Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize), The - John Cheever [20]
It was an immense, still, and beautiful night. Instead of returning to the drive, he took a short cut through the garden and across a field toward the tool house. The ground was very dark. He moved cautiously and awkwardly. The heavy carcass smelled like a dog. "Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, oh, Mr. Brown," someone called. It was Agnes. Her voice was breathless and fretful. Agnes and Carlotta were standing in the field. They were in nightgowns. "We heard the noise," Agnes called. "We heard the gun going off. We were afraid there had been an accident. Of course I knew Carlotta was all right. She was right beside me. Weren't you, dear? But we couldn't sleep. We couldn't close our eyes after we heard the noise. Is everything all right?"
"Yes," Jim said. "There was a coon in the garden."
"Where's the coon?" Carlotta asked.
"The coon's gone on a long, long journey, dear," Agnes said. "Come now, come along, sweet. I hope nothing else will wake us up, don't you?" They turned and started back toward the house, warning one another of the sticks and ditches and other perils of the country. Their conversation was filled with diminutives, timidity, and vagueness. He wanted to help them, he wanted urgently to help them, he wanted to offer them his light, but they reached the house without his help and he heard the back door close on their voices.
The Enormous Radio
Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio.
Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio—or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them—and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came.
The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with