We went out of the station and up a side street to a restaurant. It was still early, and the place was empty. The bartender was quarreling with a delivery boy, and there was one very old waiter in a red coat down by the kitchen floor. We sat down and my father hailed the waiter in a loud voice.
The narrator is son recalling the last time he saw his father. It was a reunion of sorts; the two had not seen each other since the boy’s mother had left her husband. The reunion fails to meet with his expectations because what was supposed to be a meeting for lunch turns into a boorish ambling trek from one bar to the next. This quote reveals how Cheever effectively sets the stage for the revelations to come through telling understatement. The hour too early for drinking, the single aged waiter and the manner in which his father is already starting to make a spectacle of himself foreshadows to the attentive reader what the son did not yet realize: his mother left his father because he is an alcoholic.
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.”
The opening line of one of Cheever’s most anthologized and famous stories serves to further indicate the significance of alcohol as a major recurring element in his stories. Cheever’s stories are typically peopled with affluent suburban commuters who inhabit social milieus heavily dependent upon the sedating effects of liquor. Like the subtle means by which the alcoholic father reveals himself in “Reunion” the opening line here instantly tells readers much about the setting and characters to come.
She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet.
In this passage, Cheever reveals his mastery of descriptive prose, implicating the titular radio as a mechanism that does not possess any particularly otherworldly characteristics yet still manages to convey an uneasy feeling of dread. While it remains clear that the radio is just a radio—absolutely no indication is given that it might be anything else such as might be conveyed in a science fiction or horror tale—the little details like its pronounced ugliness, abundance of dials and sickly green light all serve to underscore that though it may be just be a radio…something here ain’t right.
Given these unpleasant facts, then, about these not attractive people, we can dispatch them brightly enough, and who but Dolly would ever miss them? Donald Wryson, in his crusading zeal for upzoning, was out in all kinds of weather, and let’s say that one night, when he was returning from a referendum in an ice storm, his car skidded down Hill Street, struck the big elm at the corner, and was demolished. Finis.
Cheever’s enthusiasm for third-person narrator is on full display in this excerpt from “The Wrysons.” The title refers to the last name of yet another suburban couple, but is also word play foreshadowing the tenor of the story itself. Perhaps no better word in the English languages exists with which to describe the tone of the above quote than “wry.” It is as effective a connotative example of wry humor as one could find.
He ordered a Gibson and shouldered his way in between two other men at the bar, so that if she should be watching from the window she would lose sight of him. The place was crowded with commuters putting down a drink before the ride home. They had brought in on their clothes—on their shoes and umbrellas—the rancid smell of the wet dusk outside, but Blake began to relax as soon as he tasted his Gibson.
The intensely unpleasant Mr. Blake is no backyard barbecue Caesar nor a uncouth drunk, but like the title character in the “The Swimmer” and the pathetic non-father-figure in “Reunion” he is yet another Cheever character for whom liquor is almost an extension of his mortality. Blake’s lack of imagination and passively aggressive willingness to embody a modern stereotype is telegraphed by his choice for a “usual.” A Gibson situates Mr. Blake as firmly within the world of mid-century New York executives as a blue flannel suit, the constant presence of a cigarette between his fingers and an utter disregard for objectifying attractive women as worthy of little more than being the playthings of semi-ambitious men.
