The Stories of John Cheever

A few days later, we received an invitation to hear Grace sing at the Aboleens’. Now, Mrs. Aboleen is the muse of our province. Through her brother, the novelist W. H. Towers, she has some literary connections, and through the bounty of her husband—a successful dental surgeon—she has a large collection of paintings. On her walls you read Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, but the pictures on which these signatures appear are very bad, and Mrs. Aboleen is a surprisingly jealous muse. Any other woman in the neighborhood with similar inclinations is thought to be a vulgar usurper. The paintings, of course, are her paintings, but when a poet comes to spend a weekend at the Aboleens’ he becomes her poet. She may display him, urge him to perform, and let you shake his hand, but if you come too close to him or talk with him for more than a minute or two she will cut in with an avid possessiveness, a kind of anger, as if she had caught you pocketing the table silver. Grace had become, I suppose, her princess. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon, a lovely day, and I went bitterly. This may have colored my judgment of Grace’s performance, but everybody else said it was terrible. She sang a dozen songs, mostly in English, mostly arch and about love. Boobee’s despondent sighs could be heard between the songs, and I knew he was thinking that her abysmal spitefulness had invented the whole scene—the folding chairs, the vases of flowers, the maids waiting to pass tea. He was polite enough when the concert ended, but his nose seemed enormous.

I didn’t see him again for some time, and then I read one evening in the local paper that Marcantonio Parlapiano had been injured in an automobile accident on Route 67 and was recovering at the Platner Memorial Hospital. I went there at once. When I asked the nurse on his floor where I could find him, she said gaily, “Oh, you want to see Tony? Poor old Tony. Tony no speaka da English.”

He was in a room with two other patients. He had broken a leg, he looked dreadful, and there were tears in his eyes. I asked him when he would be allowed to go home. “To Grace?” he asked. “Never. I am never going back. Her father and mother are with her now. They are arranging a legal separation. I am going to Verona. I am taking the Colombo on the twenty-seventh.” He sobbed. “You know what she is asking me?” he said.

“No, Boobee. What did she ask you?”

“She is asking me to change my name.” He began to cry.