The Stories of John Cheever (121 page)

My real work these days is to write an edition of
The New York Times
that will bring gladness to the hearts of men. How better could I occupy myself? The
Times
is a critical if rusty link in my ties to reality, but in these last years its tidings have been monotonous. The prophets of doom are out of work. All one can do is to pick up the pieces. The lead story is this:
PRESIDENT’S HEART TRANSPLANT DEEMED SUCCESSFUL
. There is this box on the lower left:
COST OF J. EDGAR HOOVER MEMORIAL CHALLENGED
. “The subcommittee on memorials threatened to halve the seven million dollars appropriated to commemorate the late J. Edgar Hoover with a Temple of Justice….” Column three:
CONTROVERSIAL LEGISLATION REPEALED BY SENATE
. “The recently enacted bill, making it a felony to have wicked thoughts about the administration, was repealed this afternoon by a standup vote of forty-three to seven.” On and on it goes. There are robust and heartening editorials, thrilling sports news, and the weather of course is always sunny and warm unless we need rain. Then we have rain. The air-pollutant gradient is zero, and even in Tokyo fewer and fewer people are wearing surgical masks. All highways, throughways, and expressways will be closed for the holiday weekend. Joy to the World!

BUT TO GET BACK
to the Cabots. The scene that I would like to overlook or forget took place the night after Geneva had stolen the diamonds. It involves plumbing. Most of the houses in the village had relatively little plumbing. There was usually a water closet in the basement for the cook and the ash man and a single bathroom on the second floor for the test of the household. Some of these rooms were quite large, and the Endicotts had a fireplace in their bathroom. Somewhere along the line Mrs. Cabot decided that the bathroom was her demesne. She had a locksmith come and secure the door. Mr. Cabot was allowed to take his sponge bath every morning, but after this the bathroom door was locked and Mrs. Cabot kept the key in her pocket. Mr. Cabot was obliged to use a chamber pot, but since he came from the South Shore I don’t suppose this was much of a hardship. It may even have been nostalgic. He was using the chamber pot late that night when Mrs. Cabot came to the door of his room. (They slept in separate rooms.) “Will you close the door?” she screamed. “Will you close the door? Do I have to listen to that horrible noise for the rest of my life?” They would both be in nightgowns, her snow-white hair in braids. She picked up the chamber pot and threw its contents at him. He kicked down the door of the locked bathroom, washed, dressed, packed a bag, and walked over the bridge to Mrs. Wallace’s place on the East Bank.

He stayed there for three days and then returned. He was worried about Molly, and in such a small place there were appearances to be considered—Mrs. Wallace’s as well as his own. He divided his time between the East and the West banks of the river until a week or so later, when he was taken ill. He felt languid. He stayed in bed until noon. When he dressed and went to his office he returned after an hour or so. The doctor examined him and found nothing wrong.

One evening Mrs. Wallace saw Mrs. Cabot coming out of the drugstore on the East Bank. She watched her rival cross the bridge and then went into the drugstore and asked the clerk if Mrs. Cabot was a regular customer. “I’ve been wondering about that myself,” the clerk said. “Of course she comes over here to collect her rents, but I always thought she used the other drugstore. She comes in here to buy ant poison—arsenic, that is. She says they have these terrible ants in the house on Shore Road and arsenic is the only way of getting rid of them. From the way she buys arsenic the ants must be terrible.” Mrs. Wallace might have warned Mr. Cabot but she never saw him again.

She went after the funeral to Judge Simmons and said that she wanted to charge Mrs. Cabot with murder. The drug clerk would have a record of her purchases of arsenic that would be incriminating. “He may have them,” the judge said, “but he won’t give them to you. What you are asking for is an exhumation of the body and a long trial in Barnstable, and you have neither the money nor the reputation to support this. You were his friend, I know, for sixteen years. He was a splendid man and why don’t you console yourself with the thought of how many years it was that you knew him? And another thing. He’s left you and Wallace a substantial legacy. If Mrs. Cabot were provoked to contest the will you could lose this.”

* * *

I WENT OUT
to Luxor to see Geneva. I flew to London in a 747. There were only three passengers; but as I say the prophets of doom are out of work. I went from Cairo up the Nile in a low-flying two-motor prop. The sameness of wind erosion and water erosion makes the Sahara there seem to have been gutted by floods, rivers, courses, streams, and brooks, the thrust of a natural search. The scorings are watery and arboreal, and as a false stream bed spreads out it takes the shape of a tree, striving for light. It was freezing in Cairo when we left before dawn. Luxor, where Geneva met me at the airport, was hot.

I was very happy to see her, so happy I was unobservant, but I did notice that she had gotten fat. I don’t mean that she was heavy; I mean that she weighed about three hundred pounds. She was a fat woman. Her hair, once a coarse yellow, was now golden but her Massachusetts accent was as strong as ever. It sounded like music to me on the Upper Nile. Her husband—now a colonel—was a slender, middle-aged man, a relative of the last king. He owned a restaurant at the edge of the city and they lived in a pleasant apartment over the dining room. The colonel was humorous, intelligent—a rake, I guess—and a heavy drinker. When we went to the temple at Karnak our dragoman carried ice, tonic, and gin. I spent a week with them, mostly in temples and graves. We spent the evenings in his bar. War was threatening—the air was full of Russian planes—and the only other tourist was an Englishman who sat at the bar, reading his passport. On the last day I swam in the Nile—overhand—and they drove me to the airport, where I kissed Geneva—and the Cabots—goodbye.

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1912. At the age of 23, Cheever published his first story in the
New Yorker
, beginning what would be an essential professional relationship spanning five decades and more than 100 stories. His first novel,
The Wapshot Chronicle
, was published in 1957 and won the National Book Award. It was followed by
The Wapshot Scandal
(1964),
Bullet Park
(1969),
Falconer
(1977), and
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
(1982). In 1978
The Stories of John Cheever
won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received the National Medal for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. John Cheever died in 1982. His complete work is included in the Library of America.

The publication, in 1978, of
The Stories of John Cheever
was an event in American letters, and the book has stood as a literary monument ever since. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, the book is an essential, indelible portrait of mid-century America: its cities, its suburbs, and the brave and wounded people that inhabit them.

Starting with “Goodbye, My Brother,” Cheever’s instant classic from 1951,
The Stories of John Cheever
ranges through his mid-career masterpieces such as “The Sorrows of Gin” and “The Country Husband,” and culminates in such profound and unforgettable late stories as “The Swimmer” and “The World of Apples.” Cheever’s mastery of the short-form is everywhere evident in this world of lurid cocktail parties in fourth-floor walk-ups, of gloved and hatted women shopping in Woolworth’s, of families dining on chicken pot pie in automats, and of late Sunday trains back to the suburbs of Westchester and Connecticut.

These stories create a bright and enchanted New York City that teems with buried secrets behind apartment doors and in quiet alleys. The people that populate this world—bored housewives, ambitious career-men, tired nannies—are daringly real, familiar in their tragedies petty and profound, and in their earnest desire for love and happiness. In prose that is elegant and powerful, John Cheever captures all the angst, innocence, jealousy, and good intentions that define the American psyche.