The Stories of John Cheever

“Behold the lordly moose, Mama Finelli,” Evarts shouted. He ran to her side and sat down. “Oh, Mama Finelli, I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “You won’t believe it, but I’ve been thinking about you all day. I’ve been wishing all day that I could talk with you.” He turned to drink in her vulpine features and her whiskery chin. “How did you ever get to New York, Mama Finelli?”

“Come up on a flying machine,” she cried. “Come up on a flying machine today. Have a sandwich.” She was eating some sandwiches from a paper bag.

“No, thanks,” he said. “What do you think of New York?” he asked. “What do you think of that high building?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, but he could see that she did know and he could see her working her face into shape for a retort. “I guess there’s just but the one, for if there hada been two, they’d of pollinated and bore!” She whooped with laughter and struck herself on the legs.

“What are you doing in New York, Mama Finelli? How did you happen to come here?”

“Well,” she said, “man named Tracey Murchison calls me on the telephone long-distance and says for me to come up to New York and sue you for libel. Says you wrote a play about me and I can sue you for libel and git a lot of money and split it with him, fairly, he says, and then I don’t have to run the gas station no more. So he wires me money for the flying-machine ticket and I come up here and I talk with him and I’m going to sue you for libel and split it with him, sixty-forty. That’s what I’m going to do,” she said.

Later that night, the Malloys returned to the marble waiting room of Grand Central and Evarts began to search for a Chicago train. He found a Chicago train, bought some tickets, and they boarded a coach. It was a rainy night, and the dark, wet paving, deep in the station, did not glitter, but it was still Alice’s belief that diamonds had been ground into it, and that was the way she would tell the story. They had picked up the lessons of travel rapidly, and they arranged themselves adroitly over several seats. After the train started, Alice made friends with a plain-spoken couple across the aisle, who were traveling with a baby to Los Angeles. The woman had a brother there, who had written to her enthusiastically about the climate and the opportunities.

“Let’s go to Los Angeles,” Alice said to Evarts. “We still have a little money and we can buy tickets in Chicago and you can sell your play in Hollywood, where nobody’s ever heard of Mama Finelli or any of the others.