Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [95]
Perhaps to show how well he understood, he wrote “The Season of Divorce,” about a woman named Ethel—gifted in her own right—whose life is “confined” to housewifery by her husband's modest salary. For a while she hangs her college diploma over the kitchen sink as a pathetic joke (“I don't know where the diploma is now,” the husband-narrator remarks), and is tempted by the passionate appreciation of a man named Trencher, who sends roses on her birthday while her husband forgets the occasion entirely. One of the woman's outbursts stands as a rather remarkable apologia given the times—all the more so in comparison with Cheever's later, decidedly less compassionate portraits of talented, unfulfilled women: “In Grenoble,” Ethel says, “I wrote a long paper on Charles Stuart in French. A professor at the University of Chicago wrote me a letter. I couldn't read a French newspaper without a dictionary today, I don't have the time to follow any newspaper, and I am ashamed of my incompetence, ashamed of the way I look. Oh, I guess I love you, I do love the children, but I love myself, I love my life, it has some value and some promise for me and Trencher's roses make me feel that I'm losing this, that I'm losing my self-respect. …”
Such a dark view of the distaff middle class was galling to Harold Ross, who preferred to give his readers (chiefly female) a little uplift in their fiction. Later Cheever would claim that Ross—while picking his nose and scratching himself and jumping about in his chair—had once admonished him, “Goddammit, Cheever, why do you write these fucking gloomy goddamn stories? … But I have to buy them. I don't know why.” He might have bought them, but he sometimes hesitated to print them, letting almost two years pass before he published a grindingly lugubrious story titled “The Pot of Gold,” about a nice young couple named Whittemore who endure a life of constant disappointment while clinging to the lower rungs of white-collar Manhattan. A dream of success sustains them, coloring their dreary lives with a wan golden light that Cheever paints into the story with deft, incidental strokes, as when Laura Whittemore chats with another deprived wife amid “the sorry and touching countryside of Central Park”: “Vaguely, boastfully, the two women discussed the irons their men had in the fire. They sat together with their children through the sooty twilights, when the city to the south burns like a Bessemer furnace, and the air smells of coal, and the wet boulders shine like slag, and the Park itself seems like a strip of woods at the edge of a coal town.” All the Whittemores’ schemes come to nothing in the end, and the light seems to fade as they find themselves poor as ever and middle-aged to boot. Left at that, the story would rank with Chekhov at his most laughably desolate; but perhaps as a sop to Ross (as well as an oblique tribute to his wife's forbearance), Cheever tacked on a sappy ending in which Ralph Whittemore realizes that the gold he sought was always there for the taking: “Desire for [his wife] delighted and confused him. Here it was, here it all was, and the shine of the gold seemed to him then to be all around her arms.”
“The Pot of Gold” and “The Season of Divorce” were included, respectively, in the 1951 O. Henry Award Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories, though Cheever gloomily concluded that “Pot of Gold,” at least, was “not a first-rate story”: “It is deeply felt but it is morbid,” he wrote in his journal. “It is a morbid story with a sentimental resolution. It was a step in the right direction, perhaps, but don't do this again.”
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AS THE NEW YORKER prepared to celebrate