The Stories of John Cheever

The Ocean

I AM KEEPING this journal because I believe myself to be in some danger and because I have no other way of recording my fears. I cannot report them to the police, as you will see, and I cannot confide in my friends. The losses I have recently suffered in self-esteem, reasonableness, and charity are conspicuous, but there is always some painful ambiguity about who is to blame. I might be to blame myself. Let me give you an example. Last night I sat down to dinner with Cora, my wife, at half past six. Our only daughter has left home, and we eat, these days, in the kitchen, off a table ornamented with a goldfish bowl. The meal was cold ham, salad, and potatoes. When I took a mouthful of salad I had to spit it out. “Ah, yes,” my wife said. “I was afraid that would happen. You left your lighter fluid in the pantry, and I mistook it for vinegar.”

As I say, who was to blame? I have always been careful about putting things in their places, and had she meant to poison me she wouldn’t have done anything so clumsy as to put lighter fluid in the salad dressing. If I had not left the fluid in the pantry, the incident wouldn’t have taken place. But let me go on for a minute. During dinner a thunderstorm came up. The sky got black. Suddenly there was a soaking rain. As soon as dinner was over, Cora dressed herself in a raincoat and a green shower cap and went out to water the lawn. I watched her from the window. She seemed oblivious of the ragged walls of rain in which she stood, and she watered the lawn carefully, lingering over the burnt spots. I was afraid that she would compromise herself in the eyes of our neighbors. The woman in the house next door would telephone the woman on the corner to say that Cora Fry was watering her lawn in a downpour. My wish that she not be ridiculed by gossip took me to her side, although as I approached her, under my umbrella, I realized that I lacked the tact to get through this gracefully. What should I say? Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends. “Come in, dear,” I said. “You might get struck.”

“Oh, I doubt that very much,” she said in her most musical voice. She speaks these days in the octave above middle C.

“Won’t you wait until the rain is over?” I asked.

“It won’t last long,” she said sweetly. “Thunderstorms never do.”

Under my umbrella, I returned to the house and poured myself a drink. She was right. A minute later the storm blew off, and she went on watering the grass. She had some rightness on her side in both of these incidents, but this does not change my feeling that I am in some danger.

Oh, world, world, world, wondrous and bewildering, when did my troubles begin? This is being written in my house in Bullet Park. The time is 10 A.M. The day is Tuesday. You might well ask what I am doing in Bullet Park on a weekday morning. The only other men around are three clergymen, two invalids, and an old codger on Turner Street who has lost his marbles. The neighborhood has the serenity, the stillness of a terrain where all sexual tensions have been suspended—excluding mine, of course, and those of the three clergymen. What is my business? What do I do? Why didn’t I catch the train? I am forty-six years old, hale, well-dressed, and have a more thorough knowledge of the manufacture and merchandising of Dynaflex than any other man in the entire field. One of my difficulties is my youthful looks. I have a thirty-inch waistline and jet-black hair, and when I tell people that I used to be vice-president in charge of merchandising and executive assistant to the president of Dynaflex—when I tell this to strangers in bars and on trains—they never believe me, because I look so young.

Mr. Estabrook, the president of Dynaflex and in some ways my protector, was an enthusiastic gardener. While admiring his flowers one afternoon, he was stung by a bumblebee, and he died before they could get him to the hospital. I could have had the presidency, but I wanted to stay in merchandising and manufacture. Then the directors—including myself, of course—voted a merger with Milltonium Ltd., putting Eric Penumbra, Milltonium’s chief, at the helm. I voted for the merger with some misgivings, but I concealed these and did the most important part of the groundwork for this change. It was my job to bring in the approval of conservative and reluctant stockholders, and one by one I brought them around. The fact that I had worked for Dynaflex since I had left college, that I had never worked for anyone else, inspired their trust. A few days after the merger was a fact, Penumbra called me into his office. “Well,” he said, “you’ve had it.”

“Yes, I have,” I said. I thought he was complimenting me on having brought in the approvals. I had traveled all over the United States and made two trips to Europe. No one else could have done it.

“You’ve had it,” Penumbra said harshly. “How long will it take you to get out of here?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“How the hell long will it take you to get out of here!” he shouted. “You’re obsolete. We can’t afford people like you in the shop. I’m asking how long it will take you to get out of here.”

“It will take about an hour,” I said.

“Well, I’ll give you to the end of the week,” he said. “If you want to send your secretary up, I’ll fire her. You’re really lucky. With your pension, severance pay, and the stock you own, you’ll have damned near as much money as I take home, without having to lift a finger.” Then he left his desk and came to where I stood. He put an arm around my shoulders. He gave me a hug. “Don’t worry,” Penumbra said. “Obsolescence is something we all have to face. I hope I’ll be as calm about it as you when my time comes.”

“I certainly hope you will,” I said, and I left the office.

I went to the men’s room. I locked myself up in a cubicle and wept. I wept at Penumbra’s dishonesty, wept for the destinies of Dynaflex, wept for the fate of my secretary—an intelligent spinster, who writes short stories in her spare time—wept bitterly for my own naïveté for my own lack of guile, wept that I should be overwhelmed by the plain facts of life. At the end of a half hour I dried my tears and washed my face. I took everything out of my office that was personal, took a train home, and broke the news to Cora. I was angry, of course, and she seemed frightened. She began to cry. She retired to her dressing table, which has served as a wailing wall for all the years of our marriage.

“But there’s nothing to cry about,” I said. “I mean, we’ve got plenty of money. We’ve got loads of money. We can go to Japan. We can go to India. We can see the English cathedrals.” She went on crying, and after dinner I called our daughter Flora, who lives in New York. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said, when I told her the news. “I’m very sorry, I know how you must feel, and I’d like to see you later but not right now. Remember your promise—you promised to leave me alone.”

The next character to enter the scene is my mother-in-law, whose name is Minnie. Minnie is a harsh-voiced blonde of about seventy, with four scars on the side of her face, from cosmetic surgery. You may have seen Minnie rattling around Neiman-Marcus or the lobby of practically any Grand Hotel. Minnie uses the word “fashionable” with great versatility. Of her husband’s suicide in 1932 Minnie says, “Jumping out of windows was quite fashionable.” When her only son was fired out of secondary school for improper conduct and went to live in Paris with an older man, Minnie said, “I know it’s revolting, but it seems to be terribly fashionable.” Of her own outrageous plumage she says, “It’s hideously uncomfortable but it’s divinely fashionable.” Minnie is cruel and idle, and Cora, who is her only daughter, hates her. Cora has drafted her nature along lines that are the opposite of Minnie’s. She is loving, serious-minded, sober, and kind. I think that in order to safeguard her virtues—her hopefulness, really—Cora has been forced to evolve a fantasy in which her mother is not Minnie at all but is instead some sage and gracious lady, working at an embroidery hoop. Everybody knows how persuasive and treacherous fantasies can be.

I spent the day after I was cashiered by Penumbra hanging around the house. With the offices of Dynaflex shut to me, I was surprised to find that I had almost no place else to go. My club is a college adjunct where they serve a cafeteria lunch, and it is not much of a sanctuary. I have always wanted to read good books, and this seemed to be my chance. I took a copy of Chaucer into the garden and read half a page, but it was hard work for a businessman. I spent the rest of the morning hoeing the lettuce, which made the gardener cross. Lunch with Cora was for some reason strained. After lunch Cora took a nap. So did the maid, I discovered, when I stepped into the kitchen to get a glass of water. She was sound asleep with her head on the table. The stillness of the house at that hour gave me a most peculiar feeling. But the world with all its diversions and entertainments was available to me, and I called New York and booked some theatre tickets for that evening. Cora doesn’t much enjoy the theatre, but she came with me. After the theatre we went to the St. Regis to get some supper. When we entered the place, the band was knocking out the last number of a set—all horns up, flags flying, and the toothy drummer whacking crazily at everything he could reach. In the middle of the dance floor was Minnie, shaking her backside, stamping her feet, and popping her thumbs. She was with a broken-winded gigolo, who kept looking desperately over his shoulder, as if he expected his trainer to throw in the sponge. Minnie’s plumage was exceptionally brilliant, her face seemed exceptionally haggard, and a lot of people were laughing at her. As I say, Cora seems to have invented a dignified parent, and these encounters with Minnie are cruel. We turned and went away. Cora said nothing during the long drive home.

Minnie must have been beautiful many years ago. It was from Minnie that Cora got her large eyes and her fine nose. Minnie comes to visit us two or three times a year. There is no question about the fact that if she announced her arrivals we would lock up the house and go away. Her ability to make her daughter miserable is consummate and voracious, and so, with some cunning, she makes her arrivals at our house a surprise. I spent the next afternoon trying to read Henry James in the garden. At about five I heard a car stop in front of the house. A little while later it began to rain, and I stepped into the living room and saw Minnie standing by a window. It was quite dark, but no one had bothered to turn on a light. “Why, Minnie,” I exclaimed, “how nice to see you, what a pleasant surprise. Let me get you a drink …” I turned on a lamp and saw that it was Cora.

She turned on me slowly a level and eloquent look of utter misgiving. It might have been a smile had I not known that I had wounded her painfully; had I not felt from her a flow of emotion like the flow of blood from a wound. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, darling,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. I couldn’t see.” She went out of the room. “It was the dark,” I said. “It got so dark all of a sudden, when it began to rain. I’m terribly sorry, but it was just the dark and the rain.” I heard her climb the dark stairs and close the door to our room.

When I saw Cora in the morning—and I didn’t see her again until morning—I could tell by the pained look on her face that she thought I had wickedly pretended to mistake her for Minnie. I suppose she was as deeply and lastingly hurt as I had been hurt when Penumbra called me obsolete. It was at this point that her voice became an octave higher, and she spoke to me—when she spoke to me at all—in notes that were weary and musical, and her looks were accusing and dark. Now, I might not have noticed any of this had I been absorbed in my work and tired in the evening. To strike a healthy balance between motion and scrutiny was nearly impossible with my opportunities for motion so suddenly curtailed. I went on with my program of serious reading, but more than half my time was spent in observing Cora’s sorrows and the disorganized workings of my house. A part-time maid came four times a week, and when I saw her sweeping dust under the rugs and taking catnaps in the kitchen, I got irritable. I said nothing about this, but a vexatious relationship quickly sprang up between us. It was the same with the gardener. If I sat on the terrace to read, he would cut the grass under my chair, and he took a full day, at four dollars an hour, to cut the lawns, although I knew from experience that this could be done in a much shorter time. As for Cora, I saw how empty and friendless her life was. She never went out to lunch. She never played cards. She arranged flowers, went to the hairdresser, gossiped with the maid, and rested. The smallest things began to irritate and offend me, and I was doubly offended by my unreasonable irritability. The sound of Cora’s light and innocent footstep as she wandered aimlessly around the house made me cross. I was even offended at her manner of speaking. “I must try to arrange the flowers,” she would say. “I must try to buy a hat. I must try to have my hair done. I must try to find a yellow pocketbook.” Leaving the lunch table she would say, “Now I shall try to lie in the sun.” But why try? The sun poured from the heavens down onto the terrace, where there was a large assortment of comfortable furniture, and a few minutes after she had stretched herself out in a long chair she was asleep. Rising from her nap she would say, “I must try not to get a sunburn,” and entering the house she would say, “Now I am going to try to take a bath.”

I drove down to the station one afternoon to watch the six-thirty-two come in. It was the train I used to return home on. I stopped my car in a long line of cars driven mostly by housewives. I was terribly excited. I was waiting for no one, and the women around me were merely waiting for their husbands, but it seemed to me that we were all waiting for much more. The stage, it seemed, was set. Pete and Harry, the two cab drivers, stood by their cars. With them was the Bruxtons’ Airedale, who wanders. Mr. Winters, the station agent, was talking with Louisa Balcolm, the postmistress, who lives two stops up the line. These, then, were the attendant players, the porters and gossips who would put down the groundwork for the spectacle. I kept an eye on my wristwatch. Then the train pulled in, and a moment later an eruption, a jackpot of humanity, burst through the station doors—so numerous and eager, so like sailors home from the sea, so hurried, so loving, that I laughed with pleasure. There they all were, the short and the tall, the rich and the poor, the sage and the foolish, my enemies and friends, and they all headed out the door with such a light step, so bright an eye, that I knew I must rejoin them. I would simply go back to work. This decision made me feel cheerful and magnanimous, and when I came home my cheer seemed for a moment to be infectious. Cora spoke for the first time in days in a voice that was full and warm, but when I replied, she said, musically, “I was speaking to the goldfish,” She was indeed. The beautiful smile that she had withheld from me was aimed at the goldfish bowl, and I wondered if she had not left the world, its lights, cities, and the clash of things, for this sphere of glass and its foolish castle. Watching her bend lovingly over the goldfish bowl, I got the distinct impression that she looked longingly into this other world.

I WENT TO NEW YORK in the morning and called the friend who has always been most complimentary about my work with Dynaflex. He told me to come to his office at around noon—I guessed for lunch. “I want to go back to work,” I told him. “I want your help.”

“Well, it isn’t simple,” he said. “It isn’t as simple as it might seem. To begin with, you can’t expect much in the way of sympathy. Everybody in the business knows how generous Penumbra was to you. Most of us would be happy to change places. I mean, there’s a certain amount of natural envy. People don’t like to help a man who’s in a more comfortable position than they. And another thing is that Penumbra wants you to stay in retirement. I don’t know why this is, but I know it’s a fact, and anybody who took you on would be in trouble with Milltonium. And, to get on with the unpleasant facts, you’re just too damned old. Our president is twenty-seven. Our biggest competitor has a chief in his early thirties. So why don’t you enjoy yourself? Why don’t you take it easy? Why don’t you go around the world?” Then I asked, very humbly, if I made an investment in his firm—say fifty thousand dollars—could he find me a responsible post. He smiled broadly. It all seemed so easy. “I’ll be happy to take your fifty thousand,” he said lightly, “but as for finding you anything to do, I’m afraid …” Then his secretary came in to say that he was late for lunch.

I stood on a street corner, appearing to wait for the traffic light to change, but I was just waiting. I was staggered. What I wanted to do was to make a sandwich board on which I would list all my grievances. On it I would describe Penumbra’s dishonesty, Cora’s sorrow, the indignities I had suffered from the maid and gardener, and how cruelly I had been hurled out of the stream of things by a vogue for youth and inexperience. I would hang this sign from my shoulders and march up and down in front of the public library from nine until five, passing out more detailed literature to those who were interested. Throw in a snowstorm, gale winds, and the crash of thunder; I wanted it to be a spectacle.

I then stepped into a side-street restaurant to get a drink and some lunch. It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious. The headwaiter was a brisk character off the Corso di Roma. He duck-footed, banging down the heels of his Italian shoes, and hunched his shoulders as if his suit jacket bound. He spoke sharply to the bartender, who then whispered to a waiter, “I’ll kill him! Someday I’ll kill him!” “You and me,” whispered the waiter, “we’ll kill him together.” The hat-check girl joined the whispering. She wanted to kill the manager. The conspirators scattered when the headwaiter returned, but the atmosphere remained mutinous. I drank a cocktail and ordered a salad, and then I overheard the impassioned voice of a man in the booth next to mine. I had nothing better to do than listen. “I go to Minneapolis,” he said. “I have to go to Minneapolis, and as soon as I check into the hotel the telephone’s ringing. She wants to tell me that the hot-water heater isn’t working. There I am in Minneapolis and she’s on Long Island and she calls me long-distance to say that the hot-water heater isn’t working. So then I ask her why doesn’t she call the plumber, and then she begins to cry. She cries over long-distance for about fifteen minutes, just because I suggest that she might call the plumber. Well, anyhow, in Minneapolis there’s this very good jewelry store, and so I bought her a pair of earrings. Sapphires. Eight hundred dollars. I can’t afford this kind of thing, but I can’t afford not to buy her presents. I mean, I can make eight hundred dollars in ten minutes, but as the tax lawyer says, I don’t take away more than a third of what I make, and so a pair of eight-hundred-dollar earrings cost me around two thousand. Anyway, I get the earrings, and I give them to her when I get homeland we go off to a party at the Barnstables’. When we come home, she’s lost one of the earrings. She doesn’t know where she lost it. She doesn’t care. She won’t even call the Barnstables to see if it’s lying around on the floor. She doesn’t want to disturb them. So then I say it’s just like throwing money into the fire, and she begins to cry and says that sapphires are cold stones—that they express my inner coldness toward her. She says there wasn’t any love in the present—it wasn’t a loving present. All I had to do was to step into a jewelry store and buy them, she says. They didn’t cost me anything in thoughtfulness and affection. So then I ask her does she expect me to make her some earrings—does she want me to go to night school and learn how to make one of those crummy silver bracelets they make? Hammered. You know. Every little hammer blow a sign of love and affection. Is that what she wants, for Christ’s sake? That’s another night when I slept in the guest room….”

I went on eating and listening. I waited for the stranger’s companion to enter into the conversation, to make some sound of sympathy or assent, but there was none, and I wondered for a moment if he wasn’t talking to himself. I craned my neck around the edge of the booth, but he was too far into the corner for me to see. “She has this money of her own,” he went on. “I pay the tax on it, and she spends it all on clothes. She’s got hundreds and hundreds of dresses and shoes, and three fur coats, and four wigs. Four. But if I buy a suit she tells me I’m being wasteful. I have to buy clothes once in a while. I mean, I can’t go to the office looking like a bum. If I buy anything, it’s very wasteful. Last year, I bought an umbrella, just so I wouldn’t get wet. Wasteful. The year before, I bought a light coat. Wasteful. I can’t even buy a phonograph record, because I know I’ll catch hell for being so wasteful. On my salary—imagine, on my salary, we can’t afford to have bacon for breakfast excepting on Sundays. Bacon is wasteful. But you ought to see her telephone bills. She has this friend, this college roommate. I guess they were very close. She lives in Rome. I don’t like her. She was married to this very nice fellow, a good friend of mine, and she just ran him into the ground. She just disposed of him. He’s a wreck. Well, now she lives in Rome, and Vera keeps calling her on the telephone. Last month my telephone bills to Rome were over eight hundred dollars. So I said, ‘Vera,’ I said, ‘if you want to talk with your girl chum so much, why don’t you just get on a plane and fly to Rome? It would be a lot cheaper.’ ‘I don’t want to go to Rome,’ she said. ‘I hate Rome. It’s noisy and dirty.’

“But you know when I think back over my past, and her past, too, it seems to me that this is a situation with a very long taproot. My grandmother was a very emancipated woman, she was very strong on women’s rights. When my mother was thirty-two years old, she went to law school and got her degree. She never practiced. She said she went to law school so she’d have more things in common with Dad, but what she actually did was to destroy, really destroy the little tenderness that remained between them. She was almost never at home, and when she was she was always studying for her exams. It was always ‘Sh-h-h! Your mother’s studying law….’ My father was a lonely man, but there’s an awful lot of lonely men around. They won’t say so, of course. Who tells the truth? You meet an old friend on the street. He looks like hell. It’s frightening. His face is gray, and his hair’s all falling out, and he’s got the shakes. So you say, ‘Charlie, Charlie, you’re looking great.’ So then he says, shaking all over, ‘I never felt better in my life, never.’ So then you go your way, and he goes his way.

“I can see that it isn’t easy for Vera, but what can I do? Honest to God sometimes I’m afraid she’ll hurt me—brain me with a hammer while I’m asleep. Not because it’s me, but just because I’m a man. Sometimes I think women today are the most miserable creatures in the history of the world. I mean, they’re right in the middle of the ocean. For instance, I caught her smooching with Pete Barnstable in the pantry. That was the night she lost the earring, the night when I came back from Minneapolis. So then when I got home, before I noticed the earring was gone, I said what is this, what is this smooching around with Pete Barnstable? So then she said—very emancipated—that no woman could be expected to limit herself to the attentions of one man. So then I said what about me, did that work for me, too? I mean, if she could smooch around with Pete Barnstable, didn’t it follow that I could take Mildred Renny out to the parking lot? So then she said I was turning everything she said into filth. She said I had such a dirty mind she couldn’t talk with me. After that I noticed she’d lost the earring, and after that we had the scene about how sapphires are such cold stones, and after that …”

His voice dropped to a whisper, and at the same time some women in the booth on the other side of me began a noisy and savage attack on a friend they all shared. I was very anxious to see the face of the man behind me, and I called for the check, but when I left the booth he was gone, and I would never know what he looked like.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I put the car in the garage and came into the house by the kitchen door. Cora was at the table, bending over a dish of cutlets. In one hand she held a can of lethal pesticide. I couldn’t be sure because I’m so nearsighted, but I think she was sprinkling pesticide on the meat. She was startled when I came in, and by the time I had my glasses on she had put the pesticide on the table. Since I had already made one bad mistake because of my eyesight, I was reluctant to make another, but there was the pesticide on the table beside the dish, and that was not where it belonged. It contained a high percentage of nerve poison. “What in the world are you doing?” I asked.

“What does it look as if I were doing?” she asked, still speaking in the octave above middle C.

“It looks as if you were putting pesticide in the cutlets,” I said.

“I know you don’t grant me much intelligence,” she said, “but please grant me enough intelligence to know better than that.”

“But what are you doing with the pesticide?” I asked.

“I have been dusting the roses,” she said.

I was routed, in a way, routed and frightened. I guessed that meat heavily dosed with pesticide could be fatal. There was a chance that if I ate the cutlets I might die. The extraordinary fact seemed to be that after twenty years of marriage I didn’t know Cora well enough to know whether or not she intended to murder me. I would trust a chance de-liveryman or a cleaning woman, but I did not trust Cora. The prevailing winds seemed not to have blown the smoke of battle off our union. I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful. The blue walls of the room seemed to be some link in the chain of being that I would offend by driving up to the club and eating an open steak sandwich alone in the bar.

I ate one of the cutlets at dinner. It had a peculiar taste, but by this time I couldn’t distinguish between my anxieties and the facts involved. I was terribly sick in the night, but this could have been my imagination. I spent an hour in the bathroom with acute indigestion. Cora seemed to be asleep, but when I returned from the bathroom I did notice that her eyes were open. I was worried, and in the morning I made my own breakfast. The maid cooked lunch, and I doubted that she would poison me. I read some more Henry James in the garden, but as the time for dinner approached I found that I was frightened. I went into the pantry to make a drink. Cora had been preparing dinner, and had gone to some other part of the house. There is a broom closet in the kitchen, and I stepped into it and shut the door. Presently I heard Cora’s footsteps as she returned. We keep the pesticides for the roses in a cabinet in the kitchen. I heard her open this cabinet. Then she stepped out into the garden, where I heard her dusting the roses. She then returned to the kitchen, but she did not return the pesticide to the closet. My field of vision through the keyhole was limited. Her back was to me as she spiced the meat, and I couldn’t tell if she was using salt and pepper or nerve poison. She then went back to the garden, and I stepped out of the broom closet. The pesticide was not on the table. I went into the living room, and entered the dining room from there when dinner was ready. “Isn’t it hot,” I asked when I sat down.

“Well,” said Cora, “we can’t expect to be comfortable, can we, if we hide in broom closets?”

I hung on to my chair, picked at my food, made some small talk, and got through the meal. Now and then she gave me a serene and wicked smile. After dinner I went into the garden. I desperately needed help, and thought then of my daughter. I should explain that Flora graduated from the Villa Mimosa in Florence, and left Smith College in the middle of her freshman year to live in a Lower East Side tenement with a sexual freak. I send her an allowance each month and have promised to leave her alone, but, considering the dangerousness of my position, I felt free to break my promise. I felt that if I could see her I could persuade her to come home. I telephoned her then and said that I must see her. She seemed quite friendly and asked me to come to tea.

I had lunch in town the next day and spent the afternoon at my club, playing cards and drinking whiskey. Flora had given me directions, and I went downtown on the subway for the first time in I don’t know how many years. It was all very strange. I’ve often thought of going to visit my only daughter and her own true love, and now at last I was making this journey. In my reveries the meeting would take place in some club. He would come from a good family. Flora would be happy; she would have the shining face of a young girl first in love. The boy would be serious, but not too serious; intelligent, handsome, and with the winning posture of someone who stands literally at the threshold of a career. I could see the fatuity in these reveries, but had they been so vulgar and idle that I deserved to have them contravened at every point—the scene changed from a club to the city’s worst slum and the substitution of a freak with a beard for an earnest young man? I had friends whose daughters married suitable young men from suitable families. Envy struck me in the crowded subway, then petulance. Why had I been singled out for this disaster? I loved my daughter. The power of love I felt for her seemed pure, strong, and natural. Suddenly I felt like crying. Every sort of door had been open for her, she had seen the finest landscapes, she had enjoyed, I thought, the company of those people who were most free to develop their gifts.

It was raining when I left the subway. I followed her directions through a slum to a tenement. I guessed the building to be about eighty years old. Two polished marble columns supported a Romanesque arch. It even had a name. It was called the Eden. I saw the angel with the flaming sword, the naked couple, stooped, their hands over their privates. Masaccio? That was when we went to visit her in Florence. So I entered Eden like an avenging angel, but once under the Romanesque arch I found a corridor as narrow as the companionway in a submarine, and the power of light over my spirits—always considerable—was in this case very depressing, the lights in the hall were so primitive and sorry. Flights of stairs often appear in my dreams, and the stairs I began to climb had a galling look of unreality. I heard Spanish spoken, the roar of water from a toilet, music, and the barking of dogs.

Moved by anger, or perhaps by the drinks I had had at the club, I went up three or four flights at a brisk clip and then found myself suddenly winded; forced to stop short in my climb and engage in a humiliating struggle for breath. It was several minutes before I could continue, and I went the rest of the way slowly. Flora had tacked one of her calling cards to the door. I knocked. “Hi, Daddy,” she said brightly, and I kissed her on the brow. Oh, this much of it was good, fresh, and strong. I felt a burst of memory, a recollection of all the happiness we had shared. The door opened onto a kitchen and beyond this was another room. “I want you to meet Peter,” she said.

“Hi,” said Peter.

“How do you do,” I said.

“See what we’ve made,” said Flora. “Isn’t it divine? We’ve just finished it. It was Peter’s idea.”

What they had made, what they had done was to purchase a skeleton with an armature from a medical supply house and glue butterflies here and there to the polished bone. I recognized some of the specimens from my youth and recognized that I would not at that time have been able to afford them. There was a Catagramme Astarte on the shoulder bone, a Sapphira in one eye socket, and a large cluster of Appia Zarinda at the pubis. “Marvelous,” I said, “marvelous,” trying to conceal my distaste. Compared to the useful tasks of life, the thought of these two grown people gluing expensive butterflies to the polished bones of some poor stranger made me intensely irritable. I sat in a canvas chair and smiled at Flora. “How are you, my dear?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Daddy,” she said. “I’m fine.”

I kept myself from remarking on either her clothing or her hair. She was dressed all in black, and her hair was straight. The purpose of this costume or uniform escaped me. It was not becoming. It did not appeal to the senses. It seemed to reflect on her self-esteem; it seemed like a costume of mourning or penance, a declaration of her indifference to the silks that I enjoy on women; but what were her reasons for despising finery? His costume was much more bewildering. Was its origin Italian? I wondered. The shoes were effeminate, and the jacket was short, but he looked more like a street boy in nineteenth-century London than someone on the Corso. That would be excepting his hair. He had a beard, a mustache, and long dark curls that reminded me of some minor apostle in a third-rate Passion Play. His face was not effeminate, but it was delicate, and seemed to me to convey a marked lack of commitment.

“Would you like some coffee, Daddy?” Flora asked.

“No, thank you, dear,” I said. “Is there anything to drink?”

“We don’t have anything,” she said.

“Would Peter be good enough to go out and get me something?” I asked.

“I guess so,” Peter said glumly, and I told myself that he was probably not intentionally rude. I gave him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to get me some bourbon.

“I don’t think they have bourbon,” he said.

“Well, then, Scotch,” I said.

“They drink mostly wine in the neighborhood,” Peter said.

Then I settled on him a clear, kindly gaze, thinking that I would have him murdered. From what I know of the world there are still assassins to be hired, and I would pay someone to put a knife in his back or push him off a roof. My smile was broad, clear, and genuinely murderous, and the boy slipped into a green coat—another piece of mummery—and went out.

“You don’t like him?” Flora asked.

“I despise him,” I said.

“But, Daddy, you don’t know him,” Flora said.

“My dear, if I knew him any better I would wring his neck.”

“He’s very kind and sensitive—he’s very generous.”

“I can see that he’s very sensitive,” I said.

“He’s the kindest person I’ve ever known,” Flora said.

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, “but let’s talk about you now, shall we? I didn’t come here to talk about Peter.”

“But we’re living together, Daddy.”

“So I’ve been told. But the reason I came here, Flora, is to find out about you—what your plans are and so forth. I won’t disapprove of your plans, whatever they are. I simply want to know what they are. You can’t spend the rest of your life gluing butterflies to skeletons. All I want to know is what you plan to do with your life.”

“I don’t know, Daddy.” She raised her face. “Nobody my age knows.”

“I’m not taking a consensus of your generation. I am asking you. I am asking you what you would like to make of your life. I am asking you what ideas you have, what dreams you have, what hopes you have for yourself.”

“I don’t know, Daddy. Nobody my age knows.”

“I wish you would eliminate the rest of your generation. I am acquainted with at least fifty girls your age who know precisely what they want to do. They want to be historians, editors, doctors, housewives, and mothers. They want to do something useful.”

Peter came back with a bottle of bourbon but he did not return any change. Was this cupidity, I wondered, or absent-mindedness? I said nothing. Flora brought me a glass and some water, and I asked if they would join me in a drink.

“We don’t drink much,” Peter said.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “While you were out, I talked with Flora about her plans. That is, I discovered that she doesn’t have any plans, and since she doesn’t I’m going to take her back to Bullet Park with me until her thinking is a little more decisive.”

“I’m going to stay with Peter,” Flora said.

“But supposing Peter had to go away?” I asked. “Suppose Peter had some interesting offer, such as six months or a year abroad—what would you do then?”

“Oh, Daddy,” she asked, “you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Oh yes I would, I most certainly would,” I said. “I would do anything on heaven or earth that I thought might bring you to your senses. Would you like to go abroad, Peter?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His face could not be said to have brightened, but for a moment his intelligence seemed engaged. “I’d like to go to East Berlin,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’d like to go to East Berlin and give my American passport to some great creative person,” he said, “some writer or musician, and let him escape to the free world.”

“Why,” I asked, “don’t you paint Peace on your arse and jump off a twelve-story building?”

This was a mistake, a disaster, a catastrophe, and I poured myself some more bourbon. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm tired. However, my offer still stands. If you want to go to Europe, Peter, I’ll be happy to pay your bills.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Peter said. “I’ve been. I mean, I’ve seen most of it.”

“Well, keep it in mind,” I said. “And as for you, Flora, I want you to come home with me. Come home for a week or two, anyhow. That’s all I ask. Ten years from now you will reproach me for not having guided you out of this mess. Ten years from now you’ll ask me, ‘Daddy, Daddy, oh, Daddy, why didn’t you teach me not to spend the best years of my life in a slum?’ I can’t bear the thought of you coming to me ten years from now, to blame me for not having forced you to take my advice.”

“I won’t go home.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“I can if I want.”

“I will stop your allowance.”

“I can get a job.”

“What kind of a job? You can’t type, you can’t take shorthand, you don’t know the first thing about any sort of business procedure, you can’t even run a switchboard.”

“I can get a job as a filing clerk.”

“Oh my God!” I roared. “Oh my God! After the sailing lessons and the skiing lessons, after the get-togethers and the cotillion, after the year in Florence and the long summers at the sea—after all this it turns out that what you really want is to be a spinster filing clerk with a low civil-service rating, whose principal excitement is to go once or twice a year to a fourth-rate Chinese restaurant with a dozen other spinster filing clerks and get tipsy on two sweet Manhattans.”

I fell back into my chair and poured myself some more whiskey. There was a sharp pain in my heart, as if that lumpy organ had weathered every abuse, only to be crippled by misery. The pain was piercing, and I thought I would die—not at that moment, in the canvas chair, but a few days later, perhaps in Bullet Park, or in some comfortable hospital bed. The idea did not alarm me; it was a consolation. I would die, and with those areas of tension that I represented finally removed, my only, only daughter would at last take up her life. My sudden disappearance from the scene would sober her with sorrow and misgiving. My death would mature her. She would go back to Smith, join the glee club, edit the newspaper, befriend girls of her own class, and marry some intelligent and visionary young man, who seemed, at the moment, to be wearing spectacles, and raise three or four sturdy children. She would be sorry. That was it, and overnight sorrow would show her the inutility of living in a slum with a stray.

“Go home, Daddy,” she said. She was crying. “Go home, Daddy, and leave us alone! Please go home, Daddy!”

“I’ve always tried to understand you,” I said. “You used to put four or five records on the player at Bullet Park, and as soon as the music began you’d walk out of the house. I never understood why you did this, but one night I went out of the house to see if I could find you, and, walking down the lawn, with the music coming from all the open windows, I thought I did understand. I mean, I thought you put the records on and left the house because you liked to hear the music pouring out of the windows. I mean, I thought you liked at the end of your walk to come back to a house where music was playing. I was right, wasn’t I? I understand that much?”

“Go home, Daddy,” she said. “Please go home.”

“And it isn’t only you, Flora,” I said. “I need you. I need you terribly.”

“Go home, Daddy,” she said, and so I did.

I HAD SOME SUPPER in town and came home at around ten. I could hear Cora drawing a bath upstairs, and I took a shower in the bathroom off the kitchen. When I went upstairs, Cora was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair. Now, I have neglected to say that Cora is beautiful, and that I love her. She has ash-blond hair, dark brows, full lips, and eyes that are so astonishingly large, volatile, and engaging, so strikingly set, that I sometimes think she might take them off and put them between the pages of a book; leave them on a table. The white is a light blue and the blue itself is of unusual depth. She is a graceful woman, not tall. She smokes continuously and has for most of her life, but she handles her cigarettes with a charming clumsiness, as if this entrenched habit were something she had just picked up. Her arms, legs, front, everything is beautifully proportioned. I love her, and, loving her, I know that love is not a reasonable process. I had not expected or wanted to fall in love when I first saw her at a wedding in the country. Cora was one of the attendants. The wedding was in a garden. A five-piece orchestra in tuxedos was half hidden in the rhododendrons. From the tent on the hill you could hear the caterer’s men icing wine in wash buckets. She was the second to come, and was wearing one of those outlandish costumes that are designed for bridal parties, as if holy matrimony had staked out some unique and mysterious place for itself in sumptuary history. Her dress was blue, as I remember, with things hanging off it, and she wore over her pale hair a broad-brimmed hat that had no crown at all. She wobbled over the lawn in her high-heeled shoes, staring shyly and miserably into a bunch of blue flowers, and when she had reached her position she raised her face and smiled shyly at the guests, and I saw for the first time the complexity and enormousness of her eyes; felt for the first time that she might take them off and put them into a pocket. “Who is she?” I asked aloud. “Who is she?” “Sh-h-h,” someone said. I was enthralled. My heart and my spirit leaped. I saw absolutely nothing of the rest of the wedding, and when the ceremony was over I raced up the lawn and introduced myself to her. I was not content with anything until she agreed to marry me, a year later.

Now my heart and my spirit leaped as I watched her comb her hair. A few days ago I had thought that she had retreated into the water of a goldfish howl. I had suspected her of attempted murder. How could I embrace decently and with the full ardor of my body and mind someone I suspected of murder? Was I embracing despair, was this an obscene passion, had I at that wedding so many years ago seen not beauty at all, but cruelty in her large eyes? I had made her, in my imagination, a goldfish, a murderess, and now when I took her in my arms she was a swan, a flight of stairs, a fountain, the unpatrolled, unguarded boundaries to paradise.

But I awoke at three, feeling terribly sad, and feeling rebelliously that I didn’t want to study sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair. I wanted to study triumphs, the rediscoveries of love, all that I know in the world to be decent, radiant, and clear. Then the word “love,” the impulse to love, welled up in me somewhere above my middle. Love seemed to flow from me in all directions, abundant as water—love for Cora, love for Flora, love for all my friends and neighbors, love for Penumbra. This tremendous flow of vitality could not be contained within its spelling, and I seemed to seize a laundry marker and write “luve” on the wall. I wrote “luve” on the staircase, “luve” on the pantry, “luve” on the oven, the washing machine, and the coffeepot, and when Cora came down in the morning (I would be nowhere around) everywhere she looked she would read “luve,” “luve,” “luve.” Then I saw a green meadow and a sparkling stream. On the ridge there were thatched-roof cottages and a square church tower, so I knew it must be England. I climbed up from the meadow to the streets of the village, looking for the cottage where Cora and Flora would be waiting for me. There seemed to have been some mistake. No one knew their names. I asked at the post office, but the answer here was the same. Then it occurred to me that they would be at the manor house. How stupid I had been! I left the village and walked up a sloping lawn to a Georgian house, where a butler let me in. The squire was entertaining. There were twenty-five or thirty people in the hall, drinking sherry. I took a glass from a tray and looked through the gathering for Flora and my wife, but they were not there. Then I thanked my host and walked down the broad lawn, back to the meadow and the sparkling brook, where I lay on the grass and fell into a sweet sleep.