John Cheever: Bullet Park

He thought that he had seen that night the writing of theatrical history and he had evolved some sentimental theory about the tragedy of the sublime. He got Frank Loesser all mixed up with Orpheus and when he read in the paper that Loesser had divorced he thought-sadly-that this had something to do with the perfection of Guys and Dolls. He had no interest in going to any of Loesser's other shows since he was convinced that they would be tragically inferior. No man-no artist-could repeat such a triumph. He seemed to feel that Loesser, like the architect of St. Basil's, should have plucked out his eyes. That opening night seemed to him to have had the perfection of a midsummer day whose sublimity hinted at the inevitability of winter and death.

He began to sing along with the recording. He had bought the recording immediately after the opening and had not replaced it, so that its tonal values were faded. He didn't care. He dispensed with the words and substituted a series of inchoate noises (dadadadad) but on "Luck Be a Lady Tonight" he got to his feet, smashed his fist into his palm and sang the verses he remembered. On the last chorus he made a groping gesture to illustrate a man reaching for stars and when the last note had been played he sighed and said: "That's a great show, really great. It's too bad you never saw it. Well, good night."

Now on this Sunday morning he seemed to be looking for the boy. Tony's room was cold. The boy kept the heat turned off and slept with both windows open. The cold made the room seem to have been emptied for more than the morning. He might have been gone for a year, Nailles felt, but why? He looked around with love at the intimate and common clutter: rucked and cleated football shoes, a football sweater, a pile of books including Stephen Crane, Somerset Maugham, Samuel Butler and Hemingway. Sometime earlier, looking for a dictionary, he had taken one from his son's bookcase and as he opened the dictionary fifty or more printed photographs of naked women slipped and cataracted to the floor. He had been provoked, it had been his principal reaction. He examined the photographs, bringing his very limited knowledge of women to this gallery of lewd strangers. The paper was cheap and he guessed that the pictures had been cut from those nudist magazines that one finds in some shoeshine parlors and barber shops. He was not in the least dismayed that his beloved son had chosen to collect these pictures instead of stamps, Indian arrowheads, geological specimens or numismatic rarities. He dropped the pictures into a wastebasket and looked up the spelling of the word that had concerned him. Sometime later, perhaps a month later, the boy asked: "Have you been using my dictionary?"

"Why yes," Nailles said, "and I threw away all those pictures."

"Oh," the boy said and neither of them said anything more.

On the table by the window was a tape recorder he had given the boy as a birthday present. He would no more have switched it on than he would have opened the boy's mail. His sense of these aspects of privacy was scrupulous and immutable; but had he turned on the recorder he would have heard his son's voice, lowered half an octave by reproduction, saying: "You dirty old baboon, you dirty old baboon. For as long as I can remember it seems to me that whenever I'm trying to go to sleep I can hear you saying dirty things. You say the dirtiest things in the whole world, you dirty, filthy, horny old baboon." However he didn't turn on the recorder.

He changed out of the business suit he wore to church into work clothes. He had once suggested to the vestry that early communicants be encouraged to attend church in the sports and work clothing most of them wore on Sunday, but Father Ran-some had countered by asking if he would be expected to serve the sacraments in tennis shorts. He went to the cellar, where he fueled the chain saw with gasoline and oil. South of the house was a small valley in which a grove of twelve elms had been lingeringly destroyed by the elm beetle. Nailles spent his weekends felling the dead trees and cutting and splitting the wood into fireplace lengths. The trees had preserved no trace of their lachrymose beauty. They had dropped their upper branches and shed their bark and the wood shone like bone in the winter light, half truncated and ungainly, the landscape for some nightmare or battlefield. He chose a tree and planned his cut. He was proud, in fact complacent, about his expert-ness with a chain saw and enjoyed maneuvering the howling, screaming engine and its murderous teeth. The valley was protected and was, that morning, so unseasonably warm that the dead wood had released some fragrance-a smell of spice that reminded him of the cold churches in Rome. Spring. He heard the belling of a wood dove or an owl. The air was soft but seemed much less than idyllic-a troubled softness-the unease of all change. Sexagesima. The Epistle? What was it? Then he remembered. "Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." Nellie then heard the howling of the saw.

One morning Tony refused to get out of bed.

"I'm not sick," he said when his mother took his temperature. "I just feel terribly sad. I just don't feel like getting up."

His parents decided to let him take the day off.

Five days later he was still in bed.

Nellie was to think of the three doctors who came to treat him as suitors in some myth or legend where a choice of three caskets-Gold, Silver and Lead-was offered to the travelers. In one of the caskets there would be the key to some great fortune-jewels and a bride. It was the element of guesswork that reminded her of the legendary princes. One by one they stood over her son trying to divine or guess the force that had stricken him. Gold? Silver? Lead? The first to come was the general practitioner.

Dr. Mullin came unwillingly since at this time doctors never visited their patients at home. When critical illness struck, the victim was taken to the hospital in an ambulance where residents and interns performed the final rites. Dr. Mullin urged Nellie to bring Tony to the office. It was difficult for Nellie to explain that Tony refused to get out of bed. When this was finally made clear Mullin agreed to come to the house at noon.

He arrived in an unwashed Volkswagen with a dented fender. He was a young man-younger than Nellie-with an optimism, a brightness, that seemed untouched and uninformed by what he must have learned about the inalienable power of sickness, disease and death. This had actually harmed his practice, since patients, faced with the grave, did not like a healer so inexperienced in grief. He was not a blustering man and he was not a fool but the forcefulness of his optimism was a kind of disturbance like those sudden winds that fling open doors and scatter papers. Nellie showed him up to Tony's room and waited downstairs. She could hear Mullin's resonant and cheerful voice and Tony's quiet replies.

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with him," the doctor said when he came down. "I've taken a specimen and some blood and I'll have the laboratory check these. If he gets up tomorrow I'll give him a cardiogram but I'm pretty sure there's nothing wrong. As a matter of fact I haven't seen as perfect a specimen in a long time. Of course he's a young man but he's certainly enjoying all the benefits of his time of life. This doesn't get him out of bed but it may be a passing depression. If he doesn't get out of bed tomorrow I'll give you some pills that ought to do the trick." He wrote a prescription and smiled at Nellie. Our relationships with healers are swift, intimate and in some ways tender, and for a moment Nellie loved the doctor. He asked her to call him in the morning at around eleven and she did.