The Angel of the Bridge

Consider John Cheever's opening paragraphs from short stories he wrote in the early 1960s.

 

Mr. Pastern was far from dead

"Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement. She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead. He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, 'Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss.' He was brigadier of the club's locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China."

~~ from "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" in The Stories of John Cheever

chronicled in scuffed baseboards

"All my dealings are with [rental] agents, and I have never known the people from whom we have rented, but their ability to leave behind them a sense of physical and emotional presences is amazing. Our affairs are certainly not written in air and water, but they do seem to be chronicled in scuffed baseboards, odors, and tastes in furniture and paintings, and the climates we step into in these rented places are as marked as changes of weather on the beach. Sometimes there is a long hallway of benignness, a purity and clearness of feeling to which we all respond. Someone was enormously happy here, and we rent their happiness as we rent their beach and catboat."

~~ from "The Seaside Houses" in The Stories of John Cheever

the Lermontov medal

"It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bascomb placed his Lermontov medal at the angel's feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: 'God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.' The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

The World of Apples

"Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and one had died of delirium tremens. Bascomb had known them all, loved most of them, and had nursed two of them when they were ill, but the broad implication that he had, by choosing to write poetry, chosen to destroy himself was something he rebelled against vigorously."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever