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Contents
1. Time (by H.E.Bates)2. Another Case of Ingratitude (by John Reed)3. Love (by Jesse Stuart)4. The orphaned swimming pool (by John Updike)
5. The pleasures of solitude (by John Cheever)
1. Time (by H.E.Bates)
H.E.Bates (1905—1974), a modern English writer, was born in 1905 in Rushden, Northampton, England. He was educated at a grammar school, then worked on a local newspaper. Disliking the drudgery of journalism, he became a clerk in a leather warehouse. His new job gave him leisure to write fiction and in 1925 he attained his majority and publication of his first novel together. The author of a number of novels, plays and essays H. E. Bates is also a prolific and widely anthologized short-story writer.
Sitting on an iron seat fixed about the body of a great chestnut tree breaking into pink-flushed blossom, two old men gazed dumbly at the sunlit emptiness of a town square. The morning sun burned in a sky of marvellous blue serenity, making the drooping leaves of the tree most brilliant and the pale blossoms expand to fullest beauty. The eyes of the old men were also blue, but the brilliance of the summer sky made a mockery of the dim and somnolent light in them. Their thin white hair and drooping skin, their faltering lips and rusted clothes, the huddling bones of their bodies had come to winter. Their hands tottered, their lips were wet and dribbling, and they stared with a kind of earnest vacancy, seeing the world as a stillness of amber mist. They were perpetually silent, for the deafness of one made speech a ghastly effort of shouting and misinterpretation. With their worn sticks between their knees and their worn hands knotted over their sticks they sat as though time had ceased to exist for them. Nevertheless every movement across the square was an event. Their eyes missed nothing that came within sight. It was as if the passing of every vehicle held for them the possibility of catastrophe; the appearance of a strange face was a revolution; the apparitions of young ladies in light summer dresses gliding on legs of shellpink silk had on them something of the effect of goddesses on the minds of young heroes. There were, sometimes, subtle changes of light in their eyes. Across the square, they observed an approaching figure. They watched it with a new intensity, exchanging also, for the first time, a glance with one another. For the first time also they spoke. "Who is it?" said one. "Duke, ain't it?" "Looks like Duke," the other said. "But I can't see that far." Leaning forward on their sticks, they watched the approach of this figure with intent expectancy. He, too, was old. Beside him, indeed, it was as if they were adolescent. He was patriarchal. He resembled a Biblical prophet, bearded and white and immemorial. He was timeless. But though he looked like a patriarch he came across the square with the haste of a man in a walking race. He moved with a nimbleness and airiness that were miraculous. Seeing the old men on the seat he waved his stick with an amazing gaiety at them. It was like the
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brandishing of a youthful sword. Ten yards away he bellowed their names lustily in greeting. "Well, Reuben boy! Well, Shepherd!" They mumbled somberly in reply. He shouted stentoriously about the weather, wagging his white beard strongly. They shifted stiffly along the seat and he sat down. A look of secret relief came over their dim faces, for he had towered above them like a statue in silver and bronze. "Thought maybe you warn't coming," mumbled Reuben. "Ah! been for a sharp walk!" he half-shouted. "A sharp walk." They had not the courage to ask where he had walked, but in his clear brisk voice he told them, and deducing that he could not have travelled less than six or seven miles they sat in gloomy silence, as though shamed. With relief they saw him fumble in his pockets and bring out a bag of peppermints, black-and-white balls sticky and strong from the heat of his strenuous body and having one by one popped peppermints into their mouths they sucked for a long time with toothless and dumb solemnity, contemplating the sunshine. As they sucked, the two old men waited for Duke to speak, and they waited like men awaiting an oracle, since he was, in their eyes, a masterpiece of a man. Long ago, when they had been napkinned and at the breast, he had been a man with a beard, and before they had reached their youth he had passed into a lusty maturity. All their lives they had felt infantile beside him. Now, in old age, he persisted in shaming them by the lustiness of his achievements and his vitality. He had the secret of devilish perpetual youth. To them the world across the square was veiled in sunny mistiness, but Duke could detect the swiftness of a rabbit on a hill-side a mile away. They heard the sounds of the world as though through a stone wall, but he could hear the crisp bark of a fox in another parish. They were condemned to an existence of memory because they could not read, but Duke devoured the papers. He had an infinite knowledge of the world and the freshest affairs of men. He brought them, every morning, news of earthquakes in Peru, of wars in China, of assassinations in Spain, of scandals among the clergy. He understood the obscurest movements of politicians and explained to them the newest laws of the land. They listened to him with the devoutness of worshippers listening to a preacher, regarding him with awe and believing in him with humble astonishment. There were times when he lied to them blatantly. They never suspected. As they sat there, blissfully sucking, the shadow of the chestnut tree began to shorten, its westward edge creeping up, like a tide, towards their feet. Beyond, the sun continued to blaze with unbroken brilliance on the white square. Swallowing the last smooth grain of peppermint, Reuben wondered aloud what time it could be. "Time?" said Duke. He spoke ominously. "Time?" he repeated. They watched his hand solemnly uplift itself and vanish into his breast. They had no watches. Duke alone could tell them the passage of time while appearing to mock at it himself. Very slowly he drew out an immense watch, held it out at length on its silver chain, and regarded it steadfastly. They regarded it also, at first with humble solemnity and then with quiet astonishment. They leaned forward to stare at it. Their eyes were filled with a great light of unbelief. The watch had stopped. The three old men continued to stare at the watch in silence. The stopping of this watch was like the stopping of some perfect automaton. It resembled almost the stopping of time itself. Duke shook the watch urgently. The hands moved onwards for a second or two from half-
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past three and then were dead again. He lifted it to his ear and listened. It was silent. For a moment or two longer the old man sat in lugubrious contemplation. The watch, like Duke, was a masterpiece, incredibly ancient, older even than Duke himself. They did not know how often he had boasted to them of its age and efficiency, its beauty and pricelessness. They remembered that it had once belonged to his father, that he had been offered incredible sums for it, that it had never stopped since the battle of Waterloo. Finally Duke spoke. He spoke with the mysterious air of a man about to unravel a mystery, "Know what't is?" They could only shake their heads and stare with the blankness of ignorance and curiosity. They could not know. Duke made an ominous gesture, almost a flourish, with the hand that held the watch. "It's the lectric." They stared at him with dim-eyed amazement. "It's the lectric" he repeated. "The lectric in me body." Shepherd was deaf. "Eh?" he said. "The lectric," said Duke significantly, in a louder voice. "Lectric?" They did not understand, and they waited. The oracle spoke at last, repeating with one hand the ominous gesture that was like a flourish. "It stopped yesterday. Stopped in the middle of my dinner," he said. He was briefly silent. "Never stopped as long as I can remember. Never. And then stopped like that, all of a sudden, just at pudden-time. Couldn't understand it. Couldn't understand it for the life of me." "Take it to the watchmaker's?" Reuben said. "I did," he said. "I did. This watch is older'n me, I said, and it's never stopped as long as I can remember. So he squinted at it and poked it and that's what he said." "What?" "It's the lectric, he says, that's what it is. It's the lectric — the lectric in your body. That's what he said. The lectric." "Lectric light?" "That's what he said. Lectric. You're full o'lectric, he says. You go home and leave your watch on the shelf and it'll go again. So I did." The eyes of the old men seemed to signal intense questions. There was an ominous silence. Finally, with the watch still in his hand, Duke made an immense flourish, a gesture of serene triumph. "And it went," he said. "It went!" The old men murmured in wonder. "It went all right. Right as a cricket! Beautiful!" The eyes of the old men flickered with fresh amazement. The fickleness of the watch was beyond the weakness of their ancient comprehension. They groped for understanding as they might have searched with their dim eyes for a balloon far up in the sky. Staring and murmuring they could only pretend to understand. "Solid truth," said Duke. "Goes on the shelf but it won't go on me. It's the lectric." "That's what licks me," said Reuben, "the lectric." "It's me body," urged Duke. "It's full of it." "Lectric light?" "Full of it. Alive with it." He spoke like a man who had won a prize. Bursting with glory, he feigned humility. His white beard wagged lustily with pride, but the hand still bearing the watch seemed to droop
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with modesty. "It's the lectric," he boasted softly. They accepted the words in silence. It was as though they began to understand at last the lustiness of Duke's life, the nimbleness of his mind, the amazing youthful-ness of his patriarchal limbs. The shadow of the chestnut tree had dwindled to a small dark circle about their seat. The rays of the sun were brilliantly perpendicular. On the chestnut tree itself the countless candelabra of blossoms were a pure blaze of white and rose. A clock began to chime for noon. Duke, at that moment, looked at his watch, still lying in his hand. He stared with instant guilt. The hands had moved miraculously to four o'clock, and in the stillness of the summer air he could hear the tick of wheels. With hasty gesture of resignation he dropped the watch into his pocket again. He looked quickly at the old men, but they were sunk in sombre meditation. They had not seen or heard. Abruptly he rose. "That's what it is," he said. "The, lectric." He made a last gesture as though to indicate that he was the victim of some divine manifestation. "The lectric," he said. He retreated nimbly across the square in the hot sunshine and the old men sat staring after him with the innocence of solemn wonder. His limbs moved with the haste of a clockwork doll, and he vanished with incredible swiftness from sight. The sun had crept beyond the zenith and the feet of the old men were bathed in sunshine.
2. Another Case of Ingratitude by John Reed
American journalist and author John Reed (1887-1920) was widely known for his eyewitness account of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, Ten Days That Shook the World, as well as for his radical political activities. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, he returned to the United States to organize the Communist Labor Party. Later, when charged with sedition, he fled to Moscow, where he remained until his premature death from typhus. Though this early short story by Reed, “Another Case of Ingratitude” (1913) seems not to carry any overt political teaching, one wonders, by its end, whether one is meant to sympathize with the down-and-out worker or with his would-be benefactor. Reed’s seemingly well-intentioned philanthropist takes a poor fellow who is, literally, on his last (and frozen) leg out of the bitter cold, buys him a warm, hearty meal, and gives him money for a night’s lodging. As the poor fellow revives, his benefactor tries to engage him in conversation, but the questions he asks are unwelcome, and his motives for doing good are impugned. Should the benefactor have behaved differently? If so, at what point and how? Should the worker have behaved differently? Again, if so, at what point and how?
Walking late down Fifth Avenue, I saw him ahead of me, on the dim stretch of sidewalk between two arc-lights. It was biting cold. Head sunk between hunched-up shoulders, hands in his pockets, he shuffled along, never lifting his feet from the ground. Even as I watched him, he turned, as if in a daze, and leaned against the wall of a building, where he made an angle out of the wind. At first I thought it was shelter he sought, but as I drew nearer I discerned the unnatural stiffness of his legs, the way his cheek pressed against the cold stone, and the glimmer of light that played on his sunken, closed eyes. The man was asleep!
Asleep—the bitter wind searching his flimsy clothes and the holes in his shapeless shoes; upright against the hard wall, with his legs rigid as an epileptic's. There was something bestial in such gluttony of sleep.
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I shook him by the shoulder. He slowly opened an eye, cringing as though he were often disturbed by rougher hands than mine, and gazed at me with hardly a trace of intelligence.
"What's the matter—sick?" I asked.
Faintly and dully he mumbles something, and at the same time stepped out as if to move away. I asked him what he said, bending close to hear.
"No sleep for two nights," came the thick voice. "Nothing to eat for three days." He stood there obediently under the touch of my hand, swaying a little, staring vacantly at me with eyes that hung listlessly between opening and shutting.
"Well, come on," I said, "we'll go get something to eat and I'll fix you up with a bed." Docilely he followed me, stumbling along like a man in a dream, falling forward and then balancing himself with a step. From time to time his thick lips gave utterance to husky, irrelevant words and phrases. "Got to sleep waking around," he said again and again. "They keep moving me on."
I took his arm and guided him into the white door of an all-night lunchroom. I sat him at a table, where he dropped into a dead sleep. I set before him roast beef, and mashed potatoes, and two ham sandwiches, and a cup of coffee, and bread and butter, and a big piece of pie. And then I woke him up. He looked up at me with a dawning meaning in his expression. The look of humble gratitude, love, devotion, was almost canine in its intensity. It sent a thrill of Christian brotherhood all through my veins. I sat back and watched him eat.
At first he went at it awkwardly, as if he had lost the habit. Mechanically he employed little tricks of table manners--perhaps his mother had taught them to him. He fumblingly changed knife and fork from right hand to left, and then put down his knife and took a dainty piece of bread in his left hand; removed the spoon from his coffee cup before he drank, and spread butter thinly and painstakingly on his bread. His motions were so somnambulistic istic that that I had a strange feeling of looking on a previous incarnation of the man.
As the dinner progressed, a marvelous change took place. The warmth and nourishment, heating and feeding his thin blood, flooded the nerve centers of that starving body; a quick flush mounted to his cheeks, every part of him started widely awake, his eyes glowed. The little niceties of manner dropped away as if they had never been. He slopped his bread roughly in the gravy, and thrust huge knife-loads of food into his mouth. The coffee vanished in great gulps. He became an individual instead of a descendant: where there had been a beast, a spirit lived; he was a man!
The metamorphosis ws so exciting that I could hardly wait to learn more about him. I held in, however, until he finished his dinner.
As the last of the pie disappeared, I drew forth a box of cigarettes and placed them before him. He took one and accepted one of my matches. "Thanks," he said.
"How much will it cost you for a bed—a quarter?" I asked.
"Yeh," he answered. "T’anks!"
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He sat looking rather nervously at the table—inhaling great clouds of smoke. It was my opportunity.
"What's the matter—no work?"
He looked me in the eye, for the first time since dinner had begin in a suprpised manner. "Sure," he said breifly. I noticed, with somewhat of a shock that his eyes were gray, whereas I had thought them brown.
"What's your job?
He dien't answer for a moment. "Bricklayer," he grunted. What was the matter with the man?
"Where do you come from?"
Même jeu. "Albany."
"Been here long?"
"Say," said my guest, leaning over. "What do you think I am, a phonygraft?"
For a moment I was speechless with surprise. "Why, I was only asking to make conversation," I said feebly.
"Naw, you wasn't. You thought just because you give me a handout, I'd do a sob-story all over you. What right you got to ask me all them questions? I know you fellers. Just because you got money you think you can buy me with a meal…"
"Nonsense!" I cried. "I do this perfectly unselfishly. What do you think I got out of feeding you?"
He lit another one of my cigarettes.
"You get all you want," he smiled. "Come on now, don't it make you feel good all over to save a poor starvin' bum's life? God! You're pure and holy for a week!"
"Well, you're a strange specimen," I said angrily. "I don't believe you've got a bit of gratitude in you."
"Gratitude. Hell!" said he easily. "What for? I'm thanking my luck, not you—see? I might as well 'a been as any other bum. You see," he leaned across the table, exhaling, "you just had to save somebody tonight. I understand. I got an appetite like that, too. Only mine's women."
Whereupon I left that ungrateful bricklayer and went to wake up Drusilla who alone understands me.
Reflection Questions
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The down-and-outer accused the well-intentioned philanthropist of “saving a poor a starvin’ bum’s life” in order to ‘feel good all over’ and to be ‘pure and holy’ for a week.’ He went on to say that had he not been the one rescued it would have been someone else in need of savin’, so the act was one of random selection without much thought for himself as a person. Does he speak truly?In what ways might philanthropists and philanthropic organizations be accused of performing their acts of kindness in a similar manner? Is the ‘why,’ i.e., the motive for, philanthropic acts clear from the way they are performed ? Do one’s motives necessarily add to or diminish the goodness of the acts themselves?
Is it possible to perform a philanthropic act unselfishly, as the well-intentioned philanthropist claimed he did in rescuing the down-and-outer? Why or why not?
What obligation, if any, might someone who is the recipient of a philanthropic act, have to those who performed the philanthropic act? If there are expectations predicated on the giving, is it a gift?
How likely would someone be to continue to give if gratitude was not expressed for the giving? How likely would someone continue to give if their giving was ‘repaid’ with disdain and contempt? Would either or both of these reactions cause you to reconsider your giving?
Given what we know from this reading, how might you have acted if you were the down-and-outer? If you were the well-intentioned philanthropist? As Drusilla, the only one who understood the well-intentioned philanthropist, what words of wisdom or comfort might you provide the well-intentioned philanthropist upon his retelling of this story?
3. Love (by Jesse Stuart)
Jesse Stuart (1907— ) was the son of an illiterate tenant farmer from eastern Kentucky. Jesse Stuart had little formal education as a child. When he finally managed to attend high school, and then college, he discovered that he had a talent for writing. He has pursued a successful career as a writer, at the same time serving as a teacher and administrator in southern schools. In addition to short stories, Stuart has written poetry, novels, an autobiography (The Thread that Runs So True, 1958) and a biography of his father (God's Oddling, 1960). It was from his father, that the author gained his great love of nature and appreciation individuality.
Yesterday when the bright sun blazed down on the wilted corn my father and I walked around the edge of the new ground to plan a fence. The cows kept coming through the chestnut oaks on the cliff and running over the young corn. They bit off the tips of the corn and trampled down the stubble. My father walked in the cornbalk. Bob, our Collie, walked in front of my father. We heard a ground squirrel whistle down over the bluff among the dead treetops at the clearing's edge. "Whoop, take him, Bob," said my father. He lifted up a young stalk of corn, with wilted dried roots, where the ground squirrel had dug it up for the sweet grain of corn left on its tender roots. This has been a dry spring and the corn has kept well in the earth where the grain has sprouted. The ground squirrels love this corn. They dig up rows of it and eat the sweet grains. The young corn stalks are killed and we have to replant the corn. I can see my father keep sicking Bob after the ground squirrel. He jumped over the corn rows. He started to run toward the ground squirrel. I, too, started running toward the clearing's edge where Bob was jumping and barking. The dust flew in tiny swirls behind our feet. There was a cloud of dust behind us. "It's a big bull blacksnake," said my father. "Kill him, Bob! Kill him, Bob!" Bob was jumping and snapping at the snake so as to make it strike and throw itself off guard. Bob had killed twenty-eight copperheads this spring. He knows how to kill a snake. He doesn't rush to do it. He takes his time and does the job well. "Let's don't kill the snake," I said. "A blacksnake is a harmless snake. It kills poison snakes. It kills the copperhead. It catches more mice from the fields than a cat." I could see the snake didn't want to fight the dog. The snake wanted to get away. Bob
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wouldn't let it. I wondered why it was crawling toward a heap of black loamy earth at the bench of the hill. I wondered why it had come from the chestnut oak sprouts and the matted greenbriars on the cliff. I looked as the snake lifted its pretty head in response to one of Bob's jumps. "It's not a bull blacksnake," I said. "It's a she-snake. Look at the white on her throat." "A snake is an enemy to me," my father snapped. "I hate a snake. Kill it, Bob. Go in there and get that snake and quit playing with it!" Bob obeyed my father. I hated to see him take this snake by the throat. She was so beautifully poised in the sunlight. Bob grabbed the white patch on her throat. He cracked her long body like an ox whip in the wind. He cracked it against the wind only. The blood spurted from her fine-curved throat. Something hit against my legs like pellets. Bob threw the snake down. I looked to see what had struck my legs. It was snake eggs. Bob had slung them from her body. She was going to the sand heap to lay her eggs, where the sun is the setting-hen that warms them and hatches them. Bob grabbed her body there on the earth where the red blood was running down on the gray-piled loam. Her body was still writhing in pain. She acted like a greenweed held over a new-ground fire. Bob slung her viciously many times. He cracked her limp body against the wind. She was now limber as a shoestring in the wind. Bob threw her riddled body back on the sand. She quivered like a leaf in the lazy wind, then her riddled body lay perfectly still. The blood colored the loamy earth around the snake. "Look at the eggs, won't you?" said my father. We counted thirty-seven eggs. I picked an egg up and held it in my hand. Only a minute ago there was life in it. It was an immature seed. It would not hatch. Mother sun could not incubate it on the warm earth. The egg I held in my hand was almost the size of a quail's egg. The shell on it was thin and tough and the egg appeared under the surface to be a watery egg. "Well, Bob, I guess you see now why this snake couldn't fight," I said, "It is life. Stronger devour the weaker even among human beings. Dog kills snake. Snake kills birds. Birds kill the butterflies. Man conquers all. Man, too, kills for sport." Bob was panting. He walked ahead of us back to the house. His tongue was out of his mouth. He was tired. He was hot under his shaggy coat of hair. His tongue nearly touched the dry dirt and white flecks of foam dripped from it. We walked toward the house. Neither my father nor I spoke. I still thought about the dead snake. The sun was going down over the chestnut ridge. A lark was singing. It was late for a lark to sing. The red evening clouds floated above the pine trees on our pasture hill. My father stood beside the path. His black hair was moved by the wind. His face was red in the blue wind of day. His eyes looked toward the sinking sun. "And my father hates a snake," I thought. I thought about the agony women know of giving birth. I thought about how they will fight to save their children. Then, I thought of the snake. I thought it was silly for me to think such thoughts. This morning my father and I got up with the chickens. He says one has to get up with the chickens to do a day's work. We got the posthole digger, ax, spud, measuring pole and the mattock. We started for the clearing's edge. Bob didn't go along. The dew was on the corn. My father walked behind with the posthole digger across his shoulder. I walked in front. The wind was blowing. It was a good morning wind to breathe and a wind that makes one feel like he can get under the edge of a hill and heave the whole hill upside down. I walked out the corn row where we had come yesterday afternoon. I looked in front of me. I saw something. I saw it move. It was moving like a huge black rope winds around a
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windlass. "Steady," I says to my father. "Here is the bull blacksnake." He took one step up beside me and stood. His eyes grew wide apart. "What do you know about this," he said. "You have seen the bull blacksnake now," I said. "Take a good look at him! He is lying beside his dead mate. He has come to her. He, perhaps, was on her trail yesterday." The male snake had trailed her to her doom. He had come in the night, under the roof of stars, as the moon shed rays of light on the quivering clouds of green. He had found his lover dead. He was coiled beside her, and she was dead. The bull blacksnake lifted his head and followed us as we walked around the dead snake. He would have fought us to his death. He would have fought Bob to his death. "Take a stick," said my father, "and throw him over the hill so Bob won't find him. Did you ever see anything to beat that? I've heard they'd do that. But this is my first time to see it." I took a stick and threw him over the bank into the dewy sprouts on the cliff.
4. The orphaned swimming pool (by John Updike)
John Updike (1932—2009 ) is one of the most successful contemporary American writers. Updike is a perfectionist, a master of both technique and style. His short stories, humorous poems, and essays appear regularly and he has published a number of novels, among them Rabbit, Run (1960), perhaps his best work, and The Centaur (1963), which won the National Book Award for fiction. His short stories have been collected in several volumes, among them Pigeon Feathers (1962) and Museums and Women (1972), from which "The Orphaned Swimming Pool" is taken.
Marriages, like chemical unions, release upon dissolution packets of the energy locked up in their bonding. There is the piano no one wants, the cocker spaniel no one can take care of. Shelves of books suddenly stand revealed as burdensomely dated and unlikely to be reread; indeed, it is difficult to remember who read them in the first place. And what of those old skis in the attic? Or the doll house waiting to be repaired in the basement? The piano goes out of tune, the dog goes mad. The summer that the Turners got their divorce, their swimming pool had neither a master nor a mistress, though the sun beat down day after day, and a state of drought was declared in Connecticut. It was a young pool, only two years old, of the fragile type fashioned by laying a plastic liner within a carefully carved hole in the ground. The Turners' side yard looked infernal while it was being done; one bulldozer sank into the mud and had to be pulled free by another. But by midsummer the new grass was sprouting, the encircling flagstones were in place, the blue plastic tinted the water a heavenly blue, and it had to be admitted that the Turners had scored again. They were always a little in advance of their friends. He was a tall, hairy-backed man with long arms, and a nose flattened by football, and a sullen look of too much blood; she was a fine-boned blonde with dry blue eyes and lips usually held parted and crinkled as if about to ask a worrisome, or whimsical, question. They never seemed happier, nor their marriage healthier, than those two summers. They grew brown and supple and smooth with swimming. Ted would begin his day with a swim, before dressing to catch the train, and Linda would hold court all day amid crowds of wet matrons and children, and Ted would return from work to find a poolside cocktail party in progress, and the couple would end their day at midnight, when their friends had finally left, by swimming nude, before bed. What ecstasy! In darkness the water felt mild as milk and buoyant as helium, and the swimmers became giants, gliding from side to side in a single languorous stroke.
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The next May, the pool was filled as usual, and the usual after-school gangs of mothers and children gathered, but Linda, unlike her, stayed indoors. She could be heard within the house, moving from room to room, but she no longer emerged, as in the other summers, with a cheerful tray of ice and brace of bottles, and Triscuits and lemonade for the children. Their friends felt less comfortable about appearing, towels in hand, at the Turners' on weekends. Though Linda had lost some weight and looked elegant, and Ted was cumbersomely jovial, they gave off the faint, sleepless, awkward-making aroma of a couple in trouble. Then, the day after school was out, Linda fled with the children to her parents in Ohio. Ted stayed nights in the city, and the pool was deserted. Though the pump that ran the water through the filter continued to mutter in the lilacs, the cerulean pool grew cloudy. The bodies of dead horseflies and wasps dotted the still surface. A speckled plastic ball drifted into a corner beside the diving board and stayed there. The grass between the flagstones grew lank. On the glass-topped poolside table, a spray can of Off! had lost its pressure and a gin-and-tonic glass held a sere mint leaf. The pool looked desolate and haunted, like a stagnant jungle spring; it looked poisonous and ashamed. The postman, stuffing overdue notices and pornography solicitations into the mailbox, averted his eyes from the side yard politely. Some June weekends, Ted sneaked out from the city. Families driving to church glimpsed him dolefully sprinkling chemical substances into the pool. He looked pale and thin. He instructed Roscoe Chace, his neighbor on the left, how to switch on the Pump and change the filter, and how much chlorine and Algitrol should be added weekly. He explained he would not be able to make it out every weekend — as if the distance that for years he had travelled twice each day, gliding in and out of New York, had become an impossibly steep climb back into the past. Linda, he confided vaguely, had left her parents in Akron and was visiting her sister in Minneapolis. As the shock of the Turners' joint disappearance wore off, their pool seemed less haunted and forbidding. The Murtaugh children — the Murtaughs, a rowdy, numerous family, were the Turners' right-hand neighbors —- began to use it, without supervision. So Linda's old friends, with their children, began to show up, "to keep the Murtaughs from drowning each other." For if anything were to happen to a Murtaugh, the poor Turners (the adjective had become automatic) would be sued for everything, right when they could least afford it. It became, then, a kind of duty, a test of loyalty, to use the pool. July was the hottest in twenty-seven years. People brought their own lawn furniture over in station wagons and set it up. Teenage offspring and Swiss au-pair girls were established as lifeguards. A nylon rope with flotation corks, meant to divide the wading end from the diving end of the pool, was found coiled in the garage and reinstalled. Agnes Kleefield contributed an old refrigerator, which was wired to an outlet above Ted's basement workbench and used to store ice, quinine water, and soft drinks. Ari honor system shoebox containing change appeared beside it; a little lost-and-found — an array of forgotten sunglasses, flippers, towels, lotions, paperbacks, shirts, even underwear — materialized on the Turners' side steps. When people, that July, said, "Meet you 4 at the pool," they did not mean the public pool past the shopping center, or the country-club pool beside the first tee. They meant the Turners'. Restrictions on admission were difficult to enforce tactfully. A visiting Methodist bishop, two Taiwanese economists, an entire girls' softball team from Darien, an eminent Canadian poet, the archery champion of Hartford, the six members of a black rock group called the Good Intentions, an ex-mistress of Aly Khan, the lavender-haired mother-in-law of a Nixon adviser not quite of Cabinet rank, an infant of six weeks, a man who was killed the next day on the Merritt Parkway, a Filipino who could stay on the
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pool bottom for eighty seconds, two Texans who kept cigars in their mouths and hats on their heads, three telephone linemen, four expatriate Czechs, a student Maoist from Wesleyan, and the postman all swam, as guests, in the Turners' pool, though not all at Nice After the daytime crowd ebbed, and the shoebox was put back in the refrigerator, and the last au-pair girl took the last goosefleshes, wrinkled child shivering home to supper, there was a tide of evening activity, trysts (Mrs. Kleefield and the Nicholson boy, most notoriously) and what some called, overdramatically, orgies. True, late splashes and excited guffaws did often keep Mrs. Chace awake, and the Murtaugh children spent hours at their attic window with binoculars. And there was the evidence of the lost underwear. One Saturday early in August, the morning arrivals found an unknown car with New York plates parked in the garage. But cars of all sorts were so common — the parking tangle frequently extended into the road — that nothing much was thought of it, even when someone noticed that the bedroom windows upstairs were open. And nothing came of it, except that around suppertime, in the lull before the evening crowds began to arrive in force, Ted and an unknown woman, of the same physical type as Linda but brunette, swiftly exited from the kitchen door, got into the car, and drove back to New York. The few lingering babysitters and beaux thus unwittingly glimpsed the root of the divorce. The two lovers had been trapped inside the house all day; Ted was fearful of the legal consequences of their being seen by anyone who might write and tell Linda. The settlement was at a ticklish stage; nothing less than terror of Linda's lawyers would have led Ted to suppress his indignation at seeing, from behind the window screen, his private pool turned public carnival. For long thereafter, though in the end he did not marry the woman, he remembered that day when they lived together like fugitives in a cave, feeding on love and ice water, tiptoeing barefoot to the depleted cupboards, which they, arriving late last night, had hoped to stock in the morning, not foreseeing the onslaught of interlopers that would pin them in. Her hair, he remembered, had tickled his shoulders as she crouched behind him at the window, and through the angry pounding of his own blood he had felt her slim body breathless with the attempt not to giggle. August drew in, with cloudy days. Children grew bored with swimming. Roscoe Chace went on vacation to Italy; the pump broke down, and no one repaired it. Dead dragonflies accumulated on the surface of the pool. Small deluded toads hopped in and swam around hopelessly. Linda at last returned. From Minneapolis she had gone on to Idaho for six weeks, to be divorced. She and the children had burnt faces from riding and hiking; her lips looked drier and more quizzical than ever, still seeking to frame that troubling question. She stood at the window, in the house that already seemed to lack its furniture, at the same side window where the lovers had crouched, and gazed at the deserted pool. The grass around it was green from splashing, save where a long-lying towel had smothered a rectangle and left it brown. Aluminum furniture she didn't recognize lay strewn and broken. She counted a dozen bottles beneath the glass-topped table. The nylon divider had parted, and its two halves floated independently. The blue plastic beneath the colorless water tried to make a cheerful, otherworldly statement, but Linda saw that the pool in truth had no bottom, it held bottomless loss, it was one huge blue tear. Thank God no one had drowned in it. Except her. She saw that she could never live here again. In September the place was sold to a family with toddling infants, who for safety's sake have not only drained the pool but have sealed it over with iron pipes and a heavy mesh, and put warning signs around, as around a chained dog.
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5. The pleasures of solitude (by John Cheever)
John Cheever (1912—1982) is a well known American storyteller. He started on his literary career at the age of 16. In his works Cheever deals with the complexities of the life of the middle class, the inhabitants of small towns and suburbs of big cities.
One evening when Ellen Goodrich had just returned from the office to her room in Chelsea, she heard a light knock on her door. She knew no one in the city intimately; there was no one she could expect. She opened the door and found two small boys standing in the hallway. She supposed they were ten or eleven. Their clothing was thin and they were shaking with cold. "Florence Valle live here?" one of them asked. "I don't know anyone by that name," Ellen said. "Perhaps if you ask the landlady - she lives on the first floor." "We're looking for Florence Valle. She's his cousin," the second boy said, pointing to his friend. " She used to live here." "I'm very sorry," Ellen said, "but I don't know her." "Maybe she's moved," he said. "We walked all the way over here..." Ellen very seldom felt that she could afford pity and sympathy for other people, but the boys looked frightened and cold, and her desire to help them was stronger than her reserve. She noticed them staring beyond her to a dish of candy in the room. When she invited them to have a piece, they refused with a shy and elaborate politeness that made her want to take them in her arms. She suggested that they each take a piece of candy home and went into the room for the dish. They followed her. "You got a nice place here, Miss." "Yuh, you got a nice place here." Their faces were thin and solemn and their voices were hoarse. "Haven't you any overcoats, you boys?" she asked. "Are you going around in the cold dressed like that?" "We ain't got any overcoats, Miss." "I should think you'd take cold, walking around like that." "We ain't got any overcoats." They told her their names and ages when she asked for them, and said that they lived on the lower East Side. She had walked through the slums herself and she could imagine the squalor and neglect in which they must live. While she was talking with them she realized that it was the first time in more than a year that she had allowed anyone other than the landlady to come into her room. Having the boys there pleased her and she kept asking them questions until she caught the tone of her own excited voice. She stopped abruptly. "I guess you had better go now," she said. "I have some things to do." They thanked her for the candy and backed out of the room. Altogether, the encounter left her feeling generous and happy. Ellen was not a generous person. She lived in a Chelsea rooming house in order to bank as much of her salary as possible toward purchasing an annuity. It had always
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been difficult for her to find friends. During the ten years she had lived in New York she had suffered a great deal from loneliness, but this suffering was forgotten now because of the care with which she arranged her solitude. She could be unmerciful with herself and others. Her mother had once written asking if she would help her younger brother with a loan. "I think it will be better," Ellen replied, "if Harold experiences a little hardship. It is only in knowing hardship that he can understand the value of money. I don't pretend to be poor, but the little I have in the bank was put at a great sacrifice and I have no intention of lending it to Harold when we all know that he could have done as well himself if he tried. I think he owes it to you to do more than I have done, for, after all, you and Father spent more on his education than you spent on mine." She was twenty-eight at the time. After the boys had gone that night, Ellen changed from her dress into a house coat and cooked her supper. The cold wind rattled the windows and made her appreciate the warm, light room. She washed the dishes and sat down to read a rental-library book. This was the way she spent most of her evenings, and she was proud of the fact she was no longer restless and lonely. But her mind kept returning to the boys. She saw their thin, solemn faces, and when she thought of them walking in the cold she was filled with sadness and pity. Her uneventful life led her to attach significance to the few irregular things that happened to her. There was some purpose, she felt, some reason for this accidental meeting. A week later, at the same hour, there was a knock on the door and, she found the boys in the hallway again. "We were walking by." "We thought we'd come to see you." "Well, I'm very glad you stopped," Ellen said, and realized that her voice could be heard by the other tenants whose doors opened into the hallway. There was nothing wrong in what she was doing, but at the same time she didn't want the other tenants to know that she was asking strange boys into her room, so she waited until she had closed the door after them before she spoke again. "I'm very glad you stopped," she repeated. She invited them to sit down. Then she thought of giving them a drink of Coca-Cola, but this seemed a little too forward. They told her they were Italian, and she asked them if they knew how to make a veal parmigiana, something she had always wanted to learn. They didn't know, but they told her about other Italian dishes. One of the boys, the older, seemed interested in some ornaments on Ellen's dresser and she showed them to him. The younger boy took a cigarette end from his pocket and lighted it. "Aren't you too young to smoke?" Ellen asked. He looked at his friend and they both giggled. Ellen colored. The looks they exchanged and their laughter frightened her. "Those are called maracas," she said nervously, pointing to a pair of painted maracas that hung on the wall. "I bought them when I went for a Caribbean cruise in 1933. They use them in orchestras in the Caribbean." The incident of the cigarette seemed to have made the boys feel more at ease. Ellen might have asked them to leave, but she hesitated. The younger boy put out his cigarette in her pin tray and she watched him without saying anything. She was
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enjoying herself in a way she could not quite understand. They told her stories about their families, about their sisters, stories that were sly and lewd and that she should have stopped them from telling. At the end of half an hour she asked them to leave. They had been gone for some time before she discovered that her purse was missing. If they had been in the room then, she might have murdered them She took hold of the back of a chair and held it rigidly until her arms and her shoulders ached. "They don't have to steal!" she cried. "They don't have to steal! They don't have to!" She threw herself onto the bed and wept for a long time. When she sat up, she composed a discourse on honesty and imagined herself delivering it to them. She thought of calling the police, but when she tried to describe what had happened as if she were talking to the police, it sounded unconvincing and even suspicious. She went into the bathroom and washed her face with a cold cloth. "They don't have to steal," she said. "They don't have to steal. I would have given them money if they need money." She walked the floor, talking angrily to herself. In the morning, Ellen decided to forget about the boys; it was better to lose the fifteen or twenty dollars that had been in her purse than to lose her peace of mind. Usually she could forget things that troubled her, but this time it was not so easy. In the back of her mind was the feeling she had somehow made a mistake that threatened her whole way of living. A few nights later, on a Wednesday, someone knocked on the door again. She opened it and found the two boys standing in the corridor. She should have been prepared. She had rehearsed often enough the things she wanted to say, but now, when she tried to speak, she could think of nothing. "Come in here," she said finally. "Come in here, both of you. I want to speak to you." They followed her into the room. "You don't have to steal," she said. "You ought to know that you don't have to steal." Her voice had risen and she was trembling so that she had to lean against the wall. "If you need money, if you really need money, there are honest ways of getting it. You stole my purse. When you were here last lime." "We didn't steal nothing, Miss." "We ain't thieves." "Well, there's no use in standing here arguing about it," she said. "Get out." "Give us five dollars. Miss." "Get out," Ellen said. "Get out of here before I call a policeman!" They backed out of the room and she closed and locked the door and listened to them going down the hall. That night she dreamed about them. She could not remember the details of the dream clearly, but when she woke up she was depressed and frightened. Her sleep was troubled for the rest of that week. On Friday she felt that she was coming down with a cold and got permission to leave the office at noon. She picked up a book at a rental library and bought some groceries for dinner. In spite of her illness, she enjoyed her solitude more that afternoon than she had for some time. She read until dusk. Before turning on the light, she went to the window to draw the shade. A swift snow was falling slantwise between her window and the back yards. She bathed and went to bed at seven, slightly feverish. She was half asleep when she heard them knocking on the door. She remembered that she had forgotten to put the latch down. They talked for a while in the hall, knocked again,
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and then pushed the door open. When they saw her lying on the bed, they went over and stared at her. "You sick. Miss?" "Please leave me alone," she said weakly. "Please get out." "We want some money. Miss." "Can't you see that I'm sick?" she said. It was an effort for her to talk. "Please get out. I haven't any money." One of them saw her purse on the table. He went to it, removed the change purse, and started to take out the bills. She got out of bed and struck him, but already he had the money in his hand. She tried to get it away from him, but he was stronger than she; he was able to free his hand, and both boys ran out of the room and down the hall. She stood in the doorway shouting, "Mrs. Duval, Mrs. Duval!" There was no answer, and she threw herself on the bed, too sick and tired to cry. Ten minutes later the landlady knocked on the door and asked what the matter was. Ellen told her she thought she had heard some strange men in the corridor and the lock on the front door should be fixed. The next morning, Ellen decided to move. It was not easy for her, but she was desperate. One of the girls in her office recommended a rooming house on East Thirty-seventh Street, and Ellen went there that night and engaged a place. She took her possessions over the following night in a taxi. The new room was not as pleasant as the one she had left, but she tried hard to make it seem familiar. She felt that in a way she was beginning a new life. She walked to the rooming house the next night from the office. It was raining hard, and as she turned off Madison Avenue onto Thirty-seventh Street she saw them standing in front of the house, staring up at the windows. The rain was cold and the boys were without hats and coats. She walked down to Thirty-fourth Street and ate her dinner in a restaurant there. It was eight o'clock before she started back, and they had gone. She went to her room, set her umbrella in a saucer, and changed from her wet dress into her house coat. Someone knocked on the door and she opened it and they were standing there. "How did you know I was living here?" "The lady in the other place told us." "For once and for all, get out. Leave me alone, leave me alone, can't you?" She took her umbrella and struck the younger one on the shoulders with all her strength. He fell to his knees and then to the floor and she continued to beat him while the other began shrieking, "Help! Police! Police!" so that his voice could be heard in the street.
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