"Bullet Park" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cheever John)

II

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.

Nailles did not think this funny, anticipating the fact that almost everyone else in the neighborhood would. How many hundreds or perhaps thousands of cocktail parries would they have to live through, side by side: Hammer and Nailles. Nailles claimed not to be a superstitious man but he did believe in the mysterious power of nomenclature. He believed, for example, that people named John and Mary never divorced. For better for worse, in madness and in saneness they seemed bound together for eternity by the simplicity of their names. They might loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep and commit mayhem, but they were not free to divorce. Tom, Dick and Harry could go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death could separate John and Mary. How much worse was Hammer and Nailles.

"Welcome to Christ's Church," the priest was exclaiming. "Welcome to Bullet Park. Father Frisbee did write to me about you." Father Frisbee had probably not gone into their finances, but Father Ransome, at a glance; guessed them to be good for at least five hundred a year; although he had experienced many disappointments. The Follansbees, for instance, who kept saddle horses and went to Europe every summer, dropped a dollar into the plate whenever they came to church and let it go at that. On top of this they very likely claimed a tax exemption of a thousand. Live and learn. "Mr. and Mrs. Hammer," he said, "may I present your neighbor Mr. Nailles." He laughed.

The look they exchanged was deeply curious and in some ways hostile. The stranger evidently anticipated the unwanted union that the sameness of their names would enforce in such a place. Nailles, who detested genealogy, crests, idle investigations into the elegance of time gone, spoke from a conflict of feeling when he said: "Our name used to be de Noailles."

"I've never looked into the history of our name," said the stranger. He could have beeri unfriendly. He took his wife's arm and left the church.

"Tell me," the priest asked Nailles, "what's happened about Tony and the confirmation class."

"He's playing varsity basketball," said Nailles quite loudly. The Hammers were still within hearing. "He's the only member of his form on the varsity squad and I hate to ask him to give it up."

"Oh well," said Father Ransome, "the bishop will come again in the spring but I suppose he'll be playing baseball then."

"I'm afraid you're right," said Nailles, yielding his place to Mrs. Trencham, who hinted at a curtsy and would probably have kissed the priest's ring had he worn one, but his fingers were bare.

Driving away from church Nailles turned on his windshield wiper although the rain had let up. The reason for this was that (at the time of which I'm writing) society had become so automative and nomadic that nomadic signals or means of communication had been established by the use of headlights, parking lights, signal lights and windshield wipers. The evening paper described the issues involved and the suitable signals. Hang the child murderer. (Headlights.) Reduce the state income tax. (Parking lights.) Abolish the secret police. (Emergency signal.) The diocesan bishop had suggested that churchgoers turn on their windshield wipers to communicate their faith in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. He drove on through a neighborhood where all the houses stood on acre or half-acre lots. All the houses were white. His own place was at the western edge of the town. He had three acres. At the edge of his property was a sign that said: "No dumping. $50 fine. Violators will be prosecuted," Below the sign were a gutted automobile, three defunct television sets and a soiled mattress. The night population of Bullet Park was sparse but its most inscrutable and mysterious members were the scavengers' opposite- the dumpers. Four or five times a year Nailles would find on his property a collection of broken refrigerators, television sets, maimed and unidentifiable automobiles and always a few mattresses, rent, stained, human and obscene. The mattresses were ubiquitous. The town clerk had explained to him that the cost and inconvenience of legitimate dumping outweighed the scrap value of the rubbish. It was cheaper and easier to drive up to Bullet Park from the city and dump your waste than to have some professional haul it away. No violator had ever been caught and prosecuted. The problem for Nailles was merely emotional-Nellie would call the clerk and a truck would haul the stuff away in the morning-but his anger at seeing his land disfigured and his sadness and unease at the human allusions of this intimate and domestic rubbish disturbed him.

Nailles's house (white) was one of those rectilinear Dutch Colonials with a pair of columns at the door and an interior layout so seldom varied that one could, standing in the hallway with its curved staircase, correctly guess the disposition of every stick of furniture and almost every utility from the double bed in the northeast master's room through the bar in the pantry to the washing machine in the laundry basement. Nailles was met in the hall by an old red setter named Tessie whom he had trained and hunted with for twelve years. Tessie was getting deaf and now, whenever the screen door slammed, she would mistake this for the report of a gun and trot out onto the lawn, ready to retrieve a bird or a rabbit. Tessie's muzzle, her pubic hair and her footpads had turned white and it was difficult for her to climb stairs. In the evening, when he went to bed, Nailles would give her a boost. She sometimes cried out in pain. The cries were piteous and senile and the only such cries (or the first such cries) the house had heard since Nailles had bought the place. Nailles spoke to the old bitch with a familiarity that could seem foolish. He wished her good morning and asked her how she had slept. When he tapped the barometer and looked out at the sky he asked her opinion on the weather. He invited her to have a piece of toast, talked with her about the editorials in the Times and urged her, like some headmaster, to have a good day when he left for the train. When he returned in the evening he gave her some crackers or peanuts while he mixed the cocktails and often lighted a wood fire as much for her pleasure as anything else. He had decided that should a time come when she would have to be killed he would take her out behind the rose garden and shoot her himself. As she had grown old she had developed two common frailties. She was afraid of heights and thunderstorms. When the first peal of thunder sounded she would seek out Nailles and stay at his side until the violence had definitely gone into the next county. Nailles still hunted with her in the autumn.

Nellie was frying bacon in the kitchen and he kissed her and embraced her passionately. Nailles loved Nellie. If he had a manifest destiny it was to love Nellie. Should Nellie die he might immolate himself on her pyre, although the thought that Nellie might die had never occurred to him. He thought her immortal. The intenseness of his monogamy, the absoluteness of his belief in the holiness of matrimony, was thought by a surprising number of people to be morbid, aberrant and devious. In the course of events many other women were made available to Nailles but when some ardent divorcee, widow or wayward housewife attacked him, his male member would take a painful attitude of disinterest. It would seem to summon him home. It was a domesticated organ with a love of home cooking, open fires and the thighs of Nellie. Had he any talent he would have written a poem to the thighs of Nellie. The idea had occurred to him. He sincerely would have liked to commemorate his spiritual and fleshly love. The landscapes that he beheld when he raised her nightgown made his head swim. What beauty; what incredible beauty. Here was the keystone to his love of the visible world.

They ate breakfast in the dining room. Nailles went to the hallway and shouted up the stairs to his son: "Breakfast's ready, Tony."

"But he isn't here, darling," Nellie said. "He's at the Pendletons'. You drove him over on your way to church."

"Oh yes," said Nailles, but he seemed bewildered. He never seemed quite to understand that the boy was free to move in and out of his house, in and out of his orbit and his affections. Knowing that the boy was away, having in fact driven him to an airport and put him on a plane, he would then return home and look for him in the garden. The love Nailles felt for his wife and his only son seemed like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround them, cover them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic.

Sitting at their breakfast table Nailles and Nellie seemed to have less dimension than a comic strip, but why was this? They had erotic depths, origins, memories, dreams and seizures of melancholy and enthusiasm. Nailles sighed. He was thinking of his mother. She had suffered a stroke four months ago and had never quite regained consciousness. She was a patient in a nursing home in the west end of the village. Nailles visited her every Sunday and remembered uneasily his visit of a week ago.

The nursing home was one of those large places, the favorite of undertakers, that had been made obsolete by the disappearance of a servant class. There was a crystal chandelier and a marble floor in the vestibule but the furniture seemed to have been gathered from some ancient porch and the flowers on the table were made of wax. The director was a Swede and must have been a prosperous Swede since his rates began at one hundred and fifty dollars a week; but he did not spend his money on clothes. His trousers shone and he wore a shapeless brown jacket of cotton. He spoke without an accent but in the pleasant, singing way of Scandinavians. "Dr. Powers was here yesterday," he sang, "but he had nothing to report. Her blood pressure is a hundred and seventy-two. Her heart is damaged but still very strong. She is getting twenty-two cc.'s of PLM six times a day and the usual anticoagulants." The director had received no medical education but he displayed the medical information that had rubbed onto him with the same flair with which a green soldier will display his military nomenclature. "The hairdresser came on Wednesday but I didn't have her hair touched up. You asked me not to."

"My mother never dyed her hair," Nailles said.

"Yes, I know," the director said, "but most of my clients like to see their parents looking well. I call them my dolls," he said, speaking with genuine tenderness. "They look like people and yet they're really not." Nailles wondered darkly if the director had played with dolls. How else could he have hit on this comparison. "We dress them. We undress them. We have their hair arranged. We talk with them but of course they can't answer. I think of them as my dolls."

"Could I see her," Nailles asked.

"Certainly."

The director led him up the marble stairs and opened the door to his mother's room. It was a small bedroom with a single window. It would have been a child's bedroom when the house contained a family. "She spoke last Thursday," the director said. "The nurse was feeding her. She said, 'I'm living in a foxhole.' Of course her speech was blurred. Now I'll leave you alone." He closed the door and Nailles said: "Mother, Mother…"

Her white hair was thin. Her teeth were in a glass on a table by the bed. She breathed lightly and moved her left hand on the covers. Nailles had pled with the doctor to, as he put it, let her die, but the doctor had said that it was his responsibility to save lives. Inert, uncomprehending, the emaciated figure still had for him an immense emotional power. She had been in all things a fair woman-kindly, decent and loving-and that she should be so cruelly smitten and left so close to death challenged Nailles's belief in the fitness of things. She should, he thought, have been rewarded for her excellence by a graceful demise. He took the deathly wages of sin quite literally. The wicked were sick, the good were robust; although her inertness made these the opinions of a simpleton. Her hand moved and he noticed then that she wore her diamond rings. Some nurse, playing doll, must have slipped them onto her fingers. "Mother," he asked, "Mother, is there anything I can do for you? Would you like Tony to come and visit you? Would you like to see Nellie?" He was talking to himself.

Nailles then thought of his father. The old man had been a crack shot, a lucky fisherman, a heavy drinker and the life of his club. Nailles remembered returning from college in his freshman year. He had brought his roommate with him. He admired his roommate and presented him proudly to his father at the railroad station, but the old man raked the stranger with an instantaneous look of scorn and rejection and gave a perceptible shake of his head at the incredible bad taste his son had displayed in the choice of a companion. Nailles had thought they would go home for dinner but his father took them instead to a hotel where there was a band and dancing. When he began to order the dinner Nailles saw that his father was very drunk. He joked with the waitress, made a grab at her backside and spilled his water. When the band began to play "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" he left the table, made his way through the dancers, took the baton away from the conductor and led the band. Everyone in the restaurant was amused but Nailles who, had he possessed a pistol, would have shot his father in the back.

The old man shook his white head, weaved, bobbed, called for fortissimo and pianissimo and gave a hilarious impersonation of an orchestral conductor. It was one of his most successful acts at the club. The band laughed, the conductor laughed, the waitresses put down their trays to watch and Nailles sank deeper and deeper into his abyss of misery and unease. He could leave the place and take a taxi home but the already touchy relationship between himself and his father would only worsen. He excused himself and went to the toilet, where he leaned on a washbasin. It was the only way he had to express his grief. When he returned to the table the performance was over and his father was having a third or fourth drink. They finally got some dinner and in the taxi on the way home his father fell into a drunken sleep. Nailles had helped him up the steps to the house, grateful to be able to play out this much of his role as a son. He ardently wanted to love the old man but this was his only filial opportunity. His father went on up to his room and Nailles was greeted by his mother's faint, pained, knowledgeable and winsome smile.

A fresh pillow lay on the only other chair in the room. He could, by taking a step, lift it, press it to her face firmly and end her pain in a few minutes. He took the step, he lifted the pillow off the chair and returned to his seat, but suppose she struggled, suppose, in spite of her pain and her cavernous loss of consciousness she still instinctively and tenaciously loved what remained of her life; suppose she regained consciousness long enough to see that her son was a matricide. These were Nailles's memories at the breakfast table.

Nellie was not the sort of hostess who, greeting you at a dinner party, would get her tongue halfway down your throat before you'd hung up your hat. She was winsome. She wore lace that morning and smelled of carnations. She was a frail woman with reddish hair whose committee work, flower arrangements and moral views would have made the raw material for a night-club act. She was interested in the arts. She had painted the three pictures in the dining room. The canvas came printed with a maze of blue lines like a geodetic survey map. The areas within the lines were numbered-one for yellow, two for green and so forth- and by following the instructions carefully she was able to raise, on the lifeless cloth, the depth and brilliance of an autumn afternoon in Vermont or (over the sideboard) Gainsborough's portrait of the daughters of Major Gillespie. This was vulgar and she guessed as much, but it pleased her. She had recently enrolled-genuinely curious and anxious to be informed-in a class on the modern theater. One of her assignments had been to go to New York and report on a play that was being performed in the Village. She had planned to go with a friend but her friend was taken sick and she made the journey alone.

The play was performed in a loft before a small audience. The air was close. Towards the end of the first act one of the cast took off his shoes, his shirt, his trousers and then, with his back to the, audience, his underpants. Nellie could not believe her eyes. Had she protested by marching out of the theater, as her mother would have done, she would seem to be rejecting the facts of life. She intended to be a modern woman and to come to terms with the world. Then the actor turned slowly around, yawning and stretching himself unselfconsciously. It was all true to life but some violent series of juxtapositions, concepts of propriety and her own natural excitability threw her into an emotional paroxysm that made her sweat. If these were merely the facts of life why should her eyes be riveted on his thick pubic brush from which hung, like a discouraged and unwatered flower, his principal member. The lights faded. The cast remained, dressed for the rest of the play but Nellie was unnerved. When she left the theater it was rainy and humid. She crossed Washington Square to catch a bus. Some students from the university were circling the pool carrying picket signs on which were written Fuck, Prick and Cunt. Had she gone mad? She watched the procession until it wound out of sight. Shit was the last placard she saw. She was weak. Boarding the bus she looked around for the reassuring faces of her own kind, looked around desperately for honest mothers, wives, women who took pride in their houses, their gardens, their flower arrangements, their cooking. Two young men in the seat in front of her were laughing. One of them threw his arms around the other and kissed him on the ear. Should she thrash them with her umbrella? At the next stop what she was looking for-an honest woman-took the seat beside her. She smiled at the stranger, who returned the smile and said, wearily: "I've been looking everywhere for English cretonne, good English cretonne, and there doesn't seem to be a yard of it available in the city of New York. I have good English things and an English-type house and nubbly, stretchy reps look completely out of place in my decorating scheme, but nubbly, stretchy reps are all you can get. I suppose there must be some cretonne somewhere but I haven't been able to find it. My old cretonne is perfectly beautiful but it's showing signs of wear. Iris, peonies and cornflowers on a blue background. I have a sample here. She opened her bag and took out a scrap of printed linen.

It was what Nellie had wanted, but while the stranger went on talking about stuffs the words printed on the picket signs-Fuck and Prick-seemed to burn in her consciousness with a lingering incandescence and she could not forget the actor's pubic brush and his unwatered flower. She seemed unable to return to where she had been. The stranger had begun to describe her things and Nellie's reaction shifted from boredom to irritability. How contemptible was a life weighted down with rugs and chairs, a consciousness stuffed with portables, virtue incarnate in cretonne and evil represented by rep. It seemed more contemptible than the amorous young men in front of her and the asininity of the students. She seemed to have glimpsed an erotic revolution that had' left her bewildered and miserable but that had also left her enthusiasm for flower arrangements crippled. She walked east to the station in the rain, passed several newsstands that seemed to specialize in photographs of naked men. Boarding the train was a step in the right direction. She was going home and she would, in the space of an hour, be able to close her door on that disconcerting and rainy afternoon. She would be herself again, Nellie Nailles, Mrs. Eliot Nailles, honest, conscientious, intelligent, chaste, etc. But if her composure depended upon shutting doors, wasn't her composure contemptible? Contemptible or not, she felt, as the train moved, the symptoms of restoration. When she left the train at her stop and walked through the parking lot to her car she had arrived back at herself. She drove up the bill; opened the door. The cook was stewing mushrooms in butter and the living room smelled of this. "Did you have a nice day," the cook asked.

"Yes, thank you. Very nice. It was disappointing to have it rain but we do need rain for the reservoirs, don't we?" She found the utter artificiality of her sentiments galling, but how close could she, come to the truth? Could she say shit to the cook and describe what she had seen on the stage? She climbed the stairs to her pleasant room and took a pleasant bath, but falsehood, confinement, exclusion and a kind of blindness seemed to be her only means of comprehension. She did not tell Nailles about the experience.

After breakfast Nailles climbed the stairs to his son's room. Nailles had sat up the night before with his son when he and Nellie had come in from a party and found the young man reading.

"Did you have a good time?" Tony had asked.

"Pretty good."

"You going to have a nightcap," Tony asked.

"Sure. Why not. Do you want a beer?"

"Yes. I'll get them."

"I'll get them," Nailles said, not sternly but finally. He did not like to see a man his son's age tending bar. Some of his friends and neighbors allowed their children to pass drinks and mix drinks. Nailles thought this inefficient and unsuitable. The children usually got the proportions wrong and lost, he thought, through this performance, some desirable innocence. He got the beer and the whiskey and returned to his chair. He seemed intensely absorbed in his thoughts and frowned at the air above the rug. There was between the two men, preparing to speak but still silent, that sense of sanctuary that is the essence of

love.

Nailles described the party to Tony, who knew most of the guests. The boy wondered if his mother would have fallen asleep and if he would be spared the carnal demands, encouragements, exclamations and cheers that he heard so often from his parents' bedroom. He hoped his mother had fallen asleep. There was some preference in the air, some enjoyable and yet self-conscious sense that they were playing out the roles written for them as a Father and a Son. Love was definitely what Nailles felt, and where a more demonstrative man in another country would have embraced his son and declared his love, Nailles would not. Nailles lighted a cigarette and coughed. The cough was racking, phlegmatic, it shook him pitilessly and brought the blood to his face. It declared, much more than anything else, the difference in their ages. Tony wondered why he didn't stop smoking. If he stopped smoking he might stop coughing. In the discord of his father's cough, in its power to briefly enfeeble him, the boy was reminded unsentimentally of the facts of sickness, age and death. But his father, he thought proudly, looked and acted much younger than his age; much younger than Don Waltham's father or Henry Pastor's father and Herbert Matson's father. His father played no game admirably but he could still knock his way through a brief ice-hockey scrimmage, score occasionally at touch football and ski intermediate trails. He was forty-two. This time of life seemed to Tony bewildering, antique and hoary. The thought of having lived for so long excited him as an archaeologist is excited by a Sumerian or a Scythian relic. But his hair was thick and there was no gray in it, his face was lined but it was not puffy, he held himself well and he had a flat stomach. His father was unusual, Tony thought, and went on to think, complacently, that he would inherit this unusualness; he would be the unusual son of an unusual father spared the usualness of gray hair, baldness, obesity and fussiness.

Nailles put a record on the player. It would, Tony knew, be Guys and Dolls. Nailles almost never went to the theater and he was uninterested in music, but for some reason that no one remembered clearly now, it was all so long ago, he had been given a pair of tickets for the opening night of Guys and Dolls. Some friend had been taken sick or called out of town. Nailles wanted to pass the tickets on to someone else, he so disliked musicals and had never heard of Loesser or Runyon, but Nellie had a new dress she wanted to wear and for this reason they went to the theater. He listened suspiciously to the overture but his rapture seems to have begun with the opening fugue and to have mounted, number by number. On the final chorus he got to his feet and began to smash his hands together, roaring, "Encore, encore." When the house lights went on he continued to clap and shout and he was one of the last people to leave the theater.

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.