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By Root 4006 0

of kite string.” Likewise, too, Hammer and Nailles are both in their fashion prone to depression, alcoholism, and murderous tendencies. Nailles's weaknesses, however, are mostly under control, whereas Hammer's incipient criminality is revealed by his long first-person rant in Part Two; afterward, when the narrative reverts to the third person, the reader sees—from outside—how strenuously Hammer works to impersonate a relatively “normal” person such as Nailles: “[Hammer] had a nervous way of shifting his head, setting his teeth and bracing his shoulders as if his thinking consisted of a series of resolves and decisions. I must cut down on my smoking. (Teeth-setting.) Life can be beautiful. (Shoulder-bracing.) I am often misunderstood. (A sudden lifting of the head.) Nailles’ manner was much more serene.” Nailles may be more “serene,” but when Hammer reveals his inner self with a casual suggestion that Nailles shoot his beloved old dog, the latter is so infuriated that “for a moment he might have killed Hammer.”

Like his wife, Nailles prefers to believe in his own happiness and virtue, just as he takes for granted the happiness and virtue of his neighbors in Bullet Park—a typical Cheeverian suburb where decorum prevails at all costs, while misery and corruption and even human mortality are denied whenever possible. “I think [Bullet Park] stinks,” says Hammer's wife, Marietta, at an otherwise genteel gathering. “It's just like a masquerade party. All you have to do is to get your clothes at Brooks, catch the train and show up in church once a week and no one will ever ask a question about your identity.” When she then proceeds to castigate her cipherlike (but actually homicidal) husband as a “doormat,” the other guests politely make their excuses to leave rather than endure this unsavory spectacle of marital unhappiness. Thus Mrs. Hammer serves much the same purpose as Gee-Gee in “The Scarlet Moving Van,” whose drunken tirades are meant to instruct his neighbors (“They've got to learn. … I've got to teach them”) in the inevitability of “anger and lust and the agonies of death.” As for Nailles, he is a kind of ideal candidate for such edification. “Well I suppose there's plenty to be sad about if you look around,” he remarks to his son, “but it makes me sore to have people always chopping at the suburbs. … The living is cheaper out here and I'd be lost if I couldn't get some exercise. People seem to make some connection between respectability and moral purity that I don't get.” What Nailles doesn't “get,” of course, is that the vaunted “respectability” of a utopia such as Bullet Park is a sham: his charming neighbors the Wickwires are drinking themselves into early decrepitude, while Mr. Heathcup tries assuaging his misery by painting his house until he finally gives up and kills himself. For Nailles, however—a soi-disant “chemist” whose real job is merchandising Spang, a mouthwash, thereby devoting himself to the denial of such everyday unpleasantness as bad breath—all infirmity belongs to some abstract “principality” far away from Bullet Park, and it bemuses him to receive occasional reminders of such a place in the form of a postcard, say: “Edna is under sedation most of the time and has about three weeks to live but she would like a letter from you.” No wonder that when he first observes Hammer (at church), he decides that his would-be destroyer is a man of “invincible” excellence—because, after all, he appears to be. “I go on about the vulnerability of Nailles,” Cheever reflected in his notes, “of a man who was so absolutely of his time and the conveniences of his society that he was utterly defenseless at the appearance of an alien set of values.”

Nailles's best quality is also the source of his vulnerability—namely, his extravagant love of family, “[which was] like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround them, cover them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic.” His ability to demonstrate this love, however, is constrained by the narrow propriety