Bullet Park   ::   Cheever John

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.