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By Root 3974 0

the dream world of conventional fiction—though he couldn't help wondering if his experiment had gone awry. “Footnotes might help,” he wrote, while revising the story in May; “help that is to express a loss of self-confidence.” In a desperate effort to push past his doubts and ennui, Cheever finished the story “aided by gin”—a measure he'd hitherto managed to avoid in his serious work (or so the evidence suggests)—and when the thing was done, he scarcely knew what to make of it. “I will give the Cabots to Bill [Maxwell] and his enthusiasm will be boundless,” he fancied. “He will drive over here from Yorktown and embrace me, etc.” It wasn't to be. According to Cheever, Maxwell replied, “I'm happy to have been born in the same century as you, but as God is my witness this is not a story.” In any case, he rejected it.

Not for the first time, one regrets Maxwell's conservatism (not to say his lack of sympathy toward an old friend in dire need of encouragement). At the very least, “The Jewels of the Cabots” is a fascinating failure, and perhaps an essential step toward the sort of reinvention that would enable Cheever (once sober) to proceed with Falconer. The story's persistent digressiveness may seem, at times, an almost boorish distraction from its titular subject, but in fact the Cabots are almost beside the point—little more than a means of piquing the narrator's memory in a contrapuntal manner. Early in the story, for example, the narrator recalls Mrs. Cabot's yearly diatribes at St. Botolphs Academy on the evils of drink and tobacco, which remind him (at great length) of his own mother's provincial intolerance. “Miss Peacock's has changed,” she “sadly” remarks of her granddaughter's school. When her son fails to grasp her meaning, the woman explains, “They're letting in Jews”:

“Can we change the subject?” I asked.

“I don't see why,” she said. “You brought it up.”

“My wife is Jewish, Mother,” I said. My wife was in the kitchen.

“That is not possible,” my mother said. “Her father is Italian.”

“Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.”

“Well,” Mother said, “I come from old Massachusetts stock and I'm not ashamed of it although I don't like being called a Yankee.”

“There's a difference.”

“Your father said that the only good Jew was a dead Jew although I did think Justice Brandeis charming.”

“I think it's going to rain,” I said. It was one of our staple conversational switch-offs, used to express anger, hunger, love, and the fear of death.

And hence the point of Cheever's digressiveness, which reflects the very nature of things in St. Botolphs—a place where the nastiness of life (whether embodied by genteel anti-Semitism, or more blatantly by Uncle Peepee Marshmallow and Doris the male prostitute) is swept under a rug of digressive propriety (“Feel that refreshing breeze”). Consequently the narrator himself, a product of that milieu, can't help shying away from unpleasant facts. “Why would I sooner describe church bells and flocks of swallows?” he remarks, remembering a time in Rome when he overheard an unseen woman railing at a man, “You're a God-damned fucked-up no-good insane piece of shit. …” Considering this—the sad case of the Cabots, St. Botolphs, the world at large—the narrator wishes he could express some heartening truth, as opposed to the merely sordid “facts”: “My real work these days is to write an edition of The New York Times that will bring gladness to the hearts of men.” At the same time he chides his own evasiveness as “puerile, a sort of greeting-card mentality”—and he does manage, finally, to confess the unpleasant “facts” about the Cabots: namely, that Geneva stole her mother's diamonds and fled to Egypt, whereupon Mrs. Cabot poisoned the girl's father. But we also learn that Geneva's escape—however tragic in other respects—has at least resulted in her own happiness. In a brief dénouement, the narrator visits her many years later in Luxor and finds her fat, happy, and married to a nobleman. And so the story ends: “On the last day I swam in the Nile—overhand—and they drove me to