The Stories of John Cheever

I read about the theft next day in the evening paper. I delivered papers. I had begun my route on foot, moved on to a bicycle, and was assigned, when I was sixteen, to an old Ford truck. I was a truck driver! I hung around the linotype room until the papers were printed and then drove around to the four neighboring villages, tossing out bundles at the doors of the candy and stationery stores. During the World Series a second edition with box scores was brought out, and after dark I would make the trip again to Travertine and the other places along the shore. The roads were dark, there was very little traffic, and leaf burning had not been forbidden, so that the air was tannic, melancholy, and exciting. One can attach a mysterious and inordinate amount of importance to some simple journey, and this second trip with the box scores made me very happy. I dreaded the end of the World Series as one dreads the end of any pleasure, and had I been younger I would have prayed. CABOT JEWELS STOLEN was the headline and the incident was never again mentioned in the paper. It was not mentioned at all in our house, but this was not unusual. When Mr. Abbott hung himself from the pear tree next door this was never mentioned.

Molly and I took a walk on the beach at Travertine that Sunday afternoon. I was troubled, but Molly’s troubles were much graver. It did not disturb her that Geneva had stolen the diamonds. She only wanted to know what had become of her sister, and she was not to find out for another six weeks. However, something had happened at the house that night. There had been a scene between her parents and her father had left. She described this to me. We were walking barefoot. She was crying. I would like to have forgotten the scene as soon as she finished her description.

Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts. In the last chapter the ship comes home to port, the children are saved, the miners will be rescued. Is this an infirmity of the genteel or a conviction that there are discernible moral truths? Mr. X defecated in his wife’s top drawer. This is a fact, but I claim that it is not a truth. In describing St. Botolphs I would sooner stay on the West Bank of the river where the houses were white and where the church bells rang, but over the bridge there was the table-silver factory, the tenements (owned by Mrs. Cabot), and the Commercial Hotel. At low tide one could smell the sea gas from the inlets at Travertine. The headlines in the afternoon paper dealt with a trunk murder. The women on the streets were ugly. Even the dummies in the one store window seemed stooped, depressed, and dressed in clothing that neither fitted nor became them. Even the bride in her splendor seemed to have got some bad news. The politics were neofascist, the factory was non-union, the food was unpalatable, and the night wind was bitter. This was a provincial and a traditional world enjoying few of the rewards of smallness and traditionalism, and when I speak of the blessedness of all small places I speak of the West Bank. On the East Bank was the Commercial Hotel, the demesne of Doris, a male prostitute who worked as a supervisor in the factory during the day and hustled the bar at night, exploiting the extraordinary moral lassitude of the place. Everybody knew Doris, and many of the customers had used him at one time or another. There was no scandal and no delight involved. Doris would charge a traveling salesman whatever he could get but he did it with the regulars for nothing. This seems more like tolerance than hapless indifference, the absence of vision, moral stamina, the splendid Ambitiousness of romantic love. On fight night Doris drifts down the bar. Buy him a drink and he’ll put his hand on your arm, your shoulder, your waist, and move a fraction of an inch in his direction and he’ll reach for the cake. The steam fitter buys him a drink, the high-school dropout, the watch repairman. (Once a stranger shouted to the bartender, “Tell that son of a bitch to take his tongue out of my ear “—but he was a stranger.) This is not a transient world, these are not drifters, more than half of these men will never live in any other place, and yet this seems to be the essence of spiritual nomadism. The telephone rings and the bartender beckons to Doris. There’s a customer in room 8. Why would I sooner be on the West Bank where my parents are playing bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Pinkham in the golden light of a great gas chandelier?