Cheever’s
main themes included the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption,
and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody
the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his
works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by
abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to
the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
The Swimmer
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when
everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have
heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church,
heard it from the lips of the priest
himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf
links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader
of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. “I drank too
much,” said Donald Westerhazy. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill.
“It must have been the wine,” said Helen Westerhazy. “I drank too much of that claret.”
This was at the edge of the Westerhazys’
pool. The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale
shade of green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of
cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance—from the bow of an
approaching ship—that it might have had a name.
Lisbon. Hackensack. The sun was hot. Neddy
Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was
a slender man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while he
was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning and given the
bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the
smell of coffee in his dining room.
He might have been compared to a
summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis
racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and
clement weather. He had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply,
stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the
heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow into
his chest. His own house stood in Bullet Park, eight miles to the south, where
his four beautiful daughters would have had their lunch and might be playing
tennis.
Then it occurred to him that by taking a
dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water. His life was not
confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be
explained by its suggestion of escape.
He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s
eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across
the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he
would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor
was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea
of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it
seemed to him that a long swim might
enlarge and celebrate its beauty.
He took off a sweater that was hung over
his shoulders and dove in. He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not
hurl themselves into pools. He swam a choppy crawl,
breathing either with every stroke or every
fourth stroke and counting somewhere well in the back of his mind the one-two one-two
of a flutter kick.
It was not a serviceable stroke for long
distances but the domestication of swimming had saddled the sport with some
customs and in his part of the world a crawl was customary. To be embraced and
sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the
resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without
trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project. He hoisted himself
up on the far curb—he never used the ladder—and started across the lawn. When
Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going to swim home.
The only maps and charts he had to go by
were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the
Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and
the Crosscups. He would cross Ditmar Street
to the Bunkers and come, after a short portage, to the Levys, the Welchers, and
the public pool in Lancaster. Then there were the Hallorans, the Sachses, the
Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the Clydes.
The day was lovely, and that he lived in a
world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.
His heart was high and he ran across the grass. Making his way home by an
uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man
with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along theway;
friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River.
He went through a hedge that separated the
Westerhazys’land from the Grahams’, walked under some flowering apple trees,
passed the shed that housed their pump and filter, and came out at the Grahams’
pool. “Why, Neddy,” Mrs. Graham said, “what a marvelous surprise. I’ve been
trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a drink.” He saw
then, like any explorer, that the hospitable customs and traditions of the
natives would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to reach
his destination. He did not want to mystify or seem rude to the Grahams nor did
he have the time to linger there. He swam the length of their pool and joined
them in the sun and was rescued, a few minutes later, by the arrival of two
carloads of friends from Connecticut.
During the uproarious reunions he was able
to slip away. He went down by the front of the Grahams’ house, stepped over a thorny
hedge, and crossed a vacant lot to the Hammers’. Mrs.Hammer, looking up from
her roses, saw him swim by although she wasn’t quite sure who it was.
The Lears heard him splashing past the open
windows of their living room. The
Howlands and the Crosscups were away.
Afterleaving the Howlands’ he crossed Ditmar Street and started for the
Bunkers’, where he could hear, even at that distance, the noise of a party.
The water refracted the sound of voices and
laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair. The Bunkers’ pool was on a rise
and he climbed some stairs to a terrace where twenty-five
or thirty men and women were drinking. The
only person in the water was Rusty Towers, who floated there on a rubber raft.
Oh, how bonny and lush were the banks of the Lucinda
River! Prosperous men and women gathered by
the sapphire colored waters while caterer’s men in white coats passed them cold
gin.
Overhead a red de Haviland trainer was
circling around and around and around in the sky with something like the glee
of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for
the scene, a tenderness for the gathering,
as if it was something he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder. As
soon as Enid Bunker saw him she began to scream: “Oh, look who’s here! What a
marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn’t come I thought I’d
die.”
She made her way to him through the crowd,
and when they had finished kissing she led
him to the bar, a progress that was slowed
by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the
handsof as many men. A smiling bartender he had seen at a hundred parties gave
him a gin and tonic and he stood by the bar for a moment, anxious not to get
stuck in any conversation that would delay his voyage. When he seemed about to
be surrounded he dove in and swam close to the side to avoid colliding with
Rusty’s raft. At the far end of the pool he bypassed the Tomlinsons with a
broad smile and jogged up the garden path. The gravel cut his feet but this was
the only unpleasantness. The party was confined to the pool, and as he went toward
the house he heard the brilliant, watery sound of voices fade, heard the noise
of a radio from the Bunkers’ kitchen, where someone was listening to a ball
game. Sunday afternoon. He made his way through the parked cars and down the grassy
border of their driveway to Alewives Lane.
He did not want to be seen on the road in
his bathing trunks but there was no traffic and he made the short distance to
the Levys’ driveway, marked with a private property sign and a green tube for
The New York Times. All the doors and windows of the big house were open but
there were no signs of life; not even a dog barked. He went around the side of
the house tothe pool and saw that the Levys had only recently left. Glasses and
bottles and dishes of nuts were on a table at the deep end, where there was a
bathhouse or gazebo, hung with Japanese lanterns. After swimming the pool he
got himself a glass and
poured a drink. It was his fourth or fifth
drink and he had swum nearly half the length of the Lucinda River. He felt
tired, clean, and pleased at that moment to be alone; pleased with everything.
It would storm. The stand of cumulus
cloud—that city—had risen and darkened, and while he sat there he heard the percussiveness
of thunder again. The de Haviland trainer was
still circling overhead and it seemed to
Ned that he could almost hear the pilot laugh with pleasure in the afternoon;
but when there was another peal of thunder he took off for home.
A train whistle blew and he wondered what
time it had gotten to be. Four? Five? He thought of the provincial station at
that hour, where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, dwarf with some
flowers wrapped in newspaper, and a woman who had been crying would be waiting for
the local. It was suddenly growing dark; it was that moment when the pinheaded
birds seem to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable recognition
of the storm’s approach. Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the
crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the
noise of fountains came from the crowns of
all the tall trees.
Why did he love storms, what was the
meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled
rudely up the stairs, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old
house seemed fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind
have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings? Then
there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns
that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last, or was it the year
before that?
He stayed in the Levys’ gazebo until the
storm had passed. The rain had cooled the air and he shivered.
The force of the wind had stripped a maple
of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the
water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a
peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn. He braced his shoulders, emptied his
glass, and started for the Welchers’ pool. This meant crossing the Lindleys’
riding ring and he was surprised to find it overgrown with grass and all the
jumps dismantled. He wondered if the Lindleys had sold their horses or gone
away for the summer and put them out to board. He seemed
to remember having heard something about the Lindleys and their horses but the
memory was unclear. On he went, barefoot through the wet grass, to the
Welchers’, where he found their pool was dry.
This breach in his chain of water
disappointed him absurdly, and he felt like some explorer who seeks a
torrential headwater and finds a dead stream. He was disappointed and
mystified. It was common enough to go away for the summer but no one
ever drained his pool. The Welchers had
definitely gone away.
The pool furniture was folded, stacked, and
covered with a tarpaulin. The bathhouse was locked. All the windows of the
house were shut, and when he went around to the driveway in front he saw a for
sale sign nailed to a tree. When had he last heard from the Welchers—when, that
is, had he and Lucinda last regretted an invitation to dine with them? It
seemed only a week or so ago. Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined
it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the
truth? Then in the distance he heard the sound of a tennis game. This cheered
him, cleared away all his apprehensions and let him regard the overcast sky and
the cold air with indifference.
This was the day that Neddy Merrill swam
across the county. That was the day! He started off then for his most difficult
portage. Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen
him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a
chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had
his car broken down, or was he merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits
of the highway—beer cans, rags, and blowout patches—exposed to all kinds of
ridicule, he seemed pitiful.
He had known when he started that this was
a part of his journey—it had been on his maps—but confronted with the lines of
traffic, worming through the summery light, he found himself unprepared. He was
laughed at, jeered at, a beer can was thrown at
him, and he had no dignity or humor to
bring to the situation.
He could have gone back, back to the
Westerhazys’, where Lucinda would still be sitting in the sun. He had signed
nothing, vowed nothing, pledged nothing, not even to himself. Why, believing as
he did, that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable
to turn back? Why was he determined to complete his journey even if it meant
putting his life in danger? At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece
of horseplay become serious? He could not go back, he could not even recall with
any clearness the green water at the Westerhazys’, the sense of inhaling the
day’s components, the friendly and relaxed voices saying that they had drunk
too much. In the space of an hour, more or less, he had covered a distance that
made his return impossible.
An old man, tooling down the highway at
fifteen miles an hour, let him get to the middle of the road, where there was a
grass divider. Here he was exposed to the ridicule of the northbound traffic,
but after ten or fifteen minutes he was able to cross. From here he had only a
short walk to the Recreation Center at the edge of the village of Lancaster,
where there were some handball courts and a public pool.
The effect of the water on voices, the
illusion of brilliance and suspense, was the same here as it had been at the
Bunkers’ but the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill, and as soon
as he entered the crowded enclosure he was confronted with regimentation. “all
swimmers must take a shower before using the pool. all swimmers must use the
footbath. all swimmers must wear their identification disks.” He took a shower,
washed his feet in a cloudy and bitter solution, and made his way to the edge
of the water.
It stank of chlorine and looked to him like
a sink. A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police whistles at what
seemed to be regular intervals and abused the swimmers through a public address
system. Neddy remembered the sapphire water
at the Bunkers’ with longing and thought
that he might contaminate himself—damage his own prosperousness and charm —by
swimming in this murk, but he reminded himself that he was an explorer, a
pilgrim, and that this was merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River.
He dove, scowling with distaste into the
chlorine and had to swim with his head above water to avoid collisions, but
even so he was bumped into, splashed, and jostled. When he got to the shallow
end both lifeguards were shouting at him: “Hey, you, you without the
identification disk, get outa the water.” He did, but they had no way of pursuing him and he went through the reek
of suntan oil and chlorine out through the hurricane fence
and passed the handball courts. By crossing the road he entered the wooded part of the Halloran estate. The woods were not
cleared and the footing was treacherous and difficult until
he reached the lawn and the clipped beech hedge that encircled
their pool.
The Hallorans were friends, an elderly
couple of enormous wealth who seemed to bask in the suspicion
that they might be Communists. They were zealous reformers but
they were not Communists, and yet when they were accused,
as they sometimes were, of subversion, it seemed to gratify and excite them.
Their beech hedge was yellow and he guessed
this had been blighted like the Levys’ maple. He called
hullo, hullo, to warn the Hallorans of his approach, to palliate
his invasion of their
privacy. The Hallorans, for reasons that
had never been explained to him, did not wear bathing suits. No explanations were in order, really. Their nakedness was
a detail in their uncompromising zeal for reform and he stepped politely out of his trunks before he went through the
opening in the hedge.
Mrs. Halloran, a stout woman with white
hair and a serene face, was reading the Times. Mr. Halloran
was taking beech leaves out of the water with a scoop. They
seemed not surprised or displeased to see him. Their pool was perhaps the oldest in the country, a fieldstone
rectangle, fed by a brook. It had no filter or pump and its waters were
the opaque gold of
the stream.
“I’m swimming across the county,” Ned said.
“Why, I didn’t know one could,” exclaimed
Mrs. Halloran.
“Well, I’ve made it from the Westerhazys’,”
Ned said. “That
must be about four miles.”
He left his trunks at the deep end, walked
to the shallow end, and swam this stretch. As he was
pulling himself out of the water he heard Mrs. Halloran say, “We’ve
been terribly sorry
to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy.”
“My misfortunes?” Ned asked. “I don’t know
what you mean.”
“Why, we heard that you’d sold the house
and that your
poor children . . .”
“I don’t recall having sold the house,” Ned
said, “and the
girls are at home.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Halloran sighed. “Yes . . .”
Her voice filled the air with an unseasonable melancholy and Ned
spoke briskly.
“Thank you for the swim.”
“Well, have a nice trip,” said Mrs.
Halloran.
Beyond the hedge he pulled on his trunks
and fastened them. They were loose and he wondered if,
during the space of an afternoon, he could have lost some
weight. He was cold
and he was tired and the naked Hallorans
and their dark water had depressed him. The swim was too much
for his strength but how could he have guessed this, sliding
down the banister that morning and sitting in the
Westerhazys’ sun? His arms were lame. His legs felt rubbery and ached
at the joints. The worst of it was the cold in his bones and
the feeling that he might never be warm again. Leaves were
falling down around him and he smelled wood smoke on the wind.
Who would be burning wood at this time of year?
He needed a drink. Whiskey would warm him,
pick him up, the swimmer carry him
through the last of his journey, refresh his feeling that it was original and
valorous to swim across the county.
Channel swimmers took brandy. He needed a
stimulant. He crossed the lawn in front of the Hallorans’ house and went down a
little path to where they had built a house for their
only daughter, Helen, and her husband, Eric
Sachs. The Sachses’ pool was small and he found Helen and her husband there.
“Oh, Neddy,” Helen said. “Did you lunch at
Mother’s?”
“Not really,” Ned said. “I did stop to see
your parents.”
This seemed to be explanation enough. “I’m
terribly sorry to
break in on you like this but I’ve taken a
chill and I wonder if
you’d give me a drink.”
“Why, I’d love to,” Helen said, “but there
hasn’t been anything in this house to drink since Eric’s operation. That was three
years ago.”
Was he losing his memory, had his gift for
concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children
were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill? His
eyes slipped from Eric’s face to his
abdomen, where he saw three pale, sutured scars, two of them at least a foot
long. Gone was his navel, and what, Neddy thought, would the roving hand,
bed-checking one’s gifts at 3 a.m., make of a belly withno navel, no link to
birth, this breach in the succession?
“I’m sure you can get a drink at the
Biswangers’,” Helen said. “They’re having an enormous do. You
can hear it from here. Listen!”
She raised her head and from across the
road, the lawns, the gardens, the woods, the fields, he heard
again the brilliant noise of voices over water. “Well, I’ll get wet,”
he said, still feeling that he had no freedom of choice about his
means of travel.
He dove into the Sachses’ cold water and,
gasping, close to drowning, made his way from one end of the
pool to the other. “Lucinda and I want terribly to see you,”
he said over his
shoulder, his face set toward the
Biswangers’. “We’re sorry it’s been so long and we’ll call you very soon.”
He crossed some fields to the Biswangers’ and the sounds of revelry there. They would be honored to give him a drink, they would be happy to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance. They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company. They did not belong to Neddy’s
He crossed some fields to the Biswangers’ and the sounds of revelry there. They would be honored to give him a drink, they would be happy to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance. They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company. They did not belong to Neddy’s
set—they were not even on Lucinda’s
Christmas-card list. He went toward their pool with feelings of
indifference, charity, and some unease, since it seemed to be
getting dark and these were the longest days of the year. The
party when he joined it was noisy and large. Grace Biswanger was
the kind of hostess who asked the optometrist, the
veterinarian, the real-estate dealer, and the dentist. No one was
swimming and the twilight, reflected on the water of the pool, had a wintry
gleam.
There was a bar and he started for this.
When Grace Biswanger saw him she came toward him, not
affectionately as he had every right to expect, but bellicosely.
“Why, this party has everything,” she said
loudly, “including a gate crasher.”
She could not deal him a social blow—there
was no question about this and he did not flinch. “As a
gate crasher,” he asked politely, “do I rate a drink?”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “You don’t seem
to pay much attention to invitations.”
She turned her back on him and joined some
guests, and he went to the bar and ordered a whiskey. The
bartender served him but he served him rudely. His was a
world in which the
caterer’s men kept the social score, and to
be rebuffed by a part-time barkeep meant that he had
suffered some loss of social esteem. Or perhaps the man was new
and uninformed.
Then he heard Grace at his back say: “They
went for broke overnight—nothing but income—and he showed
up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five
thousand dollars. . . .” She was always talking about money.
It was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He dove into the pool, swam
It was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He dove into the pool, swam
its length and went away. The next pool on his list, the last but
two, belonged to his
old mistress, Shirley Adams. If he had
suffered any injuries at the Biswangers’ they would be cured here.
Love—sexual roughhouse in fact—was the supreme elixir,
the pain killer, the
the swimmer brightly colored pill that
would put the spring back into his step, the joy of life in his heart. They
had had an affair last week, last month, last year. He couldn’t
remember. It was he who had broken it off, his was the upper
hand, and he stepped through the gate of the wall that
surrounded her pool with
nothing so considered as self-confidence.
It seemed in a way to be his pool, as the lover, particularly the
illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an
authority unknown to holy matrimony. She was there, her hair the
color of brass, but her
figure, at the edge of the lighted,
cerulean water, excited in him no profound memories. It had been, he
thought, a lighthearted affair, although she had wept when he broke it off.
She seemed confused to see him and he
wondered if she was still wounded. Would she, God forbid, weep
again?
“What do you want?” she asked.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m swimming across the county.”
“Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”
“What’s the matter?”
“If you’ve come here for money,” she said,
“I won’t give
you another cent.”
“You could give me a drink.”
“I could but I won’t. I’m not alone.”
“Well, I’m on my way.”
He dove in and swam the pool, but when he
tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the
strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to
the ladder and
climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he
saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the
dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some
stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he
saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia?
What had become of the constellations of midsummer?
He began to cry.
It was probably the first time in his adult
life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life
that he had ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He
could not understand the rudeness of the caterer’s barkeep or the rudeness of a mistress who had come to him on her knees
and showered his trousers with tears. He had swum too long,
he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the
water. What he needed then was a drink, some company, and some clean, dry clothes, and while he
could have cut directly across the road to his home he went on to
the Gilmartins’ pool.
Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a youth. He staggered
with fatigue on his way to the Clydes’ and
paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again
with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder and
wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done what
he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so
stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague. Stooped,
holding on to the
gateposts for support, he turned up the
driveway of his own house.
The place was dark. Was it so late that
they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’
for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone
someplace else? Hadn’t they
agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to
regret all their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors
to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and
rust came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the
house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked
one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front
door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning.
The house was locked, and he thought that
the stupid cook or the stupid maid
must have locked the place up until he
remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a
maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to
force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows,
saw that the place was empty.
the swimmer