John Cheever: Bullet Park

As Mrs. Heathcup flushed toilets, opened and shut doors, the stranger, whose name was Hammer, felt a lack of interest in her house increase until it seemed like a kind of melancholy, but the tragic and brightly lighted place was commodious and efficient and one lived in such places. There was the ghost of poor Heathcup, but every house has a ghost. "I think it's what we want," he said. I'll bring Mrs. Hammer out tomorrow and let her decide."

Hazzard drove him back to the railroad station then and left him there. Suburban waiting rooms are not maintained and the place had been sacked. Broken windows let in the night wind. The clock face was smashed. The hands of the clock were gone. The architect, so many years ago, had designed the building with some sense of the erotic and romantic essence of travel, but all his inventions had been stripped or defaced and Hammer found himself in a warlike ruin. He opened the paper and read: "The Lithgow Club had its annual dinner on Thursday evening at Harvey 's restaurant. The program began with a parade of sweethearts-wives of the members-which was followed by a demonstration of the hula given by Mrs. Leonard A. Atkinson who was accompanied by her husband on the ukulele…

"Seventeen debutantes were presented to society at the Gorey Brook Country Club…

"Mr. Lewis Harwich was burned to death last night when a can of charcoal igniter exploded and set fire to his clothing during a barbecue party in the garden of his home at 23 Redburn Circle…

"School taxes expected to increase."

He caught the 7:14.

Holy Communion. Sexagesima. Nailles heard. a cricket in the chancel and the noise of a tin drum from the rain gutters while he said his prayers. His sense of the church calendar was much more closely associated with the weather than with the revelations and strictures in Holy Gospel. St. Paul meant blizzards. St. Mathias meant a thaw. For the marriage at Cana and the cleansing of the leper the oil furnace would still be running although the vents in the stained-glass windows were sometimes open to the raw spring air. Abstain from fornication. Possess your vessel in honor. Jesus departs from the coast of Tyre and Sidon as the skiing ends. For the crucifixion a bobsled stands stranded in a flowerbed, its painter coiled among the early violets. The trout streams open for the resurrection. The crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming. St. James and Revelations fell on the first warm days of summer when you could smell the climbing roses by the window and when an occasional stray bee would buzz into the house of God and buzz out again. Trinity carried one into summer, the dog days and the drought, and the parable of the Samaritan was spoken as the season changed and the gentle sounds of the night garden turned as harsh as hardware. The flesh lusteth against the spirit to the smoke of leaf fires as did the raising of the dead. Then one was back again with St. Andrew and the snows of Advent.

This division of Nailles's attention during worship had begun when, as a young boy, he had spent most of his time in church examining the forms captured in the grained-oak pews. In certain lights and frames of mind they seemed quite coherent. There was a charge of Mongol horsemen in the third pew on the right, next to the font. In the pew ahead of that there appeared to be a broad lake-some body of water-with a lighthouse on a peninsula. In the pew across the aisle there was a clash of arms and in the pew ahead of that there seemed to be a herd of cattle. This lack of concentration did not distress Nailles. He did not expect to part with his flesh or his memory in the narthex. His concerns in church remained at least partially matter-of-fact, and on this winter morning he noticed that Mrs. Trencham was carrying on her particular brand of competitive churchmanship. Mrs. Trencham was a recent convert-she had been a Unitarian-and she was more than proud of her grasp of the responses and courtesies in the service; she was bellicose. At the first sound of the priest's voice in the vestarium she was on her feet and she fired out her amens and her mercies in a stern and resonant voice, timed well ahead of the rest of the congregation as if she were involved in a sort of ecclesiastical footrace. Her genuflections were profound and graceful, her credo and confession were letter-perfect, her Lamb of God was soulful, and if she was given any competition, as she sometimes was, she would throw in a few signs of the cross as a proof of the superiority of her devotions. Mrs. Trencham was a winner.

There were chrysanthemums on the altar. The cloth was purple. Only the two candles that represent the flesh and the spirit burned. Charlie Stuart came in and took a forward pew. Something about his appearance perplexed Nailles. His clothing hung on him loosely. He must have lost weight; but how much? Forty pounds. Fifty pounds. The voluminousness of his jacket gave him a shocking, wasted and decrepit look. Cancer, Nailles wondered. But their wives were good friends and if it had been cancer he would have heard. Truths and rumors of cancer moved through the neighborhood as freely as the wind. The sight of his stricken friend forced onto him some heavy thoughts about the mysteriousness of infirmity and death. Thoughts of death brought him around to the fact that Charlie's father had died in an airplane crash in South America six months ago and this brought him around to the cheerful conclusion that Charlie was wearing his father's suits. How simple it all was! He beamed at this triumph of practicality over death. Then the strangers came in.

The handful of men and women who attended Holy Communion were all well known to Nailles. New communicants were seldom seen, and his curiosity was legitimate. They were perhaps in their forties-the man's hair was brown-superior products of heterosexual monogamy. She genuflected deeply, curtsied in fact. He gave the cross a stiff nod. At the mention of the Virgin Mary in the Credo she genuflected again while he remained standing. She had been a very pretty woman and would probably never lose the authority this good fortune had given her when she was younger. His face was scrubbed, decent and bright. But for its brightness it might have seemed commonplace. They spoke the responses in a clear voice.

She was, Nailles thought, in her grace and loveliness one of those women who seem to bask in the extraordinary and visionary state of holy matrimony… Regret, he thought, had not left a line on her face. She would excel in all her roles-ardent, clever, sage and loving. Matrimony seemed invented for her kind; indeed her kind might have had a hand in its invention. Someone less sympathetic than Nailles would have singled him out as one of those men who, at the summit of their perfection, would be discovered to have embezzled two million dollars from the accounts entrusted to him in order to finance the practice and blackmail of his savage and unnatural sexual appetites. The same critic would imagine her to be bored, vindictive, a secret sherry drinker who dreamed nightly of being debauched in a male harem. But to Nailles, on this rainy morning, they seemed invincible. Their honor, passion and intelligence were genuine. Their lives would not be undangerous but they would bring to their disappointments and their successes an immutable brand of common sense.

When the peace that passes understanding was dispersed among them, the priest left the altar and muttered a prayer from the vestarium. The sounds of muttered prayer seemed to Nailles to have an organic antiquity; to fall on his ear like the grating sound of a wave. The acolyte extinguished the lights of the flesh and the spirit, Nailles finished up his devotions and went down the aisle behind the strangers.

"We're the Hammers," the stranger said to the priest.