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By Root 4047 0

“hydrogen-proof” her vintage bomb shelter, built during the Great War, and the whole paranoid ethos inspired Cheever to write one of his most entertaining satires, “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow.” The story begins, “I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, ‘O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps?’” This fanciful shelter belongs to Charlie Pastern, the “brigadier” of the Grassy Brae Golf Club, who spends his days “marching up and down the locker room” shouting, “Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss.” For all his bravado, though, Charlie proves to be a pathetically unhappy man stuck in a loveless marriage while expiring under an avalanche of debt. To distract himself, he begins an affair with a promiscuous matron named Mrs. Flanagan, who ultimately demands a key to his bomb shelter in exchange for her favors. When this gets back to Charlie's wife, she is duly vexed: “He had dragged her good name through a hundred escapades, debauched her excellence, and thrown away her love, but she had never imagined that he would betray her in their plans for the end of the world.” Finally, as she prepares to leave the wretched Charlie (who has lost Mrs. Flanagan too), she relates her epiphany: “You want the world to end, don't you? Don't you, Charlie, don't you?” A funny, poignant dénouement follows in the form of a letter from the narrator's mother, who reports that Charlie subsequently went to jail for grand larceny, leaving his family destitute, while the now divorced and similarly bereft Mrs. Flanagan was last seen standing beside the bomb shelter “like a mourner,” until the new owner sent a maid down to shoo her away.

That dénouement led to the first explicit clash between Cheever and Maxwell, whose friendship had been on the mend since the latter's brisk rejection of “Justina.” A few months before, Maxwell had even gone so far as to accompany Cheever to the dentist—a gesture of almost maternal solicitude that had moved Cheever, who reflected in his journal: “He has for more than twenty years, encouraged and supported me, it was he who got me an award and took me into his club* and now he sits beside me at the dentists to cure my anxieties. It is a friendship I think [of] today with no jealousy, no dependence, none of the imbalance of the lover and the beloved.” At other times, suffice to say, Cheever was very much inclined to dwell on the “imbalance” (“[Bill] was a man who mistook power for love,” he'd later remark), though it's not enough to say he merely concealed his misgivings—rather he seemed determined to abolish them with good behavior, almost as if he were reproaching himself for having such ignoble thoughts in the first place. As Maxwell put it shortly after Cheever's death, “He tried to separate things so that he could be my friend and I wouldn't be responsible for anything The New Yorker did that made him angry.” To a large degree, though, Maxwell was responsible, and Cheever was never quite so foolish as to think otherwise.

In the present case it was Maxwell, and Maxwell alone, who decided that the little dénouement to “Brigadier” was superfluous—he didn't share Cheever's taste for abrupt tonal changes, whimsical digressions, or really anything that diverged (much) from straightforward realism. Cheever, however, thought the final image of Mrs. Flanagan, standing forlornly beside the bomb shelter, was imperative to the story's integrity. (“Did you know that The New Yorker tried to take that out?” he remarked in The Paris Review, still indignant eight years later.) What's more, the cut was presented to Cheever practically as a fait accompli.* Dropping by The New Yorker to correct galleys, Cheever had noticed a page missing at the end—just like that—whereupon he asked Maxwell to meet him for lunch at the Century. As he wrote Weaver, “I kept the conversation