The Stories of John Cheever Part 32

Orville Betman spent the three summer months alone in New York, as he had done ever since his marriage. He had a large apartment, a good housekeeper, and a host of friends; but he had no wife. Now, some men have a s.e.xual disposition as vigorous, indiscriminate, and demanding as a digestive tract, and to invest these drives with the crosslights of romantic agony would be as tragic as it would be to invent rituals and music for the bronchial tree. These men do not, when they are eating a piece of pie, consider themselves involved in a sacred contract; no more do they in the bounding act of love. This was not Betman. He loved his wife, and he loved no other woman in the world. He loved her voice, her tastes, her face, her grace, her presence, and her memory. He was a good-looking man, and when he was alone other women pursued him. They asked him up to their apartments, they tried to force their way into his apartment, they seized him in corridors and garden paths, and one of them, on the beach in East Hampton, pulled off his bathing trunks, but, thus incommoded, the only love he had was for Victoria.

Betman was a singer. His voice was distinguished not by its range and beauty but by its persuasiveness. He gave one recital of eighteenth-century music early in his career and was roasted by the critics. He drifted into television and for a while dubbed voices for animated cartoons. Then, by chance, someone asked him to do a cigarette commercial. It was four lines. The result was explosive. Cigarette sales shot up eight hundred per cent, and from this single commercial he made, with residuals, more than fifty thousand dollars. The element of persuasiveness in his voice could not be isolated or imitated, but it was infallible. Whatever he praised in song-shoe polish, toothpaste, floor wax-hundreds and thousands of men and women would find his praise irresistible. Even little children heeded his voice. He was very wealthy, of course, and the work was light.

He first saw his wife on a Fifth Avenue bus on a rainy night. She was then a young and slender woman with yellow hair, and the instant he saw her he felt a singular attraction or pa.s.sion that he had never felt before and would never, as it happened, feel again. The strenuousness of his feeling made him follow her when she left the bus, somewhere on upper Fifth Avenue. He suffered, as any lover will who, moved by a pure and impetuous heart, well knows that his attentions, whatever they are, will be mistaken for a molestation, and usually a revolting one. She walked toward the door of an apartment house and hesitated under the awning long enough to shake the raindrops out of her umbrella.

"Miss?" he asked.

"Yes?"

"Could I speak with you for a minute?"

"What about?"

"My name is Orville Betman," he said. "I sing television commercials. You may have heard me. I..." Her attention wandered from him to the lighted lobby, and then he sang, in a true, sweet, and manly voice, a commercial he had taped that afternoon: "Gream takes the ish Out of washing a dish."

His voice touched her as it seemed to have touched the rest of the world, but it touched her glancingly. "I don't look at television," she said. "What is it you want?"

"I want to marry you," he said sincerely.

She laughed and went on into the lobby and the elevator. The doorman, for five dollars, gave him her name and circ.u.mstances. She was Victoria Heatherstone and lived with her invalid father in 14-B. In the s.p.a.ce of a morning, the research department in the station where he worked reported that she had graduated from Va.s.sar that spring, and was doing volunteer work in an East Side hospital. One of the apprentice script girls had been in her cla.s.s and knew her roommate intimately. In a few days, Betman was able to go to a c.o.c.ktail party where he met her, and he took her out to dinner. His instinct when he first glimpsed her on the bus had been unerring. She was the woman life meant him to have; she was his destiny. She resisted his claims on her for a week or two, and then she succ.u.mbed. But there was a problem. Her old father-a Trollope scholar-was indeed an invalid, and she felt that if she left him he would die. She could not, even if it meant constricting her own life, hold the burden of his death upon her conscience. He was not expected to live for long, and she would marry Betman when her father died; she became, to express the genuineness of her promise, his mistress. Betman's happiness was exalted. But the old man did not die.

Betman wanted to marry; wanted to have the union blessed, celebrated, and announced. He was not content to have Victoria come to his apartment two or three times a week as she did. Then the old man had a stroke and was urged by his doctor to leave New York. He moved to a house he owned in Albany, and this then left Victoria free-or free at least for nine months of the year. She married Betman, and they were vastly happy together, although they had no children. However, on the first of June she left for an island in Lake St. Francis, where the dying old man summered, and she did not return to her husband until September. The old man still thought his daughter unmarried, and Betman was forbidden to visit her. He wrote her three times a week to a post-office box, and she replied much less frequently, since, as she explained, there was nothing to report but her father's blood pressure, temperature, digestion, and night sweats. He always appeared to be dying. Since he had never seen either the island or the old man, the place naturally took on for Betman legendary proportions, and his three months alone each year was agony.

He woke one summer Sunday morning to feel such love for his wife that he called out her name: "Victoria, Victoria!" He went to church, dismissed the housekeeper after lunch, and late in the afternoon went for a walk. It was inhumanly hot, and the high temperature seemed to draw the city closer to the heart of time; the smell of hot pavings seemed to belong to history. From an open car window he heard himself singing a song about peanut b.u.t.ter. Traffic was heavy on the East River Drive, and this respiratory and melancholy sound came up to where he walked. Traffic would be heavy on all the approaches to the city-and the thought of these lines of cars at Sunday's end made it seem as if the day conformed to some rigid script, part of which was the traffic, part the golden light that poured through the city's parallel streets, part a distant rumble of thunder, as if some leaf had been peeled away from the bulk of sound, and part the unendurable spiritual winter of his months alone. He was overwhelmed by the need for his only love. He got his car and started north a little after dark.

He spent the night in Albany and got to the town of Lake St. Francis in the middle of the morning. It was a small and pleasant resort town, neither booming nor dead. He asked at the boat livery how he could get out to Temple Island. "She comes over once a week," the boatman said. "She comes over to get groceries and medicine, but I don't expect she'll be over today." He pointed across the water to where the island lay, a mile or so distant. Betman rented an outboard and started across the lake. He circled the island and found a landing in a cove, where he made the boat fast. The house above him was a preposterous and old-fashioned cottage, highly inflammable, black with creosote and ornamented with outrageous medieval fancies. There was a round tower of shingles and a wooden parapet that wouldn't have withstood the fire of a .22. Tall firs surrounded the wooden castle and covered it in darkness. It was so dark on that bright morning that lights were burning in most of the rooms.

He crossed the porch and saw, through a gla.s.s panel in the door, a long hall ending in a staircase with newel posts. Venus stood on one, a l.u.s.terless bronze. In one hand she held a branch of two electric candles, lighted against the gloom of the firs. There was no trace of modesty in her stance, and that her legs were apart made her seem utterly defenseless and a little pathetic, as is sometimes the case with Venus. On the other newel post was Hermes; Hermes in flight. He, too, carried a pair of lighted electric candles. The stairs, carpeted in dark green, led up to a stained-gla.s.s window. The colors of the gla.s.s, even in the gloom, were of astonishing brilliance and discord. After he had rung, an elderly maid came down the stairs, keeping one hand on the banister. She limped. She came up to the door and, looking out at him through the gla.s.s panel, simply shook her head.

He opened the door; it opened easily. "I'm Mr. Betman," he said softly. "I want to see my wife."

"You can't see her now. n.o.body can. She's with him."

"I must see her."

"You can't. Please go. Please go away." Her pleading seemed frightened.

Beyond the firs he could see the lake, flat as gla.s.s, but the wind in the trees made a sound so like the sea that had he been blindfolded he would have guessed that the house stood on a headland. Then he thought or felt that this was that instant where death enters the terrain of love. These were not the bare facts of life but its ancient and invisible storms, and they moved him like the weight of water. Then he sang: "Wher-e'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade; Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade."

The elderly maid, too courteous perhaps to interrupt or moved perhaps by Handel's air and the words, said nothing. Upstairs he heard a door close and footsteps on the carpet. She hastened past the brilliant, ugly window down to where he waited. There was nothing in all the world so sweet to him as her kiss.

"Come back! Come with me now, he said.

"I can't, darling, my darling. He's dying."

"How many times have you thought this before?"

"Oh, I know, but now he is dying."

"Come with me.

"I can't. He's dying."

"Come."

He took her hand and led her out the door, down over the treacherous, pungent carpet of pine needles, to the landing. They crossed the lake without speaking but in such a somberness of feeling that the air, the hour, and the light seemed solid. He paid for the boat, opened the car door for her, and they started south. He did not look at her until they were on the main highway, and then he turned to bask in her freshness, her radiance. It was because he loved her too well that her white arms, the color of her hair, her smile distracted him. He veered from one lane into another and the car was crushed by a truck.

She died, of course. He was in the hospital eight months, but when he was able to walk again he found that the persuasiveness of his voice had not been injured. You can still hear him singing about table polish, bleaches, and vacuum cleaners. He always sings of inessentials, never about the universality of suffering and love, but thousands of men and women go off to the stores as if he had, as if this was his song.

III.

To watch Mrs. Peranger enter the club was a little like choosing up sides for a sand-lot ball game; it was exciting. On her way toward the dining room she would give Mrs. Bebe, who had worked with her on the hospital committee, a fleeting and absent-minded smile. She would cut Mrs. Binger, who was waving and calling her name loudly, dead. She would kiss Mrs. Evans lightly on both cheeks, but she would seem to have forgotten poor Mrs. Budd, at whose house she sometimes dined. She would also seem to have forgotten the Wrights, the Hugginses, the Frames, the Logans, and the Haisteads. A white-haired woman, beautifully dressed, she wielded the power of rudeness so adroitly that she was never caught in an exposed position, and when people asked one another how she got away with it they only increased her advantage. She had been a beauty, and had been painted by Paxton in the twenties. She stood in front of a mirror. The wall was luminous, an imitation of Vermeer, and, as in a Vermeer, the light was put on without its source. There were the usual appurtenances-the ginger jar, the gilt chair, and in the farther room, seen in the gla.s.s, a harp on a rug. Her hair had been the color of fire. But this static portrait was only half a world. She had introduced the maxixe to Newport, played golf with Bobby Jones, closed speakeasies at dawn, played strip poker at a Baltimore house party, and even now-an old woman-should she hear on the aromatic summer air the music of a Charleston, she would get up from the sofa and begin to dance with a vigorous pivot step, throwing first one leg out in front of her and then the other, cracking her thumbs and singing, "Charleston! Charleston!"

Mr. Peranger and her only son, Patrick, were dead. Of her only daughter, the nymph-like Nerissa, she would say, "Nerissa is giving me a few days of her time. I don't feel that I can ask her for more. She is so sought after that I sometimes think she has never married because she has never found the time. She showed her dogs last week in San Francisco, and hopes to take them to Rome for the dog show there. Everyone loves Nerissa. Everyone adores her. She is too attractive for words."

Enter Nerissa then, into her mother's drawing room. She is a thin and wasted spinster of thirty. Her hair is gray. Her slip shows. Her shoes are caked with mud. She is plainly one of those children who, without bitterness or rancor, seem burdened with the graceless facts of life. It is their destiny to point out that the elegance and chic of the world their mothers have mastered is not, as it might appear to be, the end of bewilderment and pain. They are a truly pure and innocent breed, and it would never cross their minds or their hearts to upset or contravene the plans, the dreams, the worldly triumphs that their elders hold out for them. It seems indeed to be the hand of G.o.d that leads them to take a pratfall during the tableaux at the debutante cotillion. Stepping from a gondola to the water stairs of some palace in Venice where they are expected for dinner, they will lose their balance and fall into the Grand Ca.n.a.l. They spill food and wine, they knock over vases, they step into dog manure, they shake hands with butlers, they have coughing fits during the chamber music, their taste for disreputable friends is unerring, and yet they are like Franciscans in their goodness and simplicity. Thus, enter Nerissa. In the process of being introduced, she savages an end table with her hipbone, tracks mud onto the rug, and drops a lighted cigarette into a chair. By the time the fire is extinguished, she seems to have satisfactorily ruffled the still waters of her mother's creation. But this is not perversity; it is not even awkwardness. It is her nearly sacred call to restate the pathos and clumsiness of mankind.

The nymph-like Nerissa bred Townsend terriers. Her mother's descriptions of the claims upon her time were, of course, transparent and pathetic. Nerissa was a shy and a lonely woman, mostly occupied with her dogs. Her heart was not unsusceptible, but she always fell in love with gardeners, deliverymen, waiters, and janitors. Late one evening, when her best b.i.t.c.h (Ch. Gaines-Clansman) was about to whelp, she asked the help of a new veterinary, who had just opened a dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14. He came to the kennels at once, and had been there only a few minutes when the b.i.t.c.h threw the first of her litter. He opened the sack and put the dog to suck. His touch with animals, Nerissa thought, was quick and natural, and, standing above him as he knelt at the whelping box, Nerissa felt a strong compulsion to touch his dark hair. She asked if he was married, and when he said that he was not she let herself luxuriate in the fact that she was in love again. Now, Nerissa never antic.i.p.ated her mother's censure. When she announced her engagement to a garage mechanic or a tree surgeon, she was always surprised at her mother's rage. It never occurred to her that her mother might not like her new choice. She beamed at the veterinary, brought him water, towels, whiskey, and sandwiches. The whelping took most of the night, and it was dawn when they were done. The puppies were sucking; the b.i.t.c.h was proud and requited. All of the litter were well favored and well marked. When Nerissa and the veterinary left the kennels, a cold white light was beating up beyond the dark trees of the estate. "Would you like some coffee?" Nerissa asked, and then, hearing in the distance the sound of running water, she asked, "Or would you like to swim? I sometimes swim in the morning."

"You know, I would," he said. "That's what I'd like. I'd like a swim. I have to go back to the hospital, and a swim would wake me up."

The pool, built by her grandfather, was of marble and had a deep and graceful curb, curved like the frame of a mirror. The water was limpid, and here and there a sunken leaf threw a shadow, edged with the strong colors of the spectrum. It was the place on her mother's estate that had always seemed to Nerissa-more than any room or garden-her home. When she was away, it was the pool she missed, and when she came back it was to the pool-this watery home-sweet-home-that she returned. She found a pair of trunks in the bathhouse, and they took an innocent swim. They dressed and walked back across the lawns to his car. "You know, you're awfully nice," he said. "Did anyone ever tell you that?" Then he kissed her lightly and tenderly and drove away.

Nerissa didn't see her mother until four the next afternoon, when she went down to tea wearing two left shoes, one brown and one black. "Oh, Mother, Mother," she said, "I've found the man I want to marry."

"Really," said Mrs. Peranger. "Who is this paragon?"

"His name is Dr. Johnson," said Nerissa. "He runs the new dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14."

"But you cannot marry a veterinary, sweet love," said Mrs. Peranger.

"He calls himself an animal hygienist," said Nerissa.

"How revolting!" said Mrs. Peranger.

"But I love him, Mother. I love him, and I'm going to marry him."

"Go to h.e.l.l!" said Mrs. Peranger.

That night, Mrs. Peranger called the Mayor and asked to speak with his wife. "This is Louisa Peranger," she said. "I am going to put someone up for the Tilton Club this fall, and I was thinking of you." There was a sigh of excitement from the wife of the Mayor. Her head would be swimming. But why? But why? The clubrooms were threadbare, the maids were surly, and the food was bad. Why was there a ferocious waiting list of thousands? "I drive a hard bargain," said Mrs. Peranger, "as everyone knows. There is a dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14 that I would like to have shut down. I'm sure your husband can discover that some sort of zoning violation is involved. It must be some sort of nuisance. If you will speak to your husband about the dog-and-cat hospital, I will get the membership list to you so that you can decide on your other sponsors. I will arrange a luncheon party for the middle of September. Goodbye."

Nerissa pined away, died, and was buried in the little Episcopal church whose windows had been given in memory of her grandfather. Mrs. Peranger looked imperious and patrician in her mourning, and as she left the church she was heard to sob loudly, "She was so attractive-she was so frightfully attractive."

Mrs. Peranger rallied from her loss, and kept up with her work, which, at that time of year, consisted of screening candidates for a debutante cotillion. Three weeks after Nerissa's funeral, a Mrs. Pentason and her daughter were shown into the drawing room.

Mrs. Peranger knew how hard Mrs. Pentason had worked for this interview. She had done hospital work; she had organized theatre parties, strawberry festivals, and antique fairs. But Mrs. Peranger looked at her callers harshly. They would have learned their manners from a book. They would have studied the chapter on how to drink tea. They were the sort who dreamed in terms of invitations that would never be received. Mr. and Mrs. William Paley request the honor... Their mail, instead, would consist of notices of private sales, trial offers from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and embarra.s.sing letters from Aunt Minnie, who lived in Waco, Texas, and used a spittoon. Nora pa.s.sed the tea and Mrs. Peranger kept a sharp eye on the girl. The noise of water from the swimming pool sounded very loud, and Mrs. Peranger asked Nora to close the window.

"We have so many applicants for the cotillion these days that we expect a little more than we used to," Mrs. Peranger said. "We not only want attractive and well-bred young women, we want interesting young women." Even with the windows shut, she could hear the sound of water. It seemed to put her at a disadvantage. "Do you sing?" she asked.

"No," the girl said.

"Do you play any musical instruments?"

"I play the piano a little."

"How little?"

"I play some of the Chopin. I mean, I used to. And 'Fur Elise.' But mostly I play popular music."

"Where do you summer?

"Dennis Port," the girl said.

"Ah yes," said Mrs. Peranger. "Dennis Port, poor Dennis Port. There really isn't any place left to go, is there? The Adriatic Coast is crowded. Capri, Ischia, and Amalfi are all ruined. The Princess of Holland has spoiled the Argentario. The Riviera is jammed. Brittany is so cold and rainy. I love Skye, but the food is dreadful. Bar Harbor, the Cape, the Islands-they've all gotten to seem so shabby." She heard again the noise of running water from the pool, as if a breeze carried the sound straight up to the shut windows. "Tell me, are you interested in the theatre?" she asked.

"Oh, yes. Very much."

"What plays did you see last season?"

"None."

"You, ride, play tennis, and so forth?"

"What in New York is your favorite museum?"

"I don't know."

'What books have you read recently?"

"I read The Seersucker Plague. It was on the best-seller list. They bought it for the movies. And Seven Roads to Heaven. That was on the best-seller list, too."

"Please take these things away, Nora," Mrs. Peranger said, making a broad gesture of distaste, as if she expected the maid to remove the Pentasons with the dirty cups and the slop jar. The tea was over, and she walked her guests down the length of the room. If she meant to be cruel, it would have been cruelest to let them wait; to prey upon the common weakness of men and women who look for glad tidings in the mail. She drew Mrs. Pentason aside and said, "I'm terribly afraid..."

"Well, thank you just the same," said Mrs. Pentason, and she began to cry. The daughter put an arm around the stricken mother and led her out the door.

Mrs. Peranger noticed again the sound of water from the pool. Why was it so loud, and why did it seem to say: Mother, Mother, I've found the man I want to marry... Why did it sound so true, and make her task of cutting the Pentasons seem so harsh and senseless? She went down the stairs to the lawn and crossed the lawn to the pool. Standing on the curb, she called, "Nerissa! Nerissa! Nerissa!" but all the water said was Mother, Mother, I've found the man I want to marry.

Her only daughter had been turned into a swimming pool.

IV.

Mr. Bradish wanted a change. He did not mean at all by this that he wanted to change himself-only his scenery, his pace, and his environment, and that for only a s.p.a.ce of eighteen or twenty days. He could leave his office for that long. Bradish was a heavy smoker, and the Surgeon General's report had made him self-conscious about his addiction. It seemed to him that strangers on the street regarded the cigarette in his fingers with disapproval and sometimes with commiseration. This was manifestly absurd, and he needed to get away. He would take a trip. He was divorced at the time, and would go alone.

One day after lunch he stopped in a travel agency on Park Avenue to see what rates were in force. A receptionist directed him to a desk at the back of the office, where a young woman offered him a chair and lit his cigarette from a matchbook flying the ensign of the Corinthian Yacht Club. She had, he noticed, a dazzling smile and a habit of biting it off when it had served its purpose, as a tailor bites off a thread. He had England in mind. He would spend ten days in London and ten in the country with friends. When he mentioned England, the clerk said that she had recently come back from England herself. From Coventry. She flashed her smile, bit it off. He did not want to go to Coventry, but she was a young woman with the determination and single-mindedness of her time of life, and he saw that he would have to hear her out on the beauties of Coventry, where she seemed to have had an aesthetic and spiritual rebirth. She took from her desk drawer an ill.u.s.trated magazine to show him pictures of the cathedral. What impressed him, as it happened, was a blunt advertis.e.m.e.nt in the magazine, stating that cigarettes caused lung cancer. He dismissed England from his mind-the clerk was still on Coventry-and thought that he would go to France. He would go to Paris. The French government had not censured smoking, and he could inhale his Gauloise without feeling subversive. However, the memory of a Gauloise stopped him. Gauloises, Bleues and Jaunes. He recalled how their smoke seemed to drop from an alt.i.tude into his lungs and double him up with paroxysms of coughing. In his imagination clouds of rank French tobacco smoke seemed to settle like a bitter fog over the City of Light, making it appear to him an unsavory and despondent place. So he would go to the Tyrol, he thought. He was about to ask for information on the Tyrol when he remembered that tobacco was a state monopoly in Austria and that all you could get to smoke there were flavorless ovals that came in fancy boxes and smelled of perfume. Italy, then. He would cross the Brenner and go down to Venice. But he remembered Italian cigarettes-Esportaziones and Giubeks-remembered how the crude tobacco stuck to his tongue and how the smoke, like a winter wind, made him shiver and think of death. He would go on to Greece, then; he would take a cruise through the islands, he thought-until he recalled the taste of that Egyptian tobacco that is all you can get to smoke in Greece. Russia. Turkey. India. j.a.pan. Glancing above the clerk's head to a map of the world, he saw it all as a chain of tobacco stores. There was no escape. "I think I won't go anywhere," he said. The clerk flashed her smile, bit it off like a thread, and watched him go out the door.

The quality of discipline shines through a man's life and all his works, giving them a probity and a fineness that preclude disorder, or so Bradish thought. The time had come for him to discipline himself. He put out his last cigarette and walked up Park Avenue with the straitened, pleasant, and slightly dancy step of an old athlete who has his shoes and his suits made in England. As a result of his decision, toward the end of the afternoon he began to suffer from something that resembled a mild case of the bends. His circulatory system was disturbed. His capillaries seemed abraded, his lips were swollen, and now and then his right foot would sting. There was a marked unfreshness in his mouth that seemed too various and powerful to be contained by that small organ, seemed by its power and variety to enlarge his mouth, giving it, in fact, the dimensions and malodorousness of some ancient burlesque theatre like the Howard Athenaeum. Fumes seemed to rise from his mouth to his brain, leaving him with an extraordinary sense of light-headedness. Since he felt himself committed to this discipline, he decided to think of these symptoms in the terms of travel. He would observe them as they made themselves felt, as one would observe from the windows of a train the changes in geology and vegetation in a strange country.

As the day changed to night, the country through which he traveled seemed mountainous and barren. He seemed to be on a narrow-gauge railroad traveling through a rocky pa.s.s. Nothing but thistles and wire gra.s.s grew among the rocks. He reasoned that once they were over the pa.s.s they would come onto a fertile plain with trees and water, but when the train rounded a turn on the summit of the mountain, he saw that what lay ahead was an alkali desert scored with dry stream beds. He knew that if he smoked, tobacco would irrigate this uninhabitable place, the fields would bloom with flowers, and water would run in the streams, but since he had chosen to take this particular journey, since it was quite literally an escape from an intolerable condition, he settled down to study the unrelieved aridity. When he made himself a c.o.c.ktail in his apartment that night, he smiled-he actually smiled-to observe that there was nothing to be seen in the ashtrays but a little dust and a leaf he had picked off his shoe.

He was changing, he was changing, and like most men he had wanted to change, it seemed. In the s.p.a.ce of a few hours, he had become more sagacious, more comprehensive, more mature. He seemed to feel the woolly mantle of his time of life come to rest on his shoulders. He felt himself to be gaining some 'understanding of the poetry of the force of change in life, felt himself involved in one of those intimate, grueling, and unseen contests that make up the story of a man's soul. If he stopped smoking, he might stop drinking. He might even curtail his erotic tastes. Immoderation had been the cause of his divorce. Immoderation had alienated his beloved children. If they could only see him now, see the clean ashtrays in his room, mightn't they invite him to come home? He could charter a schooner and sail up the coast of Maine with them. When he went, later that night, to see his mistress, the smell of tobacco on her breath made her seem to him so depraved and unclean that he didn't bother to take off his clothes and went home early to his bed and his clean ashtrays.

Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner. His censure had been aimed at people who drank clam juice and cultivated restrained tastes. Walking to work the next morning, he found himself jockeyed rudely onto the side of the angels; found himself perforce an advocate of abstemiousness, and discovered that some part of this condition was an involuntary urge to judge the conduct of others-a sensation so strange to him, so newly found, so unlike his customary point of view that he thought it exciting. He watched with emphatic disapproval a stranger light a cigarette on a street corner. The stranger plainly had no will power. He was injuring his health, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his life span, and betraying his dependents, who might suffer hunger and cold as a result of this self-indulgence. What's more, the man's clothing was shabby, his shoes were unshined, and if he could not afford to dress himself decently he could surely not afford the vice of tobacco. Should Bradish take the cigarette out of his hand? Lecture him? Awaken him? It seemed a little early in the game, but the impulse was there and he had never experienced it before. Now he walked up Fifth Avenue with his newly possessed virtuousness, looking neither at the sky nor at the pretty women but instead raking the population like a lieutenant of the vice squad employed to seek out malefactors. Oh, there were so many! A disheveled old lady, colorless but for a greasy smear of crimson lipstick, stood on the corner of Forty-fourth Street, lighting one cigarette from another. Men in doorways, girls on the steps of the library, boys in the park all seemed determined to destroy themselves.

His light-headedness continued through the morning, so that he found it difficult to make business decisions, and there was some definite injury to his eyesight. He felt as if he had taken his eyes through a dust storm. He went to a business lunch where drinks were served, and when someone pa.s.sed him a cigarette he said, "Not right now, thank you." He blushed with self-righteousness, but he was not going to demean his struggle by confiding in anyone. Having abstained triumphantly for nearly twenty-four hours, he thought he deserved a reward, and he let the waiter keep filling his c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s. In the end he drank too much, and when he got back to his office he was staggering. This, on top of his disturbed circulatory system, his swollen lips, his bleary eyes, the stinging sensation in his right foot, and the feeling that his brain was filled with the fumes and the malodorousness of an old burlesque theatre made it impossible for him to work, and he floundered through the rest of the day. He seldom went to c.o.c.ktail parties, but he went to one that afternoon, hoping that it would distract him. He definitely felt unlike himself. The damage by this time had reached his equilibrium, and he found crossing streets difficult and hazardous, as if he were maneuvering over a high and narrow bridge.

The party was large, and he kept going to the bar. He thought that gin would quench his craving. It was hardly a craving, he noticed-nothing like hunger or thirst or the need for love. It felt like some sullen and stubborn ebbing in his bloodstream. The lightness in his head had worsened. He laughed, talked, and behaved himself up to a point, but this was merely mechanical. Late in the party, a young woman wearing a light sack or tube-shaped dress, her long hair the color of Virginia tobacco, came in at the door. In his ardor to reach her he knocked over a table and several gla.s.ses. It was, or had been up to that point, a decorous party, but the noise of broken gla.s.s, followed by the screaming of the stranger when he wrapped his legs around her and buried his nose in her tobacco-colored hair, was barbarous. Two guests pried him loose. He stood there, crouched with ardor, snorting through his distended nostrils. Then he flung away the arms of the men who held him and strode out of the room.

He went down in the elevator with a stranger whose brown suit looked and smelled like a Havana Upmann, but Bradish kept his eyes on the floor of the carriage and contented himself with breathing in the stranger's fragrance. The elevator man smelled of a light, cheap blend that had been popular in the fifties. The doorman, he noticed, looked and smelled like a briar pipe with a Burley mixture. And on Fifty-seventh Street he saw a woman whose hair was the color of his favorite blend and who seemed to trail after her its striking corrupt perfume. Only by grinding his teeth and bracing his muscles did he keep from seizing her, but he realized that his behavior at the party, repeated on the street, would take him to jail, and there were, as far as he knew, no cigarettes in jail. He had changed-he had changed, and so had his world, and watching the population of the city pa.s.s him in the dusk, he saw them as Winstons, Chesterfields, Marlboros, Salems, hookahs, meerschaums, cigarillos, Corona-Coronas, Camels, and Players. It was a young woman-really a child-whom he mistook for a Lucky Strike that was his undoing. She screamed when he attacked her, and two strangers knocked him down, striking and kicking him with just moral indignation. A crowd gathered. There was pandemonium, and presently the sirens of the police car that took him away.

MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN.

Coming back from Europe that year, I was booked on an old DC-7 that burned out an engine in mid-Atlantic. Most of the pa.s.sengers seemed either asleep or drugged, and in the forward section of the plane no one saw the flames but a little girl, an old man, and me. When the fire died down, the plane veered violently, throwing open the door to the crew's quarters. There I saw the crew and the two stewardesses, wearing inflated life jackets. One of the stewardesses shut the door, but the captain came out a few minutes later and explained, in a fatherly whisper, that we had lost an engine and were heading either for Iceland or Shannon. Some time later, he came and said we would be landing in London in half an hour. Two hours later, we landed at Orly, to the astonishment of all those who had been asleep. We boarded another DC-7 and started back across the Atlantic, and when we finally landed at Idlewild we had been traveling in cramped conditions for about twenty-seven hours.

I took a bus into New York and a cab to Grand Central Station. It was an off hour-seven-thirty or eight o'clock in the evening. The newsstands were shut, and the few people on the streets were alone and seemed lonely. There was not a train to where I was going for an hour, so I went into a restaurant near the station and ordered the plat du jour. The dilemma of an expatriated American eating his first restaurant meal at home has been worked over too often to be repeated here. After paying the check, I went down some stairs to find the amenities. The place I entered had marble part.i.tions-a gesture, I suppose, toward enn.o.bling this realm. The marble was light brown-it might have been a giallo antico, but then I noticed Paleozoic fossils beneath the high polish and guessed that the stone was a madrepore. The near side of the polish was covered with writing. The penmanship was legible, although it had no character or symmetry. What was unusual was the copiousness of the writing and the fact that it was organized into panels, like the pages of a book. I had never seen anything like this before. My deepest instinct was to overlook the writing and study the fossils, but isn't the writing of a man more lasting and wonderful than a Paleozoic coral? I read: It had been a day of triumph in Capua. Lentulus, returning with victorious eagles, had amused the populace with the sports of the amphitheater to an extent hitherto unknown, even in that luxurious city. The shouts of revelry died away; the roar of the lion had ceased; the last loiterer retired from the banquet, and the lights in the palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon, piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, silvered the dewdrop on the corselet of the Roman sentinel and tipped the dark waters of Vulturnus with wavy, tremulous light. It was a night of holy calm, when the zephyr sways the young spring leaves and whispers among the hollow reeds its dreamy music. No sound was heard but the last sob of some weary wave, telling its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, and then all was still as the breast when the spirit has parted..

I read no more, although there was more to read. I was tired and in some way disarmed by the fact that I had not been home for years. The chain of circ.u.mstances that could impel a man to copy this gibberish on marble was unimaginable. Was this a sign of some change in the social climate, the result of some new force of repression? Or was it simply an indication of the fact that man's love of florid prose is irresistible? The sonorities of the writing had the tenacity of bad music, and it was difficult to forget them. Had some profound change in the psyche of my people taken place during my absence? Was there some breakdown in the normal lines of communication, some inordinate love of the romantic past?

I spent the next week or ten days traveling in the Middle West. I was waiting one afternoon in the Union Station in Indianapolis for a New York train. The train was late. The station there-proportioned like a cathedral and lit by a rose window-is a gloomy and brilliant example of that genre of architecture that means to express the mystery and drama of travel and separation. The colors of the rose windows, limpid as a kaleidoscope, dyed the marble walls and the waiting pa.s.sengers. A woman with a shopping bag stood in a panel of lavender. An old man slept in a pool of yellow light. Then I saw a sign directing the way to the men's room, and I wondered if I might not find there another example of that curious literature I had discovered in the first hours of my return. I went down some stairs into a cavernous bas.e.m.e.nt, where a shoeshine man slept in a chair. The walls again were marble. This was a common limestone-a silicate of calcium and magnesium, grained with some metalliferous gray ore. My hunch had been right. The stone was covered with writing, and it had, at a glance, a striking fitness, since it served as a reminder of the fact that it was on walls that the earliest writings and prophecies of man appeared. The penmanship was clear and symmetrical, the work of someone gifted with an orderly mind and a steady hand. Please try to imagine the baneful light, the stale air, and the sounds of running water in that place as I read: The great manor house of Wallowyck stood on a hill above the smoky mill town of X-burgh, its countless mullioned windows seeming to peer censoriously into the dark and narrow alleys of the slums that reached from the park gates to the smoking mills on the banks of the river. It was in the fringes of this wooded park that, unknown to Mr. Wallow, I spent the most lighthearted hours of my youth, roaming there with a slingshot and a sack for transporting my geological specimens. The hill and its forbidding ornament stood between the school I attended and the hovel where I lived with my ailing mother and my drunken father. All my friends took the common path around the hill, and it was only I who climbed the walls of Wallow Park and spent my afternoons in this forbidden demesne.

The lawns, the great trees, the sound of fountains, and the solemn atmosphere of a dynasty are dear to me to this day. The Wallows had no arms, of course, but the sculptors they employed had improvised hundreds of escutcheons and crests that seemed baronial at a distance but that, on examination, petered out modestly into geometrical forms. Their chimneys, gates, towers, and garden benches were thus crested. Another task of the sculptors had been to make representations of Mr. Wallow's only daughter, Emily. There was Emily in bronze, Emily in marble, Emily as the Four Seasons, the Four Winds, the Four Times of Day, and the Four Princ.i.p.al Virtues. In a sense, Emily was my only companion. I walked there in the autumn, watching the wealth of color fall from the trees to the lawns. I walked there in the bitter snow. I watched there for the first signs of spring, and smelled the fine perfume of wood smoke from the many crested chimneys of the great house above me. It was while wandering there on a spring day that I heard a girlish voice crying for help. I followed the voice to the banks of a little stream, where I saw Emily. Her lovely feet were naked, and stuck to one, like some manacle of evil, was the writhing form of a viper.