The Stories of John Cheever

This was a mistake, a disaster, a catastrophe, and I poured myself some more bourbon. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m tired. However, my offer still stands. If you want to go to Europe, Peter, I’ll be happy to pay your bills.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Peter said. “I’ve been. I mean, I’ve seen most of it.”

“Well, keep it in mind,” I said. “And as for you, Flora, I want you to come home with me. Come home for a week or two, anyhow. That’s all I ask. Ten years from now you will reproach me for not having guided you out of this mess. Ten years from now you’ll ask me, ‘Daddy, Daddy, oh, Daddy, why didn’t you teach me not to spend the best years of my life in a slum?’ I can’t bear the thought of you coming to me ten years from now, to blame me for not having forced you to take my advice.”

“I won’t go home.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“I can if I want.”

“I will stop your allowance.”

“I can get a job.”

“What kind of a job? You can’t type, you can’t take shorthand, you don’t know the first thing about any sort of business procedure, you can’t even run a switchboard.”

“I can get a job as a filing clerk.”

“Oh my God!” I roared. “Oh my God! After the sailing lessons and the skiing lessons, after the get-togethers and the cotillion, after the year in Florence and the long summers at the sea—after all this it turns out that what you really want is to be a spinster filing clerk with a low civil-service rating, whose principal excitement is to go once or twice a year to a fourth-rate Chinese restaurant with a dozen other spinster filing clerks and get tipsy on two sweet Manhattans.”