John Cheever: Falconer

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," said Eben. "This is my brother Zeke. We will continue to read Romola by George Eliot. Chapter Five. 'The Via de' Bardi, a street noted in the history of Florence, lies in Oltrarno, or that portion of the city which clothes the southern bank of the river. It extends from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza de' Mozzi at the head of the Ponte alle Grazie; its right-hand line of houses and walls being backed by the rather steep ascent which in the fifteenth century was known as the hill of Bogoli, the famous stone-quarry whence the city got its pavement-of dangerously unstable consistence when penetrated by rains…”

The blind were very inattentive. The rouged woman fell asleep and snored lightly, but she snored. The amputee wheeled herself out of the room after a page or two. Eben went on reading to the near-dead, the truncated, the blind and the dying. Considering Farragut's passion for blue sky, he thought his brother contemptible; although they looked enough like one another to be taken for twins. Farragut did not like to look at his brother and he kept his eyes on the floor. Eben read to the end of the chapter and as they were leaving Farragut asked him why he had chosen Romola.

"It was their choice," said Eben.

"But the red one fell asleep," said Farragut.

"They often do," he said. "One doesn't, this late in life, blame them for anything. One doesn't take offense."

On the drive home Farragut sat as far from his brother as possible. Marcia opened the door. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Eben," she said, "but your wife is very upset. We were talking about the family and something she remembered or something I said made her cry."

"She cries all the time," said Eben. "Don't pay any attention to her. She cries at parades, rock music; last year she cried through the whole World Series. Don't take it seriously, don't blame yourself. Do sit down and let me get you a drink."

Marcia's face was pale. She saw the tragic household, Farragut knew, much more clearly than he. Eben was working at that time as a paid executive for some charitable foundation that carried on the tradition of distributing skinny chickens. His marriage could be dismissed, if one were that superficial, as an extraordinary sentimental and erotic collision. There were the lives of the two children to be considered, and their lives seemed ruined by the reverberations of this matrimonial crash. The young man, Eben's only son, was serving a two-year sentence in the Cincinnati workhouse for his part in some peace demonstration against some war. Rachel, the daughter, had tried three times to kill herself. Farragut had exorcised the details, but they would be remembered by Marcia. Rachel had first gone into the attic with a quart of vodka, twenty Seconals and one of those dry-cleaner's bags that threaten suffocation. She had been rescued by the barking of a dog. She had then thrown herself into a barbecue pit after a large party in New Mexico and had been rescued again-disfigured, but rescued. She had then, a month later, blown off a piece of her face with a sixteen-gauge shotgun, using a number nine shell. Rescued again, she had written two high-spirited and passionate letters to her uncle about her determination to die. These had inspired in Farragut a love for the blessed paradigm, the beauty of the establishment, the glory of organized society. Rachel was an aberration and Farragut would sweep her under the rug as her father seemed to have done. Eben's house, the cradle of these tragedies, was distinguished by its traditional composure.

The house was very old and so was most of the furniture. Eben had, quite unselfconsciously, reconstructed the environment of what he claimed was his miserable youth. The blue china had been brought from Canton in a sailing ship by their great-grandfather and they had learned to crawl on the hieroglyphs woven into the Turkey rugs. Marcia and Zeke sat down and Eben went into the pantry to make some drinks. His wife, Carrie, was in the kitchen, sitting on a stool and crying.

"I'm leaving," she sobbed, "I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to your shit anymore."

"Oh, shut up," Eben shouted. "Shut up. Shut up. You've been leaving me weekly or oftener for as long as I can remember. You started leaving me before you asked me to marry you. My God! Unless you rent space in a warehouse, there Isn't a place in the county with enough room for your clothes. You're about as portable as the Metropolitan Opera Company's production of Turandot. Just to get your crap out of here would keep the moving men busy for weeks. You have hundreds of dresses, hats, fur coats and shoes. I have to hang my clothes in the laundry. And then asked him if it was hard to get on Trial and Error and he said no, he thought he could arrange it. So he called me a few days later and said he thought they could use me on Trial and Error the next day. It's a live show and I was to get to the studio at five for makeup and so forth. It's one of those shows where you pay forfeits and what you had to do that night was to walk over a water tank on a tightrope. They gave me a suit of clothes because I'd get wet and I had to sign all sorts of releases. So I got into this suit and went through the first part of the show, smiling all the time at the cameras. I mean I was smiling at Carrie. I thought that for once she might be looking at my smile. Then I climbed up the ladder to the tightrope and started walking over the pool and fell in. The audience didn't laugh too uproariously so they taped in a lot of laughter. So then I got dressed and came home and shouted, 'Hey, hey, did you see me on television?” She was lying on a sofa in the living room by the big set. She was crying. So then I thought I'd done the wrong thing, that she was crying because I looked like such a fool, falling into the tank. She went on crying and sobbing and I said, 'What's the matter, dear?' and she said, 'They shot the mother polar bear, they shot the mother polar bear!' Wrong show. I got the wrong show, but you can't say that I didn't try."

When he got up to collect their glasses he moved the curtain at t he window where he sat and Farragut saw that behind the curtain were two empty vodka bottles. That might account for his stolid, seafaring walk, his thick speech and his air of stupid composure. So with his wife sobbing in the kitchen and his poor daughter crazy and his son in jail, Farragut asked, "Eben, why do you live like this?"

"Because I love it," said Eben. Then he bent down, raised the old Turkey carpet and kissed it with his wet mouth.

"I know one thing," shouted Farragut. "I don't want to be your brother. I don't want anyone on the street, anywhere in the world, to say that I look like you. I'll be any kind of a freak or addict before I'll be mistaken for you. I'll do anything before I'll kiss a rug.

"Kiss my ass," said Eben.

"You’ve got Dad's great sense of humor," Farragut said.

"He wanted you to be killed," screamed Eben. "I bet you didn't know that. He loved me, but he wanted you to be killed. Mother told me. He had an abortionist come out to the house. Your own father wanted you to be killed."

Then Farragut struck his brother with a fire iron. The widow testified that Farragut had struck his brother eighteen to twenty times, but she was a liar, and Farragut thought the doctor who corroborated this lie contemptible.

The trial that followed was, he thought, a mediocre display of a decadent judiciary. He was convicted as a drug addict and a sexual adventurer and sentenced to fail for the murder of his brother. "Your sentence would be lighter were you a less fortunate man," said the judge, "but society has lavished and wasted her riches upon you and utterly failed to provoke in you that conscience that is the stamp of an educated and civilized human being and a useful member of society." Marcia had said nothing in his defense, although she had smiled at him when she was on the stand, smiled at him sadly while she agreed to their description of the grueling humiliation of being married to a drug addict who put the procurement of his fix miles ahead of his love for his wife and his only son. There were the stalenesses of the courthouse to remember, the classroom window shades, the sense of an acute tedium that was like the manipulations of the most pitiless and accomplished torturer, and if the last he would see of the world was the courthouse, he claimed he had no regrets, although he would, in fact, have clung to any floorboard, spittoon or worn bench if he thought that it might save him.