Over the course of the previous half century, Vladimir Nabokov observed in November 1971, “the greatest Short Stories have been produced not in England, not in Russia, and certainly not in France, but in [the United States].” As examples, Nabokov went on to cite half a dozen personal favorites, with John Cheever's “The Country Husband” (1954) leading the list.¹ Two years later, John Leonard declared his belief that “Cheever is our best living writer of short stories,” adding that this view was not commonly shared.² With the publication of The Stories of John Cheever in 1978, however, everyone sailed their hats in the air. What the critics neglected to discover earlier, reading Cheever's stories singly in the New Yorker or in his smaller collections, suddenly became clear in the wake of this whopping assemblage of sixty-one stories. In fact, Cheever now deserved recognition, according to Stephen Becker, as “one of the two or three most imaginative and acrobatic literary artists” in the world.³

One reason it took the critical establishment so long to respond to Cheever was his propensity toward short rather than long fiction. He himself addressed the question of story versus novel on several occasions during the 1950s, a decade that ended with the publication of his The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), a loosely organized episodic novel, and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958), a coherently constructed story sequence. Simply for economic reasons, he understood that he must write novels. He also knew that a novel could do more than earn money: It could attract more serious attention than a book of stories. Circumstances proved the point. The Wapshot Chronicle won the National Book Award, and stayed in print for decades. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill generated some of the worst reviews of his life and soon disappeared from the bookstores.

Cheever was forty-five and had been writing stories for a quarter of a century before Chronicle, his first novel, was published. Many of his earliest stories were extremely brief, little more than sketches, and he omitted from his 1978 collection everything he wrote before the end of World War II. After the war he quickly found his stride as a writer of short stories, producing such excellent examples as “The Enormous Radio” (1947), “Torch Song” (1947), and “Goodbye, My Brother” (1951).⁴ In 1951, he moved from Manhattan to suburban Westchester County, first to settle in Scarborough (until 1961) and then in nearby Ossining. There he began soaking up the atmosphere and discovering the trials of the characters who would populate Shady Hill, while struggling to complete the novel that had long been promised to his publisher. In effect he wrote Shady Hill and Chronicle at the same time, between 1953 and 1957. At the beginning of that period, Cheever publicly stated his preference for the short story. The novel, he felt, depended upon a stable social ambience rarely encountered in modern life. As a result, it was an artificial form, “unless you're living in Army installations or in a community that's fairly anachronistic.” The short story, on the other hand, was “determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event,”⁵ and so ideally suited the unsettled nature of contemporary existence. Stories also carried a kind of concentrated energy that the novel, with its sustained length, could hardly match.

By 1958, after the publication of both Chronicle and Shady Hill, Cheever apparently changed his mind. He was still “interested in the short story form,” he acknowledged, but generally it was better suited to “young writers, who are more intense, whose perceptions are more fragmentary.”⁶ Yet whether he was writing a novel or a story, Cheever felt acutely the confusion of modern life. Some reviewers of Chronicle took him to task for not supplying a linear plot, but such plotting, he believed, would be false to the chaos he witnessed everywhere around him. In his “The Death of Justina” (1960), for example, the narrator begins with a reflection on the purpose of fiction. “Fiction is art and art is the triumph of over chaos (no less)” yet it was terribly easy for the artist to go wrong in an environment where “even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night.”⁷ Cheever's task, as Robert A. Morace has succinctly expressed it, was to “write about such a world in a way that will take account of the incoherence without succumbing to it.”⁸ Nowhere did he succeed more brilliantly than in Shady Hill, a book about people who inhabit an outwardly manicured but internally hangnailed community.

Considering that it included four of his best stories—the title story, “O Youth and Beauty!” (1953), “The Country Husband,” and “The Five-Forty-Eight” (1954)— Shady Hill was very badly reviewed. With few exceptions, reviewers criticized the stories for a presumed lack of moral depth, for appealing too directly to the comfortable upper-middle-class readership of the New Yorker (where seven of the eight stories originally appeared), and above all for their focus on a suburban milieu. Some damned him with snide praise. He was the “Dante of the cocktail hour” or “the poet of the exurbs” foolishly trying to invest the lives of “the country-club set” with significance. The general assumption was that those people, and the communities where they chose to reside, were dull, conformist, wealthy, and unworthy of fictional representation. Whatever miseries befell suburbanites might produce sadness, but never tragedy. As Richard Gilman expressed it, “Cheever's women are always loved for their blondeness or bosom line and his men because they are lithe. They have a nostalgic need for mountains (not high), sailboats at twilight and tennis with new balls.” As against the stereotype of the spoiled and immature suburbanite lodged in Gilman's head, it hardly mattered that Cheever never created a character with an interest in tennis, whether with new balls or old, and that several of the protagonists of Shady Hill face financial crises. Apparently working from the same preconceptions, the distinguished critic Irving Howe labeled Cheever a “toothless Thurber” who “connive[d] in the cowardice of contemporary life.” Herbert Mitgang in the daily New York Times offered a rare exception to this pattern of disparagement. Shady Hill, he wrote, presented “a diagnosis of a particular form of community life, at once striving and brave, melancholy and humorous.” But the critical consensus, as articulated by Robert Kirsch, was that Cheever should “say goodbye to Shady Hill for a good long time.” The place and its inhabitants were not worthy of his “unquestioned ability.”⁹

Considering the prevailing climate of scorn for the suburbs, it is not surprising that so few of our best writers have chosen to focus their attention in that direction. In effect, demographic lag operates in our fiction. Up until 1925 or so, most major American writing concentrated its gaze on rural or small-town settings, though the nation itself was rapidly urbanizing. Then, during the last half century, the fictional scene shifted to the cities, while one-third of a nation was deserting to the suburbs. One of the writers who followed that migration was John Cheever, and it was the most natural thing in the world that he should begin to write about the people and events he encountered there. With the publication of Shady Hill in September 1958, he became fixed in the public mind as a chronicler of suburban life. For the previous two decades he had been writing about city dwellers, and he later went on to write about American expatriates in Italy and the inmates of Falconer prison. Nonetheless, for better or worse, he was categorized as the John Cheever who wrote those “Connecticut” (actually Westchester, though Shady Hill or Proxmire Manor or Bullet Park might just as well have been stops on the New Haven line as on the Hudson) stories for the New Yorker.¹⁰ What was not generally recognized was the depth and sophistication of his understanding of what went on in those communities.

As well as anyone, Cheever knew that such places sometimes deserved derision for their materialism and conventionality. “God preserve me,” says Charles Flint in “The Trouble of Marcie Flint” (1957), “from women who dress like toreros to go to the supermarket, and from cowhide dispatch cases, and from flannels and gabardines. Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from basset hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapés and Bloody Marys and smugness and syringa bushes and P.T.A. meetings.” Yet the narrator of the story, who may speak for Cheever himself, objects at first that “there was absolutely nothing wrong with the suburb from which Charles Flint was fleeing,” then retreats to the position that if there was anything wrong, “it was the fact that the village had no public library.”¹¹ In the title story of the collection, housebreaker Johnny Hake defends the community. It is true, he admits, that “Shady Hill is open to criticism by city planners, adventurers, and lyric poets, but if you work in the city and have children to raise, I can't think of a better place.”¹² Yet as a man driven to thievery to keep his suburban home, Johnny's opinions are somewhat compromised.

Manifestly, Cheever felt a degree of ambivalence about the manners and mores of suburbia. Thus he sarcastically described the compulsive joining of Shady Hill as “a regular Santa Claus's workshop of madrigal singers, political discussion groups, recorder groups, dancing schools, confirmation classes, committee meetings, and lectures on literature, philosophy, city planning, and pest control.”¹³ (Note the wonderful descending ladder of lecture topics.) At the same time he regarded the suburbs as representing “an improvisational way of life” adopted by many as a refuge from the expense of living in cities and the difficulty of raising children there. In such new communities tradition meant less, and it seemed to him that there was “more vitality, more change” in the suburbs than in the cities.¹⁴ Above all he was not willing to dismiss the denizens of suburbia as unworthy of fictional representation. He does not demand that we identify with Shady Hill's Johnny Hake or Cash Bentley or Francis Weed, but he does expect us to care about what happens to them, for in their particular distress they take on a measure of universality.

Cheever was “often labelled a writer about suburbia,” as John Updike wrote in a memorial reminiscence, yet only he “was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been. Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams; no one else satirized with such tenderness its manifold distinctions of class and style, or felt with such poignance the weary commuter's nightly tumble back into the arms of his family.”¹⁵ “Satirized with tenderness”: Just so, for the cement that binds Shady Hill's stories into a coherent group is not merely their common setting but the faintly ironic, far from judgmental, tone of the storyteller.

The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories might have been subtitled Suburbia and Its Discontents. There are only eight stories, and in each of them—save one—one kind of demon or another lies in wait beyond the well-tended lawns and handsome facades of upper-middle-class homes in Westchester County. The male characters commute to work in New York and feel a sense of dislocation caused by incessant traveling. They are weighed down with debt, addicted to drink, themselves adulterous or suspicious of their wives' faithfulness, and—as in the poignant “O Youth and Beauty!”—overcome by nostalgia for the glories of the past. Yet no matter how painful their troubles or vexatious their daily existence, almost all of them conspire in the pretense that everything is perfectly all right.

As willing partners in this communal hypocrisy, the citizens of Shady Hill are skeptical about the Crutchmans, who not only seem to be, but actually are, entirely contented with their lot. The Crutchmans are the central figures of “The Worm in the Apple,” a brief and tellingly ironic story Cheever wrote at the last minute especially for Shady Hill and placed at the midpoint of his collection to bind together the seven other tales. “The Crutchmans were so very, very happy and so temperate in all their habits and so pleased with everything that came their way that one was bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple,” the story begins.¹⁶ Larry's ship had been sunk in the war and surely he must suffer from nightmares, people speculate. Or, they think, Helen had too much money: Larry might quit his job, play golf, and take to drink. But no, “Larry seemed to have no nightmares and Helen spread her income among the charities and lived a comfortable but a modest life” (108). Perhaps they were sexually unsatisfied, then. Was Helen, with that “striking pallor,” a concealed nymphomaniac? And what about Larry? “Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had all been put off.” What could explain such constancy? “Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous?” (109).

The Crutchmans have two children who are not spoiled by their money and turn out well. But why, people wonder, only two children and not three or four? And how to account for the apparent pleasure Larry took both in his work and in the activities of Shady Hill?

Larry went to his job each morning with such enthusiasm that you might think he was trying to escape from something. His participation in the life of the community was so vigorous that he must have been left with almost no time for self-examination. He was everywhere: He was at the communion rail, the fifty-yard line, he played the oboe with the Chamber Music Club, drove the fire truck, served on the school board and rode the 8:03 into New York every morning. What was the sorrow that drove him? (108)

Finally, the narrator proposes the alternative that there might be no worm in the Crutchmans' apple at all, that the worm might instead be “in the eye of the observer who, through timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the broad range of their natural enthusiasms and would not grant that, while Larry played neither Bach nor football very well, his pleasure in both was genuine.” In any case the Crutchmans continue to entertain their friends and read books and remain euphoric as they age. Larry gives up the fire truck but continues his other activities, and—so the story ends—“they got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily” (112).

This ending prefigures the closing lines of Cheever's novel of suburbia, Bullet Park (1969), where the youth Tony Nailles is rescued from a would-be assassin by his father and their everyday life resumes. “Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.”¹⁷ Similar though they may seem, the two endings depend on different kinds of irony. In Bullet Park, Nailles's drugged happiness is clearly suspect, and the quadruple repetition works to undercut what is stated. In “The Worm in the Apple,” however, the Crutchmans are happy, and the irony of the repetition is directed at the end, as throughout the story, against those Shady Hill observers who will not credit the Crutchmans' contentment or will only acknowledge it as the consequence of their wealth.

It is predictable that the residents of Shady Hill should think this way, for they are beset—many of them—by financial woes. It is not easy to afford the green lawns and good schools and weekend parties of their suburban environment. If only they had more money, they would be perfectly happy, or so they think. Specifically, financial troubles provide the donnee of the first two stories in the book, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “O Youth and Beauty!” Johnny Hake of “Housebreaker” comes from a privileged background. “I was conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the Presbyterian Hospital, raised on Sutton Place” (3), he tells us in the opening paragraph of this first-person narrative. At thirty-six, he and his wife Christina and their children live in a handsome house in Shady Hill with a garden and a place to cook meat outdoors. Sitting there on summer nights with the kids, looking down the front of Christina's dress or up at the stars, he feels a thrill, and that, he supposes, “is what is meant by the pain and the sweetness of life” (3). Then through no fault of his own, Johnny is fired and for six months is out of work. In desperation—he had never yearned for anyone the way he yearned for money, he realizes—he breaks into Carl Warburton's house and steals his wallet, which contains just over nine hundred dollars.

Johnny's conscience is immediately awakened. On the way into town the next morning, he consigns himself to the sorry company of the bank robbers and embezzlers he reads about in the paper. He begins to see thievery everywhere. At a restaurant, a stranger lifts a thirty-five-cent tip left by a previous customer. At a brokerage house, his friend Burt Howe offers to let him in on a lead-pipe cinch of a deal. “It's a steal,” Burt tells him. “They're green, and they're dumb, and they're loaded, and it's just like stealing” (15). Earlier he had ignored such examples of greed, but now he longs for redemption. He experiences what Robert Coles calls “a visionary moment”¹⁸ as he rides home on a peaceable spring evening. “It seemed to me that fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sand-lot ballplayers and lovers unashamed of their sport and the owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world that were made by men like me” (19). But he does not go in the company of those ordinary honest people who do not care about money. Instead he becomes depressed and embittered. He quarrels with his wife. The natural world that once gave him such joy now appears to be the locus of desolation. In his extremity, he schemes to break into the house of the Pewters, neighbors who drank so heavily that even a thunderstorm wouldn't rouse them once they'd gone to bed. As it happens, he encounters only a gentle rain as he walks toward their house at three in the morning: “There was a harsh stirring in all the trees and gardens … and I wondered what it was until I felt the rain on my hands and face, and then I began to laugh” (28). The rain miraculously sets him straight, and on the spot he abandons his career as a thief. The next day, in what may seem too convenient a coincidence, the same man who fired him asks him to come back to work, with a healthy advance. And that night, after “taking some precautions about fingerprints,” he sneaks back into the Warburtons' and places an envelope containing nine hundred dollars on their kitchen table (30).

The tale of Johnny Hake's financial distress ends happily enough. In fact, his venture into crime seems to have made him morally more discerning.¹⁹ For Cash Bentley in “O Youth and Beauty!” it is a very different story. He is not aptly named, for he has suffered business reversals and has never owned an elegant motor car. In fact, he and his wife Louise barely scrape along. The drawer of their hall table is stuffed with unpaid bills, and at night Louise talks in her sleep. “I can't afford veal cutlets,” she says, with a sigh.²⁰ The Bentleys relieve the drabness of their lives at the parties of their friends—the Beardens, the Farquarsons—on Alewives Lane. At the end of these parties, in what has become almost a ritual, a well-muddled Cash rearranges the furniture and goes hurdling over it. He is forty years old, with dim prospects for the future, but in his youth he had been a track star and when he hurdles the furniture it is as if he were recapturing the triumphs of the past.

But Cash is no longer young, and one night he trips and falls and breaks his leg. As his recovery drags on, he grows discontented. His senses repeatedly remind him of mortality. The meat in the icebox has spoiled, and he cannot shake off the rank odor. Up in the attic, “looking for his old varsity sweater,” he walks into a spider web that nearly gags him. On a New York side street, he sees an old whore “so sluttish and ugly that she looked like a cartoon of Death.” The faded roses Louise brings in from the garden give off “a putrid, compelling smell” and he dumps them into a wastebasket (40). Without his race to run, the parties no longer amuse him. He is rude to his friends, and irritable around Louise.

The climax comes on a summer weekend when Shady Hill is bathed in “placid golden light,” and the scent of the new grass and trees is invigorating, not depressing (41). Apparently revived, Cash once again hurdles the furniture on Saturday night. On Sunday he returns from a party at the Farquarsons: “Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues!” the narrator comments. Louise has stayed home, and is upstairs busily “cutting out of the current copy of Life those scenes of mayhem, disaster, and violent death that she felt might corrupt her children. She always did this.” After a while, she hears Cash moving the living-room furniture around, and he calls her down to fire the starting pistol. Eager to run his race, he neglects to tell her about the safety. “‘It's that little lever,’ he said. ‘Press that little lever.’ Then, in his impatience, he hurdled the sofa anyhow. The pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead” (46).

The Lawtons in “The Sorrows of Gin” (1953) belong to the same heavy-drinking party set as the Bentleys, and it is their drinking—particularly that of “Mr. Lawton,” who unlike his wife Marcia is not referred to by a Christian name—that the story explores. The tale is told from the point of view of their young daughter Amy, whose unsophisticated account adds a measure of pathos. It soon emerges that the Lawtons neglect their daughter in order to pursue their social rounds. Often, their evening martinis lead them out of the house for further imbibing, while Amy is left to have dinner alone. In a particularly suggestive section, Amy describes the effect of the cocktail hour on her father. He does not reel around like a circus clown, she observes. On the contrary, his walk is if anything steadier than usual, except that “sometimes, when he got to the dining room door, he would miss it by a foot or more.”²¹ And he keeps putting his drink down, forgetting where, and making himself another as a replacement. These confusions do not seem to bother Mr. Lawton at all, and no one says anything about them, but he is extremely judgmental about similar faults in others. Thus he commands Amy not to overdo by taking too many nuts from the tray she is passing to guests and berates her for misplacing her raincoat.

His most hypocritical burst of moral piety, however, is reserved for the cooks and gardeners and babysitters who, he is certain, have been drinking his liquor in vast quantities. Here Amy is partly at fault, for in an attempt to moderate her parents' drinking she has taken to pouring the contents of gin bottles down the drain. The Lawtons lose one wonderful cook because she actually does get drunk, though only on her day off. “I'm lonely, and I'm afraid, and it's all I've got” (92), she confesses. Mr. Lawton summarily fires her. Then they lose the next cook because of a gin bottle Amy has emptied. “Everybody is drinking my liquor,” Mr. Lawton roars, “and I am God-damned sick and tired of it!” (94). Finally, the Lawtons leave Amy with a gossipy old babysitter for a party, and when they return at two in the morning, her father discovers that another bottle of gin has been drained. “You must be stinking, Mrs. Henlein,” he tells the babysitter, who in her indignation threatens to call the police. “I'm over at the Lawton',” she shouts into the receiver. “He's drunk, and he's calling me insulting names, and I want you to come over here and arrest him!” (100-01). Awakened by the uproar, Amy “perceived vaguely the corruption of the adult world,” but she is frightened too, because she knows she is to blame for the argument, and decides to run away. This plan does not succeed, for the stationmaster recognizes her and calls her father when she tries to buy a ticket. Mr. Lawton drives over to collect his daughter. Why should she want to travel? he wonders in conclusion. “How could he teach her that home sweet home was the best place of all?” (104).

The final three stories in Shady Hill—“The Five-Forty-Eight,” “Just Tell Me Who It Was” (1955), and “The Trouble of Marcie Flint”—all deal with adultery, and in the first of these Cheever creates a moral monster of such darkness as to make Mr. Lawton pale. An executive in New York, Blake has enjoyed a series of sexual conquests, while carefully avoiding any consequences. In fact, “most of the many women he had known had been picked for their lack of self-esteem” (119-20). That seduction is, for him, a way of exerting his power over others is underlined by his behavior toward his wife and son. One evening he came home to Shady Hill tired and hungry, only to find that his wife Louise had not prepared supper. In cruel retaliation, he drew a circle around a date two weeks hence on the kitchen calendar. “I'm not going to speak to you for two weeks,” he told Louise, and though she wept and protested, it was to no avail, for she was no longer beautiful in his eyes and “it had been eight or ten years since she had been able to touch him with her entreaties.”²² Similarly, when his son Charlie befriended the Watkins boy, Blake took steps to break off the relationship. Mr. Watkins was, after all, only a commercial artist who had long dirty hair and sometimes wore sandals.

It is with a mixture of satisfaction and dread that we follow the course of the story, during which Blake is confronted by Miss Dent, a former secretary he had slept with one night, ordered personnel to fire the next day, and refused to see ever since. Bent on revenge, she follows him from his office to the train station, and though he thinks he has escaped her by ducking into the men's bar, she is on the five-forty-eight when he boards. During the ride up the Hudson, it develops that she is quite mad, that she means to do him harm, and that she has a pistol to do it with. The trip is one of terror for Blake. He keeps hoping that someone will notice his predicament, but no one does. Miss Dent's pistol keeps him quiet, while she debates whether or not to kill him. At Shady Hill, she marches him off into the soggy lowlands along the river and makes him kneel and put his face in the filth. “Now I feel better,” she says. “Now I can wash my hands of you” (134). And so he is spared, though justly humiliated.

Blake's tyranny is not to be forgiven, or atoned for, by the degradation Miss Dent visits upon him. He will continue to exploit other people, in all likelihood, yet Cheever invites us to identify with him at least in one respect. Blake is offended by Mr. Watkins's unconventional garb partly because he himself “dressed—like the rest of us—as if he admitted the existence of sumptuary laws. His raincoat was the pale buff color of a mushroom. His hat was dark brown, so was his suit. Except for the few bright threads in his necktie, there was a scrupulous lack of color in his clothing that seemed protective” (120-21). Despicable as he is, Blake is almost pitiable in his attempt to secure protection through dun-colored clothing. And in that attempt, he is “like the rest of us,” or at least like the rest who live in Shady Hill.

The end of “The Trouble of Marcie Flint,” the final story in the book, provides a case in point. Sexual jealousy, not dominance, is central to this story. Marcie Flint has been unfaithful to her husband Charlie—he is often away on business trips—with the civic-minded, but otherwise unappealing, Noel Mackham. To keep busy while her husband is traveling, Marcie gets elected to the village council. There, one night, Mackham makes a plea for a public library. His words carry little weight, however, for he lives in the Maple Dell development, “the kind of place where the houses stand cheek by jowl, all of them white frame, all of them built twenty years ago, and parked beside each was a car that seemed more substantial than the house itself, as if this were a fragment of some nomadic culture” (169). Marcie feels sorry for Noel, whose proposal is rejected out of hand, and invites him back to her house for a drink. “Perhaps,” she says, “we could get the library project moving again” (177). That they cannot do, for the rest of the council is adamantly opposed. Besides, as her old friend Mark Barrett tells her when he hears about Noel's visit, most of them think that “Mackham is a meatball” (182). This only makes Marcie pity Mackham more, however, and when he next comes by and clumsily pulls off his rubbers, she is helpless to resist him.

As honest as she has been unfaithful, Marcie tells her husband about her lapse. In response, he packs his suitcase and goes off to “Torino, where the girls love peanut butter and the world is a man's castle” (165). But as Charlie sails across the Atlantic, a foghorn begins to sound and his resolve weakens. He will catch a plane in Genoa, he will fly back to his dear sweet Marcie, he “will shelter her with the curve of [his] body from all the harms of the dark” (185).

Implicit in Charlie Flint's decision is the assumption that Shady Hill's residents—excluding those unfortunate enough to live in Maple Dell—can escape the dark. Cheever's stories make it abundantly clear that they cannot, that money and drink and sex will turn their rosy apple rotten. Shady Hill collectively demonstrates that you can't shut out trouble by willing it away or pretending it doesn't exist, by wearing drab clothes or excising accounts of unpleasantness from magazines. “The Country Husband,” the best story in the book, most powerfully communicates this point.

“It goes without saying,” Cheever remarked in a 1958 interview, “that the people in my stories and the things that happen to them could take place anywhere.”²³ A significant difference, though, is that in the suburbs of Cheever's fiction, these people try very hard to ignore even the possibility of suffering. In Proxmire Manor, the setting for “The Death of Justina” and a community that strongly resembles Shady Hill, a local zoning ordinance decrees that it is illegal to die in Zone B. When Aunt Justina passes on, her relatives are advised to “put her in the car and drive her over to Chestnut Street, where Zone C begins.”²⁴ The survivors lack moorings. They exist in a state of perpetual rootlessness deriving from their eternal commuting and frequent continent hopping. “The people of Bullet Park intend not so much to have arrived there as to have been planted and grown there,” Cheever writes in his 1969 novel, but there is nothing organic or indigenous about their way of life. Bullet Park like Shady Hill and Proxmire Manor is what the sociologists call a final suburb, one whose residents have, presumably, arrived. But in due course many of them will be forced to leave, accompanied by “disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears, and desperation” (4-5).

At thirty-four pages by far the longest story in Shady Hill, “The Country Husband” is (as Nabokov commented) “really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.”²⁵ There are indeed a great many things going on: love, war, joy, sorrow, and the community's repudiation of bad manners, bad news, and both past and future. The story begins with Francis Weed on his way back from a business trip to Minneapolis. The plane that carries him makes a crash landing in a cornfield not far from Philadelphia, but no one is hurt. “It's just like the Marne,” a fellow passenger says, but there is no sense of comradeship among the survivors as among soldiers. Later that day, Francis catches his regular evening train from New York to Shady Hill, and tells fellow commuter Trace Bearden about the close call. Trace, unimpressed, continues to read his newspaper.

Surely, one thinks, his tale will find a receptive audience when he reaches his Dutch Colonial home in Shady Hill. “Late-summer sunlight, brilliant and as clear as water,” brightens the living room. “Nothing here was neglected; nothing had not been burnished” (51-2). Yet this “polished and tranquil” environment has been transformed into a war zone—one of the interlocking motifs Nabokov singled out—by his fractious children, and no one is interested in hearing about the accident. Henry, Louisa, and Toby exchange blows and accusations, while his wife Julia equably ignores the chaos and lights the candles for dinner. She asks Francis to go upstairs and summon their eldest child Helen to the table. He “is happy to go; it is like getting back to headquarters company.” Helen says she “doesn’t understand about the plane crash, because there wasn't a drop of rain in Shady Hill.” At dinner, frustrated, Francis announces that “[he] was nearly killed in a plane crash, and [he] doesn't like to come home every night to a battlefield.” It is not a battlefield, Julia objects, and dissolves in tears. “Poor Mummy,” Toby says (53-4).

Afterward, Francis smokes a cigarette in the back garden and takes in the sights and sounds of the neighborhood. There he encounters Jupiter, the Mercers’ black retriever. Jupiter is a nuisance “whose retrieving instincts and … high spirits were out of place in Shady Hill.” He goes where he pleases, “ransacking wastebaskets, clotheslines, garbage pails, and shoe bags,” and lifting steaks off the barbeque. From the way he is described—he has “a long, alert, intelligent, rakehell face,” his eyes gleam with mischief, and he holds his head high—it is apparent that Jupiter is to be admired. Francis calls to him, but he bounds away, carrying the remains of a felt hat in his mouth (56).

The bulk of “The Country Husband” concerns Francis's infatuation with Anne Murchison, a teenage babysitter who stays with the children when the Weeds are out, which is often. One evening, during a dinner party at the Farquarsons, Francis recognizes the maid as a young Frenchwoman he had seen punished for consorting with the Germans during the war. In a public ceremony, her fellow townspeople in Normandy had shaved her skull clean, stripped her naked, and jeered at her. Francis decides not to tell anyone at the party, for “it would have been a social as well as a human error. The people in the Farquarsons' living room seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world.” In such an atmosphere, his memory would have been “unseemly and impolite” (58-9).

When they return from the party, Francis drives the sitter home. He is expecting the same Mrs. Henlein who had been so grievously insulted by Mr. Lawton for her supposed drinking; instead, the sitter is the remarkably beautiful Anne Murchison. Anne is crying, for her father is an alcoholic. Unlike practically everyone else in Shady Hill she is willing to talk about her troubles. She sobs on Francis's shoulder, gives him a quick kiss good night, and he is smitten. In the morning he “washed his body, shaved his jaws, drank his coffee, and missed the seven-thirty-one” (63-4). As he waits for the next train, he insults boring old Mrs. Wrightson. The experience exhilarates him. It had been years, he realized, since he “had enjoyed being deliberately impolite.” For too long, he had listened to fools and bores with as much attention as he gave the brilliant and gifted, for that was what was expected of him. Now he felt a “bracing sensation of independence,” and—he thinks—he has Anne to thank for it.

His passion for Anne, he knows, is both ridiculous—he is old enough to be her father—and dangerous. The

Moral card house would come down on them all—on Julia and the children as well—if he got caught taking advantage of a babysitter. Looking back over the recent history of Shady Hill for some precedent, he found there was none. There was no turpitude; there had not been a divorce since he lived there; there had not even been a breath of scandal. Things seemed arranged with more propriety even than in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Nonetheless, on his lunch hour he buys Anne a bracelet, and when he gets home in the evening, there she is. Stunned by her perfection, he “seized her and covered her lips with his, and she struggled but she did not have to struggle for long, because just then little Gertrude Flannery appeared from somewhere” (65-7).

Gertrude Flannery, like Jupiter, knows no boundaries and is hence an anomaly in Shady Hill: “garrulous, skinny, and unwashed, she drifted from house to house.” You might find her on your front stoop in the morning, or on the toilet when you opened your bathroom door. She never goes home of her own free will, though people are always telling her to. That is what Francis tells her when she interrupts him and Anne. “Go home, Gertrude, go home and don't tell anyone, Gertrude,” he says, giving her a quarter to seal the bargain. The Weeds are going out again, and during the course of the party Francis can think of nothing but where he should park the car when he takes Anne home. But Julia tells him to put the car in the garage, instead; she'd let “the Murchison girl” leave at eleven. Devastated, Francis realizes that he is to be spared “nothing … that a fool was not spared: ravening lewdness, jealousy, this hurt to his feelings that put tears in his eyes, even scorn” (67-9).

The jealousy is aroused the very next evening. First the Weeds, parents and children, are photographed for their Christmas card in absolute decorum. Then young Clayton Thomas stops by. He and his mother don't have much money, and Clayton has dropped out of college to get a job. They will probably move to New York, he says, in part because Clayton—who is tall and homely, with a deep voice and a judgmental streak—disapproves of Shady Hill's mores. At the club dance the previous Saturday night, he'd seen “Mr. Granner trying to put Mrs. Minot into the trophy case” and they were both drunk. Besides, he says, the community has no future. The only thing that people in Shady Hill care about is keeping out undesirables, and the only future will be “more commuting trains and more parties.” That's not healthy, according to Clayton, and despite his youth and pretensions he is surely right. As he is leaving, Clayton tells the Weeds that he is engaged to Anne Murchison. The news strikes Francis “like a bitter turn of the weather” (71-3).

A nasty husband-and-wife dispute follows. Julia berates Francis for having insulted Mrs. Wrightson. She has invited everyone in the village to her anniversary party except the Weeds, and furthermore, as Shady Hill's official social gatekeeper, Mrs. Wrightson can keep their daughter Helen from being invited to the assemblies. Francis tries to defend himself—“I have very good manners” and “I've got to express my likes and dislikes”—but this only makes Julia angrier, and eventually Francis strikes her. Immediately contrite, he tries to dissuade her from packing and leaving. In a plaintive complaint, he blames what has gone wrong between them on the incessant gregariousness of Shady Hill. “Julia, I do love you, and I would like to be as we were—sweet and bawdy and dark—but now there are so many people” (74-5). She decides to stay, for he needs taking care of.

At the office the following day, Francis has a phone call from Trace Bearden asking him to recommend Clayton Thomas for a job. He can't do that, Francis says, “the kid's worthless.” It is a gratuitously cruel act, and its very wickedness makes Francis aware that he is lost, in trouble, with only bleakness ahead. He calls a psychiatrist and demands an appointment that very day. When he arrives at the doctor's office, a policeman is on hand to frisk him down. Once inside, he starts to tell his old sad story: “I'm in love, Dr. Herzog.”

Dr. Herzog advises him to pursue a hobby, perhaps woodworking. A week or ten days later, in our last glimpse of Shady Hill, Francis Weed—his last name a clue that like Jupiter and Gertrude he is an outsider²⁶—is happily building a coffee table in the cellar. Neighbor Donald Goslin is worrying Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata,” as he does every night, and the housemaid at the Goslins is writing a letter to Arthur Godfrey. The Weeds' son Tony dives from bed to floor in his space suit, “landing with a thump that is audible to everyone in the house but himself.” Someone tells Gertrude Flannery to go home. The Babcocks' door flies open, and Mr. Babcock, nude, pursues his naked wife behind their protective hedge. Mr. Nixon shouts at the squirrels in his bird feeder. “Rapscallions! Varmints! Avaunt and quit my sight!” A miserable cat, dressed up in a doll's dress and hat, wanders into the garden. Julia calls to the pussy, but she slinks off in her skirts. “The last to come is Jupiter. He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains” (82-3).

“The Country Husband” ends then, with a two-page burst of joyfulness. All of those described manage to assert their independence—even their eccentricity—against the community's unwritten standard of conventionality. The descriptions fairly glow with pleasure. Cheever himself liked to quote aloud the final sentence about kings and elephants crossing the mountains. But how appropriate was this ending, like the lyrical conclusion of “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” to the sordid subject matter of these stories: a suburbanite falling in love with his teenage babysitter, another stealing his neighbor's wallet in the dead of night? In another writer's hands, the contrast would seem hopelessly sentimental, but Cheever's verbal magic carries the day. That Francis Weed takes up woodworking is not enough to convert Shady Hill into an earthly paradise, except that for the space of one golden evening Cheever makes it so.

The enduring impression that Shady Hill leaves is one of ambiguity. The author “seems to be suspended,” as R. G. Collins comments, “between a tragic pessimism and a raptured expectancy; … he seems to be listening for the angels, as the earth smoulders beneath him.”²⁷ On the one hand, the stories perceptively present the sorry spectacle of a community trying to shut out any vestige of trouble. The task was both foolish and futile, for as Cheever was to observe a few years later, “the characters [of fiction] have become debased and life in the United States in 1960 is Hell.”²⁸ On the other hand, he wished to affirm the light that relieved the dark. As Joan Didion wrote in 1961, Cheever's stories represent nothing less than “a celebration of life.”²⁹ Denying the existence of evil would not make it go away, as the residents of Shady Hill are persistently reminded. Yet magic could also strike even in such a banlieue, even in such an homogeneous, upper-middle-class, conformist, WASP suburb as Shady Hill. Cheever insists—Shady Hill insists—on having it both ways.

Notes

1. Vladimir Nabokov, “Inspiration,” Saturday Review of the Arts 1 (January 1973): 32.

2. John Leonard, “Cheever to Roth to Malamud,” Atlantic Monthly 231 (June 1973): 112.

3. Stephen Becker, “Excellence Level … Astounding,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 9 November 1978, sec. 5, 10.

4. For an enlightening analysis of Cheever's development in this period, see James O’Hara, “John Cheever's Flowering Forth: The Breakthroughs of 1947,” Modern Language Studies 17 (Fall 1987): 50-9.

5. Quoted in Harvey Breit, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times, 10 May 1953, 8.

6. Quoted in Rollene Waterman, “Literary Horizons,” Saturday Review 41 (13 September 1958): 33.

7. John Cheever, “The Death of Justina,” The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1978), 429.

8. Robert A. Morace, “From Parallels to Paradise: The Lyrical Structure of Cheever's Fiction,” Twentieth Century Literature 35 (Winter 1989): 509.

9. The reviews cited are Richard Gilman, “Dante of Suburbia,” Commonweal 69 (19 December 1978): 320; Paul C. Wermuth, Library Journal 83 (15 September 1978): 2, 438-39; Irving Howe, “Realities and Fictions,” Partisan Review 26 (Winter 1959): 130-31; Herbert Mitgang, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 6 September 1978, 15; and Robert Kirsch, “Cheever Paints Pallid Exurbia,” Los Angeles Times, 21 September 1978, part V, 7.

10. Cheever's treatment of suburban themes is topic I have examined previously. See Scott Donaldson, “The Machines in Cheever's Garden,” The Changing Face of the Suburbs, ed. Barry Schwartz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 309, and John Cheever: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1988), 170.

11. John Cheever, “The Trouble of Marcie Flint,” The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 165, 167, 185.

12. Cheever, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” Shady Hill, 12.

13. Cheever, “Marcie Flint,” Shady Hill, 166-67.

14. John Callaway, interview with John Cheever, 15 Oct. 1981, Conversations with John Cheever, ed. Scott Donaldson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 245.

15. [John Updike], “Notes and Comment: The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker 58 (12 July 1982): 27-8.

16. Cheever, “The Worm in the Apple,” Shady Hill, 107-12.

17. John Cheever, Bullet Park (New York: Knopf, 1969), 245.

18. Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 151.

19. Financially, the story worked out well for Cheever, too. MGM bought film rights for $40,000; the money enabled the Cheever family to spend a year in Italy.

20. Cheever, “O Youth and Beauty!” Shady Hill, 35-6.

21. Cheever, “The Sorrows of Gin,” Shady Hill, 96-8.

22. Cheever, “The Five-Forty-Eight,” Shady Hill, 121-22. This story won the University of Illinois Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award for the best short story of 1954.

23. Quoted in Waterman, 33.

24. Cheever, “The Death of Justina,” Stories, 433.

25. Nabokov, 32.

26. The inappropriateness of Weed's name to his place of residence is noted by Robert A. Morace, “John Cheever,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 2: “American Novelists Since World War II” (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978), 91.

27. R. G. Collins, “Fugitive Time: Dissolving Experience in the Later Fiction of Cheever,” Studies in American Fiction 12 (Autumn 1984): 175.

28. Quoted in Robert Gutwilling, “Dim Views Through Fog,” New York Times Book Review, 13 November 1960, 68.

29. Joan Didion, “A Celebration of Life,” National Review to (22 April 1961): 255.