loads and Part Loads to All Far-Distant Places,” said the gold letters on the sides, and this legend had the effect of a distant train whistle. Martha Folkestone, who lived next door, watched through a window as the portables of her new neighbors were carried across the porch. “That looks like real Chippendale,” she said, “although it’s hard to tell in this light. They have two children. They seem like nice people. Oh, I wish there was something I could bring them to make them feel at home. Do you think they’d like flowers? I suppose we could ask them for a drink. Do you think they’d like a drink? Would you want to go over and ask them if they’d like a drink?”

Later, when the furniture was all indoors and the van had gone, Charlie Folkestone crossed the lawn between the two houses and introduced himself to Peaches and Gee-Gee. This is what he saw. Peaches was peaches—blond and warm, with a low-cut dress and a luminous front. Gee-Gee had been a handsome man, and perhaps still was, although his yellow curls were thin. His face seemed both angelic and menacing. He had never (Charlie learned later) been a boxer, but his eyes were slightly squinted and his square, handsome forehead had the conformation of layers of scar tissue. You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.

They would be delighted to have a drink. They would be right over. Peaches wanted to put on some lipstick and say good night to the children, and then they would be right over. They came right over, and what seemed to be an unusually pleasant evening began. The Folkestones had been worried about who their new neighbors would be, and to find a couple as sympathetic as Gee-Gee and Peaches made them very high-spirited. Like everyone else, they loved to express an opinion about their neighbors, and Gee-Gee and Peaches were, naturally, interested. It was the beginning of a friendship, and the Folkestones overlooked their usual concern with time and sobriety. It got late—it was past midnight—and Charlie did not notice how much whiskey was being poured or that Gee-Gee seemed to be getting drunk. Gee-Gee became very quiet—he dropped out of the conversation—and then he suddenly interrupted Martha in a flat, unpleasant drawl.

“God, but you’re stuffy people,” he said.

“Oh, no, Gee-Gee!” Peaches said. “Not on our first night!”

“You’ve had too much to drink, Gee-Gee,” Charlie said.

“Like hell I have,” said Gee-Gee. He bent over and began to unlace his shoes. “I haven’t had half enough.”

“Please, Gee-Gee, please,” Peaches said.

“I have to teach them, honey,” Gee-Gee said. “They’ve got to learn.”

Then he stood up and, with the cunning and dexterity of a drunk, got out of most of his clothing before anyone could stop him.

“Get out of here,” Charlie said.

“The pleasure’s all mine, neighbor,” said Gee-Gee. He kicked over a hammered-brass umbrella stand on his way out the door.

“Oh, I’m frightfully sorry!” Peaches said, “I feel terribly about this!”

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Martha said. “He’s probably very tired, and we’ve all had too much to drink.”

“Oh, no,” Peaches said. “It always happens. Everywhere. We’ve moved eight times in the last eight years, and there’s never been anyone to say goodbye to us. Not a soul. Oh, he was a beautiful man when I first knew him! You never saw anyone so fine and strong and generous. They called him the Greek God at college. That’s why he’s called Gee-Gee. He was All-America twice, but he was never a money player—he always played straight out of his heart. Everybody loved him. Now it’s all gone, but I tell myself that I once had the love of a good man. I don’t think many women have known that kind of love. Oh, I wish he’d come back. I wish he’d be the way he was. The night before last, when we were packing up the dishes in the old house, he got drunk and I slapped him in the face, and I shouted at him, ‘Come back! Come back! Come back to me, Gee-Gee!’ But he didn’t listen. He didn’t hear me. He doesn’t hear anyone any more—not even the voices of his children. I ask myself every day what I’ve done to be punished so cruelly.”

“I’m sorry, my dear!” Martha said.

“You won’t be around to say goodbye when we go,” Peaches said. “We’ll last a year. You wait and see. Some people have tender farewell parties, but even the garbage man in the last place was glad to see us go.” With a grace and resignation that transcended the ruined evening, she began to gather up the clothing that her husband had scattered on the rug. “Each time we move, I think that the change will be good for him,” she said. “When we got here tonight, it all looked so pretty and quiet that I thought he might change. Well, you don’t have to ask us again. You know what it’s like.”

A FEW DAYS or perhaps a week later, Charlie saw Gee-Gee on the station platform in the morning and saw how completely personable his neighbor was when he was sober. B________ was not an easy place to conquer, but Gee-Gee seemed already to have won the affectionate respect of his neighbors. Charlie could see, as he watched him standing in the sun among the other commuters, that he would be asked to join everything. Gee-Gee greeted Charlie heartily, and there was no trace of the ugliness he had shown that night. Indeed, it was impossible to believe that this charming and handsome man had been so offensive. In the morning light, and surrounded by new friends, he seemed to challenge the memory. He seemed almost able to transfer the blame onto Charlie.

Arrangements for the social initiation of the new couple were unusually rapid and elaborate, and began with a dinner party at the Watermans’. Charlie was already at the party when Gee-Gee and Peaches came in, and they came in like royalty. Arm in arm, radiant and beautiful, they seemed, at the moment of their entrance, to make the evening. It was a large party, and Charlie hardly saw them until they went in to dinner. He sat close to Peaches, but Gee-Gee was at the other end of the table. They were halfway through dessert when Gee-Gee’s flat and unpleasant drawl sounded, like a parade command, over the general conversation.

“What a God-damned bunch of stuffed shirts!” he said. “Let’s put a little vitality into the conversation, shall we?” He sprang onto the center of the table and began to sing a dirty song and dance a jig. Women screamed. Dishes were upset and broken. Dresses were ruined. Peaches pled to her wayward husband. The effect of this outrageous performance was to empty the dining room of everyone but Gee-Gee and Charlie.

“Get down off there, Gee-Gee,” Charlie said.

“I have to teach them,” Gee-Gee said. “I’ve got to teach them.”

“You’re not teaching anybody anything but the fact that you’re rotten drunk.”

“They’ve got to learn,” Gee-Gee said. “I’ve got to teach them.” He got down off the table, breaking a few more dishes, and wandered out into the kitchen, where he embraced the cook, and then went on out into the night.

ONE MIGHT have thought that this was warning enough to a worldly community, but unusual amounts of forgiveness were extended to Gee-Gee. One liked him, and there was always the chance that he might not misbehave. There was always his charming figure in the morning light to confound his enemies, but it began to seem more and more like a lure that would let him into houses where he could break the crockery. Forgiveness was not what he wanted, and if he seemed to have failed at offending the sensibilities of his hostess he would increase and complicate his outrageousness: No one had ever seen anything like it. He undressed at the Bilkers’. At the Levys’ he drop-kicked a bowl of soft cheese onto the ceiling. He danced the Highland fling in his underpants, set fire to wastebaskets, and swung on the Townsends’ chandelier—that famous chandelier. Inside of six weeks, there was not a house in B________ where he was welcome.

The Folkestones still saw him, of course—saw him in his garden in the evening and talked to him across the hedge. Charlie was greatly troubled at the spectacle of someone falling so swiftly from grace, and he would have liked to help. He and Martha talked with Peaches, but Peaches was without hope. She did not understand what had happened to her Adonis, and that was as far as her intelligence took her. Now and then some innocent stranger from the next town or perhaps some newcomer would be taken with Gee-Gee and ask him to dinner. The performance was always the same, the dishes were always broken. The Folkestones were neighbors—there was this ancient bond—and Charlie may have thought that he could save the man. When Gee-Gee and Peaches quarreled, sometimes she telephoned Charlie and asked his protection. He went there one summer evening after she had telephoned. The quarrel was over; Peaches was reading a comic book in the living room, and Gee-Gee was sitting at the dining-room table with a drink in his hand. Charlie stood over his friend.

“Gee-Gee.”

“Yes.”

“Will you go on the wagon?”

“No.”

“Will you go on the wagon if I go on the wagon?”

“No.”

“Will you go to a psychiatrist?”

“Why? I know myself. I only have to play it out.”

“Will you go to a psychiatrist if I go with you?”

“No.”

“Will you do anything to help yourself?”

“I have to teach them.” Then he threw back his head and sobbed, “Oh, Jesus …”

Charlie turned away. It seemed, at that instant, that Gee-Gee had heard, from some wilderness of his own, the noise of a distant horn that prophesied the manner and the hour of his death. There seemed to be some tremendous validity to the drunken man. Folkestone felt an upheaval in his spirit. He felt he understood the drunken man’s message; he had always sensed it. It was at the bottom of their friendship. Gee-Gee was an advocate for the lame, the diseased, the poor, for those who through no fault of their own live out their lives in misery and pain. To, the happy and the wellborn and the rich he had this to say—that for all their affection, their comforts, and their privileges, they would not be spared the pangs of anger and lust and the agonies of death. He only meant for them to be prepared for the blow when the blow fell. But was it not possible to accept this truth without having him dance a jig in your living room? He spoke from some vision of the suffering in life, but was it necessary to suffer oneself in order to accept his message? It seemed so.

“Gee-Gee?” Charlie asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you trying to teach them?”

“You’ll never know. You’re too God-damned stuffy.”

THEY didn’t even last a year. In November, someone made them a decent offer for the house and they sold it. The gold-and-scarlet moving van returned, and they crossed the state line, into the town of Y_________, where they bought another house. The Folkestones were glad to see them go. A well-behaved young couple took their place, and everything was as it had been. They were seldom remembered. But through a string of friends Charlie learned, the following winter, that Gee-Gee had broken his hip playing football a day or two before Christmas. This fact, for some reason, remained with him, and one Sunday afternoon when he had nothing much better to do he got Gee-Gee’s telephone number from Information and called his old neighbor to say that he was coming over for a drink. Gee-Gee roared with enthusiasm and gave Charlie directions for getting to the house.

It was a long drive, and halfway there Charlie wondered why he had undertaken it. Y_________ was several cuts below B________. The house was in a development, and the builder had not stopped at mere ugliness; he had constructed a community that looked, with its rectilinear windows, like a penal colony. The streets were named after universities—Princeton Street, Yale Street, Rutgers Street, and so forth. Only a few of the houses had been sold, and Gee-Gee’s house was surrounded by empty dwellings. Charlie rang the bell and heard Gee-Gee shouting for him to come in. The house was a mess, and as he was taking his coat off, Gee-Gee came slowly down the hall half riding in a child’s wagon, which he propelled by pushing a crutch. His right hip and leg were encased in a massive cast.

“Where’s Peaches?” Charlie asked.

“She’s in Nassau. She and the children went to Nassau for Christmas.”

“And left you alone?”

“I wanted them to go. I made them go. Nothing can be done for me. I get along all right on this wagon. When I’m hungry, I make a sandwich. I wanted them to go. I made them go. Peaches needed a vacation, and I like being alone. Come on into the living room and make me a drink. I can’t get the ice trays out—that’s about the only thing I can’t do. I can shave and get into bed and so forth, but I can’t get the ice trays out.”

Charlie got some ice. He was glad to have something to do. The image of Gee-Gee in his wagon had shocked him, and he felt a terrifying stillness over the place. Out of the kitchen window he could see row upon row of ugly, empty houses. He felt as if some hideous melodrama were approaching its climax. But in the living room Gee-Gee was his most charming, and his smile and his voice gave the afternoon a momentary equilibrium. Charlie asked if Gee-Gee couldn’t get a nurse to stay with him. Couldn’t someone be found to stay with him? Couldn’t he at least rent a wheelchair? Gee-Gee laughed away all these suggestions. He was contented. Peaches had written him from Nassau. They were having a marvelous time.

Charlie believed that Gee-Gee had made them go. It was this detail, above everything else, that gave the situation its horror. Peaches would have liked, naturally enough, to go to Nassau, but she never would have insisted. She was much too innocent to have any envious dreams of travel. Gee-Gee would have insisted that she go; he would have made the trip so tempting that she could not, in her innocence, resist it. Did he wish to be left alone, drunken and crippled, in an isolated house? Did he need to feel abused? It seemed so. The disorder of the house and the image of his wife and children running, running, running on some coral beach seemed like a successful contrivance—a kind of triumph.

Gee-Gee lit a cigarette and, forgetting about it, lit another, and fumbled so clumsily with the matches that Charlie saw that he might easily burn to death. Hoisting himself from the wagon to the chair, he nearly fell, and, if he were alone and fell, he could easily die of hunger and thirst on his own rug. But there might be some drunken cunning in his clumsiness, his playing with fire. He smiled slyly when he saw the look on Charlie’s face. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be all right. I have my guardian angel.”

“That’s what everybody thinks,” Charlie said.

“Oh, but I have.”

Outside, it had begun to snow. The winter sky was overcast, and it would soon be dark. Charlie said that he had to go. “Sit down,” Gee-Gee said. “Sit down and have another drink.” Charlie’s conscience held him there a few moments longer. How could he openly abandon a friend—a neighbor, at least—to the peril of death? But he had no choice; his family was waiting and he had to go. “Don’t worry about me,” Gee-Gee said when Charlie was putting on his coat. “I have my angel.”

It was later than Charlie had realized. The snow was heavy now, and he had a two-hour drive, on winding back roads. There was a little rise going out of Y________, and the new snow was so slick that he had trouble making the hill. There were steeper hills ahead of him. Only one of his windshield wipers worked, and the snow quickly covered the glass and left him with one small aperture onto the world. The snow sped into the headlights at a dizzying rate, and at one place where the road was narrow the car slid off onto the shoulder and he had to race the motor for ten minutes in order to get back onto the hard surface. It was a lonely stretch there—miles from any house—and he would have had a sloppy walk in his loafers. The car skidded and weaved up every hill, and it seemed that he reached the top by the thinnest margin of luck.

After driving for two hours, he was still far from home. The snow was so deep that guiding the car was like the trickiest kind of navigation. It took him three hours to get back, and he was tired when he drove into the darkness and peace of his own garage—tired and infinitely grateful. Martha and the children had eaten their supper, and she wanted to go over to the Lissoms’ and discuss some school-board business. He told her that the driving was bad, and since it was such a short distance, she decided to walk. He lit a fire and made a drink, and the children sat at the table with him while he ate his supper. After supper on Sunday nights, the Folkestones played, or tried to play, trios. Charlie played the clarinet, his daughter played the piano, and his older son had a tenor recorder. The baby wandered around underfoot. This Sunday night they played simple arrangements of eighteenth-century music in the pleasantest family atmosphere—complimenting themselves when they squeezed through a difficult passage, and extending into the music what was best in their relationship. They were playing a Vivaldi sonata when the telephone rang. Charlie knew immediately who it was.

“Charlie, Charlie,” Gee-Gee said. “Jesus. I’m in hot water. Right after you left I fell out of the God-damned wagon. It took me two hours to get to the telephone. You’ve got to get over. There’s nobody else. You’re my only friend. You’ve got to get over here. Charlie? You hear me?”

It must have been the strangeness of the look on Charlie’s face that made the baby scream. The little girl picked him up in her arms, and stared, as did the other boy, at their father. They seemed to know the whole picture, every detail of it, and they looked at him calmly, as if they were expecting him to make some decision that had nothing to do with the continuing of a pleasant evening in a snowbound house—but a decision that would have a profound effect on their knowledge of him and on their final happiness. Their looks were, he thought, clear and appealing, and whatever he did would be final.

“You hear me, Charlie? You hear me?” Gee-Gee asked. “It took me damned near two hours to crawl over to the telephone. You’ve got to help me. No one else will come.”

Charlie hung up. Gee-Gee must have heard the sound of his breathing and the baby crying, but Charlie had said nothing. He gave no explanation to the children, and they asked for none. They knew. His daughter went back to the piano, and when the telephone rang again and he did not answer it, no one questioned the ringing of the phone. They seemed happy and relieved when it stopped ringing, and they played Vivaldi until nine o’clock, when he sent them up to bed.

He made a drink to diminish the feeling that some emotional explosion had taken place, that some violence had shaken the air. He did not know what he had done or how to cope with his conscience. He would tell Martha about it when she came in, he thought. That would be a step toward comprehension. But when she returned he said nothing. He was afraid that if she brought her intelligence to the problem it would only confirm his guilt. “But why didn’t you telephone me at the Lissoms’?” she might have asked. “I could have come home and you could have gone over.” She was too compassionate a woman to accept passively, as he was doing, the thought of a friend, a neighbor, lying in agony. She went on upstairs. He poured some whiskey into his glass. If he had called the Lissoms’, if she had returned to care for the children and left him free to help Gee-Gee, would he have been able to make the return trip in the heavy snow? He could have put on chains, but where were the chains? Were they in the car or in the cellar? He didn’t know. He hadn’t used them that year. But perhaps by now the roads would have been plowed. Perhaps the storm was over. This last, distressing possibility made him feel sick. Had the sky betrayed him? He switched on the outside light and went hesitantly, unwillingly, toward the window.

The clean snow gave off an ingratiating sparkle, and the beam of light shone into empty and peaceful air. The snow must have stopped a few minutes after he had entered the house. But how could he have known? How could he be expected to take into consideration the caprices of the weather? And what about that look the children had given him—so stern, so clear, so like a declaration that his place at that hour was with them, and not with the succoring of drunkards who had forfeited the chance to be taken seriously?

Then the image of Gee-Gee returned, crushing in its misery, and he remembered Peaches standing in the hallway at the Watermans’ calling, “Come back! Come back!” She was calling back the youth that Charlie had never known, but it was easy to imagine what Gee-Gee must have been—fair, high-spirited, generous, and strong—and why had it all come to ruin? Come back! Come back! She seemed to call after the sweetness of a summer’s day—roses in bloom and all the doors and windows open on the garden. It was all there in her voice; it was like the illusion of an abandoned house in the last rays of the sun. A large place, falling to pieces, haunted for children and a headache for the police and fire departments, but, seeing it with its windows blazing in the sunset, one thinks that they have all come back. Cook is in the kitchen rolling pastry. The smell of chicken rises up the back stairs. The front rooms are ready for the children and their many friends. A coal fire burns in the grate. Then as the light goes off the windows, the true ugliness of the place scowls into the dusk with redoubled force, as, when the notes of that long-ago summer left Peaches’ voice, one saw the finality and confusion of despair in her innocent face. Come back! Come back! He poured himself some more whiskey, and as he raised the glass to his mouth he heard the wind change and saw—the outside light was still on—the snow begin to spin down again, with the vindictive swirl of a blizzard. The road was impassable; he could not have made the trip. The change in the weather had given him sweet absolution, and he watched the snow with a smile of love, but he stayed up until three in the morning with the bottle.

He was red-eyed and shaken the next morning, and ducked out of his office at eleven and drank two Martinis. He had two more before lunch and another at four and two on the train, and came reeling home for supper. The clinical details of heavy drinking are familiar to all of us; it is only the human picture that concerns us here, and Martha was finally driven to speak to him. She spoke most gently.

“You’re drinking too much, darling,” she said. “You’ve been drinking too much for three weeks.”

“My drinking,” he said, “is my own God-damned business. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”

It got worse and worse, and she had to do something. She finally went to their rector—a good-looking young bachelor who practiced both psychology and liturgy—for advice. He listened sympathetically. “I stopped at the rectory this afternoon,” she said when she got home that night, “and I talked with Father Hemming. He wonders why you haven’t been in church, and he wants to talk to you. He’s such a good-looking man,” she added, trying to make what she had just, said sound less like a planned speech, “that I wonder why he’s never married.” Charlie—drunk, as usual—went to the telephone and called the rectory. “Look, Father,” he said. “My wife tells me that you’ve been entertaining her in the afternoons. Well, I don’t like it. You keep your hands off my wife. You hear me? That damned black suit you wear doesn’t cut any ice with me. You keep your hands off my wife or I’ll bust your pretty little nose.”

In the end, he lost his job, and they had to move, and began their wanderings, like Gee-Gee and Peaches, in the scarlet-and-gold van.

AND WHAT HAPPENED to Gee-Gee—what ever became of him? That boozy guardian angel, her hair disheveled and the strings of her harp broken, still seemed to hover over where he lay. After telephoning Charlie that night, he telephoned the fire department. They were there in eight minutes flat, with bells ringing and sirens blowing. They got him into bed, made him a fresh drink, and one of the firemen, who had nothing better to do, stayed on until Peaches got back from Nassau. They had a fine time, eating all the steaks in the deep freeze and drinking a quart of bourbon every day. Gee-Gee could walk by the time Peaches and the children got back, and he took up that disorderly life for which he seemed so much better equipped than his neighbor, but they had to move at the end of the year, and, like the Folkestones, vanished from the hill towns.