Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [122]
And then he suspected that plenty of nonpoets suffered too. Even among his most prosaic neighbors, he noticed a certain “breakdown of perspective” in middle age: “Bald-headed men” who suddenly took up painting, or played the Moonlight Sonata with their windows open (“this ardent invitation to some lonely chamber-maid”). Any one of them might slip along the tightrope of propriety: commit adultery, seduce the babysitter, “bugger the tree surgeon,” but (in most cases) they didn't—Cheever didn't—because “to do any of these things would so damage the health of my self-esteem that I would be dealing with the obscenities of death.” Or, as he put it in the story he began to write, “The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light.” When at last Cheever finished “The Country Husband”—almost three months after his first tentative notes—he was so exalted that he drove at once to Maxwell's house in Yorktown Heights, to wait while his editor (ill with bronchitis) read the manuscript in bed. Maxwell would always remember his own sense of “rapture.”
“To begin at the beginning” (the story opens), Francis Weed is rocked out of his daily torpor with a picturesque airplane crash on the first page of the story. The airplane goes down through “a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires,” while the only sound is that of the pilot “singing faintly, ‘I've got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence. …’ “ Not only does Francis survive, but the whole incident is made to seem immediately unreal. Returning to New York (the crash was outside Philadelphia), he encounters his old friend Trace Bearden on the train to Shady Hill, but the man can scarcely credit that Francis has been in a weather-related crash, since, after all, that late-September day in New York is as “fragrant and shapely as an apple.” As for Mrs. Weed and their children, they are too “absorbed in their own antagonisms” to give Francis a proper greeting, much less listen to his story about miraculously escaping death. Indeed, when Francis asks his wife if they might try eating dinner apart from their squabbling children, the woman brings him crashing back to earth in a different sense: “Julia's guns are loaded for this. She can't cook two dinners and lay two tables. She paints with lightning strokes that panorama of drudgery in which her youth, her beauty, and her wit have been lost.” Meanwhile the spirit of anarchy—embodied by a black retriever named Jupiter—frolics amid the staid gardens of Shady Hill: “Jupiter crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.”
Such is the banality of Francis's life—his Weedness—that the airplane crash might have been forgotten and everything restored to normal, were it not for a subsequent encounter that piques his memory and leaves his senses “dilated” (momentously for one so absorbed in the quotidian present: “He had not developed his memory as a sentimental faculty. Wood smoke, lilac, and other such perfumes did not stir him, and his memory was something like his appendix—a vestigial repository”). At an otherwise unremarkable dinner party, Francis recognizes the housemaid as a woman he saw in France during the war. Punished for fraternizing with Germans, she had had her head shaved and was forced to strip naked in the public square. Aglow with the strangeness of that memory—of that whole incongruously vivid time—Francis goes home to find their usual babysitter, a crone, replaced by a lovely seventeen-year-old named Anne Murchison. The girl begins sobbing in his car because of a nasty exchange with her drunken father, and Francis tries to comfort her: “The layers of their clothing felt thin, and when her shuddering began to diminish, it was so