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By Root 4177 0

to, that poetic demonstration of his abiding youth, the scales fall from his eyes and the parties of Shady Hill seem “interminable and stale.” And lest we fail to grasp the man's dejection, a suave and witty narrator (who henceforth will intrude himself more and more into Cheever's fiction) is apt to apostrophize on the matter: “Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale cocktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those postmortems and pickup suppers!” Cheever knew those blues all right, but he also knew the peculiar magic of those leafy streets, and he imparts this too with sensual immediacy—the “sense of being alive” that he found in Fitzgerald's work, and which he invokes here with a sudden switch to the present tense (the same way one is cued to the building excitement of Gatsby's parties): “Then it is a summer night, a wonderful summer night. The passengers on the eight-fifteen see Shady Hill—if they notice it at all—in a bath of placid golden light. … On Alewives Lane sprinklers continue to play after dark. You can smell the water. The air seems as fragrant as it is dark—it is a delicious element to walk through—and most of the windows on Alewives Lane are open to it.” The night's fragrant nostalgia moves Cash to resume, foolishly, his hurdle races—to take a last look at himself in the water, as it were—until his wife (accidentally or not) shoots him dead in midair. No dénouement is necessary. “It seems allright to me,” Cheever noted on finishing the story. “God knows I need the money. What to do next.”

Cheever's next story (also set in Shady Hill) was one of his best, “The Five-Forty-Eight,” though its raw materials were homely enough. His brother, Fred, had mentioned that he'd fired a secretary who seemed unstable, and afterward the woman had sent him a few threatening notes. (When Iris read the story, she was furious that John had plundered their lives for a donnée—it would be far from the last time—or rather two données: as John wrote in his journal, Fred would sometimes punish his wife “by refusing to speak to her for a week or two.”) But the story is no more about Fred than “O Youth and Beauty!” is about Dudley. Mostly it was determined by Cheever's own alienation—his occasional sense that there were “two worlds,” his own and everyone else's, that he was unloved and unloving, doomed to be “the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality.”

“When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her,” the story begins, in medias res, proceeding in somber, muted prose that seems the work of an almost entirely different man from the author of “O Youth and Beauty!” Not a flicker of humor is found in “The Five-Forty-Eight,” since the reader is confined to the perspective of a humorless man incapable of love. “She had no legitimate business with him,” he briskly decides of the woman waiting outside the elevator, and that fixes Blake's character once and for all. And yet one feels a vague sympathy for him—as he pauses, say, on a rainy street (the woman lurking somewhere behind him) to peer into a store window: “The window was arranged like a room in which people live and entertain their friends. There were cups on the coffee table, magazines to read, and flowers in the vases, but the flowers were dead and the cups were empty and the guests had not come. In the plate glass, Blake saw a clear reflection of himself and the crowds that were passing, like shadows, at his back.” Here is perfect loneliness—a man divided from the domestic tableau in front of him (made desolate by his gaze) and the crowds passing behind him like so many ghosts. It is precisely the hell of a man “with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality,” a point sustained in almost everything Blake thinks and sees. Trapped on a train—the woman holding him at gunpoint—he wistfully notices the same advertisements at every station: “There