“Pot of Gold”
Cheever constantly displays a gift for opening his stories with an efficient delineation of main characters that doesn’t make a direct statement, but rather alludes to a core essence of their being through imagery. The imagery may refer to physical features or behavioral patterns or moral disposition. The imagery here that situates a fairly average couple as being somewhat overly obsessed with money sets up a story that questions the nature of economic self-evaluation.
“You could not say fairly of Ralph and Laura Whittemore that they had the failings and the characteristics of incorrigible treasure hunters, but you could say truthfully of them that the shimmer and the smell, the peculiar force of money, the promise of it, had an untoward influence on their lives. They were always at the threshold of fortune; they always seemed to have something on the fire.”
“O Youth and Beauty”
This story also opens with imagery that immediately creates a sense of character through behavioral patterns and moral dispositions, but in this case the description is of setting. That setting is Cheever’s favorite and the one which made him famous. Cheever has been called the “Chekhov of the Suburbs” and he writes about it knowingly. Let it be noted that the excerpt here to illustrate imagery represents just part of the first half of the opening paragraph:
“At the tag end of nearly every...Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low…and the baby-sitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long since stretched out on the sofa and fallen into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves…”
“The Wrysons”
Imagery is used in “The Wrysons” for a very specific purpose, the details of which will not be divulged here in order for the purpose of avoiding giving away the ending. The husband and wife are each declared “odd” by the narrator who then proceeds to describe what in particular makes each of them odd. These descriptions are separated: first the oddness of Irene is described and then the oddness of Donald. The centerpiece of Irene’s oddness is a recurring dream about a hydrogen bomb explosion and it is only with the subsequent explanation of Donald’s oddness that everything comes together in the end:
“The dream was set in Shady Hill—she dreamed that she woke in her own bed. Donald was always gone. She was at once aware of the fact that the bomb had exploded. Mattress stuffing and a trickle of brown water were coming through a big hole in the ceiling. The sky was gray—lightless—although there were in the west a few threads of red light, like those charming vapor trails we see in the air after the sun has set.”
“The Sutton Place Story”
A precocious little girl not yet three years old goes missing in the city and sets off a desperate search. Through a nice bit of imagery, Cheever demonstrates how the character of a place is more often than not defined not by what it actually is, but the emotional state of the one who seeing it. From inside a police car in throes of fear, the father of the little girl comes to look at everything quite different:
“He saw the city only in terms of mortal danger. Each manhole cover, excavation, and flight of stairs dominated the brilliance of the day like the reverse emphasis of a film negative, and he thought the crowds and the green trees in Central Park looked profane. The Hotel Princess was on a dingy street in the West Seventies. The air in the lobby was fetid.”
