You've Got to Read This (27 page)

He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. "I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build," he said. "I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life's work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they're no different from the rest of us, right?" He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Germany. The Englishman's voice droned on.

RAYMOND CARVER • 147

"Cathedrals," the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. "If you want the truth, bub, that's about all I know. What I just said.

What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you'd do it. I'd like that. If you want to know, I really don't have a good idea."

I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, "To begin with, they're very tall." I was looking around the room for clues.

"They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They're so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak.

These supports are called buttresses. They remind me of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don't know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies.

Don't ask me why this is," I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

"I'm not doing so good, am I?" I said.

He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn't getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. "They're really big," I said. "They're massive. They're built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone's life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I'm sorry," I said, "but it looks like that's the best I can do for you.

I'm just no good at it."

"That's all right, bub," the blind man said. "Hey, listen. I hope you don't mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I'm just curious and there's no offense. You're my host.

But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don't mind my asking?"

I shook my head. He couldn't see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. "I guess I don't believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it's hard. You know what I'm saying?"

"Sure, I do," he said.

"Right," I said.

The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping.

"You'll have to forgive me," I said. "But I can't tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn't in me to do it. I can't do any more than I've done."

The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.

I said, "The truth is, cathedrals don't mean anything special to me. Noth-148 - CATHEDRAL

ing. Cathedrals. They're something to look at on late-night TV. That's all they are."

It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, "I get it, bub. It's okay. It happens. Don't worry about it," he said. "Hey, listen to me.

Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don't you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We'll do something. We'll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff," he said.

So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn't have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I'd done some running. In my wife's room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet.

He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

"All right," he said. "All right, let's do her."

He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. "Go ahead, bub, draw," he said. "Draw. You'll see. I'll follow along with you. It'll be okay. Just begin now like I'm telling you. You'll see. Draw,"

the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

"Swell," he said. "Terrific. You're doing fine," he said. "Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it's a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up."

I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn't stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

"Doing fine," the blind man said.

I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I'm no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, "What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know."

I didn't answer her.

The blind man said, "We're drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard," he said to me. "That's right. That's good," he said.

RAYMOND CARVER • 149

"Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn't think you could. But you can, can't you? You're cooking with gas now. You know what I'm saying? We're going to really have us something here in a minute. How's the old arm?" he said. "Put some people in there now. What's a cathedral without people?"

My wife said, "What's going on? Robert, what are you doing? What's going on?"

"It's all right," he said to her. "Close your eyes now," the blind man said to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.

"Are they closed?" he said. "Don't fudge."

"They're closed," I said.

"Keep them that way," he said. He said, "Don't stop now. Draw."

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

Then he said, "I think that's it. I think you got it," he said. "Take a look.

What do you think?"

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

"Well?" he said. "Are you looking?"

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything.

"It's really something," I said.

Goodbye, M y Brother

by John Cheever

Introduced by Allan Gurganus

WE WATCH A MASTER POTTER WORK THE WHEEL. HE STRADDLES A
spinning disk topped by a lump of muck, and in hands this able, this scarily practiced, this rigged with sheer killing power, the vessel's walls lift like some fine mouth singing its only vowel straight up.

The consolations of mastery are evident in John Cheever's own favorite John Cheever story, "Goodbye, My Brother." To read this admission of fratricidal impulses, this hymn of family continuity, is to participate in the very act of its shaping. "What is a masterpiece?" Gertrude Stein liked to ask. By asking, she showed the immodesty of daily inquiring, "Mirror, mirror on the wall..." But surely one way to recognize roaming Masterworks involves: human breath.

What gauge is simpler yet more profound? If you find your gray matter clicking like some car hood at the last pit stop of the Indy 500, that's a start; if your heart becomes aware of its surrounding bell tower, that's an early warning sign; should the sound of the fire alarm clanging in the next room dwindle to gnat-sized distraction, that might give a hint; but if you hold your breath till a ravishing relentless emotional sentence's period says, "You may breathe . . .
nou)
'—then you might be reading "Goodbye, My Brother" for the first time or, more especially, the sixtieth.

The pleasures of Cheever begin in something as mysterious as tone. This is a pitch that can accommodate the most casual turn of conversation ("I don't think about the family much"). But it's a voice that can suddenly push the all-too-human offhandedness of address toward surprising universal topics like honor, shelter, love, compromise, lust. Though most stories might be said to concern family reunions gone ruinously wrong, the very familiarity of the present tale's material—a single unregenerate brother's return and exit—

serves only to highlight the mastery itself.

Artists are notoriously poor judges of their own work. But in this instance, John Cheever knew precisely what he had (and had not) done. He ignored chronology and placed "Goodbye, my Brother" first in
The Stories of
John Cheever.
There it belongs.

Cheever ends his brief introduction to the collected stories: It was under the canopy of a Fifty-ninth Street apartment house that I wrote, aloud, the closing of "Goodbye, My Brother." "Oh, what can you do with a man like that'" I asked, and closed by saying, "I watched the naked women walk out of the sea." "You're talking to yourself, Mr. Cheever," the doorman said politely ...

correct, friendly, and content with his ten-dollar tip at Christmas.

INTRODUCTION BY ALLAN GURGANUS • 153

The more you love a story, the stronger is your impulse to illuminate its virtues by simply quoting from the thing. That urge will be beautifully sated by "Goodbye, My Brother" appearing, whole, just ahead. I would urge you, fellow reader, to drink it all before you return to sip this particular appreciation. I loathe those chatterers who give away the ends of movies. Though the Cheever story concludes in a way that seems inevitable, I don't want its final beautiful chord change anticipated or diminished by my meddling love for it. So absorb the story first.

According to Scott Donaldson's biography, in Cheever's original draft, there was no "bad" brother. No "Tifty," named with a family's fond cruelty for the sound of his childhood bedroom slippers. In the beginning, the schoolteacher narrator himself shouldered both roles; he enacted all those mixed emotions about his own pretentious, endearing, fallen family. The struggle remained inward. By subdividing the fight, by embodying the nay-sayer in the peevish, heightened character of Lawrence—a nondrinking, ungambler en route from sad Cleveland to sadder Albany—Cheever elevates what might've been a soured inward story to one as simple and resounding as myth.

Of course, the tale is also what teachers of advanced-placement ninth grade lit might call "a contemporary reworking of the Cain and Abel legend."

So much of Cheever's work can be traced to the Old Testament or the
Bulfinch's Mythology,
required reading at Quincy Academy, his only school (the world excepted).

Here the author of many longer works embodies (and all but retires) most of his own recurrent themes. Cheever, born under the sign of Gemini, the twin brothers, played out the urge toward fratricide again and again.

Never did he render it more successfully. By making the history of the Pommeroys a long one, by leaning hard on the image of the new "old" home place created from borrowed shingles, the writer plainly posits this family's long struggle as paralleling our myth-gorged American Experiment itself.

The branch of the Pommeroys to which we belong was founded by a minister who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for his untiring abjuration of the Devil.

The Pommeroys were ministers until the middle of the nineteenth century, and the harshness of their thought—man is full of misery, and all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt—has been preserved in books and sermons. The temper of our family changed somewhat and became more lighthearted, but when I was of school age, I can remember a cousinage of old men and women who seem to hark back to the dark days of the ministry and to be animated by perpetual guilt and the deification of the scourge.

How beautiful a paragraph! It is theologically sound. Note that new old Gothick word "cousinage," the uninsisted-upon internal ryhme of "to hark back to the dark days of the ministry." And, of course, the suggestion that
154 « GOODBYE, MY BROTHER

cocktail banter, the love of the natural world, the sophisticated treatment of sexuality as a comic subject might constitute recent familial achievements, not mere slippage into the sea. The story hints that these are as much a part of the Pommeroys' recombinant mythology at the end of the twentieth century as was the abjured "Devil" striding the end of the eighteenth.

Along with one of the editors of this volume, I was John Cheever's student at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early seventies. It was during this dark period of his later life that we came to know what a disciplined, funny, and joyful person he could be. We reveled in his company and in the example of his faultless prose. At the time, of course, he seemed somewhat antiquated; I mean his curious method of beginning stories at their starts (see Genesis, line one) and closing them as they concluded. We were then gaga over the backflip antics of Donald Barthleme. Still, we knew—by the very meter of our breath—that Cheever had shaped some of the best sentences ever written by a Flaubert-inspired American. (Flaubert, as teacher and model, is pitiless, and therefore supremely useful.) But it was a pitching back and forth, between clay as mud and clay as porcelain, that so marked everybody's dealings with John Cheever. Despite evidence otherwise, he once confessed to writing this story in a single sitting: confessed and boasted. But the boast was couched in the humility of a potter confronting the daily merciless judgment of centrifugal force. Cheever said he liked best to work in the back guest bedroom of his beautiful homeplace in Ossining, New York. I later saw this room, the sort of at-the-ugly-end-of-the-hall war-ren where the sewing machine is stowed, where dotty visiting great-aunts are sent with genial grace, knowing that such sparseness will discourage long stays. There, at a card table, he pounded out his stories and novels. All on a little black machine that possessed no electrical plug.