The Stories of John Cheever Part 18

"DO YOU WANT to go downstairs alone? The elevator men in these buildings-" Stephen Bruce said when they had dressed.

"I don't care about the elevator men in these buildings," she said lightly.

She took his arm, and they went down in the elevator together. When they left the building, they were unwilling to part, and they decided on the Metropolitan Museum as a place where they were not likely to be seen by anyone they knew. The nearly empty rotunda looked, at that hour of the afternoon, like a railroad station past train time. It smelled of burning coal. They looked at stone horses and pieces of cloth. In a dark pa.s.sage, they found a prodigal representation of the Feast of Love. The G.o.d-disguised now as a woodcutter, now as a cowherd, a sailor, a prince-came through every open door. Three spirits waited by a holly grove to lift the armor from his shoulders and undo his buckler. A large company encouraged his paramour. The whole creation was in accord-the civet and the bear, the lion and the unicorn, fire and water.

Coming back through the rotunda, Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan met a friend of Lois's mother. It was impossible to avoid her and they said How-do-you-do and I'm-happy-to-meet-you, and Stephen promised to remember the friend to his mother-in-law. Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan walked over to Lexington and said goodbye. He returned to his office and went home at six. Mrs. Bruce had not come in, the maid told him. Katherine was at a party, and he was supposed to bring her home. The maid gave him the address and he went out again without taking off his coat. It was raining. The doorman, in a white raincoat, went out into the storm, and returned riding on the running board of a taxi. The taxi had orange seats, and as it drove uptown, he heard the car radio playing a tango. Another doorman let him out and he went into a lobby that, like the one in the building where he lived, was meant to resemble the hall of a manor house. Upstairs, there were peanut sh.e.l.ls on the rug, balloons on the ceiling; friends and relatives were drinking c.o.c.ktails in the living room, and at the end of the room, the marionette stage was again being dismantled. He drank a Martini and talked with a friend while he waited for Katherine to put her coat on. "Oh yes, yes!" he heard Mrs. Sheridan say, and then he saw her come into the room with her daughters.

Katherine came between them before they spoke, and he went, with his daughter, over to the hostess. Katherine dropped her curtsy and said brightly, "It was very nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Bremont, and thank you very much." As Mr. Bruce started for the elevator, the younger Sheridan girl dropped her curtsy and said, "It was a very nice party, Mrs. Bremont..."

He waited downstairs, with Katherine, for Mrs. Sheridan, but something or someone delayed her, and when the elevator had come down twice without bringing her, he left.

MR. BRUCE AND MRS. SHERIDAN met at the apartment a few days later. Then he saw her in a crowd at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, waiting for her children. He saw her again in the lobby of the Chardin Club, among the other parents, nursemaids, and chauffeurs who were waiting for the dancing cla.s.s to end. He didn't speak to her, but he heard her at his back, saying to someone, "Yes, Mother's very well, thank you. Yes, I will give her your love." Then he heard her speaking to someone farther away from him and then her voice fell below the music. That night, he left the city on business and did not return until Sunday, and he went Sunday afternoon to a football game with a friend. The game was slow and the last quarter was played under lights. When he got home, Lois met him at the door of the apartment. The fire in the living room was lighted. She fixed their drinks and then sat across the room from him in a chair near the fire. "I forgot to tell you that Aunt Helen called on Wednesday. She's moving from Gray's Hill to a house nearer the sh.o.r.e."

He tried to find something to say to this item of news and couldn't. After five years of marriage he seemed to have been left with nothing to say. It was like being embarra.s.sed by a shortage of money. He looked desperately back to the football game and the trip to Chicago for something that might please her, and couldn't find a word. Lois felt his struggle and his failure. She stopped talking herself. I haven't had anyone to talk to since Wednesday, she thought, and now he has nothing to say. "While you were away, I strained my back again, reaching for a hatbox," she said. "The pain is excruciating, and Dr. Parminter doesn't seem able to help me, so I'm going to another doctor, named Walsh."

"I'm terribly sorry your back is bothering you," he said. "I hope Dr. Walsh will be able to help."

The lack of genuine concern in his voice hurt her feelings. "Oh, and I forgot to tell you-there's been some trouble," she said crossly. "Katherine spent the afternoon with Helen Woodruff and some other children. There were some boys. When the maid went into the playroom to call them for supper, she found them all undressed. Mrs. Woodruff was very upset and I told her you'd call."

"Where is Katherine?"

"She's in her room. She won't speak to me. I don't like to be the one to say it, but I think you ought to get a psychiatrist for that girl."

"I'll go and speak to her," Mr. Bruce said.

"Well, will you want any supper?" Lois asked.

"Yes," he said, "I would like some supper."

Katherine had a large room on the side of the building. Her furniture had never filled it. When Mr. Bruce went in, he saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, in the dark. The room smelled of a pair of rats that she had in a cage. He turned on the light and gave her a charm bracelet that he had bought at the airport, and she thanked him politely. He did not mention the trouble at the Woodruffs', but when he put his arm around her shoulders, she began to cry bitterly.

"I didn't want to do it this afternoon," she said, "but she made me, and she was the hostess, and we always have to do what the hostess says."

"It doesn't matter if you wanted to or not," he said. "You haven't done anything terribly wrong."

He held her until she was quiet, and then left her and went into his bedroom and telephoned Mrs. Woodruff. "This is Katherine Bruce's father," he said. "I understand that there was some difficulty there this afternoon. I just wanted to say that Katherine has been given her lecture, and as far as Mrs. Bruce and I are concerned, the incident has been forgotten."

"Well, it hasn't been forgotten over here," Mrs. Woodruff said. "I don't know who started it, but I've put Helen to bed without any supper. Mr. Woodruff and I haven't decided how we're going to punish her yet, but we're going to punish her severely." He heard Lois calling to him from the living room that his supper was ready. "I suppose you know that immorality is sweeping this country," Mrs. Woodruff went on. "Our child has never heard a dirty word spoken in her life in this household. There is no room for filth here. If it takes fire to fight fire, that's what I'm going to do!"

The ignorant and ill-tempered woman angered him, but he listened helplessly to her until she had finished, and then went back to Katherine.

Lois looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and called to her husband sharply, a second time. She had not felt at all like making his supper. His lack of concern for her feelings and then her having to slave for him in the kitchen had seemed like an eternal human condition. The ghosts of her injured s.e.x thronged to her side when she slammed open the silver drawer and again when she poured his beer. She set the tray elaborately, in order to deepen her displeasure in doing it at all. She heaped cold meat and salad on her husband's plate as if they were poisoned. Then she fixed her lipstick and carried the heavy tray into the dining room herself, in spite of her lame back.

Now, smoking a cigarette and walking around the room, she let five minutes pa.s.s. Then she carried the tray back to the kitchen, dumped the beer and coffee down the drain, and put the meat and salad in the icebox. When Mr. Bruce came back from Katherine's room he found her sobbing with anger-not at him but at her own foolishness. "Lois?" he asked, and she ran out of the room and into her bedroom and slammed the door.

DURING the next two months, Lois Bruce heard from a number of sources that her husband had been seen with a Mrs. Sheridan. She confided to her mother that she was losing him and, at her mother's insistence, employed a private detective. Lois was not vindictive; she didn't want to trap or intimidate her husband; she had, actually, a feeling that this maneuver would somehow be his salvation. The detective telephoned her one day when she was having lunch at home, and told her that her husband and Mrs. Sheridan had just gone upstairs in a certain hotel. He was telephoning from the lobby, he said. Lois left her lunch unfinished but changed her clothes. She put on a hat with a veil, because her face was strained, and she was able because of the veil to talk calmly with the doorman, who got her a taxi. The detective met her on the sidewalk. He told her the floor and the number of the apartment, and offered to go upstairs with her. She dismissed him officiously then, as if his offer was a reflection on her ability to handle the situation competently. She had never been in the building before, but the feeling that she was acting on her rights kept her from being impressed at all with the building's strangeness.

The elevator man closed the door after her when she got off at the tenth floor, and she found herself alone in a long, windowless hall. The twelve identical doors painted dark red to match the dusty carpet, the dim ceiling lights, and the perfect stillness of the hall made her hesitate for a second, and then she went directly to the door of the apartment, and rang the bell. There was no sound, no answer. She rang the bell several times. Then she spoke to the shut door. "Let me in, Stephen. It's Lois. Let me in. I know you're in there. Let me in."

She waited. She took off her gloves. She put her thumb on the bell and held it there. Then she listened. There was still no sound. She looked at the shut red doors around her. She jabbed the bell. "Stephen!" she called. "Stephen. Let me in there. Let me in. I know you're in there. I saw you go in there. I can hear you. I can hear you moving around. I can hear you whispering. Let me in, Stephen. Let me in. If you don't let me in, I'll tell her husband."

She waited again. The silence of the early afternoon filled the interval. Then she attacked the door handle. She pounded on the door with the frame of her purse. She kicked it. "You let me in there, Stephen Bruce!" she screamed. "You let me in there, do you hear! Let me in, let me in, let me in!"

Another door into the hallway opened, and she turned and saw a man in his shirtsleeves, shaking his head. She ran into the back hall and, crying, started down the fire stairs. Like the stairs in a monument, they seemed to have no beginning and no end, but at last she came down into a dark hall where tricycles and perambulators were stored, and found her way into the lobby.

WHEN Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan left the hotel, they walked through the Park, which, in the late-winter sunshine, smelled faintly like a wood. Crossing a bridle path, they saw Miss Prince, the children's riding mistress. She was giving a lesson to a fat little girl whose horse was on a lead. "Mrs. Sheridan!" she said. "Mr. Bruce! Isn't this fortunate!" She stopped the horses. "I wanted to speak to both of you," she said. "I'm having a little gymkhana next month, and I want your children to ride in it. I want them all three to ride in the good-hands cla.s.s. And perhaps the next year," she said, turning to the fat little girl, "you too may ride in the good-hands cla.s.s."

They promised to allow their children to take part in the gymkhana, and Miss Prince said goodbye and resumed her riding lesson. In the Seventies they heard the roaring of a lion. They walked to the southern edge of the Park. It was then late in the afternoon. From the Plaza he telephoned his office. Among the messages was one from the maid; he was to stop at the Chardin Club and bring Katherine home.

From the sidewalk in front of the dancing school they could hear the clatter of the piano. The Grand March had begun. They moved through the crowd in the vestibule and stood in the door of the ballroom, looking for their children. Through the open door they could see Mrs. Bailey, the dancing teacher, and her two matrons curtsying stiffly as the children came to them in couples. The boys wore white gloves. The girls were simply dressed. Two by two the children bowed, or curtsied, and joined the grown people at the door. Then Mr. Bruce saw Katherine. As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her, it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth. They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done. Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies.

One of the dancing teachers came up to them and said, "Oh, I'm so glad to see you, Mrs. Sheridan. We were afraid that you'd been taken sick. Very soon after the cla.s.s began this afternoon, Mr. Sheridan came and got the two girls. He said he was going to take them out to the country, and we wondered if you were ill. He seemed very upset."

The a.s.sistant smiled and wandered off.

Mrs. Sheridan's face lost its color and got dark. She looked very old. It was hot in the ballroom, and Mr. Bruce led her out the door into the freshness of a winter evening, holding her, supporting her really, for she might have fallen. "It will be all right," he kept saying, "it will be all right, my darling, it will be all right."

THE WORM IN THE APPLE.

THE CRUTCHMANS were so very, very happy and so temperate in all their habits and so pleased with everything that came their way that one was bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple and that the extraordinary rosiness of the fruit was only meant to conceal the gravity and the depth of the infection. Their house, for instance, on Hill Street with all those big gla.s.s windows. Who but someone suffering from a guilt complex would want so much light to pour into their rooms? And all the wall-to-wall carpeting as if an inch of bare floor (there was none) would touch on some deep memory of unrequition and loneliness. And there was a certain necrophilic ardor to their gardening. Why be so intense about digging holes and planting seeds and watching them come up? Why this morbid concern with the earth? She was a pretty woman with that striking pallor you so often find in nymphomaniacs. Larry was a big man who used to garden without a shirt, which may have shown a tendency to infantile exhibitionism.

They moved happily out to Shady Hill after the war. Larry had served in the Navy. They had two happy children: Rachel and Tom. But there were already some clouds on their horizon. Larry's ship had been sunk in the war and he had spent four days on a raft in the Mediterranean and surely this experience would make him skeptical about the comforts and songbirds of Shady Hill and leave him with some racking nightmares. But what was perhaps more serious was the fact that Helen was rich. She was the only daughter of old Charlie Simpsonone of the last of the industrial buccaneers-who had left her with a larger income than Larry would ever take away from his job at Melcher & Thaw. The dangers in this situation are well known. Since Larry did not have to make a living-since he lacked any incentive-he might take it easy, spend too much time on the golf links, and always have a gla.s.s in his hand. Helen would confuse financial with emotional independence and damage the delicate balances within their marriage. But Larry seemed to have no nightmares and Helen spread her income among the charities and lived a comfortable but a modest life. Larry went to his job each morning with such enthusiasm that you might think he was trying to escape from something. His partic.i.p.ation in the life of the community was so vigorous that he must have been left with almost no time for self-examination. He was everywhere: he was at the communion rail, the fifty-yard line, he played the oboe with the Chamber Music Club, drove the fire truck, served on the school board, and rode the 8:03 into New York every morning. What was the sorrow that drove him?

He may have wanted a larger family. Why did they only have two children? Why not three or four? Was there perhaps some breakdown in their relationship after the birth of Tom? Rachel, the oldest, was terribly fat when she was a girl and quite aggressive in a mercenary way. Every spring she would drag an old dressing table out of the garage and set it up on the sidewalk with a sign saying: FRESH LEMONADE .15. Tom had pneumonia when he was six and nearly died, but he recovered and there were no visible complications. The children may have felt rebellious about the conformity of their parents, for they were exacting conformists. Two cars? Yes. Did they go to church? Every single Sunday they got to their knees and prayed with ardor. Clothing? They couldn't have been more punctilious in their observance of the sumptuary laws. Book clubs, local art and music lover a.s.sociations, athletics and cards-they were up to their necks in everything. But if the children were rebellious they concealed their rebellion and seemed happily to love their parents and happily to be loved in return, but perhaps there was in this love the ruefulness of some deep disappointment. Perhaps he was impotent. Perhaps she was frigid-but hardly, with that pallor. Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had all been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?

As their children grew one might look to them for the worm in the apple. They would be rich, they would inherit Helen's fortune, and we might see here, moving over them, the shadow that so often falls upon children who can count on a lifetime of financial security. And anyhow Helen loved her son too much. She bought him everything he wanted. Driving him to dancing school in his first blue serge suit she was so entranced by the manly figure he cut as he climbed the stairs that she drove the car straight into an elm tree. Such an infatuation was bound to lead to trouble. And if she favored her son she was bound to discriminate against her daughter. Listen to her. "Rachel's feet," she says, "are immense, simply immense. I can never get shoes for her." Now perhaps we see the worm. Like most beautiful women she is jealous; she is jealous of her own daughter! She cannot brook compet.i.tion. She will dress the girl in hideous clothing, have her hair curled in some unbecoming way, and keep talking about the size of her feet until the poor girl will refuse to go to the dances or if she is forced to go she will sulk in the ladies' room, staring at her monstrous feet. She will become so wretched and so lonely that in order to express herself she will fall in love with an unstable poet and fly with him to Rome, where they will live out a miserable and a boozy exile. But when the girl enters the room she is pretty and prettily dressed and she smiles at her mother with perfect love. Her feet are quite large, to be sure, but so is her front. Perhaps we should look to the son to find our trouble.

And there is trouble. He fails his junior year in high school and has to repeat and as a result of having to repeat he feels alienated from the members of his cla.s.s and is put, by chance, at a desk next to Carrie Witch.e.l.l, who is the most conspicuous dish in Shady Hill. Everyone knows about the Witch.e.l.ls and their pretty, high-spirited daughter. They drink too much and live in one of those frame houses in Maple Dell. The girl is really beautiful and everyone knows how her shrewd old parents are planning to climb out of Maple Dell on the strength of her white, white skin. What a perfect situation! They will know about Helen's wealth. In the darkness of their bedroom they will calculate the settlement they can demand and in the malodorous kitchen where they take all their meals they will tell their pretty daughter to let the boy go as far as he wants. But Tom fell out of love with Carrie as swiftly as he fell into it and after that he fell in love with Karen Strawbridge and Susie Morris and Anna Macken and you might think he was unstable, but in his second year in college he announced his engagement to Elizabeth Trustman and they were married after his graduation and since he then had to serve his time in the Army she followed him to his post in Germany, where they studied and learned the language and befriended the people and were a credit to their country.

Rachel's way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate young woman is unfathomable. What, but chance, was there to keep her from ending up as a hostess at a Times Square dance hall? And what would her poor father think, seeing the face of his daughter, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s lightly covered with gauze, gazing mutely at him on a rainy morning from one of those showcases? What she did was to fall in love with the son of the Farquarsons' German gardener. He had come with his family to the United States on the Displaced Persons quota after the war. His name was Eric Reiner and to be fair about it he was an exceptional young man who looked on the United States as a truly New World. The Crutchmans must have been sad about Rachel's choice-not to say heartbroken-but they concealed their feelings. The Reiners did not. This hard-working German couple thought the marriage hopeless and improper. At one point the father beat his son over the head with a stick of firewood. But the young couple continued to see each other and presently they eloped.

They had to. Rachel was three months pregnant. Eric was then a freshman at Tufts, where he had a scholarship. Helen's money came in handy here and she was able to rent an apartment in Boston for the young couple and pay their expenses. That their first grandchild was premature did not seem to bother the Crutchmans. When Eric graduated from college he got a fellowship at M.I.T. and took his Ph. D. in physics and was taken on as an a.s.sociate in the department. He could have gone into industry at a higher salary but he liked to teach and Rachel was happy in Cambridge, where they remained.

With their own dear children gone away the Crutchmans might be expected to suffer the celebrated spiritual dest.i.tution of their age and their kind-the worm in the apple would at last be laid bare-although watching this charming couple as they entertained their friends or read the books they enjoyed one might wonder if the worm was not in the eye of the observer who, through timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the broad range of their natural enthusiasms and would not grant that, while Larry played neither Bach nor football very well, his pleasure in both was genuine. You might at least expect to see in them the usual destructiveness of time, but either through luck or as a result of their temperate and healthy lives they had lost neither their teeth nor their hair. The touchstone of their euphoria remained potent, and while Larry gave up the fire truck he could still be seen at the communion rail, the fifty-yard line, the 8:03, and the Chamber Music Club, and through the prudence and shrewdness of Helen's broker they got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily.

THE TROUBLE OF MARCIE FLINT.

"This is being written aboard the S. S. Augustus, three days at sea. My suitcase is full of peanut b.u.t.ter, and I am a fugitive from the suburbs of all large cities. What holes! The suburbs, I mean. G.o.d preserve me from the lovely ladies taking in their asters and their roses at dusk lest the frost kill them, and from ladies with their heads whirling with civic zeal. I'm off to Torino, where the girls love peanut b.u.t.ter and the world is a man's castle and..." There was absolutely nothing wrong with the suburb (Shady Hill) from which Charles Flint was fleeing, his age is immaterial, and he was no stranger to Torino, having been there for three months recently on business.

"G.o.d preserve me," he continued, "from women who dress like toreros to go to the supermarket, and from cowhide dispatch cases, and from flannels and gabardines. Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from ba.s.set hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapes and b.l.o.o.d.y Marys and smugness and syringa bushes and P. T. A. meetings." On and on he wrote, while the Augustus, traveling at seventeen knots, took a course due east; they would raise the Azores in a day.

Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth. Marcie, the wife from whom he was fleeing, was a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman-not young by any stretch of the imagination but gifted with great stores of feminine sweetness and gallantry. She had not told her neighbors that Charlie had left her; she had not even called her lawyer; but she had fired the cook, and she now took a south-southwest course between the stove and the sink, cooking the children's supper. It was not in her to review the past, as her husband would, or to inspect the forces that could put an ocean between a couple who had been cheerfully married for fifteen years. There had been, she felt, a slight difference in their points of view during his recent absence on business, for while he always wrote that he missed her, he also wrote that he was dining at the Superga six nights a week and having a wonderful time. He had only planned to be away for six weeks, and when this stretched out to three months, she found that it was something to be borne.

Her neighbors had stood by her handsomely during the first weeks, but she knew, herself, that an odd woman can spoil a dinner party, and as Flint continued to stay away, she found that she had more and more lonely nights to get through. Now, there were two aspects to the night life of Shady Hill; there were the parties, of course, and then there was another side-a regular Santa Claus's workshop of madrigal singers, political discussion groups, recorder groups, dancing schools, confirmation cla.s.ses, committee meetings, and lectures on literature, philosophy, city planning, and pest control. The bright banner of stars in heaven has probably never before been stretched above such a picture of nocturnal industry. Marcie, having a sweet, clear voice, joined a madrigal group that met on Thursdays and a political workshop that met on Mondays. Once she made herself available, she was sought as a committeewoman, although it was hard to say why; she almost never opened her mouth. She finally accepted a position on the Village Council, in the third month of Charlie's absence, mostly to keep herself occupied.

Virtuousness, reason, civic zeal, and loneliness all contributed to poor Marcie's trouble. Charlie, far away in Torino, could imagine her well enough standing in their lighted doorway on the evening of his return, but could he imagine her groping under the bed for the children's shoes or pouring bacon fat into an old soup can? "Daddy has to stay in Italy in order to make the money to buy the things we need," she told the children. But when Charlie called her from abroad, as he did once a week, he always seemed to have been drinking. Regard this sweet woman, then, singing "Hodie Christus Natus Est," studying Karl Marx, and sitting on a hard chair at meetings of the Village Council.

If there was anything really wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library-no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage; no broken sets of Dostoevski and George Eliot; no Galsworthy, even; no Barrie and no Bennett. This was the chief concern of the Village Council during Marcie's term. The library partisans were mostly newcomers to the village; the opposition whip was Mrs. Selfredge, a member of the Council and a very decorous woman, with blue eyes of astonishing brilliance and inexpressiveness. Mrs. Selfredge often spoke of the chosen quietness of their life. "We never go out," she would say, but in such a way that she seemed to be expressing not some choice but a deep vein of loneliness. She was married to a wealthy man much older than herself, and they had no children; indeed, the most indirect mention of s.e.xual fact brought a deep color to Mrs. Selfredge's face. She took the position that a library belonged in that category of public service that might make Shady Hill attractive to a development. This was not blind prejudice. Ca.r.s.en Park, the next village, had let a development inside its boundaries, with disastrous results to the people already living there. Their taxes had been doubled, their schools had been ruined. That there was any connection between reading and real estate was disputed by the partisans of the library, until a horrible murder-three murders, in fact-took place in one of the cheese-box houses in the Ca.r.s.en Park development, and the library project was buried with the victims.

From the terraces of the Superga you can see all of Torino and the snow-covered mountains around, and a man drinking wine there might not think of his wife attending a meeting of the Village Council. This was a board of ten men and two women, headed by the Mayor, who screened the projects that came before them. The Council met in the Civic Center, an old mansion that had been picked up for back taxes. The board room had been the parlor. Easter eggs had been hidden here, children had pinned paper tails on paper donkeys, fires had burned on the hearth, and a Christmas tree had stood in the corner; but once the house had become the property of the village, a conscientious effort seems to have been made to exorcise these gentle ghosts. Raphael's self-portrait and the pictures of the Broken Bridge at Avignon and the Avon at Stratford were taken down and the walls were painted a depressing shade of green. The fireplace remained, but the flue was sealed up and the bricks were spread with green paint. A track of fluorescent tubing across the ceiling threw a withering light down into the faces of the Village Council members and made them all look haggard and tired. The room made Marcie uncomfortable. In its harsh light her sweetness was unavailing, and she felt not only bored but somehow painfully estranged.

On this particular night they discussed water taxes and parking meters, and then the Mayor brought up the public library for the last time. "Of course, the issue is closed," he said, "but we've heard everyone all along, on both sides. There's one more man who wants to speak to us, and I think we ought to hear him. He comes from Maple Dell." Then he opened the door from the board room into the corridor and let Noel Mackham in.

Now, the neighborhood of Maple Dell was more like a development than anything else in Shady Hill. It was the kind of place where the houses stand cheek by jowl, all of them white frame, all of them built twenty years ago, and parked beside each was a car that seemed more substantial than the house itself, as if this were a fragment of some nomadic culture. And it was a kind of sp.a.w.ning ground, a place for bearing and raising the young and for nothing else-for who would ever come back to Maple Dell? Who, in the darkest night, would ever think with longing of the three upstairs bedrooms and the leaky toilet and the sour-smelling halls? Who would ever come back to the little living room where you couldn't swing a cat around without knocking down the colored photograph of Mount Rainier? Who would ever come back to the chair that bit you in the b.u.m and the obsolete TV set and the bent ashtray with its pressed-steel statue of a naked woman doing a scarf dance?

"I understand that the business is closed," Mackham said, "but I just wanted to go on record as being in favor of a public library. It's been on my conscience."

He was not much of an advocate for anything. He was tall. His hair had begun an erratic recession, leaving him with some spa.r.s.e fluff to comb over his bald brow. His features were angular; his skin was bad. There were no deep notes to his voice. Its range seemed confined to a delicate hoa.r.s.eness-a monotonous and laryngitic sound that aroused in Marcie, as if it had been some kind of Hungarian music, feelings of irritable melancholy. "I just wanted to say a few words in favor of a public library," he rasped. "When I was a kid we were poor. There wasn't much good about the way we lived, but there was this Carnegie Library. I started going there when I was about eight. I guess I went there regularly for ten years. I read everything-philosophy, novels, technical books, poetry, ships' logs. I even read a cookbook. For me, this library amounted to the difference between success and failure. When I remember the thrill I used to get out of cracking a good book, I just hate to think of bringing my kids up in a place where there isn't any library."

"Well, of course, we know what you mean," Mayor Simmons said. "But I don't think that's quite the question. The question is not one of denying books to children. Most of us in Shady Hill have libraries of our own."

Mark Barrett got to his feet. "And I'd like to throw in a word about poor boys and reading, if I might," he said, in a voice so full of color and virility that everyone smiled. "I was a poor boy myself," he said cheerfully, "and I'm not ashamed to say so, and I'd just like to throw in-for what it's worth-that I never put my nose inside a public library, except to get out of the rain, or maybe follow a pretty girl. I just don't want anybody to be left with the impression that a public library is the road to success."

"I didn't say that a public library was the road to-"

"Well, you implied it!" Barrett shouted, and he seated himself with a big stir. His chair creaked, and by bulging his muscles a little he made his garters, braces, and shoes all sound.

"I only wanted to say-" Mackham began again.

"You implied it!" Barrett shouted.

"Just because you can't read," Mackham said, "it doesn't follow-"

"d.a.m.n it, man, I didn't say that I couldn't read!" Barrett was on his feet again.

"Please, gentlemen. Please! Please!" Mayor Simmons said. "Let's keep our remarks temperate."

"I'm not going to sit here and have someone who lives in Maple Dell tell me the reason he's such a hot rock is because he read a lot of books!" Barrett shouted. "Books have their place. I won't deny it. But no book ever helped me to get where I am, and from where I am I can spit on Maple Dell. As for my kids, I want them out in the fresh air playing ball, not reading cookbooks."

"Please, Mark. Please," the Mayor said. And then he turned to Mrs. Selfredge and asked her to move that the meeting be adjourned.

"MY DAY, my hour, my moment of revelation," Charlie wrote, in his sun-deck cabin on the Augustus, "came on a Sunday, when I had been home eight days. Oh G.o.d, was I happy! I spent most of the day putting up storm windows, and I like working on my house. Things like putting up storm windows. When the work was done, I put the ladder away and grabbed a towel and my swimming trunks and walked over to the Townsends' swimming pool. They were away, but the pool hadn't been drained. I put on my trunks and dove in and I remember seeing-way, way up in the top of one of the pine trees-a bra.s.siere that I guess the Townsend kids had snitched and heaved up there in midsummer, the screams of dismay from their victim having long since been carried away on the west wind. The water was very cold, and blood pressure or some other medical reason may have accounted for the fact that when I got out of the pool and dressed I was nearly busting with happiness. I walked back to the house, and when I stepped inside it was so quiet that I wondered if anything had gone wrong. It was not an ominous silence-it was just that I wondered why the clock should sound so loud. Then I went upstairs and found Marcie asleep in her bedroom. She was covered with a light wrap that had slipped from her shoulders and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Then I heard Henry and Katie's voices, and I went to the back bedroom window. This looked out onto the garden, where a gravel path that needed weeding went up a little hill. Henry and Katie were there. Katie was scratching in the gravel with a stick-some message of love, I guess. Henry had one of those broad-winged planes-talismanic planes, really-made of balsa wood and propelled by a rubber band. He twisted the band by turning the propeller, and I could see his lips moving as he counted. Then, when the rubber was taut, he set his feet apart in the gravel, like a marksman-Katie watched none of this-and sent the plane up. The wings of the plane were pale in the early dark, and then I saw it climb out of the shade up to where the sun washed it with yellow light. With not much more force than a moth, it soared and circled and meandered and came slowly down again into the shade and crashed on the peony hedge. 'I got it up again!' I heard Henry shout. 'I got it up into the light.' Katie went on writing her message in the dirt. And then, like some trick in the movies, I saw myself as my son, standing in a like garden and sending up out of the dark a plane, an arrow, a tennis ball, a stone-anything-while my sister drew hearts in the gravel. The memory of how deep this impulse to reach into the light had been completely charmed me, and I watched the boy send the plane up again and again.

"Then, still feeling very springy and full of fun, I walked back toward the door, stopping to admire the curve of Marcie's b.r.e.a.s.t.s and deciding, in a blaze of charity, to let her sleep. I felt so good that I needed a drink-not to pick me up but to dampen my spirits-a libation, anyhow-and I poured some whiskey in a gla.s.s. Then I went into the kitchen to get some ice, and I noticed that ants had got in somehow. This was surprising, because we never had much trouble with ants. Spiders, yes. Before the equinoctial hurricanes-even before the barometer had begun to fall-the house seemed to fill up with spiders, as if they sensed the trouble in the air. There would be spiders in the bathtubs and spiders in the living room and spiders in the kitchen, and, walking down the long upstairs hallway before a storm, you could sometimes feel the thread of a web break against your face. But we had had almost no trouble with ants. Now, on this autumn afternoon, thousands of ants broke out of the kitchen woodwork and threw a double line across the drain-board and into the sink, where there seemed to be something they wanted.

"I found some ant poison at the back of the broom-closet shelf, a little jar of brown stuff that I'd bought from Timmons in the village years ago. I put a generous helping of this into a saucer and put it on the drain-board. Then I took my drink and a piece of the Sunday paper out onto the terrace in front of the house. The house faced west, so I had more light than the children, and I felt so happy that even the news in the papers seemed cheerful. No kings had been a.s.sa.s.sinated in the rainy black streets of Ma.r.s.eille; no storms were brewing in the Balkans; no clerkly Englishman-the admiration of his landlady and his aunts-had dissolved the remains of a young lady in an acid bath; no jewels, even, had been stolen. And that sometime power of the Sunday paper to evoke an anxious, rain-wet world of fallen crowns and inevitable war seemed gone. Then the sun withdrew from my paper and from the chair where I sat, and I wished I had put on a sweater.

"It was late in the season-the salt of change was in the air-and this tickled me, too. Last Sunday, or the Sunday before, the terrace would have been flooded with light. Then I thought about other places where I would like to be-Nantucket, with only a handful of people left and the sailing fleet depleted and the dunes casting, as they never do in the summer, a dark shadow over the bathing beach. And I thought about the Vineyard and the farina-colored bluffs and the purple autumn sea and that stillness in which you might hear, from way out in the Sound, the rasp of a block on a traveler as a sailboard there came about. I tasted my whiskey and gave my paper a shake, but the view of the golden light on the gra.s.s and the trees was more compelling than the news, and now mixed up with my memories of the sea islands was the whiteness of Marcie's thighs.

"Then I was seized by some intoxicating pride in the hour, by the joy and the naturalness of my relationship to the scene, and by the ease with which I could put my hands on what I needed. I thought again of Marcie sleeping and that I would have my way there soon-it would be a way of expressing this pride. And then, listening for the voices of my children and not hearing them, I decided to celebrate the hour as it pa.s.sed. I put the paper down and ran up the stairs. Marcie was still sleeping and I stripped off my clothes and lay down beside her, waking her from what seemed to be a pleasant dream, for she smiled and drew me to her.

TO GET BACK TO Marcie and her trouble: She put on her coat after the meeting was adjourned and said, "Good night. Good night. I'm expecting him home next week." She was not easily upset, but she suddenly felt that she had looked straight at stupidity and unfairness. Going down the stairs behind Mackham, she felt a powerful mixture of pity and sympathy for the stranger and some clear anger toward her old friend Mark Barrett. She wanted to apologize, and she stopped Mackham in the door and said that she had some cheerful memories of her own involving a public library.

As it happened, Mrs. Selfredge and Mayor Simmons were the last to leave the board room. The Mayor waited, with his hand on the light switch, for Mrs. Selfredge, who was putting on her white gloves. "I'm glad the library's over and done with," he said. "I have a few misgivings, but right now I'm against anything public, anything that would make this community attractive to a development." He spoke with feeling, and at the word "development" a ridge covered with identical houses rose in his mind. It seemed wrong to him that the houses he imagined should be identical and that they should be built of green wood and false stone. It seemed wrong to him that young couples should begin their lives in an atmosphere that lacked grace, and it seemed wrong to him that the rows of houses could not, for long, preserve their slender claim on propriety and would presently become unsightly tracts. "Of course, it isn't a question of keeping children from books," he repeated. "We all have libraries of our own. There isn't any problem. I suppose you were brought up in a house with a library?"

"Oh yes, yes," said Mrs. Selfredge. The Mayor had turned off the light, and the darkness covered and softened the lie she had told. Her father had been a Brooklyn patrolman, and there had not been a book in his house. He had been an amiable man-not very sweet-smelling-who talked to all the children on his beat. Slovenly and jolly, he had spent the years of his retirement drinking beer in the kitchen in his underwear, to the deep despair and shame of his only child.

The Mayor said good night to Mrs. Selfredge on the sidewalk, and standing there she overheard Marcie speaking to Mackham. "I'm terribly sorry about Mark, about what he said," Marcie said. "We've all had to put up with him at one time or another. But why don't you come back to my house for a drink? Perhaps we could get the library project moving again."

So it wasn't over and done with, Mrs. Selfredge thought indignantly. They wouldn't rest until Shady Hill was nothing but developments from one end to the other. The colorless, hard-pressed people of the Ca.r.s.en Park project, with their flocks of children, and their monthly interest payments, and their picture windows, and their view of identical houses and treeless, muddy, unpaved streets, seemed to threaten her most cherished concepts-her lawns, her pleasures, her property rights, even her self-esteem.

Mr. Selfredge, an intelligent and elegant old gentleman, was waiting up for his Little Princess and she told him her troubles. Mr. Selfredge had retired from the banking business-mercifully, for whenever he stepped out into the world today he was confronted with the deterioration of those qualities of responsibility and initiative that had made the world of his youth selective, vigorous, and healthy. He knew a great deal about Shady Hill-he even recognized Mackham's name. "The bank holds the mortgage on his house," he said. "I remember when he applied for it. He works for a textbook company in New York that has been accused by at least one Congressional committee of publishing subversive American histories. I wouldn't worry about him, my dear, but if it would put your mind at ease, I could easily write a letter to the paper."

"BUT THE CHILDREN were not as far away as I thought," Charlie wrote, aboard the Augustus. "They were still in the garden. And the significance of that hour for them, I guess, was that it was made for stealing food. I have to make up or imagine what took place with them. They may have been drawn into the house by a hunger as keen as mine. Coming into the hall and listening for sounds, they would hear nothing, and they would open the icebox slowly, so that the sound of the heavy latch wouldn't be heard. The icebox must have been disappointing, because Henry wandered over to the sink and began to eat the sodium a.r.s.enate. 'Candy,' he said, and Katie joined him, and they had a fight over the remaining poison. They must have stayed in the kitchen for quite a while, because they were still in the kitchen when Henry began to retch. 'Well, don't get it all over everything,' Katie said. 'Come on outside.' She was beginning to feel sick herself, and they went outside and hid under a syringa bush, which is where I found them when I dressed and came down.

"They told me what they had eaten, and I woke Marcie up and then ran downstairs again and called Doc Mullens. 'Jesus Christ!' he said. 'I'll be right over.' He asked me to read the label on the jar, but all it said was sodium a.r.s.enate; it didn't say the percentage. And when I told him I had bought it from Timmons, he told me to call and ask Timmons who the manufacturer was. The line was busy and so, while Marcie was running back and forth between the two sick children, I jumped into the car and drove to the village. There was a lot of light in the sky, I remember, but it was nearly dark in the streets. Timmons' drugstore was the only place that was lighted, and it was the kind of place that seems to subsist on the crumbs from other tradesmen's tables. This late hour when all the other stores were shut was Timmons' finest. The crazy jumble of displays in his windows-irons, ashtrays, Venus in a truss, ice bags, and perfumes-was continued into the store itself, which seemed like a pharmaceutical curiosity shop or funhouse: a storeroom for cardboard beauties anointing themselves with sun oil; for cardboard mountain ranges in the Alpine glow, advertising pine-scented soap; for bookshelves, and bins filled with card-table covers, and plastic water pistols. The drugstore was a little like a house, too, for Mrs. Timmons stood behind the soda fountain, a neat and anxious-looking woman, with photographs of her three sons (one dead) in uniform arranged against the mirror at her back, and when Timmons himself came to the counter, he was chewing on something and wiped the crumbs of a sandwich off his mouth with the back of his hand. I showed him the jar and said, 'The kids ate some of this about an hour ago. I called Doc Mullens, and he told me to come and see you. It doesn't say what the percentage of a.r.s.enate is, and he thought if you could remember where you got it, we could telephone the manufacturer and find out.'

"'The children are poisoned?' Timmons asked.

"'Yes!' I said.

"'You didn't buy this merchandise from me,' he said.

"The clumsiness of his lie and the stillness in that crazy store made me feel hopeless. 'I did buy it from you, Mr. Timmons,' I said. 'There's no question about that. My children are deathly sick. I want you to tell me where you got the stuff.'

"'You didn't buy this merchandise from me,' he said.

"I looked at Mrs. Timmons, but she was mopping the counter; she was deaf. 'G.o.d d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, Timmons!' I shouted, and I reached over the counter and got him by the shirt. 'You look up your records! You look up your G.o.dd.a.m.ned records and tell me where this stuff came from.'

"'We know what it is to lose a son,' Mrs. Timmons said at my back. There was nothing full to her voice; nothing but the monotonous, the gritty, music of grief and need. 'You don't have to tell us anything about that.'