The Stories of John Cheever

An Educated American Woman

ITEM: “I remain joined in holy matrimony to my unintellectual 190-pound halfback, and keep myself busy chauffeuring my son Bibber to and from a local private school that I helped organize. I seem, at one time or another, to have had the presidency of every civic organization in the community, and last year I ran the local travel agency for nine months. A New York publisher (knock on wood) is interested in my critical biography of Gustave Flaubert, and last year I ran for town supervisor on the Democratic ticket and got the largest Democratic plurality in the history of the village. Polly Coulter Mellowes (‘42) stayed with us for a week on her way home from Paris to Minneapolis and we talked, ate, drank, and thought in French during her visit. Shades of Mile, de Grasse! I still find time to band birds and knit Argyle socks.”

This report, for her college alumnae magazine, might have suggested, an aggressive woman, but she was not that at all. Jill Chidchester Madison held her many offices through competence, charm, and intellect, and she was actually quite shy. Her light-brown hair, at the time of which I’m writing, was dressed simply and in a way that recalled precisely how she had looked in boarding school twenty years before. Boarding school may have shaded her taste in clothing; that and the fact that she had a small front and was one of those women who took this deprivation as if it was something more than the loss of a leg. Considering her comprehensive view of life, it seemed strange that such a thing should have bothered her, but it bothered her terribly. She had pretty legs. Her coloring was fresh and high. Her eyes were brown and set much too close together, so that when she was less than vivacious she had a mousy look.

Her mother, Amelia Faxon Chidchester, was a vigorous, stocky woman with splendid white hair, a red face, and an emphatic accent whose roots seemed more temperamental than regional. Mrs. Chidchester's words were shaped to express her untiring vigor, her triumph over pain, her cultural enthusiasm, and her trust in mankind. She was the author of seventeen unpublished books. Jill’s father died when she was six days old. She was born in San Francisco, where her father had run a small publishing house and administered a small estate. He left his wife and daughter with enough money to protect them from any sort of hardship and any sort of financial anxiety, but they were a good deal less rich than their relatives. Jill appeared to be precocious, and when she was three her mother took her to Munich, where she was entered in the Gymnasium für Kinder, run by Dr. Stock for the purpose of observing gifted children. The competition was fierce, and her reaction tests were only middling, but she was an amiable and a brilliant girl. When she was five, they shifted to the Scuola Pantola in Florence, a similar institution. They moved from there to England, to the famous Tower Hill School, in Kent. Then Amelia, or Melee, as she was called, decided that the girl should put down some roots, and so she rented a house in Nantucket, where Jill was entered in the public school.

I don’t know why it is that expatriate children should seem underfed, but they often do, and Jill, with her mixed clothing, her mixed languages, her bare legs and sandals, gave the impression that the advantages of her education had worked out in her as a kind of pathos. She was the sort of child who skipped a lot. She skipped to school. She skipped home. She was shy. She was not very practical, and her mother encouraged her in this. “You shall not wash the dishes, my dear,” she said. “A girl of your intelligence is not expected to waste her time washing dishes.” They had a devoted servant—all of Melee’s servants worshipped the ground she walked on—and Jill’s only idea about housework was that it was work she was not expected to do. She did, when she was about ten, learn to knit Argyle socks and was allowed this recreation. She was romantic. Entered in her copybook was the following: “Mrs. Amelia Faxon Chidchester requests the honor of your company at the wedding of her daughter Jill to Viscount Ludley-Huntington, Earl of Ashmead, in Westminster Abbey. White tie. Decorations.” The house in Nantucket was pleasant, and Jill learned to sail. It was in Nantucket that her mother spoke to her once about that subject for which we have no vocabulary in English—about love. It was late afternoon. A fire was burning and there were flowers on a table. Jill was reading and her mother was writing. She stopped writing and said, over her shoulder, “I think I should tell you, my dear, that during the war I was in charge of a canteen at the Embarcadero, and I gave myself to many lonely soldiers.”

The remark was crushing. It seemed to the girl emotionally and intellectually incomprehensible. She wanted to cry. She could not imagine her mother giving herself, as she put it, to a string of lonely soldiers. Her mother’s manner firmly and authoritatively declared her indifference to this side of things. There seemed to be no way of getting around what had been said. It stuck up in the girl’s consciousness like a fallen meteor. Perhaps it was all a lie, but her mother had never lied. Then, for once, she faced up to the limitations of her only parent. Her mother was not a liar, but she was a fraud. Her accent was a fraud, her tastes were fraudulent, and the seraphic look she assumed when she listened to music was the look of someone trying to recall an old telephone number. With her indomitable good cheer, her continual aches and pains, her implacable snobbism, her cultural squatter’s rights, her lofty friends, and her forceful and meaningless utterances, she seemed, for a moment, to illustrate a supreme lack of discernment in nature. But was Jill meant to fabricate, single-handed, some cord of love and wisdom between this stranger who had given her life and life itself as she could see it, spread out in terms of fields and woods, wondrous and fair, beyond the windows? Could she not instead—But she felt too young, too thin, too undefended to make a life without a parent, and so she decided that her mother had not said what she said, and sealed the denial with a light kiss.

Jill went away to boarding school when she was twelve, and took all the prizes. Her scholastic, social, and athletic record was unprecedented. During her second year in college, she visited her relatives in San Francisco, and met and fell in love with Georgie Madison. He was not, considering her intelligence, the sort of man she would have been expected to choose, but it may have been sensible of her to pick a man whose interests were so different. He was a quiet, large-boned man with black hair and those gentle looks that break the hearts of the fatherless of all ages; and she was, after all, fatherless. He worked as a junior executive in a San Francisco shipyard. He had graduated from Yale, but when Melee once asked him if he liked Thackeray he said sincerely and politely that he had never tasted any. This simmered down to a family joke. They got engaged in her junior year, and were married a week after she graduated from college, where she again took all the prizes. He was transferred to a Brooklyn shipyard, and they moved to New York, where she got a public-relations job in a department store.

In the second or third year of their marriage, she had a son, whom they called Bibber. The birth was difficult, and she would not be able to have more children. When the boy was still young, they moved to Gordenville. She was happier in the country than she had been in town, since the country seemed to present more opportunities for her talents. The presidencies of the civic organizations followed one after the other, and when the widow who ran the local travel agency got sick, Jill took over and ran this successfully. Their only problem in the country was to find someone to stay with Bibber. A stream of unsatisfactory old women drifted through the house, augmented by high-school girls and cleaning women. Georgie loved his son intemperately. The boy was bright enough, but his father found this brightness blinding. He walked with the boy, played with him, gave him his bath at bedtime, and told him his story. Georgie did everything for his son when he was at home, and this was just as well, since Jill often came in later than he.

When Jill put down the reins of the travel agency, she decided to organize a European tour. She had not been abroad since their marriage, and if she wrote her own ticket she could make the trip at a profit. This, at least, was what she claimed. Georgie’s shipyard was doing well, and there was no real reason for her to angle for a free trip, but he could see that the idea of conducting a tour stimulated and challenged her, and in the end he gave her his approval and his encouragement. Twenty-eight customers signed up, and early in July Georgie saw Jill and her lambs, as she called them, take off in a jet for Copenhagen. Their itinerary was to take them as far south as Naples, where Jill would put her dependents aboard a home-bound plane. Then Georgie would meet her in Venice, where they would spend a week. Jill sent her husband postcards each day, and several of her customers were so enthusiastic about her leadership that they wrote Georgie themselves to tell him what a charming, competent, and knowledgeable wife he possessed. His neighbors were friendly, and he mostly dined with them. Bibber, who was not quite four, had been put into a summer camp.

Before Georgie left for Europe, he drove to New Hampshire to check on Bibber. He had missed the little boy painfully and had seen him much oftener in his reveries than he had seen his wife’s vivacious face. To put himself to sleep, he imagined some implausible climbing tour through the Dolomites with Bibber when the boy was older. Night after night, he helped his son up from ledge to ledge. Overhead, the thin snow on the peaks sparkled in the summer sunlight. Carrying packs and ropes, they came down into Cortina a little after dark. The bare facts of his trip north contrasted sharply with this Alpine reverie.

The drive took him most of a day. He spent a restless night in a motel and scouted out the camp in the morning. The weather was mixed, and he was in the mountains. There were showers and then pale clearings—an atmosphere not so much of gloom as of bleakness. Most of the farms that he passed were abandoned. As he approached the camp, he felt that it and the surrounding countryside had the authority of a remote creation; or perhaps this was a reprise of his own experience of summers and camps as interludes unconnected with the rest of time. Then, from a rise of ground, he saw the place below him. There was a small lake—a pond, really: one of those round ponds whose tea-colored waters and pine groves leave with you an impression of geological fatigue. His own recollections of camp were sunny and brilliant, and this rueful water hole, with its huddle of rotting matchboard shanties, collided violently with his robust memories. He guessed—he insisted to himself—that things would look very different when the sun shone. Arrows pointed the way to the administration building, where the directress was waiting for him. She was a blue-eyed young woman whose efficiency had not quite eclipsed her good looks. “We’ve had a bit of trouble with your son,” she said. “He’s not gotten along terribly well. It’s quite unusual. We seldom if ever have cases of homesickness. The exception is when we take children from divided families, and we try never to do this. We can cope with normal problems, but we cannot cope with a child who brings more than his share of misery with him. As a rule, we turn down applications from children of divorce.”

“But Mrs. Madison and I are not divorced,” Georgie said.

“Oh, I didn’t know. You are separated?”

“No,” Georgie said, “we are not. Mrs. Madison is traveling in Europe, but I am going to join her tomorrow.”

“Oh, I see. Well, in that case, I don’t understand why Bibber has been so slow to adjust. But here is Bibber to tell us all about it himself!”

The boy threw off the hand of the woman with him and ran to his father. He was crying.

“There, there,” said the directress. “Daddy hasn’t come all this way to see a weeper, has he, Bibber?”

Georgie felt his heart heave in love and confusion. He kissed the tears from the boy’s face and held him against his chest.

“Perhaps you’d like to take a little walk with Bibber,” the directress suggested. “Perhaps Bibber would like to show you the sights.”

Georgie, with the boy clinging to his hand, had to face certain responsibilities that transcended the love he felt for his son. His instinct was to take the boy away. His responsibility was to hearten and encourage him to shoulder the burdens of life. “What is your favorite place, Bibber?” he asked enthusiastically, keenly aware of the fatuity in his tone, and convinced of the necessity for it. “I want you to show me your favorite place in the whole camp.”

“I don’t have any favorite place,” Bibber said. He was trying successfully to keep from crying. “That’s the mess hall,” he said, pointing to a long, ugly shed. Fresh pieces of yellow lumber had replaced those that had rotted.

“Is that where you have your plays?” Georgie asked.

“We don’t have any plays,” Bibber said. “The lady in charge of plays got sick and she had to go home.”

“Is that where you sing?”

“Please take me home, Daddy,” Bibber said.

“But I can’t, Bibber. Mummy’s in Europe, and I’m flying over tomorrow afternoon to join her.”

“When can I go home?”

“Not until camp closes.” Georgie felt some of the weight of this sentence himself. He heard the boy’s breathing quicken with pain. Somewhere a bugle sounded. Georgie, struggling to mix his responsibilities with his instincts, knelt and took the boy in his arms. “You see, I can’t very well cable Mummy and tell her I’m not coming. She’s expecting me there. And anyhow, we don’t really have a home when Mummy isn’t with us. I have my dinners out, and I’m away all day. There won’t be anyone there to take care of you.”

“I’ve participated in everything,” the boy said hopefully. It was his last appeal for clemency, and when he saw it fail he said, “I have to go now. It’s my third period.” He went up a worn path under the pines.

Georgie returned to the administration building reflecting on the fact that he had loved camp, that he had been one of the most popular boys in camp, and that he had never wanted to go home.

“I think things are bound to improve,” the directress said. “As soon as he gets over the hump, he’ll enjoy himself much more than the others. I would suggest, however, that you don’t stay too long. He has a riding period now. Why don’t you watch him ride, and leave before the period’s ended? He takes pride in his riding, and in that way you’ll avoid a painful farewell. This evening we’re going to have a big campfire and a good long sing. I’m sure that he’s suffering from nothing that won’t be cured by a good sing with his mates around a roaring fire.”

It all sounded plausible to Georgie, who liked a good campfire sing himself. Were there any sorrows of early life that couldn’t be cured by a rousing performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? He walked over to the riding ring singing, “They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps….” It had begun to rain again, and Georgie couldn’t tell whether the boy’s face was wet with tears or drops of rain. He was on horseback and being led around the ring by a groom. Bibber waved once to his father and nearly lost his seat, and when the boy’s back was turned Georgie went away.

He flew to Treviso and took a train into Venice, where Jill waited for him in a Swiss hotel on one of the back canals. Their reunion was ardent, and he loved her no less for noticing that she was tired and thin. Getting her lambs across Europe had been a rigorous and exhausting task. What he wanted to do then was to move from their third-rate hotel to Cipriani’s, get a cabana at the Lido, and spend a week on the beach. Jill refused to move to Cipriani’s—it would be full of tourists—and on their second day in Venice she got up at seven, made instant coffee in a toothbrush glass, and rushed him off to eight-o’clock Mass at St. Mark’s. Georgie knew Venice, and Jill knew—or should have known—that he was not interested in painting or mosaics, but she led him by the nose, so to speak, from monument to monument. He guessed that she had got into the habit of tireless sightseeing, and that the tactful thing to do would be to wait until the habit spent itself. He suggested that they go to Harry’s for lunch, and she said, “What in the world are you thinking of, Georgie?” They had lunch in a trattoria, and toured churches and museums until closing time. In the morning, he suggested that they go to the Lido, but she had already made arrangements to go to Maser and see the villas.

Jill brought all her competence as a tour director to their days in Venice, although Georgie didn’t see why. Most of us enjoy displaying our familiarity with the world, but he could not detect a trace of enjoyment in her assault. Some people love painting and architecture, but there was nothing loving in her approach to the treasures of Venice. The worship of beauty was mysterious to Georgie, but was beauty meant to crush one’s sense of humor? She stood, one hot afternoon, before the facade of a church, lecturing him from her guidebook. She recited dates, naval engagements, and so on, and sketched the history of the Republic as if she were preparing him for an examination. The light in which she stood was bright and unflattering, and the generally festive air of Venice made her erudition, the sternness of her enthusiasm, seem ungainly. She was trying to impress him with the fact that Venice was to be taken seriously. And was this, he wondered, the meaning, the sum, of these brilliant marbles, this labyrinthine and dilapidated place, suffused with the rank and ancient smell of bilge? He put an arm around her and said, “Come off it, darling.” She put him away from her and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Had she lost an address, a child, a pocketbook, a string of beads, or any other valuable, her canvass of Venice couldn’t have been more grueling and exhaustive. He spent the rest of their time in Venice accompanying her on this mysterious search. Now and then he thought of Bibber and his camp. They flew home from Treviso, and in the gentler and more familiar light of Gordenville she seemed herself again. They took up their happiness, and welcomed Bibber when he was released from camp.

“ISN’T IT DIVINE, isn’t it the most divine period in domestic American architecture?” Jill always asked, showing guests through their large frame house. The house had been built in the 1870s, and had long windows, an oval dining room, and a stable with a cupola. It must have been difficult to maintain, but these difficulties—at parties, anyhow—were never felt. The high-ceilinged rooms were filled with light and had a special grace—austere, gloomy, and finely balanced. The obvious social responsibilities were all hers; his conversation was confined to the shipbuilding industry, but he mixed the drinks, carved the roast, and poured the wine. There was a fire in the fireplace, there were flowers, the furniture and the silver shone, and no one knew and no one would have guessed that it was he who polished the furniture and forks.

“Housework simply isn’t my style,” she had said, and he was intelligent enough to see the truth in her remark; intelligent enough not to expect her to recast this image of herself as an educated woman. It was the source of much of her vitality and joy.

One stormy winter, they weren’t able to get any servants at all. A fly-by-night cook came in when they had guests, but the rest of the work fell to Georgie. That was the year Jill was studying French literature at Columbia and trying to finish her book on Flaubert. On a typical domestic evening, Jill would be sitting at her desk in their bedroom, working on her book. Bibber would be asleep. Georgie might be in the kitchen, polishing the brass and silver. He wore an apron. He drank whiskey. He was surrounded by cigarette boxes, andirons, bowls, ewers, and a large chest of table silver. He did not like to polish silver, but if he did not do this the silver would turn black. As she had said, it was not her style. It was not his style, either, nor was it any part of his education, but if he was, as she said, unintellectual, he was not so unintellectual as to accept any of the vulgarities and commonplaces associated with the struggle for sexual equality. The struggle was recent, he knew; it was real; it was inexorable; and while she sidestepped her domestic tasks, he could sense that she might do this unwillingly. She had been raised as an intellectual, her emancipation was still challenged in many quarters, and since he seemed to possess more latitude, to hold a stronger traditional position, it was his place to yield on matters like housework. It was not her choice, he knew, that she was raised as an intellectual, but the choice, having been made by others, seemed irrevocable. His restless sexual nature attributed to her softness, warmth, and the utter darkness of love; but why, he wondered as he polished the forks, did there seem to be some contradiction between these attributes and the possession of a clear mind? Intellect, he knew, was not a masculine attribute, although the bulk of tradition had put decisive powers into the hands of men for so many centuries that their ancient supremacy would take some unlearning. But why should his instincts lead him to expect that the woman in whose arms he lay each night would at least conceal her literacy? Why should there seem to be some rub between the enormous love he felt for her and her ability to understand the quantum theory?

She wandered downstairs and stood in the kitchen doorway, watching him at his work. Her feeling was tender. What a kind, gentle, purposeful, and handsome man she had married. What pride he took in their house. But then, as she went on watching him, she suffered a spiritual chill, a paroxysm of doubt. Was he, bent over the kitchen table at a woman’s work, really a man? Had she married some half male, some aberration? Did he like to wear an apron? Was he a transvestite? And was she aberrant herself? But this was inadmissible, and equally inadmissible was the reasoning that would bring her to see that he polished silver because he was forced to. Suddenly some vague, brutish stray appeared in the corner of her imagination, some hairy and drunken sailor who would beat her on Saturday nights, debauch her with his gross appetites, and make her scrub the floor on her hands and knees. That was the kind of man she should have married. That had been her destiny. He looked up, smiled gently, and asked her how her work was coming. “Ça marche, ça marche,” she said wearily, and went back upstairs to her desk. “Little Gustave didn’t get along at all well with his school chums,” she wrote. “He was frightfully unpopular …”

He came into their room when his work was done. He ran a hand lightly through her hair. “Just let me finish this paragraph,” she said. She heard him take a shower, heard his bare feet on the carpet as he crossed the room and bounded happily into bed. Moved equally by duty and desire but still thinking of the glories of Flaubert, she washed, scented herself with perfume, and joined him in their wide bed, which, with its clean and fragrant linen and equal pools of light, seemed indeed a bower. Bosquet, she thought, brume, bruit. And then, sitting up in his arms, she exclaimed, “Elle avait lu ‘Paul et Virginie’ et elle avait rêvé la maisonnette de bambous, le nègre Domingo, le chien Fidèle, mais surtout l’amitié douce de quelque bon petit frère, qui va chercher pour vous des fruits rouges dans des grands arbres plus hauts que des clochers, ou qui court pieds nus sur le sable, vous apportant un nid d’oiseau …”

“God damn it to hell!” he said. He spoke in utter bitterness. He got out of bed, got a blanket from the closet, and made his bed in the living room.

She cried. He was jealous of her intelligence—she saw that. But was she meant to pose as a cretin in order to be attractive? Why should he rage because she had said a few words in French? To assume that intelligence, knowledge, the very benefits of education were male attributes was an attitude that had been obsolete for a century. Then she felt as if the strain put on her heart by this cruelty was too much She seemed to feel one of its fastenings give, as if this organ was a cask and so heavily laden with sorrow that, like some ruptured treasure chest of childhood, its sides had burst. “Intelligence” was the word she returned to—intelligence was at stake. And yet the word should ring free and clear of the pain she was suffering. Intelligence was the subject up for discussion, but it had the sentience, at that hour, of flesh and blood. What she faced was the bare bones of pain, cleansed in the stewpot and polished by the hound’s tooth; this intelligence had the taste of death. She cried herself to sleep.

Later she was awakened by a crash. She was afraid. Might he harm her? Had something gone wrong with the complicated machinery of the old house? Burglars? Fire? The noise had come from their bathroom. She found him naked on his hands and knees on the bathroom floor. His head was under the washbasin. She went to him quickly and helped him to his feet. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m just terribly drunk.” She helped him back to their bed, where he fell asleep at once.

THEY HAD a dinner party a few nights later, and all the silver he had polished was used. The party went off without a hitch. One of their guests, a lawyer, described a local scandal. A four-mile link of highway, connecting two parkways in the neighborhood, had been approved by the state and the local governments. The cost was three million dollars, on a bid given by a contractor named Felici. The road was to destroy a large formal garden and park that had been maintained and open to the public for half a century. The owner, an octogenarian, lived in San Francisco and was either helpless, indifferent, or immobilized by indignation. The connecting road was of no use; no study of traffic patterns had proved that there was any need for such a road. A beautiful park and a large slice of tax money were to be handed over to an unscrupulous and avaricious contractor.

It was the kind of story Jill liked. Her eyes were bright, her color was high. Georgie watched her with a mixture of pride and dismay. Her civic zeal had been provoked, and he knew she would pursue the scandal to some conclusion. She was very happy with this challenge, but it was, on that evening, a happiness that embraced her house, her husband, her way of life. On Monday morning she stormed the various commissions that controlled highway construction, and verified the scandal. Then she organized a committee and circulated a petition. An old woman named Mrs. Haney was found to take care of Bibber, and a high-school girl came in to read to him in the afternoons. Jill was absorbed in her work, bright-eyed and excited.

This was in December. Late one afternoon, Georgie left his office in Brooklyn and went into New York to do some shopping. All the high buildings in mid town were hidden in rain clouds, but he felt their presence overhead like the presence of a familiar mountain range. His feet were wet and his throat felt sore. The streets were crowded, and the decorations on the store fronts were mostly at such an angle that their meaning escaped him. While he could see the canopy of light at Lord & Taylor’s, he could only see the chins and vestments of the choir plastered across the front of Saks. Blasts of holy music wavered through the rain. He stepped into a puddle. It was as dark as night; it seemed, because of the many lights, the darkest of nights. He went into Saks. Inside, the scene of well-dressed and brightly lighted pillage stopped him. He stood to one side to avoid being savaged by the crowds that were pushing their way in and out. He distinctly felt the symptoms of a cold. A woman standing beside him dropped some parcels. He picked them up. She had a pleasant face, wore a black mink coat, and her feet, he noticed, were wetter than his. She thanked him, and he asked if she was going to storm the counters. “I thought I would,” she said, “but now I think I won’t. My feet are wet, and I have a terrible feeling that I’m coming down with a cold.”

“I feel the same way,” he said. “Let’s find some quiet place and have a drink.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. “It’s a festival, isn’t it?”

The dark afternoon seemed to turn on that word. It was meant to be festive. That was the meaning of the singing and the lights.

“I had never thought of it that way,” she said.

“Come on,” he said. He took her arm and led her down the avenue to a quiet bar. He ordered drinks and sneezed. “You ought to have a hot bath and go to bed,” she said. Her concern seemed purely maternal. He introduced himself. Her name was Betty Landers. Her husband was a doctor. Her daughter was married and her son was in his last year at Cornell. She was alone a good deal of the time, but she had recently taken up painting. She went to the Art Students League three times a week, and had a studio in the Village. They had three or four drinks and then took a cab downtown to see her studio.

It was not his idea of a studio. It was a two-room apartment in one of the new buildings near Washington Square and looked a little like the lair of a spinster. She pointed out her treasures. That’s what she called them. The desk she had bought in England, the chair she had bought in France, the signed Matisse lithograph. Her hair and her eyebrows were dark, her face was thin, and she might have been a spinster. She made him a drink, and when he asked to see her paintings she modestly refused, although he was to see them later, stacked up in the bathroom, where her easel and her other equipment were neatly stored. Why they became lovers, why in the presence of this stranger he should suddenly find himself divested of all his inhibitions and all his clothing, he never understood. She was not young. Her elbows and knees were lightly gnarled, as if she were some distant cousin of Daphne and would presently be transformed, not into a flowering shrub but into some hardy and common tree.

They met after this two or three times a week. He never discovered much about her beyond the fact that she lived on Park Avenue and was often alone. She was interested in his clothes and kept him posted on department-store sales. It was a large part of her conversation. Sitting in his lap, she told him that there was a sale of neckties at Saks, a sale of shoes at Brooks, a sale of shirts at Altman’s. Jill, by this time, was so absorbed in her campaign that she hardly noticed his arrivals and departures, but, sitting one evening in the living room while Jill was busy on the upstairs telephone, he felt that he had behaved shabbily. He felt that it was time that the affair, begun on that dark afternoon before Christmas, was over. He took some notepaper and wrote to Betty: “Darling, I’m leaving for San Francisco this evening and will be gone six weeks. I think it will be better, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me, if we don’t meet again.” He wrote the letter a second time, changing San Francisco to Rome, and addressed the note to her studio in the Village.

Jill was campaigning on the telephone the next night when he returned home. Mathilde, the high-school girl, was reading to Bibber. He spoke to his son and then went down to the pantry to make a drink. While he was there, he heard Jill’s heels on the stairs. They seemed to strike a swift and vengeful note, and when she came into the pantry her face was pale and drawn. Her hands were shaking, and in one of them she held the first of the two notes he had written.

“What is the meaning of this?” she asked.

“Where did you find it?”

“In the wastepaper basket.”

“Then I will explain,” he said. “Please sit down. Sit down for a minute, and I’ll explain the whole thing.”

“Do I have to sit down? I’m terribly busy.”

“No, you don’t have to sit down; but would you close the door? Mathilde can hear us.”

“I can’t believe you have anything to say that would necessitate closing a door.”

“I have this to say,” he said. He closed the door. “In December, just before Christmas, I took a mistress, a lonely woman. I can’t explain my choice. It may have been because she had an apartment of her own. She was not young; she was not beautiful. Her children are grown. Her husband is a doctor. They live on Park Avenue.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Park Avenue!” and she laughed. “I adore that part of it. I could have guessed that if you invented a mistress she would live on Park Avenue. You’ve always been such a hick.”

“Do you think this is all an invention?”

“Yes, I do. I think you’ve made the whole thing up to try and hurt me. You’ve never had much of an imagination. You might have done better if you’d tasted some Thackeray. Really. A Park Avenue matron. Couldn’t you have invented something more delectable? A Vassar senior with blazing red hair? A colored night-club singer? An Italian princess?”

“Do you really think I’ve made this all up?”

“I do, I do. I think it’s all a fabrication and a loathsome one, but tell me more, tell me more about your Park Avenue matron.”

“I have nothing more to tell you.”

“You have nothing more to tell me because your powers of invention have collapsed. Isn’t that it? My advice to you, old chap, is never to embark on anything that counts on a powerful imagination. It isn’t your forte.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I do not, and if I did I wouldn’t be jealous. My sort of woman is never jealous. I have more important things to do.”

AT THIS POINT in their marriage, Jill’s assault on the highway commission served as a sort of suspension bridge over which they could travel, meet, converse, and dine together, elevated safely above the turbulence of their feelings. She was working to have the issue brought to a public hearing, and was to appear before the commission with petitions and documents that would prove the gravity of her case and the number of influential supporters she had been able to enlist. Unluckily, at this time Bibber came down with a bad cold and it was difficult to find anyone to stay with him. Now and then, Mrs. Haney would come to sit beside his bed, and in the afternoons Mathilde read to him. When it was necessary for Jill to go to Albany, George stayed home from his office for a day so that she could make this trip. He stayed home on another day when she had an important appointment and Mrs. Haney couldn’t come. She was sincerely grateful to him for these sacrifices, and he had nothing but admiration for her intelligence and tenacity. She was far superior to him as an advocate and as an organizer. She was to appear before the commission on a Friday, and he looked forward to having this much of their struggle behind them. He came home on Friday at around six. He called out, “Jill? Mathilde? Mrs. Haney?” but there was no answer. He threw off his hat and coat and bounded up the stairs to Bibber’s room. The room was lighted, but the boy was alone and seemed to be asleep. Pinned to his pillow was this note: “Dear Mrs. Madison my aunt and uncle came to visit with us and I have to go home and help my mother. Bibber’s asleep so he won’t know the difference. I am sorry. Mathilde.” On the pillow next to the note was a dark stain of blood. He touched the boy lightly and felt the searing heat of fever. Then he tried to rouse the child, but Bibber was not sleeping; he was unconscious.

Georgie moistened the boy’s lips with some water, and Bibber regained consciousness long enough to throw his arms around his father. The pathos of seeing the burden of grave illness on someone so innocent and so young made Georgie cry. There was a tumultuous power of love in that small room, and he had to subdue his feelings lest he harm the boy with the force of his embrace. They clung to one another. Then Georgie called the doctor. He called ten times, and each time he heard the idiotic and frustrating busy signal. Then he called the hospital and asked for an ambulance. He wrapped the boy in a blanket and carried him down the stairs, enormously grateful to have this much to do. The ambulance was there in a few minutes.

Jill had stopped long enough to have a drink with one of her assistants, and came in a half hour later. “Hail the conquering hero!” she called as she stepped into the empty house. “We shall have our hearing, and the scurvy rascals are on the run. Even Felici appeared to be moved by my eloquence, and Carter said that I should have been an advocate. I was simply stupendous.”

ITEM: “INTL PD FLORENCE VIA RCA 22 23 9:35 AMELIA FAXON CHIDCHESTER CARE AMEXCO: BIBBER DIED OF PNEUMONIA ON THURSDAY. CAN YOU RETURN OR MAY I COME TO YOU LOVE JILL”

Amelia Faxon Chidchester was staying with her old friend Louisa Trefaldi, in Fiesole. She bicycled down into Florence late in the afternoon of the twenty-third of January. Her bicycle was an old, high-seated Dutheil, and it elevated her a little above the small cars. She bumped imperturbably through some of the worst traffic in the world. Her life was threatened every few minutes by a Vespa or a trolley, but she yielded to no one, and the look on her ruddy face was serene. Elevated, moving with that somnambulistic pace of a cyclist, smiling gently at the death that menaced her at every intersection, she looked a little supernatural, and it may have been that she thought she was. Her smile was sweet, inscrutable, and adamantine, and you felt that, had she been knocked off her bicycle, this expression, as she sailed through the air, would not lose its patience. She pumped over a bridge, dismounted gracefully, and walked along the river to the American Express office. Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail. The place was crowded, and she read her tragic cable in the middle of the crowd. You could not, from her expression, have guessed its content. She sighed deeply and raised her face. She seemed ennobled. She wrote her reply at once: “NON POSSO TORNARE TANTT BACI FERVIDI. MELEE.”

“Dearest darling,” she wrote that evening. “I was frightfully sorry to have your tragic news. I can only thank God that I didn’t know him better, but my experience in these matters is rather extensive, and I have come to a time of life when I do not especially like to dwell upon the subject of passing away. There is no street I walk on, no building or painting I see here that doesn’t remind me of Berenson, dear Berenson. The last time I saw him, I sat at his feet and asked if he had a magic carpet what picture in the whole wide world would he ask to be transported to. Without a moment’s hesitation he chose the Raphael Madonna in The Hermitage. It is not possible for me to return. The truth will out, and the truth is that I don’t like my own countrymen. As for your coming over, I am now staying with dear Louisa and, as you know, with her two is company, three is a crowd. Perhaps in the autumn, when your loss is not so painful, we might meet in Paris for a few days and revisit some of our old haunts.”

GEORGIE WAS CRUSHED by the death of his son. He blamed Jill, which was cruel and unreasonable, and it seemed, in the end, that he could be both. Jill went to Reno at his request and got a consent decree. It was all made by Georgie to seem like a punishment. Later on she got a job with a textbook publishing firm in Cleveland. Her acumen and her charm were swiftly recognized and she was very successful, but she didn’t marry again, or hadn’t married when I last had any news. The last I heard was from Georgie, who telephoned one night and said that we must get together for lunch. It was about eleven. I think he was drunk. He hadn’t married again either, and from the bitterness with which he spoke of women that night I guessed that he never would. He told me about Jill’s job in Cleveland and said that Mrs. Chidchester was bicycling across Scotland. I thought then how inferior he was to Jill, how immature. When I agreed to call him about lunch he gave me his telephone number at the shipyard, his extension there, the telephone number of his apartment, the telephone number of a cottage he had in Connecticut, and the telephone number of the club where he lunched and played cards. I wrote all these numbers on a piece of paper and when we said goodbye I dropped the paper into a wastebasket.