John William Cheever (1912 – 1982)
American short story writer and novelist, best known for his short stories The Enormous Radio, Goodbye, My Brother, The Five-Forty-Eight, The Country Husband, and The Swimmer, and his novels, The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, and Falconer. The Five-Forty-Eight was first published in The New Yorker on April 10th1954. It was later collected in The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories in 1958 and The Stories of John Cheever in 1978. In 1955 it was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award.
Available to read online here.
This is the seventh of eight stories in the volume Points of View to be given the style classification by Moffett and McElheny of Biography, or Anonymous Narration – Single Character Point of View. Their introduction continues: “Why, in each particular story, does the narrator place the reader at the vantage point of one character only, and why, in each case, has the author chosen the character he has, and not another?”
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t read the story yet and want to before you read the summary of it below, stop now!
The Five-Forty-Eight
Blake leaves his office at the end of the day only to realise that he is being followed by a woman. What was her name – Miss Dent, Miss Bent, Miss Lent…? He can’t remember now, but it doesn’t matter much, after all, who remembers their personal assistants’ names anyway? It had been six months since they last met, but he doesn’t want to talk to her so loses himself on the Manhattan streets and dives into a bar where she’ll never find him. He doesn’t have great memories of her anyway; quiet, attractive in her own way, but with ugly handwriting. She invited him back to her apartment once for a drink; after taking advantage of her, he got dressed, returned home, and the next day arranged that she should be fired.
Blake takes the 5:48 train home, where she unexpectedly confronts him quietly in the carriage. Even though the train is full of the usual daily commuters, many of whom he knows and ignores, no one else seems to realise there’s a new person on the train talking intimately to him. He doesn’t need this kind of confrontation in his life so he gets up to move to another compartment when she warns him that she has a pistol and she will shoot him if he does.
Panicking, he sweats nervously as the rest of his train journey flashes by. Surely someone will notice her and somehow this torment will quickly end? But no, the train reaches his destination of Shady Hill, and she marches him out of the station at gunpoint. Will she kill him? Or will she just degrade and shame him, and make him realise there are consequences to his actions. Is his death worth a prison sentence? Having forced his face down in the dirt, she’s content that she’s a better person than he is, and that he knows it. A job well done for Miss Dent.
Gripping, suspenseful and unpredictable, this is a beautifully written tale that slowly reveals Blake’s callousness and equally slowly reveals Miss Dent’s own story. John Cheever has a real knack for making the reader appreciate the environment in which the story takes place – the smelly wetness of the New York streets, the crowded but comfortable sanctuary that the bar provides, the unspoken dynamics of the train commuters, and how this terrifying encounter is being held in plain sight by two seemingly diminutive and unimportant people against the backdrop of a busy city.
Cheever has Blake constantly noticing tiny details about the people he meets: Miss Dent’s crooked stockings, Mr Watkins’ long and dirty hair, the brevity of Mrs Compton’s smile. Blake himself finds comfort in the blandness and colourlessness of his clothing, rejecting light and colour. Cheever gives us the detail of Blake putting Miss Dent’s rose in the waste bin (“I don’t like roses” he tells her). There’s nothing beautiful or attractive in his life, and he’ll keep it that way.
But to an extent Blake is a product of his environment. Cheever takes pains to describe a store window: “The window was arranged like a room in which people live and entertain their friends. There were cups on the coffee table, magazines to read, and flowers in the vases, but the flowers were dead and the cups were empty and the guests had not come.” Blake’s hollow and false respectability is no different from this sham pretend shop window living room. Sex with Miss Dent was joyless, transactional and meaningless, just a notch on the bedpost. But this is no surprise when you consider his marital life, diarising the two weeks during which he will punish his wife Louise by not talking to her, for not having prepared dinner when he wanted it. No wonder his fourteen-year-old son Charlie chooses to more or less move in with the next-door neighbours.
Even when Miss Dent is pointing the pistol at him, he still doesn’t take responsibility for his own situation. So many things he could have done to avoid this, and maybe he still could; but instead he thinks: “Help would come, Blake thought. It was only a question of minutes. Someone, noticing the look on his face or her peculiar posture, would stop and interfere, and it would all be over. All he had to do was to wait until someone noticed his predicament.” Cheever increases the tension of Miss Dent’s virtual kidnap of Blake by emphasising the surrounding normality of the environment; the same advertising slogans on station after station, the image of the Hawaiian dancer who haunts his journey, the minutiae of other commuters awaiting their trains. Stable lives going about their everyday existence, such as the “men fishing on the nearly dark river, and then a ramshackle boat club that seemed to have been nailed together out of scraps of wood that had been washed up on the shore”. Suspecting he might die at any minute, he finally understands the concept of regret.
The resolution of the story is uncertain right up until the final sentences. Even Miss Dent herself is unsure how this encounter will end, but Cheever explains the conclusion that she draws: I’m better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and the brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you […] I shouldn’t waste my time or spoil my life like this. Put your face in the dirt […] Now I can wash my hands of you, I can wash my hands of all this, because you see there is some kindness, some saneness in me that I can find and use.”
Always remember that actions have consequences, and you can’t always ignore them; and you never know quite how much someone might be suffering. Blake learns this the hard way; but you have little expectation that he will change his ways and become a better man.
The next story in the anthology is the eighth and last to be classified by Moffett and McElheny as Biography, or Anonymous Narration – Single Character Point of View, A Father-to-Be by Saul Bellow.