The Stories of John Cheever

At about this time he had to go to Chicago. It was an overcast day, and he took the train. Waking a little after dawn, all usefulness and innocence, he looked out the window of his bedroom at a coffin factory, used-car dumps, shanties, weedy playing fields, pigs fattening on acorns, and in the distance the monumental gloom of Gary. The tedious and melancholy scene had the power over his spirit of a show of human stupidity. He had never applied his theorem to landscapes, but he discovered that, by translating the components of the moment into a parallelogram, he was able to put the discouraging countryside away from him until it seemed harmless, practical, and even charming. He ate a hearty breakfast and did a good day’s work. It was a day that needed no geometry. One of his associates in Chicago asked him to dinner. It was an invitation that he felt he could not refuse, and he showed up at half past six at a little brick house in a part of the city with which he was unfamiliar. Even before the door opened, he felt that he was going to need Euclid.

His hostess, when she opened the door, had been crying. She held a drink in her hand. “He’s in the cellar,” she sobbed, and went into a small living room without telling Mallory where the cellar was or how to get there. He followed her into the living room. She had dropped to her hands and knees, and was tying a tag to the leg of a chair. Most of the furniture, Mallory noticed, was tagged. The tags were printed: CHICAGO STORAGE WAREHOUSE. Below this she had written: “Property of Helen Fells McGowen.” McGowen was his friend’s name. “I’m not going to leave the s. o. b. a thing,” she sobbed. “Not a stick.”

“Hi, Mallory,” said McGowen, coming through the kitchen. “Don’t pay any attention to her. Once or twice a year she gets sore and puts tags on all the furniture, and claims she’s going to put it in storage and take a furnished room and work at Marshall Field’s.”

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

“What’s new?” McGowen asked.

“Lois Mitchell just telephoned. Harry got drunk and put the kitten in the blender.”

“Is she coming over?”

“Of course.”

The doorbell rang. A disheveled woman with wet cheeks came in. “Oh, it was awful,” she said. “The children were watching. It was their little kitten and they loved it. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the children hadn’t been watching.”