The Stories of John Cheever

Percy

REMINISCENCE, along with the cheese boards and ugly pottery sometimes given to brides, seems to have a manifest destiny with the sea. Reminiscences are written on such a table as this, corrected, published, read, and then they begin their inevitable journey toward the bookshelves in those houses and cottages one rents for the summer. In the last house we rented, we had beside our bed the Memories of a Grand Duchess, the Recollections of a Yankee Whaler, and a paperback copy of Goodbye to All That, but it is the same all over the world. The only book in my hotel room in Taormina was Recordi d’un Soldato Garibaldino, and in my room in Yalta I found «Повесть о Жизни». Unpopularity is surely some part of this drifting toward salt water, but since the sea is our most universal symbol for memory, might there not be some mysterious affinity between these published recollections and the thunder of waves? So I put down what follows with the happy conviction that these pages will find their way into some bookshelf with a good view of a stormy coast. I can even see the room—see the straw rug, the window glass clouded with salt, and feel the house shake to the ringing of a heavy sea.

Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead. My father's cousin, Anna Boynton, who had taught Greek at Radcliffe, starved herself to death during the Armenian famine. She and her sister Nanny had the copper skin, high cheekbones, and black hair of the Natick Indians. My father liked to recall the night he drank all the champagne on the New York-Boston train. He started drinking splits with some friend before dinner, and when they finished the splits they emptied the quarts and the magnums and were working on a Jeroboam when the train reached Boston. He felt that this guzzling was heroic. My Uncle Hamlet—a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team—called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter—droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him. This all took place in the environs of Athenian Boston, but the family seemed much closer to the hyperbole and rhetoric that stem from Wales, Dublin, and the various principalities of alcohol than to the sermons of Phillips Brooks.

One of the most vivid members of my mother’s side of the family was an aunt who called herself Percy, and who smoked cigars. There was no sexual ambiguity involved. She was lovely, fair, and intensely feminine. We were never very close. My father may have disliked her, although I don’t recall this. My maternal grandparents had emigrated from England in the 1890s with their six children. My Grandfather Holinshed was described as a bounder—a word that has always evoked for me the image of a man leaping over a hedge just ahead of a charge of buckshot. I don’t know what mistakes he had made in England, but his transportation to the New World was financed by his father-in-law, Sir Percy Devere, and he was paid a small remittance so long as he did not return to England. He detested the United States and died a few years after his arrival here. On the day of his funeral, Grandmother announced to her children that there would be a family conference in the evening. They should be prepared to discuss their plans. When the conference was called, Grandmother asked the children in turn what they planned to make of their lives. Uncle Tom wanted to be a soldier. Uncle Harry wanted to be a sailor. Uncle Bill wanted to be a merchant. Aunt Emily wanted to marry. Mother wanted to be a nurse and heal the sick. Aunt Florence—who later called herself Percy—exclaimed, “I wish to be a great painter, like the Masters of the Italian Renaissance!” Grandmother then said, “Since at least one of you has a clear idea of her destiny, the rest of you will go to work and Florence will go to art school.” That is what they did, and so far as I know none of them ever resented this decision.

How smooth it all seems and how different it must have been. The table where they gathered would have been lighted by whale oil or kerosene. They lived in a farmhouse in Dorchester. They would have had lentils or porridge or at best stew for dinner. They were very poor. If it was in the winter, they would be cold, and after the conference the wind would extinguish Grandmother’s candle—stately Grandmother—as she went down the back path to the malodorous outhouse. They couldn’t have bathed more than once a week, and I suppose they bathed out of pails. The succinctness of Percy’s exclamation seems to have obscured the facts of a destitute widow with six children. Someone must have washed all those dishes, and washed them in greasy water, drawn from a pump and heated over a fire.

The threat of gentility in such recollections is Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation, and when Grandmother spoke French at the dinner table, as she often did, she merely meant to put her education to some practical use. It was, of course, a much simpler world. For example, Grandmother read in the paper one day that a drunken butcher, the father of four, had chopped up his wife with a meat cleaver, and she went directly to Boston by horsecar or hansom—whatever transportation was available. There was a crowd around the tenement where the murder had taken place, and two policemen guarded the door. Grandmother got past the policemen and found the butcher’s four terrified children in a bloody apartment. She got their clothes together, took the children home with her, and kept them for a month or longer, when other homes were found. Cousin Anna’s decision to starve and Percy’s wish to become a painter were made with the same directness. It was what Percy thought she could do best—what would make most sense of her life.

She began to call herself Percy in art school, because she felt that there was some prejudice against women in the arts. In her last year in art school she did a six-by-fourteen-foot painting of Orpheus taming the beasts. This won her a gold medal and a trip to Europe, where she studied at the Beaux-Arts for a few months. When she returned, she was given three portrait commissions, but she was much too skeptical to succeed at this. Her portraits were pictorial indictments, and all three of them were unacceptable. She was not an aggressive woman, but she was immoderate and critical.

After her return from France she met a young doctor named Abbott Tracy at some yacht club on the North Shore. I don’t mean the Corinthian. I mean some briny huddle of driftwood nailed together by weekend sailors. Moths in the billiard felt. Salvaged furniture. Two earth closets labeled “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” and moorings for a dozen of those wide-waisted catboats that my father used to say sailed like real estate. Percy and Abbott Tracy met in some such place, and she fell in love. He had already begun a formidable and clinical sexual career, and seemed unacquainted in any way with sentiment, although I recall that he liked to watch children saying their prayers. Percy listened for his footsteps, she languished in his absence, his cigar cough sounded to her like music, and she filled a portfolio with pencil sketches of his face, his eyes, his hands, and, after their marriage, the rest of him.

They bought an old house in West Roxbury. The ceilings were low, the rooms were dark, the windows were small, and the fireplaces smoked. Percy liked all of this, and shared with my mother a taste for drafty ruins that seemed odd in such high-minded women. She turned a spare bedroom into a studio and did another large canvas—Prometheus bringing fire to man. This was exhibited in Boston, but no one bought it. She then painted a nymph and centaur. This used to be in the attic, and the centaur looked exactly like Uncle Abbott. Uncle Abbott’s practice was not very profitable, and I guess he was lazy. I remember seeing him eating his breakfast in pajamas at one in the afternoon. They must have been poor, and I suppose Percy did the housework, bought the groceries, and hung out the wash. Late one night when I had gone to bed, I overheard my father shouting, “I cannot support that cigar-smoking sister of yours any longer.” Percy spent some time copying paintings at Fenway Court. This brought in a little money, but evidently not enough. One of her friends from art school urged her to try painting magazine covers. This went deeply against all of her aspirations and instincts, but it must have seemed to her that she had no choice, and she began to turn out deliberately sentimental pictures for magazines. She got to be quite famous at this.

She was never pretentious, but she couldn’t forget that she had not explored to the best of her ability those gifts that she may have had, and her enthusiasm for painting was genuine. When she was able to employ a cook, she gave the cook painting lessons. I remember her saying, toward the end of her life, “Before I die, I must go back to the Boston Museum and see the Sargent watercolors.” When I was sixteen or seventeen, I took a walking tour in Germany with my brother and bought Percy some van Gogh reproductions in Munich. She was very excited by these. Painting, she felt, had some organic vitality—it was the exploration of continents of consciousness, and here was a new world. The deliberate puerility of most of her work had damaged her draftsmanship, and at one point she began to hire a model on Saturday mornings and sketch from life. Going there on some simple errand—the return of a book or a newspaper clipping—I stepped into her studio and found, sitting on the floor, a naked young woman. “Nellie Casey,” said Percy, “this is my nephew, Ralph Warren.” She went on sketching. The model smiled sweetly—it was nearly a social smile and seemed to partially temper her monumental nakedness. Her breasts were very beautiful, and the nipples, relaxed and faintly colored, were bigger than silver dollars. The atmosphere was not erotic or playful, and I soon left. I dreamed for years of Nellie Casey. Percy’s covers brought in enough money for her to buy a house on the Cape, a house in Maine, a large automobile, and a small painting by Whistler that used to hang in the living room beside a copy Percy had made of Titian’s Europa.

Her first son, Lovell, was born in the third year of her marriage. When he was four or five years old, it was decided that he was a musical genius, and he did have unusual manual dexterity. He was great at unsnarling kite lines and fishing tackle. He was taken out of school, educated by tutors, and spent most of his time practicing the piano. I detested him for a number of reasons. He was extremely dirty-minded, and used oil on his hair. My brother and I wouldn’t have been more disconcerted if he had crowned himself with flowers. He not only used oil on his hair but when he came to visit us he left the hair-oil bottle in our medicine cabinet. He had his first recital in Steinway Hall when he was eight or nine, and he always played a Beethoven sonata when the family got together.

Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband’s lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion. How could a man that she adored be faithless? She hired a detective agency, which tracked him down to an apartment house near the railroad station called the Orpheus. Percy went there and found him in bed with an unemployed telephone operator. He was smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. “Now, Percy,” he is supposed to have said, “why did you have to go and do this?” She then came to our house and stayed with us for a week or so. She was pregnant, and when her son Beaufort was born his brain or his nervous system was seriously damaged. Abbott always claimed that there was nothing wrong with his son, but when Beaufort was five or six years old he was sent off to some school or institution in Connecticut. He used to come home for the holidays, and had learned to sit through an adult meal, but that was about all. He was an arsonist, and he once exposed himself at an upstairs window while Lovell was playing the “Waldstein.” In spite of all this, Percy was never bitter or melancholy, and continued to worship Uncle Abbott.

The family used to gather, as I recall, almost every Sunday. I don’t know why they should have spent so much time in one another’s company. Perhaps they had few friends or perhaps they held their family ties above friendship. Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy’s old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile. The house was dark. It had a liverish smell.

The guests often included Grandmother and old Nanny Boynton, whose sister had starved herself to death. Nanny taught music in the Boston public schools until her retirement, when she moved to a farm on the South Shore. Here she raised bees and mushrooms, and read musical scores—Puccini, Mozart, Debussy, Brahms, etc.—that were mailed to her by a friend in the public library. I remember her very pleasantly. She looked, as I’ve said, like a Natick Indian. Her nose was beaked, and when she went to the beehives she covered herself with cheesecloth and sang Vissi d’arte. I once overheard someone say that she was drunk a good deal of the time, but I don’t believe it. She stayed with Percy when the winter weather was bad, and she always traveled with a set of the Britannica, which was set up in the dining room behind her chair to settle disputes.

The meals at Percy’s were very heavy. When the wind blew, the fireplaces smoked. Leaves and rain fell outside the windows. By the time we retired to the dark living room, we were all uncomfortable. Lovell would then be asked to play. The first notes of the Beethoven sonata would transform that dark, close, malodorous room into a landscape of extraordinary beauty. A cottage stood in some green fields near a river. A woman with flaxen hair stepped out of the door and dried her hands on an apron. She called her lover. She called and called, but something was wrong. A storm was approaching. The river would flood. The bridge would be washed away. The bass was massive, gloomy, and prophetic. Beware, beware! Traffic casualties were unprecedented. Storms lashed the west coast of Florida. Pittsburgh was paralyzed by a blackout. Famine gripped Philadelphia, and there was no hope for anyone. Then the lyric treble sang a long song about love and beauty. When this was done, down came the bass again, fortified by more bad news reports. The storm was traveling north through Georgia and Virginia. Traffic casualties were mounting. There was cholera in Nebraska. The Mississippi was over its banks. A live volcano had erupted in the Appalachians. Alas, alas! The treble resumed its part of the argument, persuasive, hopeful, purer than any human voice I had ever heard. Then the two voices began their counterpoint, and on it went to the end.

One afternoon, when the music was finished, Lovell, Uncle Abbott, and I got into the car and drove into the Dorchester slums. It was in the early winter, already dark and rainy, and the rains of Boston fell with great authority. He parked the car in front of a frame tenement and said that he was going to see a patient.

“You think he’s going to see a patient?” Lovell asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s going to see his girl friend,” Lovell said. Then he began to cry.

I didn’t like him. I had no sympathy to give him. I only wished that I had more seemly relations. He dried his tears, and we sat there without speaking until Uncle Abbott returned, whistling, contented, and smelling of perfume. He took us to a drugstore for some ice cream, and then we went back to the house, where Percy was opening the living-room windows to let in some air. She seemed tired but still high-spirited, although I suppose that she and everyone else in the room knew what Abbott had been up to. It was time for us to go home.

LOVELL ENTERED the Eastman Conservatory when he was fifteen, and performed the Beethoven G-Major Concerto with the Boston orchestra the year he graduated. Having been drilled never to mention money, it seems strange that I should recall the financial details of his debut. His tails cost one hundred dollars, his coach charged five hundred, and the orchestra paid him three hundred for two performances. The family was scattered throughout the hall, so we were unable to concentrate our excitement, but we were all terribly excited. After the concert we went to the greenroom and drank champagne. Koussevitzky did not appear, but Burgin, the concertmaster, was there. The reviews in the Herald and the Transcript were fairly complimentary, but they both pointed out that Lovell’s playing lacked sentiment. That winter, Lovell and Percy went on a tour that took them as far west as Chicago, and something went wrong. They may, as travelers, have been bad company for one another; he may have had poor notices or small audiences; and while nothing was ever said, I recall that the tour was not triumphant. When they returned, Percy sold a piece of property that adjoined the house and went to Europe for the summer. Lovell could surely have supported himself as a musician, but instead he took a job as a manual laborer for some electrical-instrument company. He came to see us before Percy returned, and told me what had been happening that summer.

“Daddy didn’t spend much time around the house after Mother went away,” he said, “and I was alone most evenings. I used to get my own supper, and I spent a lot of time at the movies. I used to try and pick up girls, but I’m skinny and I don’t have much self-confidence. Well, one Sunday I drove down to this beach in the old Buick. Daddy let me have the old Buick. I saw this very fat couple with a young daughter. They looked lonely. Mrs. Hirshman is very fat, and she makes herself up like a clown, and she has a little dog. There is a kind of fat woman who always has a little dog. So then I said something about how I loved dogs, and they seemed happy to talk with me, and then I ran into the waves and showed off my crawl and came back and sat with them. They were Germans, and they had a funny accent, and I think their funny English and their fatness made them lonely. Well, their daughter was named Donna-Mae, and she was all wrapped up in a bathrobe, and she had on a hat, and they told me she had such fair skin she had to keep out of the sun. Then they told me she had beautiful hair, and she took off her hat, and I saw her hair for the first time. It was beautiful. It was the color of honey and very long, and her skin was pearly. You could see that the sun would burn it. So we talked, and I got some hot dogs and tonic, and took Donna-Mae for a walk up the beach, and I was very happy. Then, when the day was over, I offered to drive them home—they’d come to the beach in a bus—and they said they’d like a ride if I’d promise to have supper with them. They lived in a sort of a slum, and he was a house painter. Their house was behind another house. Mrs. Hirshman said while she cooked supper why didn’t I wash Donna-Mae off with the hose? I remember this very clearly, because it’s when I fell in love. She put on her bathing suit again, and I put on my bathing suit, and I sprayed her very gently with the hose. She squealed a little, naturally, because the water was cold, and it was getting dark, and in the house next door someone was playing the Chopin C-Sharp-Minor, Opus 28. The piano was out of tune, and the person didn’t know how to play, but the music and the hose and Donna-Mae’s pearly skin and golden hair and the smells of supper from the kitchen and the twilight all seemed to be a kind of paradise. So I had supper with them and went home, and the next night I took Donna-Mae to the movies. Then I had supper with them again, and when I told Mrs. Hirshman that my mother was away and that I almost never saw my father, she said that they had a spare room and why didn’t I stay there? So the next night I packed some clothes and moved into their spare room, and I’ve been there ever since.”

It is unlikely that Percy would have written my mother after her return from Europe, and, had she written, the letter would have been destroyed, since that family had a crusading detestation of souvenirs. Letters, photographs, diplomas—anything that authenticated the past was always thrown into the fire. I think this was not, as they claimed, a dislike of clutter but a fear of death. To glance backward was to die, and they did not mean to leave a trace. There was no such letter, but had there been one it would, in the light of what I was told, have gone like this:

DEAR POLLY:

Lovell met me at the boat on Thursday. I bought him a Beethoven autograph in Rome, but before I had a chance to give it to him he announced that he was engaged to be married. He can’t afford to marry, of course, and when I asked him how he planned to support a family he said that he had a job with some electrical-instrument company. When I asked about his music he said he would keep it up in the evenings. I do not want to run his life and I want him to be happy but I could not forget the amount of money that has been poured into his musical education. I had looked forward to coming home and I was very upset to receive this news as soon as I got off the boat. Then he told me that he no longer lived with his father and me. He lives with his future parents-in-law.

I was kept busy getting settled and I had to go into Boston several times to find work so I wasn’t able to entertain his fiancée until I had been back a week or two. I asked her for tea. Lovell asked me not to smoke cigars and I agreed to this. I could see his point. He is very uneasy about what he calls my “bohemianism” and I wanted to make a good impression. They came at four. Her name is Donna-Mae Hirshman. Her parents are German immigrants. She is twenty-one years old and works as a clerk in some insurance office. Her voice is high. She giggles. The one thing that can be said in her favor is that she has a striking head of yellow hair. I suppose Lovell may be attracted by her fairness but this hardly seems reason enough to marry. She giggled when we were introduced. She sat on the red sofa and as soon as she saw Europa she giggled again. Lovell could not take his eyes off her. I poured her tea and asked if she wanted lemon or cream. She said she didn’t know. Then I asked politely what she usually took in her tea and she said she’d never drunk tea before. Then I asked what she usually drank and she said she drank mostly tonic and sometimes beer. I gave her tea with milk and sugar, and tried to think of something to say. Lovell broke the ice by asking me if I didn’t think her hair was beautiful. I said that it was very beautiful. Well, it’s a lot of work, she said. I have to wash it twice a week in whites of egg. Oh, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve wanted to cut it off. People don’t understand. People think that if God crowns you with a beautiful head of hair you ought to treasure it but it’s just as much work as a sinkful of dishes. You have to wash it and dry it and comb it and brush it and put it up at night. I know it’s hard to understand but honest to God there’s days when I would just like to chop it off but Mummy made me promise on the Bible that I wouldn’t. I’ll take it down for you if you’d like.

I’m telling you the truth, Polly. I am not exaggerating. She went to the mirror, took a lot of pins out of her hair, and let it down. There was a great deal of it. I suppose she could sit on it although I didn’t ask. I said that it was very beautiful several times. Then she said that she had known I would appreciate it because Lovell had told her I was artistic and interested in beautiful things. Well she displayed her hair for some time and then began the arduous business of getting it back into place again. It was hard work. Then she went on to say that some people thought her hair was dyed and that this made her angry because she felt that women who dyed their hair were immoral. I asked her if she would like another cup of tea and she said no. Then I asked her if she had ever heard Lovell play the piano and she said no, they didn’t have a piano. Then she looked at Lovell and said that it was time to go. Lovell drove her home and then came back to ask, I suppose, for some words of approval. Of course my heart was broken in two. Here was a great musical career ruined by a head of hair. I told him I never wanted to see her again. He said he was going to marry her and I said I didn’t care what he did.

Lovell married Donna-Mae. Uncle Abbott went to the wedding, but Percy kept her word and never saw her daughter-in-law again. Lovell came to the house four times a year to pay a ceremonial call on his mother. He would not go near the piano. He had not only given up his music, he hated music. His simple-minded taste for obsceneness seemed to have transformed itself into simple-minded piety. He had transferred from the Episcopal church to the Hirshmans’ Lutheran congregation, which he attended twice on Sundays. They were raising money to build a new church when I last spoke with him. He spoke intimately of the Divinity. “He has helped us in our struggles, again and again. When everything seemed hopeless, He has given us encouragement and strength. I wish I could get you to understand how wonderful He is, what a blessing it is to love Him….” Lovell died before he was thirty, and since everything must have been burned, I don’t suppose there was a trace left of his musical career.

But the darkness in the old house seemed, each time we went there, to deepen. Abbott continued his philandering, but when he went fishing in the spring or hunting in the fall Percy was desperately unhappy without him. Less than a year after Lovell’s death, Percy was afflicted with some cardiovascular disease. I remember one attack during Sunday dinner. The color drained out of her face, and her breathing became harsh and quick. She excused herself and was mannered enough to say that she had forgotten something. She went into the living room and shut the door, but her accelerated breathing and her groans of pain could be heard. When she returned, there were large splotches of red up the side of her face. “If you don’t see a doctor, you will die,” Uncle Abbott said.

“You are my husband and you are my doctor,” she said.

“I have told you repeatedly that I will not have you as a patient.”

“You are my doctor.”

“If you don’t come to your senses, you will die.”

He was right, of course, and she knew it. Now, as she saw the leaves fall, the snow fall, as she said goodbye to friends in railroad stations and vestibules, it was always with a sense that she would not do this again. She died at three in the morning, in the dining room, where she had gone to get a glass of gin, and the family gathered for the last time at her funeral.

There is one more incident. I was taking a plane at Logan Airport. As I was crossing the waiting room, a man who was sweeping the floor stopped me.

“Know you,” he said thickly. “I know who you are.”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Tm Cousin Beaufort,” he said. “Tm your cousin Beaufort.”

I reached for my wallet and took out a ten-dollar bill.

“I don’t want any money,” he said. “I’m your cousin. I’m your cousin Beaufort. I have a job. I don’t want any money.”

“How are you, Beaufort?” I asked.

“Lovell and Percy are dead,” he said. “They buried them in the earth.”

“I’m late, Beaufort,” I said. “I’ll miss my plane. It was nice to see you. Goodbye.” And so off to the sea.