The Stories of John Cheever (6 page)

“I don’t want a daisy necklace,” Carlotta said.

“But you told me you wanted one,”

“I want a
real
necklace,” Carlotta said. “I want a pearl necklace like Aunt Ellen has.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Garrison said. She put aside her needle and the flowers. She remembered her first pearls. She had worn them to a party in Baltimore. It had been a wonderful party and the memory excited her for a moment. Then she felt old.

“You’re not old enough to have pearls,” she told Carlotta. “You’re just a little girl.” She spoke quietly, for the memory of Baltimore had reminded her of other parties; of the yacht-club party at which she had sprained her ankle and the masquerade she had attended dressed as Sir Walter Raleigh. The day had got very hot. The heat made Mrs. Garrison sleepy and encouraged her to reminisce. She thought about Philadelphia and Bermuda, and became so absorbed in these memories that she was startled when Carlotta spoke again.

“I’m not a little girl,” Carlotta said suddenly. “I’m a big girl!” Her voice broke and tears came to her eyes. “I’m bigger than Timmy and Ingrid and everybody!”

“You’ll be big enough in time,” Mrs. Garrison said. “Stop crying.”

“I want to be a big lady. I want to be a big lady like Aunt Ellen and Mummy.”

“And when you’re as big as your mother, you’ll wish you were a child again!” Mrs. Garrison said angrily.

“I want to be a lady,” the child cried. “I don’t want to be little. I don’t want to be a little girl.”

“Stop it,” Mrs. Garrison called, “stop crying. It’s too hot. You don’t know what you want. Look at me. I spend half my time wishing I were young enough to dance. It’s ridiculous, it’s perfectly …” She noticed a shadow crossing the lowered awning at the window. She went to the window and saw Nils Lund going down the lawn. He would have overheard everything. This made her intensely uncomfortable. Carlotta was still crying. She hated to hear the child cry. It seemed as if the meaning of that hot afternoon, as if for a second her life, depended upon the little girl’s happiness.

“Is there anything you’d like to do, Carlotta?”

“No.”

“Would you like a piece of candy?”

“No, thank you.”

“Would you like to wear my pearls?”

“No, thank you.”

Mrs. Garrison decided to cut the interview short and she rang for Agnes.

* * *

IN THE KITCHEN
, Greta and Agnes were drinking coffee. The lunch dishes had been washed and the turmoil that attended dinner had not begun. The kitchen was cool and clean and the grounds were still. They met there every afternoon and it was the pleasantest hour of their day.

“Where is
she?
” Greta asked.

“She’s
in there with Carlotta,” Agnes said.

“She
was talking to herself in the garden this morning,” Greta said. “Nils heard her. Now she wants him to move some lilies. He won’t do anything. He won’t even cut the grass.”

“Emma cleaned the living room,” Agnes said. “Then
she
comes in with all those flowers.”

“Next summer I go back to Sweden,” Greta said.

“Does it still cost four hundred dollars?” Agnes asked.

“Yes,” Greta said. In order to avoid saying
ja
, she hissed the word. “Maybe next year it won’t cost so much. But if I don’t go next year, Ingrid will be twelve years old and she’ll cost full fare. I want to see my mother. She’s old.”

“You should go,” Agnes said.

“I went in 1927,1935, and 1937,” Greta said.

“I went home in 1937,” Agnes said. “That was the last time. My father was an old man. I was there all summer. I thought I’ll go the year after, but
she
said if I go she fires me, so I didn’t go. And that winter my father died. I wanted to see him.”

“I want to see my mother,” Greta said.

“They talk about the scenery here,” Agnes said. “These little mountains! Ireland is like a garden.”

“Would I do it again? I ask myself,” Greta said. “Now I’m too old. Look at my legs. Varicose veins.” She moved one of her legs out from underneath the table for Agnes to see.

“I have nothing to go back for,” Agnes said. “My brothers are dead, both my brothers. I have nobody on the other side. I wanted to see my father.”

“Oh, that first time I come here,” Greta cried. “It was like a party on that boat. Get rich. Go home. Get rich. Go home.”

“Me, too,” Agnes said. They heard thunder. Mrs. Garrison rang again impatiently.

A STORM
came down from the north then. The wind blew a gale, a green branch fell onto the lawn and the house resounded with cries and the noise of slammed windows. When the rain and the lightning came, Mrs. Garrison watched them from her bedroom window. Carlotta and Agnes hid in a closet. Jim and Ellen and their son were at the beach and they watched the storm from the door of the boathouse. It raged for half an hour and then blew off to the west, leaving the air chill, bitter, and clean; but the afternoon was over.

While the children were having their supper, Jim went up to the corn patch and set and baited his traps. As he started down the hill, he smelled baking cake from the kitchen. The sky had cleared, the light on the mountains was soft, and the house seemed to have all its energies bent toward dinner. He saw Nils by the chicken house and called good evening to him, but Nils didn’t reply.

Mrs. Garrison, Jim, and Ellen had cocktails before they went in to dinner, then wine, and when they took their brandy and coffee onto the terrace, they were slightly drunk. The sun was setting.

“I got a letter from Reno,” Mrs. Garrison said. “Florrie wants me to bring Carlotta to New York when I go down on the twelfth for the Peyton wedding.”

“Shay will die,” Ellen said.

“Shay will perish,” Mrs. Garrison said.

The sky seemed to be full of fire. They could see the sad, red light through the pines. The odd winds that blow just before dark in the mountains brought, from farther down the lake, the words of a song, sung by some children at a camp there.

The voices were shrill, bright, and trusting. Then the changing wind extinguished the song and blew some wood smoke down along the slate roof to where the three people sat. There was a rumble of thunder.

“I never hear thunder,” Mrs. Garrison said, “without recalling that Enid Clark was struck dead by lightning.”

“Who was she?” Ellen said.

“She was an extraordinarily disagreeable woman,” Mrs. Garrison said. “She took a bath in front of an open window one afternoon and was struck dead by lightning. Her husband had wrangled with the bishop, so she wasn’t buried from the cathedral. They set her up beside the swimming pool and had the funeral service there, and there wasn’t anything to drink. We drove back to New York after the ceremony and your father stopped along the way at a bootlegger’s and bought a case of Scotch. It was a Saturday afternoon and there was a football game and a lot of traffic outside Princeton. We had that French-Canadian chauffeur, and his driving had always made me nervous. I spoke to Ralph about it and he said I was a fool, and five minutes later the car was upside down. I was thrown out of the open window into a stony field, and the first thing your father did was to look into the luggage compartment to see what had happened to the Scotch. There I was, bleeding to death, and he was counting bottles.”

Mrs. Garrison arranged a steamer rug over her legs and looked narrowly at the lake and the mountains. The noise of footsteps on the gravel drive alarmed her. Guests? She turned and saw that it was Nils Lund. He left the driveway for the lawn and came across the grass toward the terrace, shuffling in shoes that were too big for him. His cowlick, his short, faded hair, his spare figure, and the line of his shoulders reminded Jim of a boy. It was as if Nils’s growth, his spirit, had been stopped in some summer of his youth, but he moved wearily and without spirit, like a broken-hearted old man. He came to the foot of the terrace and spoke to Mrs. Garrison without looking at her. “I no move the lilies, Mrs. Garrison.”

“What, Nils?” she asked, and leaned forward.

“I no move the lilies.”

“Why not?”

“I got too much to do.” He looked at her and spoke angrily. “All winter I’m here alone. There’s snow up to my neck. The wind screams so, I can’t sleep. I work for you seventeen years and you never been here once in the bad weather.”

“What has the winter got to do with the lilies, Nils?” she asked calmly.

“I got too much to do. Move the lilies. Move the roses. Cut the grass. Every day you want something different. Why is it? Why are you better than me? You don’t know how to do anything but kill flowers. I grow the flowers. You kill them. If a fuse burns out, you don’t know how to do it. If something leaks, you don’t know how to do it. You kill flowers. That’s all you know how to do. For seventeen years I wait for you all winter,” he shouted. “You write me, ‘Is it warm? Are the flowers pretty?’ Then you come. You sit here. You drink. God damn you people. You killed my wife. Now you want to kill me. You—”

“Shut up, Nils,” Jim said.

Nils turned quickly and retreated across the lawn, so stricken with self-consciousness that he seemed to limp. None of them spoke, for they had the feeling, after he had disappeared behind the hedge, that he might be hiding there, waiting to hear what they would say. Then Ingrid and Greta came up the lawn from their evening walk, overburdened with the stones and wild flowers that they brought back from these excursions to decorate their rooms above the garage. Greta told Jim that something was caught in a trap in the corn patch. She thought it was a cat.

Jim got the rifle and a flashlight and went up the hill to the gardens. As he approached the corn patch, he could hear a wild, thin crying. Then the animal, whatever it was, began to pound the dirt. The stroke was strong, as regular as a heartbeat, and accompanied by the small rattling of the trap chain. When Jim reached the patch, he turned his light into the broken stalks. The animal hissed, sprang in the direction of the light; but it could not escape the chain. It was a fat, humpbacked coon. Now it hid from the light in the ruined corn. Jim waited. Against the starlight he could see the high, ragged stand of corn and when a breeze passed through the leaves they rattled like sticks. The coon, driven by pain, began to strike the ground convulsively and Jim held the light against the barrel of the rifle and fired twice. When the coon was dead, he unstaked the trap and carried it and the carcass out of the garden.

It was an immense, still, and beautiful night. Instead of returning to the drive, he took a shortcut through the garden and across a field toward the tool house. The ground was very dark. He moved cautiously and awkwardly. The heavy carcass smelled like a dog. “Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, oh, Mr. Brown,” someone called. It was Agnes. Her voice was breathless and fretful. Agnes and Carlotta were standing in the field. They were in nightgowns. “We heard the noise,” Agnes called. “We heard the gun going off. We were afraid there had been an accident. Of course I knew Carlotta was all right. She was right beside me. Weren’t you, dear? But we couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t close our eyes after we heard the noise. Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “There was a coon in the garden.”

“Where’s the coon?” Carlotta asked.

“The coon’s gone on a long, long journey, dear,” Agnes said. “Come now, come along, sweet. I hope nothing else will wake us up, don’t you?” They turned and started back toward the house, warning one another of the sticks and ditches and other perils of the country. Their conversation was filled with diminutives, timidity, and vagueness. He wanted to help them, he wanted urgently to help them, he wanted to offer them his light, but they reached the house without his help and he heard the back door close on their voices.

J
IM AND IRENE WESTCOTT
were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naive. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio.

Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio—or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them—and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came.

The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to the instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her children came home from school then, and she took them to the Park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio.