The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) by John Cheever Read Free Book Online

and mountains. The Helderbergs seem as high as the mountains near Franconia. But it is the highest land on the eastern seaboard, these are the oldest escarpments on the earth’s crust, and the winds that blow across it are mountain winds. The quality of the air is omniscient. In the morning the air is cold and dark and as clear as glass. The darkness in the clear air seems nearly visible, as if it were made up of fine particles of silt, and yet you can see for fifty miles. At this hour the air is too cold to have a distinctive fragrance. You smell mostly coffee, sausage, the salt pork for the chowder at lunch. By eleven o’clock the sun has warmed the air. It smells now of the garden, the pines, the weeds and wildflowers in the pasture behind the barn. The air is warm, but it is still light and changeable. It will not be heavy until after lunch. Then the air smells like sugar and spice, but as it grows heavier and warmer the weeds in the pasture dominate. Their smell is stronger than spice, they smell like drugs. During all this time the air on the mountain has remained cold and changeable, and at five or six when the children come in to get their supper the cold air mushrooms down through the woods like a cloud (feel the mountain air). The smell of spice and drugs is lost, but the cold air spreads unevenly, and on the terrace or walking out to the woodshed you can feel the eddies of coolness and warmth, clearness and fragrance as distinctly as the currents in the lake. After supper the air on the terrace is cool and dark again and too light to hold many smells (unless it should rain), but sitting on the terrace or in the house you are still conscious of the changeable air. The window curtains move. The smell of cold stone from the massive pieces of granite on the open chimney is flattened against the wall and falls to where we are. Then this is gone again and we smell the heavy odor of cut flowers. It rains somewhere in the neighborhood—in Hebron or Alexandria—and for ten minutes the air smells of the pungency released by a rainfall. Then the permanent smells of the room, panelling and ashes and flowers, are still. It is this continuous play of light and air and water that makes my response to that country so keen. It is also the sense of summer and youth. Driving down the parkway, through Ossining and along River Road, I felt the proximity of the city, I felt that I was driving into an increase of ugliness.
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    Into Ossining to buy a loaf of bread, a can of Spam, and the Salinger book. I felt the way I used to feel when I was a soldier. The sky was gray. It was muggy. Ossining looked like an Army town. I felt sad, but it was a useless sadness. I miss Mary and the children. I hear their voices upstairs. I come back here every year to work hard and establish my independence from them, but I never really leave them, and away from them I feel maimed and foolish. I call up everyone I know. They are away. I leave messages with maids. I drink a Martini. I wait for the phone to ring. When I’m unlucky I get drunk and go to the movies and return to Bristol. The idea is to get away from one place, but I never get away, I never reach another place. I try to struggle with the things that bind me, but I forget the nature of the bonds. I go to the movies. I get up at four and read until dawn. I do everything but the work that I came here to do.
       Tense last night. We had been talking earlier about the presence of the dead in this place. I do not believe in the supernatural. I despise it. There is a sense of unrequitedness here, or rather the evidence of unrequitedness: the run-down buildings, the overgrown garden. Read some Turgenev, took a bath, got into bed. As I was going to fall asleep that nervous reflex that is usually the last thing I remember before sleep seemed to rebound—I heard some noise from the children’s room—and I was wakeful and frightened. Then suddenly my daughter spoke hoarsely in her sleep, eight