«The seaside houses»

by John Cheever

1. Read the story.

2. Explain the meaning of the following words and word combinations:

to rent a house, to investigate the houses, to loom up, the midst of someone else’s life, catboat, cradle, curved staircase, bay window, a haunted cottage diminishing income, drain.

3. Cross out the word that doesn’t belong in the same group:

• dull, twilight, drab, dim;

• stingy, mean, parsimonious, inescapable;

• lamp, bulb, bra, chandelier;

• bartender, caller. mechanic, guide;

• attic, lighthouse, basement, pantry.

4. Replace Russian words and word combinations by their English equivalents. Ask special questions to cover the contents.

That night in the (гостиная), reading one of his books, I noticed that the (диванные подушки) seemed unyielding. Reaching under them, I found three copies of a magazine dealing with sunbathing. They were illustrated with many (фотография) of men and women wearing nothing but their shoes. I put the magazines into the (камин) and lighted them with a (спичка), but the paper was (лощеный) and they burned slowly. Why should I be made so (зол), I wondered; why should I seem so (поглощен) in this image of a lonely and drunken man? In the (наверху в коридоре), there was a bad (запах), left perhaps by an unhouse broken cat or a stopped (водосток), but it seemed to me like the distillate, the essence, of a bitter (ссора). I slept (плохо).

5. Think of the idea of the story. What is the author message to the reader?

6. Put the parts of the story in a proper order:

1. You could see at a glance that he was one of the legion of wage-earning ghosts who haunt midtown Manhattan, dreaming of a new job in Madrid, Dublin, or Cleveland. His hair was slicked down. His face had the striking ruddiness of a baseball park or race-track burn, although you could see by the way his hands shook that the flush was alcoholic. The bartender knew him, and they chatted for a while, but then the bartender went over to the cash register to add up his slips and Mr. Greenwood was left alone. He felt this. You could see it in his face. He felt that he had been left alone. It was late, all the express trains would have pulled out, and the rest of them were drifting in—the ghosts, I mean. God knows where they come from or where they go, this host of prosperous and well-dressed hangers-on who, in spite of the atmosphere of a fraternity they generate, would not think of speaking to one another.

2. We had our first caller on Wednesday. This was Mrs. Whiteside, the Southern lady from whom we got the key. She rang our bell at five and presented us with a box of strawberries. Her daughter, Mary-Lee, a girl of about twelve, was with her.

Mrs. Whiteside was formidably decorous, but Mary-Lee had gone in heavily for make-up. Her eyebrows were plucked, her eyelids were painted, and the rest of her face was highly colored. I suppose she didn’t have anything else to do. I asked Mrs. Whiteside in enthusiastically, because I wanted to cross-question her about the Greenwoods. “Isn’t it a beautiful staircase?” she asked when she stepped into the hall. “They had it built for their daughter’s wedding. Dolores was only four at the time, but they liked to imagine that she would stand by the window in her white dress and throw her flowers down to her attendants.” I bowed Mrs. Whiteside into the living room and gave her a glass of sherry. “We’re pleased to have you here, Mr. Ogden,” she said. “It’s so nice to have children running on the beach again. But it’s only fair to say that we all miss the Greenwoods. They were charming people, and they’ve never rented before.

3. Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer—with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook—arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers—travelers, at least, with a traveler’s acuteness of feeling. I never investigate the houses that we rent, and so the wooden castle with a tower, the pile, the Staffordshire cottage covered with roses, and the Southern mansion all loom up in the last of the sea light with the enormous appeal of the unknown. You get the sea-rusted keys from the house next door. You unfasten the lock and step into a dark or a light hallway, about to begin a vacation—a month that promises to have no worries of any kind. But as strong as or stronger than this pleasant sense of beginnings is the sense of having stepped into the midst of someone else’s life. All my dealings are with agents, and I have never known the people from whom we have rented, but their ability to leave behind them a sense of physical and emotional presences is amazing.

4. This is being written in another seaside house with another wife. I sit in a chair of no discernible period or inspiration. Its cushions have a musty smell. The ashtray was filched from the Excelsior in Rome. My whiskey glass once held jelly. The table I’m writing on has a bum leg. The lamp is dim. Magda, my wife, is dyeing her hair. She dyes it orange, and this has to be done once a week. It is foggy, we are near a channel marked with buoys, and I can hear as many bells as I would hear in any pious village on a Sunday morning. There are high bells, low bells, and bells that seem to ring from under the sea. When Magda asks me to get her glasses, I step quietly onto the porch. The lights from the cottage, shining into the fog, give an illusion of substance, and it seems as if I might stumble on a beam of light. The shore is curved, and I can see the lights of other haunted cottages where people are building up an accrual of happiness or misery that will be left for the August tenants or the people who come next year. Are we truly this close to one another? Must we impose our burdens on strangers? And is our sense of the universality of suffering so inescapable? “My glasses, my glasses!” Magda shouts. “How many times do I have to ask you to bring them for me?” I get her glasses, and when she is finished with her hair we go to bed. In the middle of the night, the porch door flies open, but my first, my gentle wife is not there to ask, “Why have they come back? What have they lost?”

7. Make a summary of the story.

8. Find the words that constantly repeat in the story. How do they help to create the atmosphere?

9. Speak about the characters:

• Describe the narrator of the story.

• Describe Mr. Greenwood.

10. Say if the statements are true or false. Provide evidence:

1. Every summer the narrator, his wife and their children rent a house at the seashore through an agency.

2. The narrator feels on the way in which each house he has rented retains the personalities of its owners in bits of furniture, toys and personal items.

3.  One summer they stayed at Broadmere, the house of a family named Whiteside. 

4. Their neighbor told them that the family quarreled a lot, that their son had had to get married, disappointing his parents.

5. The rent house was gloomy and depressed the narrator, so he returned to New York.

6.  In his office he saw a man enter who, from a picture he had seen at the house, he recognized as Mr. Greenwood.

7. The narrator returned to the seashore, quarreled with his wife, walked out and never saw her again.

8. This story is being written in another rent seaside house with another wife, who is much more horrid than the first one.