I am reading my way through a 819-page paperback book made up short stories by John Cheever, who was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker from the late 1940s into the late 1970s.

In the preface to The Stories of John Cheever (for which he won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) he describes the stories:

"Here is the last generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."

One of his main themes is the duality of human nature, how our public/social persona differs from who we are when we are alone with ourselves. I enjoy meeting his characters and finding out what happens to them.



One story in particular struck a chord with me: The Lowboy.

"It is traditional in our family to display our greatest emotional powers over heirlooms -- to appropriate sets of dishes before the will can be probated, to have tugs-of-war with carpets, and to rupture blood relationships over the subject of a rickety chair. Stories and tales that dwell on some wayward attachment to an object -- a soup tureen or lowboy -- seem to narrow down to the texture of the object itself, the glaze on the china or the finish on the wood and generate those feelings of frustration that I, for one, experience when I hear harpsichord music. My last encounter with my brother involved a lowboy. Because our mother died unexpectedly and there was an ambiguous clause in her will, certain of the family heirlooms were seized by Cousin Mathilda."

This is exactly how I feel about what I consider to be family heirlooms, and exactly what happens in my own family, and exactly what has come between my sister and me, only ours was an old refrigerator and a pink chintz comforter that my mother made 40 years ago.

The way Cheever's story about the lowboy ends, is the narrator's brother set the coveted lowboy up on a carpet that closely resembled the one it always sat on at the mother's house, and even found a silver pitcher like the one she kept on top of it.

"... but once the lowboy took a commanding position in his house, he seemed driven back upon his wretched childhood. We went there for dinner -- it must have been Thanksgiving. The lowboy stood in the dining room, on its carpet of mysterious symbols, and the silver pitcher was full of chrysanthemums. Richard spoke to his wife and children in a tone of vexation that I had forgotten. He quarreled with everyone; he even quarreled with my children. Oh, why is it that life is for some an exquisite privilege and others must pay for their seats at the play with a ransom of cholers, infections, and nightmares? We got away as soon as we could.
When we got home, I took the green glass epergne that belonged to Aunt Mildred off the sideboard and smashed it with a hammer. Then I dumped Grandmother's sewing box into the ash can, burned a big hole in her lace tablecloth, and buried her pewter in the garden. ... We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another.... Dismiss whatever molests us and challenges our purpose, sleeping or waking. Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border."