You've Got to Read This (28 page)

How beautiful to recall—as if trying to remember the snuffboxes of the devilish eighteenth century—-a writing device that depended only on the strength of downrushing human fingers. I mean a gizmo constructed to answer Newtonian physics; it had no moving part that was not rubber or metal and therefore replaceable in two minutes. The shifting roller was called the "carriage"—another shade of things antique. The carriage reaching the end of a line was signaled by something as literally primitive as the ringing of a bell. Today's computer salespersons might refer to unecessary options as "bells and whistles." But, I tell you, the bell was necessary then.

This present story could not, I think, have been composed without the faintly churchlike gratitude of a silver bell, half nautical, achievable, and sonorous. Perhaps the bell's metronomic contribution made pre-computer prose more pulsating, the typical sentences shorter, purer—unlike the snaking silent toxic run-ons of today? That bell and simple wizardry colluded in the composition of this story, a lash of consciousness perfectly outcurling, snapping exact at its end. It must be regarded both as music and as gift.

John Cheever certainly saw it that way.

INTRODUCTION BY ALLAN GURGANUS « 155

The story remains so fresh. Only one word dates it. A certain breakfast roll is herein called a "crescent" and not, as every American can now boldly say, a

"croissant."

"Goodbye, My Brother" makes promises so often forgotten these days—

an assurance that the ocean is the source of life, that beautiful women are—

in Cheever's un-P.C. daringly prelapsarian relation to womankind—easier to be around than the other sort; that all family relations, though strained and harrowing and violent as human birth, must eventually empty into acceptance, self-knowledge, and a kind of resignation that can pass, in dealing with our brothers and sisters, for love: that often
is
love.

The architecture of Cheever's narrative possesses all the frontal force of eighteenth-century New England ecclesiastical design. The white symmetry (unmarked by the blue chalk of its makings) aims upward, a frame structure that—in its very starchiness—recalls the Puritan self-purging. It mortally reflects a region's will to ethical beauty, life at its more orderly, its most civic and transcendental, yet contained.

Cheever's best short fiction is even better than most people think. There is a distance between his greatest stories and the mere surface joys of the others. But in a tale like this one, a complex morality keeps burning through the surface heraldry. There is a relentless vision at work. The theology is notable for rerouting Cotton Mather's aseptic values: Lawrence stands accused of
not
drinking,
not
gambling,
not
flirting, and therefore
not
enjoying; his damnation is no less fixed than an earlier generation's certainty.

"The harsh surface beauty of life," as the story terms it, seems what we have these days. To our narrator—the harried schoolmaster with just two weeks a year to experience pure fun, pure masquerade, pure simplifying natural pleasure—such a return to courtesy (and class entitlement) replaces an early ethical "absolute good." The unabashed lyrical passages are reserved here for a single person's experiencing of the elements. Such a Winslow Homer watercolor of a sentence our narrator commits:

Most of the sailing that I do these days is in Manhasset, and I am used to setting a homeward course by the gasoline barge and the tin roofs of the boat shed, and it was a pleasure that afternoon, as we returned, to keep the bow on a white church spire in the village and to find even the inshore water green and clear.

The sentence is constructed as a set of waves, resisted. Cheever's every word is operative; there's no filler, no cornstarch, no MSG to interfere with the taste of sea spray and eternity. The mundane landmarks, the gasoline barge and the roofs, manage—instead of impeding the sense of speed and joy—to heighten the feel of our being fully at home on the water itself, the very briny depths where patriarch Pommeroy met his traditional doom.

But Cheever's tale of a misspent family reunion allows the natural
156 " GOODBYE, MY BROTHER

world's pleasure to serve as more than mere comfort margin and counter-point to human discord. The water and the land, the scent of beach grapes, the perfect vistas observed from a house sinking into the sea—these, as human relations strain and fray, become, like the gaming social rituals of the cliffside house itself, sacramental.

We drank our gin; the abuse seemed to reach a crescendo, and then, one by one, we went swimming in the solid green water. But when we came out no one mentioned Lawrence unkindly; the line of abusive conversation had been cut, as if swimming had the cleansing force claimed for baptism.

Cheever is preparing us for the glorious final chord change of the story.

It is that most generous sort of account, and hardest to achieve: a sad, sad story about the possibility of beauty in this life, a hymn to pleasure and order that, on ending, leaves one soaked in a strange soaring sense of creature well-being.

The writer has been setting up that exquisite last line when his sister, Diana, and his wife, Helen—till now, never named in a shared sentence—

are finally joined, to emerge, glistening, redeemed, redeeming. Cheever finally lets us reflect on these two names from Myth and from that Myth called History. It is typical of Cheever that the names should be so characteristic of WASPs of this and earlier generations. But the surprise of alchemically allowing these women to emerge nude from the unimprovable sea is just part of the writer's revised theology of pleasure.

At the top of his form, Cheever can function botn as a social historian and as a magic realist, both as a creator of supreme entertainments and as a moralist who'll be remembered like the best Pommeroy preachers "in sermons and books." In the final exit from the sea, what lifts is not simply that last lush symphonic swell after the brutalities family life exacts from the best of us. No, we are returned to mere Eden, before the falling of a house into the sea might be of concern, before there was a need for houses, before God sent rain to Eden—because rain might inconvenience the couple placed there for pleasure-seeking only. We are returned to the childhood happiness of pure noun. A tree is to climb. Anything red needs eating. The human form is incorruptible.

"The great value of art," Delmore Schwartz wrote, "is in the exercise of an observing faculty able to confer on commonplace experience a universal value and thus restore significance to the life of the individual."

And so, godless yet a believer, I choose to end my admiration of this perfect vessel of a story with two awed simple syllables—ones that constitute every reader's psalm of praise to a work that seems so true. I mean our sweetest, most succinct form of literary criticism, of loving praise: "Amen."

Goodbye, M y Brother

John C h e e v e r

We are a family that has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again. I don't think about the family much, but when I remember its members and the coast where they lived and the sea salt that I think is in our blood, I am happy to recall that I am a Pommeroy—that I have the nose, the coloring, and the promise of longevity—and that while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that the Pommeroys are unique. I don't say any of this because I'm interested in family history or because this sense of uniqueness is deep or important to me but in order to advance the point that we are loyal to one another in spite of our differences, and that any rupture in this loyalty is a source of confusion and pain.

We are four children: there is my sister Diana and the three men—

Chaddy, Lawrence, and myself. Like most families in which the children are out of their twenties, we have been separated by business, marriage, and war. Helen and I live on Long Island now, with our four children. I teach in a secondary school, and I am past the age where I expect to be made head-master—or principal, as we say—but I respect the work. Chaddy, who has done better than the rest of us, lives in Manhattan, with Odette and their children. Mother lives in Philadelphia, and Diana, since her divorce, has been living in France, but she comes back to the States in the summer to spend a month at Laud's Head. Laud's Head is a summer place on the shore of one of the Massachusetts islands. We used to have a cottage there, and in the twenties our father built the big house. It stands on a cliff above the sea and, excepting St. Tropez and some of the Apennine villages, it is my favorite place in the world. We each have an equity in the place and we contribute some money to help keep it going.

Our youngest brother, Lawrence, who is a lawyer, got a job with a Cleveland firm after the war, and none of us saw him for four years. When he decided to leave Cleveland and go to work for a firm in Albany, he wrote Mother that he would, between jobs, spend ten days at Laud's Head, with his wife and their two children. This was when I had planned to take my vacation—I had been teaching summer school—and Helen and Chaddy and Odette and Diana were all going to be there, so the family would be
157

1 58 • GOODBYE, MY BROTHER

together. Lawrence is the member of the family with whom the rest of us have least in common. We have never seen a great deal of him, and I suppose that's why we still call him Tifty—a nickname he was given when he was a child, because when he came down the hall toward the dining room for breakfast, his slippers made a noise that sounded like "Tifty, tifty, tifty."

That's what Father called him, and so did everyone else. When he grew older, Diana sometimes used to call him Little Jesus, and Mother often called him the Croaker. We had disliked Lawrence, but we looked forward to his return with a mixture of apprehension and loyalty, and with some of the joy and delight of reclaiming a brother.

Lawrence crossed over from the mainland on the four-o'clock boat one afternoon late in the summer, and Chaddy and I went down to meet him. The arrivals and departures of the summer ferry have all the outward signs that suggest a voyage—whistles, bells, hand trucks, reunions, and the smell of brine—but it is a voyage of no import, and when I watched the boat come into the blue harbor that afternoon and thought that it was completing a voyage of no import, I realized that I had hit on exactly the kind of observation that Lawrence would have made. We looked for his face behind the windshields as the cars drove off the boat, and we had no trouble in recognizing him. And we ran over and shook his hand and clumsily kissed his wife and the children. "Tifty!" Chaddy shouted. "Tifty!" It is difficult to judge changes in the appearance of a brother, but both Chaddy and I agreed, as we drove back to Laud's Head, that Lawrence still looked very young. He got to the house first, and we took the suitcases out of his car. When I came in, he was standing in the living room, talking with Mother and Diana. They were in their best clothes and all their jewelry, and they were welcoming him extravagantly, but even then, when everyone was endeavoring to seem most affectionate and at a time when these endeavors come easiest, I was aware of a faint tension in the room. Thinking about this as I carried Lawrence's heavy suitcases up the stairs, I realized that our dislikes are as deeply ingrained as our better passions, and I remembered that once, twenty-five years ago, when I had hit Lawrence on the head with a rock, he had picked himself up and gone directly to our father to complain.

I carried the suitcases up to the third floor, where Ruth, Lawrence's wife, had begun to settle her family. She is a thin girl, and she seemed very tired from the journey, but when I asked her if she didn't want me to bring a drink upstairs to her, she said she didn't think she did.

When I got downstairs, Lawrence wasn't around, but the others were all ready for cocktails, and we decided to go ahead. Lawrence is the only member of the family who has never enjoyed drinking. We took our cocktails onto the terrace, so that we could see the bluffs and the sea and the islands in the east, and the return of Lawrence and his wife, their presence in the house, seemed to refresh our responses to the familiar view; it was as if the pleasure they would take in the sweep and the color of that coast, after such
JOHN CHEEVER • 159

a long absence, had been imparted to us. While we were there, Lawrence came up the path from the beach.

"Isn't the beach fabulous, Tifty?" Mother asked. "Isn't it fabulous to be back? Will you have a Martini?"

"I don't care," Lawrence said. "Whiskey, gin—I don't care what I drink.

Give me a little rum."

"We don't have any
rum,"
Mother said. It was the first note of asperity.

She had taught us never to be indecisive, never to reply as Lawrence had.

Beyond this, she is deeply concerned with the propriety of her house, and anything irregular by her standards, like drinking straight rum or bringing a beer can to the dinner table, excites in her a conflict that she cannot, even with her capacious sense of humor, surmount. She sensed the asperity and worked to repair it. "Would you like some Irish, Tifty dear?" she said. "Isn't Irish what you've always liked? There's some Irish on the sideboard. Why don't you get yourself some Irish?" Lawrence said that he didn't care. He poured himself a Martini, and then Ruth came down and we went in to dinner. In spite of the fact that we had, through waiting for Lawrence, drunk too much before dinner, we were all anxious to put our best foot forward and to enjoy a peaceful time. Mother is a small woman whose face is still a striking reminder of how pretty she must have been, and whose conversation is unusually light, but she talked that evening about a soil-reclamation project that is going on up-island. Diana is as pretty as Mother must have been; she is an animated and lovely woman who likes to talk about the dissolute friends that she has made in France, but she talked that night about the school in Switzerland where she had left her two children. I could see that the dinner had been planned to please Lawrence. It was not too rich, and there was nothing to make him worry about extravagance.