The Stories of John Cheever

Mrs. Cabot spoke once or twice a year at the St. Botolphs Academy, where many of us went to school. She had three subjects: My Trip to Alaska (slides), The Evils of Drink, and The Evils of Tobacco. Drink was for her so unthinkable a vice that she could not attack it with much vehemence, but the thought of tobacco made her choleric. Could one imagine Christ on the Cross smoking a cigarette? she would ask us. Could one imagine the Virgin Mary smoking? A drop of nicotine fed to a pig by trained laboratory technicians had killed the beast. Etc. She made smoking irresistible, and if I die of lung cancer I shall blame Mrs. Cabot. These performances took place in what we called the Great Study Hall. This was a large room on the second floor that could hold us all. The academy had been built in the 1850s and had the lofty, spacious, and beautiful windows of that period in American architecture. In the spring and in the autumn the building seemed gracefully suspended in its grounds but in the winter a glacial cold fell off the large window lights. In the Great Study Hall we were allowed to wear coats, hats, and gloves. This situation was heightened by the fact that my Great-aunt Anna had bought in Athens a large collection of plaster casts, so that we shivered and memorized the conative verbs in the company of at least a dozen buck-naked gods and goddesses. So it was to Hermes and Venus as well as to us that Mrs. Cabot railed against the poisons of tobacco. She was a woman of vehement and ugly prejudice, and I suppose she would have been happy to include the blacks and the Jews but there was only one black and one Jewish family in the village and they were exemplary. The possibility of intolerance in the village did not occur to me until much later, when my mother came to our house in Westchester for Thanksgiving.

This was some years ago, when the New England highways had not been completed and the trip from New York or Westchester took over four hours. I left quite early in the morning and drove first to Haverhill, where I stopped at Miss Peacock’s School and picked up my niece. I then went on to St. Botolphs, where I found Mother sitting in the hallway in an acolyte’s chair. The chair had a steepled back, topped with a wooden fleur-de-lis. From what rain-damp church had this object been stolen? She wore a coat and her bag was at her feet. “I’m ready,” she said. She must have been ready for a week. She seemed terribly lonely. “Would you like a drink?” she asked. I knew enough not to take this bait. Had I said yes she would have gone into the pantry and returned, smiling sadly, to say: “Your brother has drunk all the whiskey.” So we started back for Westchester. It was a cold, overcast day and I found the drive tiring, although I think fatigue had nothing to do with what followed. I left my niece at my brother’s house in Connecticut and drove on to my place. It was after dark when the trip ended. My wife had made all the preparations that were customary for Mother’s arrival. There was an open fire, a vase of roses on the piano, and tea with anchovy-paste sandwiches. “How lovely to have flowers,” said Mother. “I so love flowers. I can’t live without them. Should I suffer some financial reverses and have to choose between flowers and groceries I believe I would choose flowers.”

I do not want to give the impression of an elegant old lady because there were lapses in her performance. I bring up, with powerful unwillingness, a fact that was told to me by her sister after Mother’s death. It seems that at one time she applied for a position with the Boston Police Force. She had plenty of money at the time and I have no idea of why she did this. I suppose that she wanted to be a policewoman. I don’t know what branch of the force she planned to join, but I’ve always imagined her in a dark-blue uniform with a ring of keys at her waist and a billy club in her right hand. My grandmother dissuaded her from this course, but the image of a policewoman was some part of the figure she cut, sipping tea by our fire. She meant this evening to be what she called Aristocratic. In this connection she often said, “There must be at least a drop of plebeian blood in the family. How else can one account for your taste in torn and shabby clothing. You’ve always had plenty of clothes but you’ve always chosen rags.”

I mixed a drink and said how much I had enjoyed seeing my niece.

“Miss Peacock’s has changed,” Mother said sadly.

“I didn’t know,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“They’ve let down the bars.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They’re letting in Jews,” she said. She fired out the last word.

“Can we change the subject?” I asked.

“I don’t see why,” she said. “You brought it up.”

“My wife is Jewish, Mother,” I said. My wife was in the kitchen. “That is not possible,” my mother said. “Her father is Italian.”

“Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.”