Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize), The - John Cheever [119]
It worked out very well. Their rooms were large and quiet, and the relationship with Mrs. Brownlee was easygoing. Any sense of obligation they may have felt was dispelled by their knowing that they were useful to their hostess in a hundred ways. She needed a man around the place, and who else would want to live in Salisbury Hall? Except for gala occasions, more than half the rooms were shut, and there were not enough servants to intimidate the rats that lived in the basement. Theresa undertook the herculean task of repairing Mrs. Brownlee's needlepoint; there were eighty-six pieces. The tennis court at Salisbury Hall had been neglected since the war, and Victor, on his weekends, weeded and rolled it and got it in shape again. He absorbed a lot of information about Mrs. Brownlee's house and her scattered family, and when she was too tired to take interested guests around the place, he was always happy to. "This hall," he would say, "was removed panel by panel and stone by stone from a Tudor house near the cathedral in Salisbury... The marble floor is part of the lobby floor of the old First National Bank. Mr. Brownlee gave Mrs. Brownlee the Venetian Salon as a birthday present, and these four columns of solid onyx came from the ruins of Herculaneum. They were floated down Lake Erie from Buffalo to Ashtabula..." Victor could also point out the scar on a tree where Spencer Brownlee had wrecked his car, and the rose garden that had been planted for Hester Brownlee when she was so sick. We have seen how helpful he was on occasions like the dance for the Girl Scout fund.
Violet was away in camps and schools. "Why do you live here?" she asked the first time she came to visit her parents in Salisbury Hall. "What a moldy old wreck! What a regular junk heap!" Mrs. Brownlee may have heard Violet laughing at her house. In any event, she took a violent dislike to the Mackenzies' only child, and Violet's visits were infrequent and brief. The only one of Mrs. Brownlee's children who returned from time to time was Prescott. Then, one evening not long after the Girl Scout dance, Mrs. Brownlee got a wire from her daughter Hester, who had been living in Europe for fifteen years. She had arrived in New York and was coming on to Pittsburgh the following day.
Mrs. Brownlee told the Mackenzies the good news at dinner. She was transported. "Oh, you'll love Hester," she said. "You'll both love her! She was always just like Dresden china. She was sickly when she was a child and I guess that's why she's always been my favorite. Oh, I hope she'll stay! I wish there was time to have her rooms painted! You must urge her to stay, Victor. It would make me so happy. You urge her to stay. I think she'll like you."
Mrs. Brownlee's words echoed through a dining room that had the proportions of a gymnasium; their small table was pushed against a window and separated from the rest of the room by a screen, and the Mackenzies liked to have dinner there. The window looked down the lawns and stairways to the ruin of a formal garden. The iron lace on the roof of the broken greenhouses, the noise of the fountains whose basins were disfigured and cracked, the rattle of the dumb-waiter that brought their tasteless dinner up from the basement kitchens, where the rats lived—the Mackenzies regarded all this foolishness with the deepest respect, as if it had some genuine significance. They may have suffered from an indiscriminate sense of the past or from an inability to understand that the past plays no part in our happiness. A few days earlier, Theresa had stumbled into a third-floor bedroom that was full of old bon-voyage baskets—gilded, and looped with dog-eared ribbons—that had been saved from Mrs. Brownlee's many voyages.
While Mrs. Brownlee talked about Hester that evening, she kept her eye on the garden and saw, in the distance, a man climbing over one of the marble walls. Then a girl handed him