The Stories of John Cheever Part 39

"How did you know my name?"

"Mrs. Kosiev told me all about you."

They saw ahead of them the statue of Mayakovsky, although Artemis didn't (doesn't today) know anything about the poet. It was gigantic and tasteless, a relic of the Stalin era that reshaped the whole pantheon of Russian literature to resemble the sons of Lenin. (Even poor Chekhov was given posthumously heroic shoulders and a ma.s.sive brow.) It grew darker and darker and more lights went on. Then, as they saw the crowd, Artemis saw that the smoke from their cigarettes had formed, thirty or forty feet in the air, a flat, substantial, and unnatural cloud. He supposed this was some process of inversion. Before they reached the square, he could hear Luncharvsky's voice. Russian is a more percussive language than English, less musical but more diverse, and this may account for its carrying power. The voice was powerful, not only in volume but in its emotional force. It seemed melancholy and exalted. Artemis understood nothing beyond the noise. Luncharvsky stood on a platform below the statue of Mayakovsky, declaiming love lyrics to an audience of one thousand or two thousand, who stood under their bizarre cloud or canopy of smoke. He was not singing, but the force of his voice was the force of singing. Natasha made a gesture as if she had brought him to see one of the wonders of the world and he thought that perhaps she had.

He was a traveler, a stranger, and he had traveled this far to see strange things. The dusk was cold, but Luncharvsky was in his shirt sleeves. His shoulders were broad-broad-boned, that is. His arms were long. His hands were large and when he closed them into a fist, as he did every few minutes, the fist seemed ma.s.sive. He was a tall man. His hair was yellow, not cut and not combed. His eyes had the startling and compelling cast of a man unremittently on the up and up. Artemis had the feeling that not only did he command the attention of the crowd but had anyone there been momentarily inattentive, he would have known it. At the end of the recitation, someone pa.s.sed him a bouquet of dying chrysanthemums and his suit coat. "I'm hungry," said Artemis.

"We will go to a Georgian restaurant," she said. "A Georgian kitchen is our best kitchen."

They went to a very noisy place where Artemis had chicken for the third time. Leaving the restaurant, she took his arm again, pressed her shoulder against his, and led him down a street. He wondered if she would take him home and if she did, what would he find? Old parents, brothers, sisters, or perhaps a roommate? "Where are we going?" he asked.

"To the park. Is that all right?"

"That's fine," said Artemis. The park, when they reached it, was like any other. There were trees, losing their leaves at that time of year, benches, and concrete walks. There was a concrete statue of a man holding a child on his shoulders. The child held a bird. Artemis supposed they were meant to represent progress or hope. They sat on a bench, he put an arm around her and kissed her. She responded tenderly and expertly and for the next half hour they kissed each other. Artemis felt relaxed, loving, close to sappy. When he stood to straighten the protuberance in his trousers, she took his hand and led him to an apartment house a block or so away. An armed policeman stood by the door. She took what Artemis guessed was an ident.i.ty card out of her purse. The policeman scrutinized this in a way that was meant to be offensive. He seemed openly bellicose. He sneered, glowered, pointed several times to Artemis, and spoke to her as if she were contemptible. In different circ.u.mstances-in a different country-Artemis would have hit him. Finally, they were allowed to pa.s.s and they took an elevator-a sort of cage-to another floor. Even the apartment house smelled to Artemis like a farm. She unlocked a door with two keys and led him into a dingy room. There was a bed in one corner. Clothes hung to dry from a string. On a table, there was half a loaf of bread and some sc.r.a.ps of meat. Artemis quickly got out of his clothes, as did she, and they (his choice of words) made love. She cleaned up the mess with a cloth, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, and poured him a gla.s.s of vodka. "I don't ever want this to end," Artemis said. "I don't ever want this to end." Lying with her in his arms, he felt a thrilling and galvanic sense of their indivisibility, although they were utter strangers. He was thinking idly about a well he had drilled two years ago and G.o.d knows what she was thinking about. "What was it like in Siberia?" he asked.

"Wonderful," she said.

"What was your father like?"

"He liked cuc.u.mbers," she said. "He was a marshal until we were sent to Siberia. When we came back, they gave him an office in the Ministry of Defense. It was a little office. There was no chair, no table, no desk, no telephone, nothing. He used to go there in the morning and sit on the floor. Then he died. Now you'll have to go."

"Why?"

"Because it's late and I'll worry about you."

"Can I see you tomorrow?"

"Of course."

"Can you come to my hotel?"

"No, I couldn't do that. It wouldn't be safe for me to be seen in a tourist hotel and, anyhow, I hate them. We can meet in the park. I'll write the address." She left the bed and walked across the room. Her figure was astonishing-it seemed in its perfection to be almost freakish. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were large, her waist was very slender and her backside was voluminous. She carried it with a little swag, as if it were filled with buckshot. Artemis dressed, kissed her good night, and went down. The policeman stopped him but finally let him go, since neither understood anything the other said. When Artemis asked for his key at the hotel, there was some delay. Then a man in uniform appeared, holding Artemis' pa.s.sport, and extracted the visa.

"You will leave Moscow tomorrow morning," he said. "You will take SAS flight 769 to Copenhagen and change for New York."

"But I want to see your great country," Artemis said. "I want to see Leningrad and Kiev."

"The airport bus leaves at half past nine."

In the morning, Artemis had the Intourist agent in the lobby telephone the interpreters' bureau. When he asked for Natasha Funaroff, he was told there was no such person there; there never had been. Forty-eight hours after his arrival, he was winging his way home. The other pa.s.sengers on the plane were American tourists and he was able to talk and make friends and pa.s.s the time.

Artemis went to work a few days later drilling in hardpan outside the village of Brewster. The site had been chosen by a dowser and he was dubious, but he was wrong. At four hundred feet he hit limestone and a stream of sweet water that came in at one hundred gallons a minute. It was sixteen days after his return from Moscow that he got his first letter from Natasha. His address on the envelope was in English, but there was a lot of Cyrillic writing and the stamps were brilliantly colored. The letter disconcerted his mother and had, she told him, alarmed the postman. To go to Russia was one thing, but to receive letters from that strange and distant country was something else. "My darling," Natasha had written. "I dreamed last night that you and I were a wave on the Black Sea at Yalta. I know you haven't seen that part of my country, but if one were a wave, moving toward sh.o.r.e, one would be able to see the Crimean Mountains covered with snow. In Yalta sometimes when there are roses in bloom, you can see snow falling on the mountains. When I woke from the dream, I felt elevated and relaxed and I definitely had the taste of salt in my mouth. I must sign this letter Fifi, since nothing so irrational could have been written by your loving Natasha."

He answered her letter that night. "Dearest Natasha, I love you. If you will come to this country, I will marry you. I think of you all the time and I would like to show you how we live-the roads and trees and the lights of the cities. It is very different from the way you live. I am serious about all of this, and if you need money for the plane trip, I will send it. If you decided that you didn't want to marry me, you could go home again. Tonight is Halloween. I don't suppose you have that in Russia. It is the night when the dead are supposed to arise, although they don't, of course, but children wander around the streets disguised as ghosts and skeletons and devils and you give them candy and pennies. Please come to my country and marry me."

This much was simple, but to copy her address in the Russian alphabet took him much longer. He went through ten envelopes before he had what he thought was a satisfactory copy. In the morning, before he went to work, he took his letter to the post office. The clerk was a friend. "What in h.e.l.l are you doing, Art, writing this scribble-scrabble to Communists?"

Artemis got rustic. "Well, you see, Sam, I was there for a day or so and there was this girl." The letter took a twenty-five-cent stamp, a dismal gray engraving of Abraham Lincoln. When Artemis, thinking of the brilliant stamps on her letter, asked if there weren't something livelier, his friend said no.

He got her reply in ten days. "I like to think that our letters cross and I like to think of them flapping their wings at each other somewhere over the Atlantic. I would love to come to your country and marry you or have you marry me here, but we cannot do this until there is peace in the world. I wish we didn't have to depend upon peace for love. I went to the country on Sat.u.r.day and the birds and the birches and the pines were soothing. I wish you had been with me. A Unitarian doctor of divinity came to the office yesterday looking for an interpreter. He seemed intelligent and I took him around Moscow myself. He told me I didn't have to believe in G.o.d to be a Unitarian. G.o.d, he told me, is the progress from chaos to order to human responsibility. I always thought G.o.d sat on the clouds, surrounded by troops of angels, but perhaps He lives in a submarine, surrounded by divisions of mermaids. Please send me a snapshot and write again. Your letters make me very happy."

"I'm enclosing a snapshot," he wrote. "It's three years old. It was taken at the Wakusha Reservoir. This is the center of the Northeast watershed. I think of you all the time. I woke at three this morning thinking of you. It was a nice feeling. I like the dark. The dark seems to me like a house with many rooms. Sixty or seventy. At night now after work I go skating. I suppose everybody in Russia must know how to skate. I know that Russians play hockey, because they usually beat the Americans in the Olympics. Three to two, seven to two, eight to one. It is beginning to snow. Love, Artemis." He had another struggle with the address.

"Your last letter took eighteen days," she wrote. "I find myself answering your letters before they come, but there's nothing mystical about this, really, for there's an immense clock at the post office with one side black and the other white showing what time it is in different parts of the world. By the time dawn breaks where you are, we are halfway through the day. They have just painted my stairs. The colors are the colors favored by all munic.i.p.al painters-light brown with a dark-brown border. While they were about it, they splashed a little white paint on the bottom of my mailbox. Now when the lift carries me down, the white paint gives me the illusion that there is a letter from you. I cannot cure myself of this. My heart beats and I run to the box, only to find white paint. Now I ride the lift with my back turned, the drop of paint is so painful."

As he returned from work one night, his mother told him that someone had called from the county seat and said that the call was urgent. Artemis guessed that it must be the Internal Revenue Service. He had had difficulty trying to describe to them the profit and loss in looking for water. He was a conscientious citizen and he called the number. A stranger identified himself as Mr. Cooper and he didn't sound like the Internal Revenue Service. Cooper wanted to see Artemis at once. "Well, you see," Artemis said, "it's my bowling night. Our team is tied for first place and I'd hate to miss the games if we could meet some other time." Cooper was agreeable and Artemis told him where he was working and how to get there. Cooper said he would be there at ten and Artemis went bowling.

In the morning, it began to snow. It looked like a heavy storm. Cooper showed up at ten. He did not get out of his car, but he was so very pleasant that Artemis guessed he was a salesman. Insurance.

"I understand that you've been in Russia."

"Well, I was only there for forty-eight hours. They canceled my visa. I don't know why."

"But you've been corresponding with Russia."

"Yes, there's this girl. I went out with her once. We write each other."

"The State Department is very much interested in your experience. Undersecretary Hurlow would like to talk with you."

"But I didn't really have any experience. I saw some churches and had three chicken dinners and then they sent me home."

"Well, the Undersecretary is interested. He called yesterday and again this morning. Would you mind going to Washington?"

"I'm working."

"It would only take a day. You can take the shuttle in the morning and come back in the afternoon. It won't take long. I think they'll pay your expenses, although this hasn't been decided. I have the information here." He handed the well digger a State Department letterhead that requested the presence of Artemis Bucklin at the new State Department building at 9 A.M. on the following day. "If you can make it," Cooper said, "your Government will be very grateful. I wouldn't worry too much about the A.M. n.o.body much gets to work before ten. It was nice to have met you. If you have any questions, call me at this number." Then he was gone and gone very quickly, because the snow was dense. The well site was in some backwoods where the roads wouldn't be plowed and Artemis drove home before lunch.

Some provincialism-some attachment to the not unpleasant routines of his life-made Artemis feel resistant to the trip to Washington. He didn't want to go, but could he be forced to? The only force involved was in the phrase that his Government would be grateful. With the exception of the Internal Revenue Service, he had no particular quarrel with his Government and he would have liked-childishly, perhaps-to deserve its grat.i.tude. That night he packed a bag and checked the airline schedules and he was at the new State Department building at nine the next morning.

Cooper had been right about time. Artemis cooled his heels in a waiting room until after ten. He was then taken up two floors, not to see the Undersecretary but to see a man named Serge Belinsky. Belinsky's office was small and bare and his secretary was a peevish Southern woman who wore bedroom slippers. Belinsky asked Artemis to fill out some simple bureaucratic forms. When had he arrived in Moscow? when had he left Moscow? where had he stayed? etc. When these were finished, Belinsky had them duplicated and took Artemis up another floor to the office of a man named Moss. Here things were very different. The secretary was pretty and flirtatious and wore shoes. The furniture was not luxurious, but it was a cut above Belinsky's. There were flowers on the desk and a painting on the wall. Artemis repeated the little he remembered, the little there was to remember. When he described the arrangements for his meeting with Khrushchev, Moss laughed; Moss whooped. He was a very elegant young man, so beautifully dressed and polished that Artemis felt himself uncouth, unwashed, and shabby. He was clean enough and mannerly, but his clothes bound at the shoulders and the crotch. "I think the Undersecretary would like to see us now," said Moss, and they went up another flight.

This was an altogether different creation. The floors were carpeted, the walls were paneled, and the secretary wore boots that were buckled with bra.s.s and reached up past her skirts, ending G.o.d knows where. How far they had come, in such a short distance, from the peevish secretary in bedroom slippers. How Artemis longed for his rig, his work clothes, and his lunch pail. They were served coffee and then the secretary-the one with the boots-dismissed Moss and took him in to the Undersecretary.

Except for a very small desk, there was nothing businesslike about the office. There were colored rugs, sofas, pictures, and flowers. Mr. Hurlow was a very tall man who seemed tired or perhaps unwell. "It was good of you to come, Mr. Bucklin. I'll go straight to the point. I have to go to the Hill at eleven. You know Natasha Funaroff."

"I took her out once. We had dinner and sat in a park."

"You correspond with her."

"Of course, we've monitored your letters. Their Government does the same. Our intelligence feels that your letters contain some sort of information. She, as the daughter of a marshal, is close to the Government. The rest of her family were shot. She wrote that G.o.d might sit in a submarine, surrounded by divisions of mermaids. That same day was the date of our last submarine crisis. I understand that she is an intelligent woman and I can't believe that she would write anything so foolish without its having a second meaning. Earlier she wrote that you and she were a wave on the Black Sea. The date corresponds precisely to the Black Sea maneuvers. You sent her a photograph of yourself beside the Wakusha Reservoir, pointing out that this was the center of the Northeast watershed. This, of course, is not cla.s.sified information, but it all helps. Later you write that the dark seems to you like a house divided into seventy rooms. This was written ten days before we activated the Seventieth Division. Would you care to explain any of this?"

"There's nothing to explain. I love her."

"That's absurd. You said yourself that you only saw her once. How can you fall in love with a woman you've only seen once? I can't at the moment threaten you, Mr. Bucklin. I can bring you before a committee, but unless you're willing to be more cooperative, this would be a waste of our time. We feel quite sure that you and your friend have worked out a cipher. I can't forbid you to write, of course, but we can stop your letters. What I would like is your patriotic cooperation. Mr. Cooper, whom I believe you've met, will call on you once a week or so and give you the information or rather the misinformation that we would like you to send to Russia, couched, of course, in your cipher, your descriptions of the dark as a house."

"I couldn't do that, Mr. Hurlow. It would be dishonest to you and to Natasha."

The Undersecretary laughed and gave a little girlish tilt to his shoulders. "Well, think it over and call Cooper when you've made up your mind. Of course, the destiny of the nation doesn't depend on your decision. I'm late." He didn't rise, he didn't offer his hand. Artemis, feeling worse than he had felt in Moscow and singing the unreality blues, went past the secretary with the boots and took an elevator down past the secretary with the shoes and the one in bedroom slippers. He got home in time for supper.

He never heard again from the State Department. Had they made a mistake? Were they fools or idle? He would never know. He wrote Natasha four very circ.u.mspect letters, omitting his hockey and his bowling scores. There was no reply. He looked for letters from her for a month or so. He thought often of the spot of paint on her mailbox. When it got warmer, there was the healing sound of rain to hear, at least there was that. Water, water.

THREE STORIES.

I.

The subject today will be the metaphysics of obesity, and I am the belly of a man named Lawrence Farnsworth. I am the body cavity between his diaphragm and his pelvic floor and I possess his viscera. I know you won't believe me, but if you'll buy a cri de coeur why not a cri de ventre? I play as large a part in his affairs as any other lights and vitals, and while I can't act, independence too is at the mercy of such disparate forces in his environment as money and starlight. We were born in the Middle West and he was educated in Chicago. He was on the track team (pole vault) and later on the diving team, two sports that made my existence dangerous and obscure. I did not discover myself until he was in his forties, when I was recognized by his doctor and his tailor. He stubbornly refused to grant me my rights and continued for almost a year to wear clothes that confined me harshly and caused me much soreness and pain. My one compensation was that I could unzip his fly at will.

I've often heard him say that, having spent the first half of his life running around behind an unruly bowsprit, he seemed d.a.m.ned to spend the rest of his life going around behind a belly that was as independent and capricious as his genitals. I have been, of course, in a position to observe his carnal sport, but I think I won't describe the thousands-or millions-of performances in which I have partic.i.p.ated. I am, in spite of my reputation for grossness, truly visionary, and I would like to look past his gymnastics to their consequences, which, from what I hear, are often ecstatic. He seems to feel that his erotic life is an entry permit into what is truly beautiful in the world. Balling in a thunderstorm-any rain will do-is his idea of a total relationship. There have been complaints. I once heard a woman ask, "Will you never understand that there is more to life than s.e.x and nature worship?" Once, when he exclaimed over the beauty of the stars his belle amie giggled. My open knowledge of the world is confined to the limited incidence of nakedness: bedrooms, showers, beaches, swimming pools, trysts, and sunbathing in the Antilles. The rest of my life is spent in a sort of purdah between his trousers and his shirts.

Having refused to admit my existence for a year or more, he finally had his trousers enlarged from thirty to thirty-four. When I had reached thirty-four inches and was striving for thirty-six his feelings about my existence became obsessive. The clash between what he had been and wanted to be and what he had become was serious. When people poked me with their fingers and made jokes about his Bay Window his forced laughter could not conceal his rage. He ceased to judge his friends on their wit and intelligence and began to judge them on their waistbands. Why was X so flat and why was Z, with a paunch of at least forty inches, contented with this state of affairs? When his friends stood his eye dropped swiftly from their smiles to their middles. We went one night to Yankee Stadium to see a ball game. He had begun to enjoy himself when he noticed that the right fielder had a good thirty-six inches. The other fielders and the bas.e.m.e.n pa.s.sed but the pitcher-an older man-had a definite bulge-and two of the umpires-when they took off their guards-were disgusting. So was the catcher. When he realized that he was not watching a ball game-that because of my influence he was unable to watch a ball game-we left. This was at the top of the fourth. A day or two later he began what was to be a year or a year and a half of h.e.l.l.

We started with a diet that emphasized water and hard-boiled eggs. He lost ten pounds in a week but he lost it all in the wrong places, and while my existence was imperiled I survived. The diet set up some metabolic disturbance that damaged his teeth, and he gave this up at his doctor's suggestion and joined a health club. Three times a week I was tormented on an electric bicycle and a rowing machine and then a ma.s.seur would knead me and strike me loudly and cruelly with the flat of his hand. He then bought a variety of elastic underpants or girdles that meant to disguise or dismiss me, and while they gave me great pain they only challenged my invincibility. When they were removed in the evening I reinstated myself amply in the world I so much love. Soon after this he bought a contraption that was guaranteed to destroy me. This was a pair of gold-colored plastic shorts that could be inflated by a hand pump. The acidity of the secretions I had to refine informed me of how painful and ridiculous he felt. When the shorts were inflated he read from a book of directions and performed some gymnastics. This was the worst pain to be inflicted on me so far, and when the exercises were finished my various parts were so abnormally cramped and knotted that we spent a sleepless night.

By this time I had come to recognize two facts that guaranteed my survival. The first was his detestation of solitary exercise. He liked games well enough but he did not like gymnastics. Each morning he would go to the bathroom and touch his toes ten times. His b.u.t.tocks (there's another story) sc.r.a.ped the washbasin and his forehead grazed the toilet seat. I knew from the secretions that came my way that this experience was spiritually crushing. Later he moved to the country for the summer and took up jogging and weight lifting. While lifting weights he learned to count in j.a.panese and Russian, hoping to give this performance some dignity, but he was not successful. Both jogging and weight lifting embarra.s.sed him intensely. The second factor in my favor was his conviction that we lead a simple life. "I really lead a very simple life," he often said. If this were so I would have no chance for prominence, but there is, I think, no first-cla.s.s restaurant in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the British Isles to which I have not been taken and asked to perform. He often says so. Going after a dish of crickets in Tokyo he gave me a friendly pat and said: "Do your best, man." So long as he considers this to be a simple life my place in the world is secure. When I fail him it is not through malice or intent. After a Homeric dinner with fourteen entrees in southern Russia we spent a night together in the bathroom. This was in Tbilisi. I seemed to be threatening his life. It was three in the morning. He was crying with pain. He was weeping and perhaps I know more than any other part of his physique about the true loneliness of this man. "Go away," he shouted at me, "go way." What could be more pitiful and absurd than a naked man at the dog hour in a strange country casting out his vitals. We went to the window to hear the wind in the trees. "Oh, I should have paid more attention to spiritual things," he shouted.

If I were the belly of a secret agent or a reigning prince my role in the clash of time wouldn't have been any different. I represent time more succinctly than any scarecrow with a scythe. Why should so simple a force as time-told accurately by the clocks in his house-cause him to groan and swear? Did he feel that some specious youthfulness was his princ.i.p.al, his only lure? I know that I reminded him of the pain he suffered in his relationship to his father. His father retired at fifty-five and spent the rest of his life polishing stones, gardening, and trying to learn conversational French from records. He had been a limber and an athletic man, but like his son he had been overtaken in the middle of the way by an independent abdomen. He seemed, like his son, to have no capacity to age and fatten gracefully. His paunch, his abdomen seemed to break his spirit. His abdomen led him to stoop, to walk clumsily, to sigh, and to have his trousers enlarged. His abdomen seemed like some precursor of the Angel of Death, and was Farnsworth, touching his toes in the bathroom each morning, struggling with the same angel?

Then there was the year we traveled. I don't know what drove him, but we went around the world three times in twelve months. He may have thought that travel would heighten his metabolism and diminish my importance. I won't go into the hardships of safety belts and a chaotic eating schedule. We saw all the usual places as well as Nairobi, Malagasy, Mauritius, Bali, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and New Zealand. We saw Madang, Goroka, Lee, Rabaul, Fiji, Reykjavik, Thingveflir, Akureyri, Narsarssuak, Kagsiarauk, Bukhara, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator, and the Gobi Desert. Then there were the Galapagos, Patagonia, the Mato Grosso jungle, and of course the Seych.e.l.les and the Amirantes.

It ended or was resolved one night at Pa.s.setto's. He began the meal with figs and Parma ham and with this he ate two rolls and b.u.t.ter. After this he had spaghetti carbonara, a steak with fried potatoes, a serving of frogs' legs, a whole spigola roasted in paper, some chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a salad with an oil dressing, three kinds of cheese, and a thick zabaglione. Halfway through the meal he had to give me some leeway, but he was not resentful and I felt that victory might be in sight. When he ordered the zabaglione I knew that I had won or that we had arrived at a sensible truce. He was not trying to conceal, dismiss, or forget me and his secretions were bland. Leaving the table he had to give me another two inches, so that walking across the piazza I could feel the night wind and hear the fountains, and we've lived happily together ever since.

II.

Marge Littleton would, in the long-gone days of Freudian jargon, have been thought maternal, although she was no more maternal than you or you. What would have been meant was a charming softness in her voice and her manner and she smelled like a summer's day, or perhaps it is a summer's day that smells like such a woman. She was a regular church-goer, and I always felt that her devotions were more profound than most, although it is impossible to speculate on anything so intimate. She was on the liturgical side, hewing to the Book of Common Prayer and avoiding sermons whenever possible. She was not a native, of course-the last native along with the last cow died twenty years ago-and I don't remember where she or her husband came from. He was bald. They had three children and lived a scrupulously unexceptional life until one morning in the fall.

It was after Labor Day, a little windy. Leaves could be seen falling outside the windows. The family had breakfast in the kitchen. Marge had baked johnnycake. "Good morning, Mrs. Littleton," her husband said, kissing her on the brow and patting her backside. His voice, his gesture seemed to have the perfect equilibrium of love. I don't know what virulent critics of the family would say about the scene. Were the Littletons making for themselves, by contorting their pa.s.sions into an acceptable social image, a sort of prison, or did they chance to be a man and woman whose pleasure in one another was tender, robust, and invincible? From what I know it was an exceptional marriage. Never having been married myself I may be unduly susceptible to the element of buffoonery in holy matrimony, but isn't it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels. But with the Littletons one felt that they might live together with intelligence and ardor-giving and taking until death did them part.

On that particular Sat.u.r.day morning he planned to go shopping. After breakfast he made a list of what they needed from the hardware store. A gallon of white acrylic paint, a four-inch brush, picture hooks, a spading fork, oil for the lawn mower. The children went along with him. They went, not to the village, which, like so many others, lay dying, but to a crowded and fairly festive shopping center on Route 64. He gave the children money for c.o.kes. When they returned the southbound traffic was heavy. It was as I say after Labor Day, and many of the cars were towing portable houses, campers, sailboats, motorboats, and trailers. This long procession of vehicles and domestic portables seemed not the spectacle of a people returning from their vacations but rather like a tragic evacuation of some great city or state. A car-carrier, trying to pa.s.s an exceptionally bulky mobile home, crashed into the Littletons and killed them all. I didn't go to the funeral but one of our neighbors described it to me. "There she stood at the edge of the grave. She didn't cry. She looked very beautiful and serene. She had to watch four coffins, one after the other, lowered into the ground. Four."

She didn't go away. People asked her to dinner, of course, but in such an intensely domesticated community the single are inevitably neglected. A month or so after the accident the local paper announced that the State Highway Commission would widen Route 64 from a four-lane to an eight-lane highway. We organized a committee for the preservation of the community and raised ten thousand dollars for legal fees. Marge Littleton was very active. We had meetings nearly every week. We met in parish houses, courtrooms, high schools, and houses. In the beginning these meetings were very emotional. Mrs. Pinkham once cried. She wept. "I've worked sixteen years on my pink room and now they're going to tear it down." She was led out of the meeting, a truly bereaved woman. We chartered a bus and went to the state capital. We marched down 64 one rainy Sunday with a motorcycle escort. I don't suppose we were more than thirty and we straggled. We carried picket signs. I remember Marge. Some people seem born with a congenital gift for protest and a talent for carrying picket signs, but this was not Marge. She carried a large sign that said: STOP GASOLINE ALLEY. She seemed very embarra.s.sed. When the march disbanded I said goodbye to her on a knoll above the highway. I remember the level gaze she gave to the line of traffic, rather, I guess, as the widows of Nantucket must have regarded the sea.

When we had spent our ten thousand dollars without any results our meetings were less and less frequent and very poorly attended. Only three people, including the speaker, showed up for the last. The highway was widened, demolishing six houses and making two uninhabitable, although the owners got no compensation. Several wells were destroyed by the blasting. After our committee was disbanded I saw very little of Marge. Someone told me she had gone abroad. When she returned she was followed by a charming young Roman named Pietro Montani. They were married.

Marge displayed her gifts for married happiness with Pietro although he was very unlike her first husband. He was handsome, witty, and substantial-he represented a firm that manufactured innersoles-but he spoke the worst English I have ever heard. You could talk with him and drink with him and laugh with him but other than that it was almost impossible to communicate with him. It didn't really matter. She seemed very happy and it was a pleasant house to visit. They had been married no more than two months when Pietro, driving a convertible down 64, was decapitated by a crane.

She buried Pietro with the others but she stayed on in the house on Twin-Rock Road, where one could hear the battlefield noises of industrial traffic. I think she got a job. One saw her on the trains. Three weeks after Pietro's death a twenty-four-wheel, eighty-ton truck, northbound on Route 64 for reasons that were never ascertained, veered into the southbound lane demolishing two cars and killing their four pa.s.sengers. The truck then rammed into a granite abutment there, fell on its side, and caught fire. The police and the fire department were there at once, but the freight was combustible and the fire was not extinguished until three in the morning. All traffic on Route 64 was rerouted. The women's auxiliary of the fire department served coffee.

Two weeks later at 8 P.M. another twenty-four-wheel truck with a load of cement blocks went out of control at the same place, crossed the southbound lane, and felled four full-grown trees before it collided with the abutment. The impact of the collision was so violent that two feet of granite was sheared off the wall. There was no fire, but the two drivers were so badly crushed by the collision that they had to be identified by their dental work.

On November third at 8:30 P.M. Lt. Dominic DeSisto reported that a man in work clothes ran into the front office. He seemed hysterical, drugged, or drunk and claimed to have been shot. He was, according to Lieutenant DeSisto, so incoherent that it was some time before he could explain what had happened. Driving north on 64, at about the same place where the other trucks had gone out of control, a rifle bullet had smashed the left window of his cab, missed the driver, and smashed the right window. The intended victim was Joe Langston of Baldwin, South Carolina. The lieutenant examined the truck and verified the broken windows. He and Langston drove in a squad car back to where the shot had been fired. On the right side of the road there was a little hill of granite with some soil covering. When the highway had been widened the hill had been blasted in two and the knoll on the right corresponded to the abutment that had killed the other drivers. DeSisto examined the hill. The gra.s.s on the knoll was trampled and there were two cigarette b.u.t.ts on the ground. Langston was taken to the hospital, suffering from shock. The hill was put under surveillance for the next month, but the police force was understaffed and it was a boring beat to sit alone on the hill from dusk until midnight. As soon as surveillance was stopped a fourth oversized truck went out of control. This time the truck veered to the right, took down a dozen trees, and drove into a narrow but precipitous valley. The driver, when the police got to him, was dead. He had been shot.

In December Marge married a rich widower and moved to North Salem, where there is only one two-lane highway and where the sound of traffic is as faint as the roaring of a sh.e.l.l.

III.

He took his aisle seat-32-in the 707 for Rome. The plane was not quite full and there was an empty seat between him and the occupant of the port seat. This was taken, he was pleased to see, by an exceptionally good-looking woman-not young, but neither was he. She was wearing perfume, a dark dress, and jewelry and she seemed to belong to that part of the world in which he moved most easily. "Good evening," he said, settling himself. She didn't reply. She made a discouraging humming noise and raised a paperback book to the front of her face. He looked for the t.i.tle but this she concealed with her hands. He had met shy women on planes before-infrequently, but he had met them. He supposed they were understandably wary of lushes, mashers, and bores. He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy. If one read the editorials, the sports page, and especially the financial section shy strangers would sometimes be ready for a conversation. The plane took off, the smoking sign went dark, and he took out a gold cigarette case and a gold lighter. They were not flashy, but they were gold. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked. "Why should I?" she asked. She did not look in his direction. "Some people do," he said, lighting his cigarette. She was nearly as beautiful as she was unfriendly, but why should she be so cold? They would be side by side for nine hours, and it was only sensible to count on at least a little conversation. Did he remind her of someone she disliked, someone who had wounded her? He was bathed, shaved, correctly dressed, and accustomed to making friends. Perhaps she was an unhappy woman who disliked the world, but when the stewardess came by to take their drink orders the smile she gave the young stranger was dazzling and open. This so cheered him that he smiled himself, but when she saw that he was trespa.s.sing on a communication that was aimed at someone else she turned on him, scowled, and went back to her book. The stewardess brought him a double Martini and his companion a sherry. He supposed that his strong drink might increase her uneasiness, but he had to take that chance. She went on reading. If he could only find the t.i.tle of the book, he thought, he would have a foot in the door. Harold Robbins, Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Emily d.i.c.kinson-anything would help. "May I ask what you're reading?" he said politely. "No," she said.

When the stewardess brought their dinners he pa.s.sed her tray across the empty seat. She did not thank him. He settled down to eat, to feed, to enjoy this simple habit. The meal was unusually bad and he said so. "One can't be too particular under the circ.u.mstances," she said. He thought he heard a trace of warmth in her voice. "Salt might help," she said, "but they neglected to give me any salt. Could I trouble you for yours?"

"Oh, certainly," he said. Things were definitely looking up. He opened his salt container and in pa.s.sing it to her a little salt spilled on the rug. "I'm afraid the bad luck will be yours," she said. This was not said at all lightly. She salted her cutlet and ate everything on her tray. Then she went on reading the book with the concealed t.i.tle. She would sooner or later have to use the toilet, he knew, and then he could read the t.i.tle of the book, but when she did go to the stern of the plane she carried the book with her.

The screen for the film was lowered. Unless a picture was exceptionally interesting he never rented sound equipment. He had found that lip-reading and guesswork gave the picture an added dimension, and anyhow the dialogue was usually offensively ba.n.a.l. His neighbor rented equipment and seemed to enjoy herself heartily. She had a lovely musical laugh and communicated with the actors on the screen as she had communicated with the stewardess and as she had refused to communicate with her neighbor. The sun rose as they approached the Alps, although the film was not over. Here and there the brightness of an Alpine morning could be seen through the cracks in the drawn shades, but while they sailed over Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn the characters on the screen relentlessly pursued their script. There was a parade, a chase, a reconciliation, an ending. His companion, still carrying her mysterious book, retired to the stern again and returned wearing a sort of mobcap, her face heavily covered with some white unguent. She adjusted her pillow and blanket and arranged herself for sleep. "Sweet dreams," he said, daringly. She sighed.

He never slept on planes. He went up to the galley and had a whiskey. The stewardess was pretty and talkative and she told him about her origins, her schedule, her fiance, and her problems with pa.s.sengers who suffered from flight fear. Beyond the Alps they began to lose alt.i.tude and he saw the Mediterranean from the port and had another whiskey. He saw Elba, Giglio, and the yachts in the harbor at Porto Ercole, where he could see the villas of his friends. He could remember coming into Nantucket so many years ago. They used to line the port railing and shout, "Oh, the Perrys are here and the Saltons and the Greenoughs." It was partly genuine, partly show. When he returned to his seat his companion had removed her mobcap and her unguent. Her beauty in the light of morning was powerful. He could not diagnose what he found so compelling-nostalgia, perhaps-but her features, her pallor, the set of her eyes, all corresponded to his sense of beauty. "Good morning," he said, "did you sleep well?" She frowned, she seemed to find this impertinent. "Does one ever?" she asked on a rising note. She put her mysterious book into a handbag with a zipper and gathered her things. When they landed at Fiumicino he stood aside to let her pa.s.s and followed her down the aisle. He went behind her through the pa.s.sport, emigrant, and health check and joined her at the place where you claim your bags.

But look, look. Why does he point out her bag to the porter and why, when they both have their bags, does he follow her out to the cab stand, where he bargains with a driver for the trip into Rome? Why does he join her in the cab? Is he the undiscourageable masher that she dreaded? No, no. He is her husband, she is his wife, the mother of his children, and a woman he has worshipped pa.s.sionately for nearly thirty years.

THE JEWELS OF THE CABOTS.

Funeral services for the murdered man were held in the Unitarian church in the little village of St. Botolphs. The architecture of the church was Bullfinch with columns and one of those ethereal spires that must have dominated the landscape a century ago. The service was a random collection of Biblical quotations closing with a verse. "Amos Cabot, rest in peace / Now your mortal trials have ceased..." The church was full. Mr. Cabot had been an outstanding member of the community. He had once run for Governor. For a month or so, during his campaign, one saw his picture on barns, walls, buildings, and telephone poles. I don't suppose the sense of walking through a shifting mirror-he found himself at every turn-unsettled him as it would have unsettled me. (Once, for example, when I was in an elevator in Paris I noticed a woman carrying a book of mine. There was a photograph on the jacket and one image of me looked over her arm at another. I wanted the picture, wanted I suppose to destroy it. That she should walk away with my face under her arm seemed to threaten my self-esteem. She left the elevator at the fourth floor and the parting of these two images was confusing. I wanted to follow her, but how could I explain in French or in any other language-what I felt? Amos Cabot was not at all like this. He seemed to enjoy seeing himself, and when he lost the election and his face vanished (excepting for a few barns in the back country where it peeled for a month or so) he seemed not perturbed.

There are, of course, the wrong Lowells, the wrong Hallowells, the wrong Eliots, Cheevers, Codmans, and Englishes, but today we will deal with the wrong Cabots. Amos came from the South Sh.o.r.e and may never have heard of the North Sh.o.r.e branch of the family. His father had been an auctioneer, which meant in those days an entertainer, horse trader, and sometimes crook. Amos owned real estate, the hardware store, the public utilities, and was a director of the bank. He had an office in the Cartwright Block, opposite the green. His wife came from Connecticut, which was, for us at that time, a distant wilderness on whose eastern borders stood the City of New York. New York was populated by harried, nervous, avaricious foreigners who lacked the character to bathe in cold water at six in the morning and to live, with composure, lives of grueling boredom. Mrs. Cabot, when I knew her, was probably in her early forties. She was a short woman with the bright-red face of an alcoholic although she was a vigorous temperance worker. Her hair was as white as snow. Her back and her front were prominent and there was a memorable curve to her spine that could have been a cruel corset or the beginnings of lordosis. No one quite knew why Mr. Cabot had married this eccentric from faraway Connecticut-it was, after all, no one's business-but she did own most of the frame tenements on the East Bank of the river where the workers in the table-silver factory lived. Her tenements were profitable but it would have been an unwarranted simplification to conclude that he had married for real estate. She collected the rents herself. I expect that she did her own housework, and she dressed simply, but she wore on her right hand seven large diamond rings. She had evidently read somewhere that diamonds were a sound investment and the blazing stones were about as glamorous as a pa.s.sbook. There were round diamonds, square diamonds, rectangular diamonds, and some of those diamonds that are set in p.r.o.ngs. On Thursday morning she would wash her diamonds in some jewelers' solution and hang them out to dry in the clothes-yard. She never explained this, but the incidence of eccentricity in the village ran so high that her conduct was not thought unusual.