The Stories of John Cheever Part 23

"Will you go to a psychiatrist if I go with you?"

"No."

"Will you do anything to help yourself?"

"I have to teach them." Then he threw back his head and sobbed, "Oh, Jesus."

Charlie turned away. It seemed, at that instant, that Gee-Gee had heard, from some wilderness of his own, the noise of a distant horn that prophesied the manner and the hour of his death. There seemed to be some tremendous validity to the drunken man. Folkestone felt an upheaval in his spirit. He felt he understood the drunken man's message; he had always sensed it. It was at the bottom of their friends.h.i.+p. Gee-Gee was an advocate for the lame, the diseased, the poor, for those who through no fault of their own live out their lives in misery and pain. To the happy and the wellborn and the rich he had this to say-that for all their affection, their comforts, and their privileges, they would not be spared the pangs of anger and l.u.s.t and the agonies of death. He only meant for them to be prepared for the blow when the blow fell. But was it not possible to accept this truth without having him dance a jig in your living room? He spoke from some vision of the suffering in life, but was it necessary to suffer oneself in order to accept his message? It seemed so.

"Gee-Gee?" Charlie asked.

"Yes."

"What are you trying to teach them?"

"You'll never know. You're too G.o.d-d.a.m.ned stuffy."

They didn't even last a year. In November, someone made them a decent offer for the house and they sold it. The gold-and-scarlet moving van returned, and they crossed the state line, into the town of Y_______ where they bought another house. The Folkestones were glad to see them go. A well-behaved young couple took their place, and everything was as it had been. They were seldom remembered. But through a string of friends Charlie learned, the following winter, that Gee-Gee had broken his hip playing football a day or two before Christmas. This fact, for some reason, remained with him, and one Sunday afternoon when he had nothing much better to do he got Gee-Gee's telephone number from Information and called his old neighbor to say that he was coming over for a drink. Gee-Gee roared with enthusiasm and gave Charlie directions for getting to the house.

It was a long drive, and halfway there Charlie wondered why he had undertaken it. Y_______ was several cuts below B_______. The house was in a development, and the builder had not stopped at mere ugliness; he had constructed a community that looked, with its rectilinear windows, like a penal colony. The streets were named after universities-Princeton Street, Yale Street, Rutgers Street, and so forth. Only a few of the houses had been sold, and Gee-Gee's house was surrounded by empty dwellings. Charlie rang the bell and heard Gee-Gee shouting for him to come in. The house was a mess, and as he was taking his coat off, Gee-Gee came slowly down the hall half riding in a child's wagon, which he propelled by pus.h.i.+ng a crutch. His right hip and leg were encased in a ma.s.sive cast.

"Where's Peaches?" Charlie asked.

"She's in Na.s.sau. She and the children went to Na.s.sau for Christmas."

"And left you alone?"

"I wanted them to go. I made them go. Nothing can be done for me. I get along all right on this wagon. When I'm hungry, I make a sandwich. I wanted them to go. I made them go. Peaches needed a vacation, and I like being alone. Come on into the living room and make me a drink. I can't get the ice trays out-that's about the only thing I can't do. I can shave and get into bed and so forth, but I can't get the ice trays out."

Charlie got some ice. He was glad to have something to do. The image of Gee-Gee in his wagon had shocked him, and he felt a terrifying stillness over the place. Out of the kitchen window he could see row upon row of ugly, empty houses. He felt as if some hideous melodrama were approaching its climax. But in the living room Gee-Gee was his most charming, and his smile and his voice gave the afternoon a momentary equilibrium. Charlie asked if Gee-Gee couldn't get a nurse to stay with him. Couldn't someone be found to stay with him? Couldn't he at least rent a wheelchair? Gee-Gee laughed away all these suggestions. He was contented. Peaches had written him from Na.s.sau. They were having a marvelous time.

Charlie believed that Gee-Gee had made them go. It was this detail, above everything else, that gave the situation its horror. Peaches would have liked, naturally enough, to go to Na.s.sau, but she never would have insisted. She was much too innocent to have any envious dreams of travel. Gee-Gee would have insisted that she go; he would have made the trip so tempting that she could not, in her innocence, resist it. Did he wish to be left alone, drunken and crippled, in an isolated house? Did he need to feel abused? It seemed so. The disorder of the house and the image of his wife and children running, running, running on some coral beach seemed like a successful contrivance-a kind of triumph.

Gee-Gee lit a cigarette and, forgetting about it, lit another, and fumbled so clumsily with the matches that Charlie saw that he might easily burn to death. Hoisting himself from the wagon to the chair, he nearly fell, and, if he were alone and fell, he could easily die of hunger and thirst on his own rug. But there might be some drunken cunning in his clumsiness, his playing with fire. He smiled slyly when he saw the look on Charlie's face. "Don't worry about me," he said. "I'll be all right. I have my guardian angel."

"That's what everybody thinks," Charlie said.

"Oh, but I have."

Outside, it had begun to snow. The winter sky was overcast, and it would soon be dark. Charlie said that he had to go. "Sit down," Gee-Gee said. "Sit down and have another drink." Charlie's conscience held him there a few moments longer. How could he openly abandon a friend-a neighbor, at least-to the peril of death? But he had no choice; his family was waiting and he had to go. "Don't worry about me," Gee-Gee said when Charlie was putting on his coat. "I have my angel."

It was later than Charlie had realized. The snow was heavy now, and he had a two-hour drive, on winding back roads. There was a little rise going out of Y_______, and the new snow was so slick that he had trouble making the hill. There were steeper hills ahead of him. Only one of his winds.h.i.+eld wipers worked, and the snow quickly covered the gla.s.s and left him with one small aperture onto the world. The snow sped into the headlights at a dizzying rate, and at one place where the road was narrow the car slid off onto the shoulder and he had to race the motor for ten minutes in order to get back onto the hard surface. It was a lonely stretch there-miles from any house-and he would have had a sloppy walk in his loafers. The car skidded and weaved up every hill, and it seemed that he reached the top by the thinnest margin of luck.

After driving for two hours, he was still far from home. The snow was so deep that guiding the car was like the trickiest kind of navigation. It took him three hours to get back, and he was tired when he drove into the darkness and peace of his own garage-tired and infinitely grateful. Martha and the children had eaten their supper, and she wanted to go over to the Lissoms' and discuss some school-board business. He told her that the driving was bad, and since it was such a short distance, she decided to walk. He lit a fire and made a drink, and the children sat at the table with him while he ate his supper. After supper on Sunday nights, the Folkestones played, or tried to play, trios. Charlie played the clarinet, his daughter played the piano, and his older son had a tenor recorder. The baby wandered around underfoot. This Sunday night they played simple arrangements of eighteenth-century music in the pleasantest family atmosphere-complimenting themselves when they squeezed through a difficult pa.s.sage, and extending into the music what was best in their relations.h.i.+p. They were playing a Vivaldi sonata when the telephone rang. Charlie knew immediately who it was.

"Charlie, Charlie," Gee-Gee said. "Jesus. I'm in hot water. Right after you left I fell out of the G.o.d-d.a.m.ned wagon. It took me two hours to get to the telephone. You've got to get over. There's n.o.body else. You're my only friend. You've got to get over here. Charlie? You hear me?" It must have been the strangeness of the look on Charlie's face that made the baby scream. The little girl picked him up in her arms, and stared, as did the other boy, at their father. They seemed to know the whole picture, every detail of it, and they looked at him calmly, as if they were expecting him to make some decision that had nothing to do with the continuing of a pleasant evening in a s...o...b..und house-but a decision that would have a profound effect on their knowledge of him and on their final happiness. Their looks were, he thought, clear and appealing, and whatever he did would be final.

"You hear me, Charlie? You hear me?" Gee-Gee asked. "It took me d.a.m.ned near two hours to crawl over to the telephone. You've got to help me. No one else will come."

Charlie hung up. Gee-Gee must have heard the sound of his breathing and the baby crying, but Charlie had said nothing. He gave no explanation to the children, and they asked for none. They knew. His daughter went back to the piano, and when the telephone rang again and he did not answer it, no one questioned the ringing of the phone. They seemed happy and relieved when it stopped ringing, and they played Vivaldi until nine o'clock, when he sent them up to bed.

He made a drink to diminish the feeling that some emotional explosion had taken place, that some violence had shaken the air. He did not know what he had done or how to cope with his conscience. He would tell Martha about it when she came in, he thought. That would be a step toward comprehension. But when she returned he said nothing. He was afraid that if she brought her intelligence to the problem it would only confirm his guilt. "But why didn't you telephone me at the Lissoms'?" she might have asked. "I could have come home and you could have gone over." She was too compa.s.sionate a woman to accept pa.s.sively, as he was doing, the thought of a friend, a neighbor, lying in agony. She went on upstairs. He poured some whiskey into his gla.s.s. If he had called the Lissoms', if she had returned to care for the children and left him free to help Gee-Gee, would he have been able to make the return trip in the heavy snow? He could have put on chains, but where were the chains? Were they in the car or in the cellar? He didn't know. He hadn't used them that year. But perhaps by now the roads would have been plowed: Perhaps the storm was over. This last, distressing possibility made him feel sick. Had the sky betrayed him? He switched on the outside light and went hesitantly, unwillingly, toward the window.

The clean snow gave off an ingratiating sparkle, and the beam of light shone into empty and peaceful air. The snow must have stopped a few minutes after he had entered the house. But how could he have known? How could he be expected to take into consideration the caprices of the weather? And what about that look the children had given him-so stern, so clear, so like a declaration that his place at that hour was with them, and not with the succoring of drunkards who had forfeited the chance to be taken seriously?

Then the image of Gee-Gee returned, crus.h.i.+ng in its misery, and he remembered Peaches standing in the hallway at the Watermans' calling, "Come back! Come back!" She was calling back the youth that Charlie had never known, but it was easy to imagine what Gee-Gee must have been-fair, high-spirited, generous, and strong-and why had it all come to ruin? Come back! Come back! She seemed to call after the sweetness of a summer's day-roses in bloom and all the doors and windows open on the garden. It was all there in her voice; it was like the illusion of an abandoned house in the last rays of the sun. A large place, falling to pieces, haunted for children and a headache for the police and fire departments, but, seeing it with its windows blazing in the sunset, one thinks that they have all come back. Cook is in the kitchen rolling pastry. The smell of chicken rises up the back stairs. The front rooms are ready for the children and their many friends. A coal fire burns in the grate. Then as the light goes off the windows, the true ugliness of the place scowls into the dusk with redoubled force, as, when the notes of that long-ago summer left Peaches' voice, one saw the finality and confusion of despair in her innocent face. Come back! Come back! He poured himself some more whiskey, and as he raised the gla.s.s to his mouth he heard the wind change and saw-the outside light was still on-the snow begin to spin down again, with the vindictive swirl of a blizzard. The road was impa.s.sable; he could not have made the trip. The change in the weather had given him sweet absolution, and he watched the snow with a smile of love, but he stayed up until three in the morning with the bottle.

He was red-eyed and shaken the next morning, and ducked out of his office at eleven and drank two Martinis. He had two more before lunch and another at four and two on the train, and came reeling home for supper. The clinical details of heavy drinking are familiar to all of us; it is only the human picture that concerns us here, and Martha was finally driven to speak to him. She spoke most gently.

"You're drinking too much, darling," she said. "You've been drinking too much for three weeks."

"My drinking," he said, "is my own G.o.d-d.a.m.ned business. You mind your business and I'll mind mine."

It got worse and worse, and she had to do something. She finally went to their rector-a good-looking young bachelor who practiced both psychology and liturgy-for advice. He listened sympathetically. "I stopped at the rectory this afternoon," she said when she got home that night, "and I talked with Father Hemming. He wonders why you haven't been in church, and he wants to talk to you. He's such a good-looking man," she added, trying to make what she had just said sound less like a planned speech, "that I wonder why he's never married." Charlie-drunk, as usual-went to the telephone and called the rectory. "Look, Father," he said. "My wife tells me that you've been entertaining her in the afternoons. Well, I don't like it. You keep your hands off my wife. You hear me? That d.a.m.ned black suit you wear doesn't cut any ice with me. You keep your hands off my wife or I'll bust your pretty little nose."

In the end, he lost his job, and they had to move, and began their wanderings, like Gee-Gee and Peaches, in the scarlet-and-gold van.

AND WHAT HAPPENED to Gee-Gee-whatever became of him? That boozy guardian angel, her hair disheveled and the strings of her harp broken, still seemed to hover over where he lay. After telephoning Charlie that night, he telephoned the fire department. They were there in eight minutes flat, with bells ringing and sirens blowing. They got him into bed, made him a fresh drink, and one of the firemen, who had nothing better to do, stayed on until Peaches got back from Na.s.sau. They had a fine time, eating all the steaks in the deep freeze and drinking a quart of bourbon every day. Gee-Gee could walk by the time Peaches and the children got back, and he took up that disorderly life for which he seemed so much better equipped than his neighbor, but they had to move at the end of the year, and, like the Folkestones, vanished from the hill towns.

JUST TELL ME WHO IT WAS.

William Pym was a self-made man; that is, he had started his adult life without a nickel or a connection, other than the general friendliness of man to man, and had risen to a vice-presidency in a rayon-blanket firm. He made a large annual contribution to the Baltimore settlement house that had set his feet upon the right path, and he had a few anecdotes to tell about working as a farmhand long, long ago, but his appearance and demeanor were those of a well-established member of the upper middle cla.s.s, with hardly a trace-hardly a trace of the anxieties of a man who had been through a grueling struggle to put some money into the bank. It is true that beggars, old men in rags, thinly dressed men and women eating bad food in the penitential lights of a cafeteria, slums and squalid mill towns, the faces in rooming-house windows-even a hole in his daughter's socks-could remind him of his youth and make him uneasy. He did not ever like to see the signs of poverty. He took a deep pleasure in the Dutch Colonial house where he lived-in its many lighted windows, in the soundness of his roof and his heating plant-in the warmth of his children's clothing, and in the fact that he had been able to make something plausible and coherent in spite of his mean beginnings. He was always conscious and sometimes mildly resentful of the fact that most of his business a.s.sociates and all of his friends and neighbors had been skylarking on the turf at Groton or Deerfield or some such school while he was taking books on how to improve your grammar and vocabulary out of the public library. But he recognized this dim resentment of people whose development had been along easier lines than his own as some meanness in his character. Considering merely his physical bulk, it was astonis.h.i.+ng that he should have preserved an image of himself as a hungry youth standing outside a lighted window in the rain. He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nouris.h.i.+ng dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream.

Will had not married until he was past forty and had moved to New York. He had not had the money or the time, and the dest.i.tution of his youth had not been sweetened by much natural love. His stepmother-wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks-had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore drinking sherry out of a coffee cup. She was not a jolly old toper, and what she had to say was usually bitter. The picture she presented may have left with Will some skepticism about the emotional richness of human involvements. It may have delayed his marriage. When he finally did marry, he picked a woman much younger than he-a sweet-tempered girl with red hair and green eyes. She sometimes called him Daddy. Will was so proud of her and spoke so extravagantly of her beauty and her wit that when people first met her they were always disappointed. But Will had been poor and cold and alone, and when he came home at the end of the day to a lovely and loving woman, when he took off his hat and coat in the front hall, he would literally groan with joy. Every stick of furniture that Maria bought seemed to him to be hallowed by her taste and charm. A footstool or a set of pots would so delight him that he would cover her face and throat with kisses. She was extravagant, but he seemed to want a childish and capricious wife, and the implausible excuses that she made for having bought something needless and expensive aroused in him the deepest tenderness. Maria was not much of a cook, but when she put a plate of canned soup in front of him on the maid's night out, he would get up from his end of the table and embrace her with grat.i.tude.

At first, they had a big apartment in the East Seventies. They went out a good deal. Will disliked parties, but he concealed this distaste for the sake of his young wife. At dinners, he would look across the table at her in the candlelight-laughing, talking, and flas.h.i.+ng the rings he had bought her-and sigh deeply. He was always impatient for the party to end, so that they would be alone again, in a taxi or in an empty street where he could kiss her. When Maria first got pregnant, he couldn't describe his happiness. Every development in her condition astonished him. He was captivated by the preparations she made for the baby. When their first child was born, when milk flowed from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, when their daughter excited in her a most natural tenderness, he was amazed.

The Pyms had three girls. When their third child was born, they moved to the suburbs. Will was past fifty then, but he carried Maria over the threshold, lighted a fire in the hearth, and observed all kinds of sentimental and amorous rites in taking possession of the house. To tell the truth, he did seem, once in a while, to talk about Maria too much. He was anxious to have her s.h.i.+ne. At parties, he would stop the general conversation and announce, "Maria will now tell us something very funny that happened at the Women's Club this afternoon." Riding into town on the commuting train, he would ring in her opinions on the baseball season or the excise tax. Eating dinner alone in a hotel in Rochester or Toledo-for he often traveled on business-he would show the waitress a picture of Maria. When he served on the grand jury, all the other members of the panel knew about Maria long before the session ended. When he went salmon fis.h.i.+ng in Newfoundland, he wondered constantly if Maria was all right.

On a Sat.u.r.day in the early spring, they celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary with a party at their house in Shady Hill. Twenty-five or thirty people came to drink their health in champagne. Most of the guests were Maria's age. Will did not like her to be surrounded by young men, and he supervised her comings and goings with a nearly paternal scrutiny. When she wandered out onto the terrace, he was not far behind. But he was a good host, and he held in admirable equilibrium the pleasure he took in his guests and the pleasure he took in thinking that they soon would all be gone. He watched Maria talking with Henry Bulstrode across the room. He supposed that ten years of marriage must have left lines on her face and wasted her figure, but he could see only that her beauty had improved. A pretty young woman was talking with him, but his admiration of Maria made him absent-minded. "You must get Maria to tell you what happened at the florist's this morning," he said.

Late on Sunday afternoon, the Pyms took a walk with their children, as they usually did when the weather was fair. It was that time of year when the woods are still bleak, and mixed with the smells of rotted and changing things is an unaccountable sweetness-a perfume as heavy as roses-although nothing is in flower. The children went on ahead. Will and Maria walked arm in arm. It was nearly dusk. Crows were calling hoa.r.s.ely to one another in some tall pines. It was that hour of a spring day-or evening-when the dark of the woods and the cold and damp from any nearby pond or brook are suddenly felt, when you realize that the world was lighted, until a minute ago, merely by the sun's fire, and that your clothes are thin.

Will stopped and took a knife from his pocket and began to cut their initials in the bark of a tree. What sense would there be in pointing out that his hair was thin? He meant to express love. It was Maria's youth and beauty that had informed his senses and left his mind so open that the earth seemed spread out before his eyes like a broad map of reason and sensuality. It was her company that made the singing of the crows so fine to hear. For his children, whose voices sounded down the path, he held out the most practical and abundant hopes. All that he had ever been deprived of was now his.

But Maria was cold and tired and hungry. They had not gone to bed until two, and it had been an effort for her to keep her eyes open while they walked in the woods. When they got home, she would have to fix the supper. Cold cuts or lamb chops, she wondered while she watched Will enclose their initials in the outline of a heart and pierce it with an arrow. "Oh, you're so lovely!" she heard him murmur when he had finished. "You're so young and beautiful!" He groaned; he took her in his arms and kissed her wildly. She went on worrying about the supper.

On a Monday night not long after this, Maria sat in the living room tying paper apple blossoms to branches. She was on the committee in charge of decorations for the Apple Blossom Fete, a costume ball given for charity at the country club each year. Will was reading a magazine while he waited for her to finish her work. He wore bedroom slippers and a red brocade smoking jacket-a present from Maria-which bunched in thick folds around his stomach, making him look portly. Maria's hands moved quickly. When she had covered a branch with blossoms, she would hold it up and say, "Isn't that pretty?" Then she would stand it in a corner where there was the beginning of a forest of flowering branches. Upstairs, the three children slept.

The decorations-committee job was the kind of thing Maria did best. She did not like to go to early-morning meetings on the reform of the primary system, or to poke her nose into dirty hospital kitchens, or to meet with other women in the late afternoons to discuss trends in modern fiction. She had tried being secretary of the Women's Club, but her minutes were so garbled that she had had to be replaced-not without some hard feeling. On the evening of the day when she was relieved of her position, Will had found her in tears, and it had taken him hours to console her. He relished these adversities. She was young and beautiful, and anything that turned her to him for succor only made his position more secure. Later, when Maria was put in charge of the mink-stole raffle to raise some money for the hospital, she had kept such poor records that Will had had to stay home from the office for a day to straighten things out. She cried and he comforted her, where a younger husband might have expressed some impatience. Will did not encourage her inefficiency, but it was a trait that he a.s.sociated with the fineness of her eyes and her pallor.

While she tied flowers she talked about the fete. There was going to be a twelve-piece orchestra. The decorations had never been so beautiful. They hoped to raise ten thousand dollars. The dressmaker had delivered her costume. Will asked what her costume was, and she said she would go upstairs and put it on. She usually went to the Apple Blossom Fete as a figure from French history, and Will's interest was not intense.

Half an hour later, she came down, and went to the mirror by the piano. She was wearing gold slippers, pink tights, and a light velvet bodice, cut low enough to show the division of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "Of course, my hair will be all different," she said. "And I haven't decided what jewels to wear.

A terrible sadness came over Will. The tight costume-he had to polish his eyegla.s.ses to see it better-displayed all the beauty he wors.h.i.+pped, and it also expressed her perfect innocence of the wickedness of the world. The sight filled poor Will with l.u.s.t and dismay. He couldn't bear to disappoint her, and yet he couldn't let her flagrantly provoke his neighbors-a group of men who seemed at that moment, to his unsettled mind, to be voracious, youthful, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, and lewd. Watching her pose happily in front of the mirror, he thought that she looked like a child-a maiden, at least-approaching some obscene doom. In her sweet and gentle face and her half-naked bosom he saw all the sadness of life.

"You can't wear that, Mummy," he said.

"What?" She turned away from the mirror.

"Mummy, you'll get pinched to death."

"Everybody else is going to wear tights, w.i.l.l.y. Helen Benson and Grace Heatherstone are going to wear tights."

"They're different, Mummy," he said sadly. "They're very different. They're tough, hardheaded, cynical, worldly women."

"What am I?"

"You're lovely and you're innocent," he said. "You don't understand what a bunch of dogs men are."

"I don't want to be lovely and innocent all the time."

"Oh, Mummy, you don't mean that! You can't mean that! You don't know what you're saying."

"I only want to have a good time."

"Don't you have a good time with me?"

She began to cry. She threw herself on the sofa and buried her face. Her tears ate like acid into Will's resolve as he bent over her slender and miserable form. Years and years ago he had wondered if a young wife would give him trouble. Now, with his eyegla.s.ses steaming and the brocade jacket bunched up around his stomach, he stood face to face with the problem. How-even when they were in grave danger-could he refuse innocence and beauty? "All right, Mummy, all right," he said. He was nearly in tears himself. "You can wear it."

Will left the next morning for a trip that took him to Cleveland, Chicago, and Topeka. He called Maria on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and the maid said that she was out. She would be putting up the decorations in the club, he realized. The pancakes he ate for breakfast on Thursday disagreed with him at once, and gave him a stomach ache that none of the many medicines he carried with him in his suitcase could cure. Friday was foggy in Kansas, and his plane was grounded until late that night. At the airport, he ate some chicken pie; it made him feel worse. He arrived in New York on Sunday morning, and had to go directly to his office, and did not get out to Shady Hill until late Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It was the day of the party, and Maria was still at the club. He spent an hour raking dead leaves from the flower beds at the side of the house. When Maria came home, he thought she looked superb. Her color was high and her eyes were bright.

She showed Will the costume she had rented for him. It was a suit of chain mail with a helmet. Will was pleased with the costume, because it was a disguise. Exhausted and bilious, he felt he needed a disguise for the dance. When he had bathed and shaved, Maria helped him strap himself into his coat of mail. She cut some ostrich plumes off an old hat and stuck them gaily into his helmet. Will went toward a mirror to see himself, but just as he got there, the visor slammed shut, and he couldn't get it to stay open. He went downstairs, holding on to the banister-the chain mail was heavy-and wedged the visor open with a folded timetable and sat down to have a drink. When Maria came down in her pink tights and her gold slippers, Will rose to admire her. She said that she would not be able to leave the dance early, because she was on the committee; if Will wanted to go home, she would get a ride with someone else. He had never gone home from a party without her, and he hated the idea. Maria put on a wrap and kissed the children, and they went off to dinner at the Beardens'.

At the Beardens', the party was large and late. They drank c.o.c.ktails until after nine. When they went in to dinner, Will sat beside Ethel Worden. She was a pretty young woman, but she had been drinking Martinis for two hours; her face was drawn and her eyes were red. She said that she loved Will, that she always had, but Will was looking down the table at Maria. Even at that distance, he seemed to take in something vital from the play of shadow upon her face. He would have liked to be near enough to hear what she was saying.

Ethel Worden didn't make it any easier. "We're poor, Will," she said sadly. "Did you know that we're poor? n.o.body realizes that there are people like us in a community like this. We can't afford eggs for breakfast. We can't afford a cleaning woman. We can't afford a was.h.i.+ng machine. We can't afford..."

Before dessert was finished, several couples got up to leave for the club. Will saw Trace Bearden handing Maria her wrap, and got up suddenly. He wanted to get to the club in time to have the first dance with her. When he got outside, Trace and Maria had gone. He asked Ethel Worden to drive over with him. She was delighted. As he put the car in the parking lot at the country club, Ethel began to cry. She was poor and lonely and hungry for love. She drew Will to her and wept on his chain-mail shoulder, while he looked out the back windows of the station wagon to see if he could recognize Trace Bearden's car. He wondered if Maria was already in the clubhouse or if she was having trouble in a parked car herself. He dried Ethel's tears and spoke to her tenderly, and they went in.

It was late by then-it was after midnight-and that dance was always a rhubarb. The floor was crowded, and plumes, crowns, animal heads, and turbans were rocking in the dim light. It was that hour when the band accelerates its beat, when the drums deepen, when the aging dancers utter loud cries of l.u.s.t and joy, seize their partners by the girdle, and break into all kinds of youthful and wanton specialties-the s.h.i.+mmy, the Charleston, hops, and belly dances. Will danced clumsily in his mail. Now and then, he glimpsed Maria in the distance, but he was never able to catch up with her. Going into the bar for a drink, he saw her at the other end of the room, but the crowd was too dense for him to get to her. She was surrounded by men. He looked for her in the lounge during the next intermission, but he could not find her. When the music started again, he gave the band ten dollars and asked them to play "I Could Write a Book." It was their music. She would hear it through the bedlam. It would remind her of their marriage, and she would leave her partner and find him. He waited alone at the edge of the floor through this song.

Discouraged, then, and tired from his traveling and the weight of his chain mail, he went into the lounge, took off his helmet, and fell asleep. When he woke, a half hour later, he saw Larry Helmsford taking Ethel Worden out the terrace door toward the parking lot. She was staggering. Will wandered back to the ballroom, drawn there by shouts of excitement. Someone had set fire to a feathered headdress. The fire was being put out with champagne. It was after three o'clock. Will put on his helmet, propped the visor open with a folded match paper, and went home.

Maria danced the last dance. She had a drink from the last bottle of wine. It was morning then. The band had gone, but a pianist was still playing and a few couples were dancing in the daylight. Breakfast parties were forming, but she refused these invitations in order to drive home with the Beardens. Will might be worried. After she said goodbye to the Beardens, she stood on her front steps to get some air. She had lost her pocketbook. Her tights had been torn by the scales of a dragon. The smell of spilled wine came from her clothes. The sweetness of the air and the fineness of the light touched her. The party seemed like gibberish. She had had all the partners she wanted, but she had not had all the right ones. The hundreds of apple blossoms that she had tied to branches and that had looked, at a distance, so like real blossoms would soon be swept into the ash can.

The trees of Shady Hill were filled with birds-larks, thrushes, robins, crows-and now the air began to ring with their song. The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal-some simple way of life, in which she dried her hands on an ap.r.o.n and Will came home from the sea-that she had betrayed. She did not know where she had failed, but the gentle morning light illuminated her failure pitilessly. She began to cry.

Will was asleep, but he woke when she opened the front door. "Mummy?" he asked as she climbed the stairs. "Mummy?... h.e.l.lo, Mummy. Good morning!" She didn't reply.

He saw her tears, the gash in her tights, and the stains on her front. She sat down at her dressing table, laid her face on the gla.s.s, and went on crying. "Oh, don't cry, Mummy!" he said. "Don't cry! I don't care, Mummy. I thought I would but I guess it doesn't really matter. I won't ever mention it, Mummy. Now, come to bed. Come to bed and get some sleep."

Her sobbing got louder. He got up and went to the dressing table and put his arms around her. "I told you what would happen if you wore that costume, didn't I? But it doesn't matter any more. I'll never ask you anything about it. I'll forget the whole thing. But come to bed now and get some sleep."

Her head was swimming, and his voice droned on and on, shutting out the noises of the morning. Then his anxious love, his nagging pa.s.sion, were more than she could support. "I don't care. I'm willing to forget it," he said.

She got out of his embrace, crossed the room to the hall, and shut the guest-room door in his face.

Downstairs, sitting over a cup of coffee, Will realized that his supervision of Maria's life had been anything but thorough. If she had wanted to deceive him, her life couldn't have been planned along more convenient lines. In the summer, she was alone most of the time, except weekends. He was away on business one week out of every month. She went to New York whenever she pleased-sometimes in the evening. Only a week before the dance she had gone into town to have dinner with some old friends. She had planned to come home on a train that reached Shady Hill at eleven. Will drove to the station to meet her. It was a rainy night and he remembered waiting, in a rather gloomy frame of mind, on the station platform. As soon as he saw the distant lights of the train, his mood was changed by the antic.i.p.ation of greeting her and taking her home. When the train stopped and only Charlie Curtin-half tipsy-got off, Will was disappointed and worried. Soon after he got home, the telephone rang. It was Maria calling to say that she had missed the train and would not be home until two. At two, Will returned to the station. It was still rainy. Maria and Henry Bulstrode were the only pa.s.sengers. She walked swiftly up the platform in the rain to kiss Will. He remembered that there had been tears in her eyes, but he had not thought anything about it at the time. Now he wondered about her tears.

A few nights before that, she had said, after dinner, that she wanted to go to the movies in the village. Will had offered to take her, although he was tired, but she said she knew how much he disliked movies. It had seemed odd to him at the time that before going off to the nine-o'clock show she should take a bath, and when she came downstairs, he heard, under her mink coat, the rustling of a new dress. He fell asleep before she returned, and for all he knew, she might have come in at dawn. It had always seemed generous of her not to insist on his going with her to meetings of the Civic Improvement a.s.sociation, but how did he know whether she had gone off to discuss the fluorination of water or to meet a lover?

He remembered something that had happened in February. The Women's Club had given a revue for charity. He had known before he went to it that Maria was going to do a dance expressing the view of the Current Events Committee on the tariff. She came onto the stage to the music of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." She wore a long evening dress, gloves, and a fur piece-the recognizable getup of a striptease artist-and, to his dismay, she was given a rousing reception. Maria walked around the stage and took off her fur piece, to applause, shouts, and some whistling. During the next chorus, she peeled off her gloves. Will pretended to be enjoying himself, but he had begun to sweat. With the third chorus, she took off her belt. This was all, but the uproarious applause she had been given rang again in Will's ears now and made them warm.

A few weeks earlier, Will had gone uptown for lunch-a thing he seldom did. Walking down Madison Avenue, he thought he saw Maria ahead of him, with another man. The dark-red suit, the fur piece, and the hat were hers. He did not recognize the man. Acting impulsively where he might have acted stealthily, he had shouted her name-"Maria! Maria! Maria!" The street was crowded, and there was the distance of half a block between them. Before he could reach the woman, she had disappeared. She might have stepped into a taxi or a store. That evening, when he said to Maria, cheerfully enough, that he thought he saw her on Madison Avenue, she answered crossly, "Well, you didn't." After dinner, she claimed to have a headache. She asked him to sleep in the guest room.

The afternoon of the day after the dance, Will took the children for a walk without Maria. He lectured them, as he always did, on the names of the trees. "That's a ginkgo... That's a weeping beech. That bitter smell comes from the boxwood in the hollow." It may have been because he had received no education himself that he liked to give an educational tone to his time with the children. They recited the states of the Union at the lunch table, discussed geology during some of their walks, and named the stars in the sky if they stayed out after dusk. Will was determined to be cheerful this afternoon, but the figures of his children, walking ahead, saddened him, for they seemed like live symbols of his trouble. He had not actually thought of leaving Maria-he had not let the idea form-but he seemed to breathe the atmosphere of separation. When he pa.s.sed the tree where he had carved their initials, he thought of the stupendous wickedness of the world.

The house was dark when they came back up the driveway at the end of their walk-dark and cold. Will turned on some lights and heated the coffee he had made at breakfast. The telephone rang, but he did not answer it. He took a cup of coffee up to the guest room, where Maria was. He thought at first she was still sleeping. When he turned on the light, he saw that she was sitting against the pillows. She smiled, but he responded warily to her charm.

"Here's some coffee, Mummy."

"Thank you. Did you have a nice walk?"

"Yes."

"I feel better," she said. "What time is it?"

"Half past five."

"I don't feel strong enough to go to the Townsends'."

"Then I won't go."

"Oh, I wish you would, w.i.l.l.y. Please go to the party and come home and tell me all about it. Please go."

Now that she urged him, the party seemed like a good idea.

"You must go, Will," Maria said. "There'll be a lot of gossip about the dance, and you can hear it all, and then you can come home and tell me all about it. Please go to the party, darling. It will make me feel guilty if you stay home on my account."

At the Townsends', cars were parked on both sides of the street, and all the windows of the big house were brightly lighted. Will stepped in the lamplight, the firelight, and the cheerful human noises of the gathering with a sincere desire to lose his heaviness of spirit. He went upstairs to leave his coat. Bridget, an old Irishwoman, took it. She was a free-lance maid who worked at most of the big parties in Shady Hill. Her husband was caretaker at the country club. "So your lady isn't with you," she said in her sweet brogue. "Ah, well, I can't say that I blame her." Then she laughed suddenly. She put her hands on her knees and rocked back and forth. "I shouldn't tell you, I know, so help me G.o.d, but when Mike was sweeping up the parking lot this morning, he found a pair of gold slippers and a blue lace girdle."

Downstairs, Will spoke with his hostess, and she said she was so sorry that Maria hadn't come. Crossing the living room, he was stopped by Pete Parsons, who drew him over to the fireplace and told him a joke. This was what Will had come for, and his spirits began to improve. But, going from Pete Parsons toward the door of the bar, he found his way blocked by Buff Worden. Ethel's story of their neediness, her tears, and her trip to the parking lot with Larry Helmsford were still fresh in his mind. He did not want to see Buff Worden. He did not like it that Buff could muster a cheerful and open face after his wife had been seduced in the Helmsfords' station wagon.

"Did you hear what Mike Reilly found in the parking lot this morning?" Buff asked. "A pair of slippers and a girdle." Will said that he wanted a drink, and he got past Buff, but the entrance to the pa.s.sage between the living room and the bar was blocked by the Chesneys.

In almost every suburb there is a charming young couple designated by their gifts to be an amba.s.sadorial pair. They are the ones who meet John Mason Brown at the train and drive him to the auditorium. They are the ones who organize the b.u.mper tennis tournaments, handle the most difficult cases in the fund-raising campaign, and can be counted on by their hostesses to humor the bore, pa.s.s the stuffed celery, breathe fire into the dying conversation, and expel the drunk. Their social and family connections are indescribably rich and varied, and physically they are models of attractiveness and fas.h.i.+on-direct, mild, well groomed, their eyes twinkling with trust and friendliness. Such a young couple were the Chesneys.

"So glad to see you," Mark Chesney said, removing his pipe from his mouth and putting a hand on Will's shoulder. "Missed you at the dance last night, although I saw Maria enjoying herself. But what I wanted to speak to you about is something of a higher order. Give me a minute? As you may or may not know, I'm in charge of the adult-education program at the high school this year. We've had a disappointing attendance, and we have a speaker coming on Thursday for whom I'm anxious to rustle up a sizable audience. Her name is Mary Bickwald, and she's going to speak on marriage problems-extramarital affairs, that sort of thing. If you and Maria are free on Thursday, I think you'll find it worth your time." The Chesneys went on into the living room, and Will continued toward the bar.