Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [123]
Such a love will not end well, of course, but for a while Francis is a man risen from the dead (or for that matter “a punching bag for the beauty and virility of the world”). The next morning he stands tingling on the platform, waiting for his train, when he sees “an extraordinary thing”: in a passing window, a beautiful nude sits in her roomette “combing and combing” her golden hair. Ecstatically Francis watches the vision pass, when suddenly he's visited by an emissary from Shady Hill—old Mrs. Wrightson, who wants to talk about her quest for the right sort of curtains. “I know what to do with them,” Francis finally interrupts her. “What?” “Paint them black on the inside, and shut up.” This exhilarating exchange proves the high point of Francis's rebellion. As his furious wife reminds him, Mrs. Wrightson wields a terrible power in the village—she decides which girls will go to the assemblies—and by insulting her Francis has consigned them all to pariah-dom. Worse, it turns out that Anne Murchison is engaged to a pimply youth named Clayton, who for good measure lectures Francis on the shortcomings of the life to which he's doomed to return: “[Shady Hill] doesn't have any future. So much energy is spent in perpetuating the place—in keeping out undesirables and so forth—that the only idea of the future anyone has is just more and more commuting trains and more parties. I don't think that's healthy.” At last the abject Francis is driven to confess his love to a psychiatrist, Dr. Herzog, who advises him to console himself with woodwork; ten days later he's in the cellar building a coffee table. “Francis is happy,” the narrator announces, with vertiginous irony.
And so the story winds down with a last, virtuosic montage of Shady Hill at twilight: a wistful neighbor, Donald Goslin, goes on playing the Moonlight Sonata with excessive rubato; little Toby Weed pretends to be a spaceman; the naked, aging Babcocks race around their hedge-screened terrace (“as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice”); an evocative cat hobbles onto the scene “securely buttoned into a doll's dress, from the skirts of which protrudes its long hairy tail.” Finally Jupiter reappears: “He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”
Cheever wrote this “arty ending” (as he called it) out of sequence, in a flash of inspiration, and felt that he'd perfectly synthesized the disparate elements of an exquisitely intricate story.* Some have criticized the ending as anticlimactic and evasive, but of course Cheever was rarely interested in resolving the loose ends of a neat linear plot; rather he sought to compose a harmonic set of impressions, in this case a picture of the suburbs rendered in a spirit of “love and charity” that yet reflected “the real limitations in such a community.” Francis is thwarted and properly so, though he finds a drop of (ambiguous) comfort in woodwork; meanwhile Jupiter prances free, as do the Babcocks, and after all it's a kingly night of (almost) infinite possibilities. In later years, Cheever wasn't averse to pointing out that Nabokov, no less, had mentioned “The Country Husband” as one of his “half-a-dozen particular favorites,” explaining its mechanism in very agreeable terms: “The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.”
At the end of that difficult year, then, Cheever could take comfort in having made better and better art out of a supposedly neurotic outlook, and there were more tangible rewards as well. “The Country Husband” won first prize in the O. Henry Awards,