The Stories of John Cheever

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

COMING BACK FROM EUROPE that year, I was booked on an old DC-7 that burned out an engine in mid-Atlantic. Most of the passengers seemed either asleep or drugged, and in the forward section of the plane no one saw the flames but a little girl, an old man, and me. When the fire died down, the plane veered violently, throwing open the door to the crew’s quarters. There I saw the crew and the two stewardesses, wearing inflated life jackets. One of the stewardesses shut the door, but the captain came out a few minutes later and explained, in a fatherly whisper, that we had lost an engine and were heading either for Iceland or Shannon. Some time later, he came and said we would be landing in London in half an hour. Two hours later, we landed at Orly, to the astonishment of all those who had been asleep. We boarded another DC-7 and started back across the Atlantic, and when we finally landed at Idlewild we had been traveling in cramped conditions for about twenty-seven hours.

I took a bus into New York and a cab to Grand Central Station. It was an off hour—seven-thirty or eight o’clock in the evening. The newsstands were shut, and the few people on the streets were alone and seemed lonely. There was not a train to where I was going for an hour, so I went into a restaurant near the station and ordered the plat du jour. The dilemma of an expatriated American eating his first restaurant meal at home has been worked over too often to be repeated here. After paying the check, I went down some stairs to find the amenities. The place I entered had marble partitions—a gesture, I suppose, toward ennobling this realm. The marble was light brown—it might have been a giallo antico, but then I noticed Paleozoic fossils beneath the high polish and guessed that the stone was a madrepore. The near side of the polish was covered with writing. The penmanship was legible, although it had no character or symmetry. What was unusual was the copiousness of the writing and the fact that it was organized into panels, like the pages of a book. I had never seen anything like this before. My deepest instinct was to overlook the writing and study the fossils, but isn’t the writing of a man more lasting and wonderful than a Paleozoic coral? I read:

It had been a day of triumph in Capua. Lentulus, returning with victorious eagles, had amused the populace with the sports of the amphitheater to an extent hitherto unknown, even in that luxurious city. The shouts of revelry died away; the roar of the lion had ceased; the last loiterer retired from the banquet, and the lights in the palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon, piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, silvered the dewdrop on the corselet of the Roman sentinel and tipped the dark waters of Vulturnus with wavy, tremulous light. It was a night of holy calm, when the zephyr sways the young spring leaves and whispers among the hollow reeds its dreamy music. No sound was heard but the last sob of some weary wave, telling its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, and then all was still as the breast when the spirit has parted….

I read no more, although there was more to read. I was tired and in some way disarmed by the fact that I had not been home for years. The chain of circumstances that could impel a man to copy this gibberish on marble was unimaginable. Was this a sign of some change in the social climate, the result of some new force of repression? Or was it simply an indication of the fact that man’s love of florid prose is irresistible? The sonorities of the writing had the tenacity of bad music, and it was difficult to forget them. Had some profound change in the psyche of my people taken place during my absence? Was there some breakdown in the normal lines of communication, some inordinate love of the romantic past?

I SPENT the next week or ten days traveling in the Middle West. I was waiting one afternoon in the Union Station in Indianapolis for a New York train. The train was late. The station there—proportioned like a cathedral and lit by a rose window—is a gloomy and brilliant example of that genre of architecture that means to express the mystery and drama of travel and separation. The colors of the rose windows, limpid as a kaleidoscope, dyed the marble walls and the waiting passengers. A woman with a shopping bag stood in a panel of lavender. An old man slept in a pool of yellow light. Then I saw a sign directing the way to the men’s room, and I wondered if I might not find there another example of that curious literature I had discovered in the first hours of my return. I went down some stairs into a cavernous basement, where a shoeshine man slept in a chair. The walls again were marble. This was a common limestone—a silicate of calcium and magnesium, grained with some metalliferous gray ore. My hunch had been right. The stone was covered with writing, and it had, at a glance, a striking fitness, since it served as a reminder of the fact that it was on walls that the earliest writings and prophecies of man appeared. The penmanship was clear and symmetrical, the work of someone gifted with an orderly mind and a steady hand. Please try to imagine the baneful light, the stale air, and the sounds of running water in that place as I read:

The great manor house of Wallowyck stood on a hill above the smoky mill town of X______burgh, its countless mullioned windows seeming to peer censoriously into the dark and narrow alleys of the slums that reached from the park gates to the smoking mills on the banks of the river. It was in the fringes of this wooded park that, unknown to Mr. Wallow, I spent the most lighthearted hours of my youth, roaming there with a slingshot and a sack for transporting my geological specimens. The hill and its forbidding ornament stood between the school I attended and the hovel where I lived with my ailing mother and my drunken father. All my friends took the common path around the hill, and it was only I who climbed the walls of Wallow Park and spent my afternoons in this forbidden demesne.

The lawns, the great trees, the sound of fountains, and the solemn atmosphere of a dynasty are dear to me to this day. The Wallows had no arms, of course, but the sculptors they employed had improvised hundreds of escutcheons and crests that seemed baronial at a distance but that, on examination, petered out modestly into geometrical forms. Their chimneys, gates, towers, and garden benches were thus crested. Another task of the sculptors had been to make representations of Mr. Wallow’s only daughter, Emily. There was Emily in bronze, Emily in marble, Emily as the Four Seasons, the Four Winds, the Four Times of Day, and the Four Principal Virtues. In a sense, Emily was my only companion. I walked there in the autumn, watching the wealth of color fall from the trees to the lawns. I walked there in the bitter snow. I watched there for the first signs of spring, and smelled the fine perfume of wood smoke from the many crested chimneys of the great house above me. It was while wandering there on a spring day that I heard a girlish voice crying for help. I followed the voice to the banks of a little stream, where I saw Emily. Her lovely feet were naked, and stuck to one, like some manacle of evil, was the writhing form of a viper.

I plucked the viper from her foot, lanced the wound with my pocketknife, and sucked the poison from her bloodstream. Then I took off my humble shirt, stitched together for me by my dear mother from some discarded blueprint linen that she had found, during her daily foraging, in an architect’s ash can. When the wound was cleansed and bound, I gathered Emily in my arms and ran up the lawn towards the great doors of Wallowyck, which rumbled open at my ring. A butler stood there, pallid at the sight.

“What have you done to our Emily?” he cried.

“He has done nothing but save my life,” said Emily.

Then from the dusk of the hall emerged the bearded and ruthless Mr. Wallow. “Thank you for saving the life of my daughter,” he said gruffly. Then he looked at me more closely, and I saw tears in his eyes. “Someday you will be rewarded,” he said. “That day will come.”

The ruin of my linen shirt obliged me to tell my parents that evening about my adventure. My father was drunk, as usual. “You will receive no reward from that beast!” he roared. “Neither in this world nor in heaven nor in hell!”

“Please, Ernest,” my mother sighed, and I went to her and held her hands, dry with fever.

Drunk as he was, it seemed that my father possessed the truth, for, in the years that followed, no sign of gratitude, no courtesy, no trifling remembrance, no hint of indebtedness came to me from the great house on the hill.

In the stern winter of 19—, the mills were shut down by Mr. Wallow, in a retaliative gesture at my struggle to organize a labor union. The stillness of the mills—those smokeless chimneys—was a blow at the heart of X_______burgh. My mother lay dying. My father sat in the kitchen drinking Sterno. Sickness, hunger, cold, and disease dominated every hovel. The snow in the streets, unbesmirched by the mill smoke, had an accusatory whiteness. It was on the day before Christmas that I led the union delegation, many of them scarcely able to walk, up to the great doors of Wallowyck and rang. It was Emily who stood there when the doors were opened. “You!” she cried. “You who saved my life, why are you killing my father?” Then the doors rumbled shut.

I managed that evening to gather a little grain, and made some porridge of this for my mother. I was spooning this into her thin lips when our door opened and in stepped Jeffrey Ashmead, Mr. Wallow’s advocate.

“If you have come,” I said, “to persecute me for my demonstration at Wallowyck this afternoon, you have come in vain. There is no pain on earth greater than that which I suffer now, as I watch my mother die.”

“I have come about other business,” he said. “Mr. Wallow is dead.”

“Long live Mr. Wallow!” shouted my father from the kitchen.

“Please come with me,” said Mr. Ashmead.

“What business can I have with you, sir?”

“You are the heir to Wallowyck—its mines, its mills, its moneys.”

“I do not understand.”

There was a piercing sob from my mother. She seized my hands in hers and said, “The truth of the past is no harsher than the truth of our sad lives! I have wanted to shelter you all these years from the truth but you are his only son. As a girl, I waited on table at the great house, and was taken advantage of on a summer’s night. It has contributed to your fathers destruction.”

“I will go with you, sir,” I said to Mr. Ashmead. “Miss Emily knows of this?”

“Miss Emily,” he said, “has fled.”

I returned that evening, and entered the great doors of Wallowyck as its master. But there was no Miss Emily. Before the New Year had come, I had buried both of my parents, reopened the mills on a profit-sharing basis, and brought prosperity to X_____burgh, but I, living alone in Wallowyck, knew a loneliness that I had never tasted before….

I was appalled, of course, I felt sick. The matter-of-factness of my surroundings made the puerility of this tale nauseating. I hurried back to the noble waiting room, with its limpid panels of colored light, and sat down near a rack of paperback books. Their lurid covers and their promise of graphic descriptions of sexual commerce seemed to tie in with what I had just read. What had happened, I supposed, was that, as pornography moved into the public domain, those marble walls, those immemorial repositories of such sport, had been forced, in self-defense, to take up the more refined task of literature. I found the idea revolutionary and disconcerting, and wondered if in a year or two I would be able to read the poetry of Sara Teasdale in a public toilet, while the King of Sweden honored some dirty-minded brute. Then my train came in, and I was happy to get out of Indianapolis and leave, as I hoped, my discovery with the Middle West.

I went up to the club car and had a drink. We belted eastward over Indiana, scaring the cows and the chickens, the horses and the pigs. People waved at the train as it passed—a little girl holding a doll upside down, an old man in a wheelchair, a woman standing in a kitchen doorway with her hair in pin curls, a young man sitting on a freight truck. You could feel the train leap forward in the straightaway, the whistle blew, the warning bells at the grade crossings went off like a coronary thrombosis, and the track joints beat out a jazz bass, versatile, exhilarating, and fleet, like some brilliant improvisation on the beating of a heart, and the wind in the brake boxes sounded like the last, hoarse recordings poor Billie Holiday ever made. I had two more drinks. When I opened the door of the lavatory in the next sleeping car and saw that the walls were covered with writing, it seemed to me like a piece of very bad news.

I didn’t want to read any more—not then. Wallowyck had been enough for one day. I wanted only to go back to the club car and have another drink and assert my healthy indifference to the fancies of strangers. But the writing was there, and it was irresistible—it seemed to be some part of my destiny—and, although I read it with bitter unwillingness, I read through the first paragraph. The penmanship was the most commanding of all.

Why does not everyone who can afford it have a geranium in his window? It is very cheap. Its cheapness is next to nothing if you raise it from seed or from a slip. It is a beauty and a companion. It sweetens the air, rejoices the eye, links you with nature and innocence, and is something to love. And if it cannot love you in return, it cannot hate you, it cannot utter a hateful thing even for your neglecting it, for though it is all beauty, it has no vanity, and such being the case, and living as it does purely to do you good and afford pleasure, how will you be able to neglect it? But, pray, if you choose a geranium …

Back in the club car, it was getting dark. I was disturbed by these tender sentiments and depressed by the general gloom of the countryside at that time of day. Was what I had read the expression of some irrepressible love of quaintness and innocence? Whatever it was, I felt then a manifest responsibility to declare what I had discovered. Our knowledge of ourselves and of one another, in a historical moment of mercurial change, is groping. To hedge our observation, curiosity, and reflection with indifference would be sheer recklessness. My three chance encounters proved that this kind of literature was widespread. If these fancies were recorded and diagnosed, they might throw a brilliant illumination onto our psyche and bring us closer to the secret world of the truth. My search had its unconventional aspects, but if we are any less than shrewd, courageous, and honest with ourselves we are contemptible. I had six friends who worked for foundations, and I decided to call their attention to the phenomenon of the writing in public toilets. I knew they had financed poetry, research in zoology, studies of the history of stained glass and of the social significance of high heels, and, at that moment, the writing in public toilets appeared to be an avenue of truth that demanded exploration.

When I got back to New York, I arranged a lunch for my friends, in a restaurant in the Sixties that has a private dining room. At the end of the meal, I made my speech. My best friend there was the first to answer. “You’ve been away too long,” he said. “You’re out of touch. We don’t go for that kind of thing over here. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I think the idea is repulsive.” I glanced down and saw that I was wearing a brocade double-breasted vest and pointed yellow shoes, and I suppose I had spoken in the flat and affected accent of most expatriates. His accusation that my thinking was alien, strange, and indecent seemed invincible. I felt then, I feel now, that it was not the impropriety of my discovery but its explosiveness that disconcerted him, and that he had, in my absence, joined the ranks of those new men who feel that the truth is no longer usable in solving our dilemmas. He said goodbye, and one by one the others left, all on the same note—I had been away too long; I was out of touch with decency and common sense.

I RETURNED to Europe a few days later. The plane for Orly was delayed, and I killed some time in the bar and then looked around for the men’s room. The message this time was written on tile. “Bright Star!” I read, “would I were stedfast as thou art—Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night …” That was all. My flight was announced, and I sailed through the eaves of heaven back to the city of light.