Essay: Reunion – John Cheever

Short story: Reunion
Reunion is a short story written by John Cheever. The short story was published in The New Yorker in 1962, and than later included in a collection of stories called “The stories of John Cheever” . Most of his short stories are situated in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York. Some of them are also situated in villages in old New England based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he also was born. John Cheever is often compared to one of the greatest writers in history and therefore he is called “the Chekhov of the Suburbs” or “the Ovid of Ossining”  .
The narrator of the short story is young boy. He is telling us the story, of how his last meeting with his dad went. The son is therefore reminding himself of how the meeting with his dad was like, which is also called a flashback. He describes himself as a boy, but we do not know or get the exact age of the boy; the only thing we get to know is that his name is Charlie and he is sitting on a train on his way to a cottage on the Cape, “I was going from my grandmother’s in the Adirondacks to a cottage on the Cape that my mother had rented, and I wrote my father that I would be in New York between trains for an hour and a half and asked if we could have lunch together” . On his way to Cape Charlie chooses to make a stop to see his father, because he has not seen him for a very long time. His parents are divorced and have been that for three years, and this was the first time Charlie was going to see his father since the split up between his mother and father. The father and his son have a “reunion” where the son is very naive to think that it was going to end up being a good one.
The short story gives us an assumption of the father being a very well educated man; you can tell this in his competences in languages, he talks: Spanish and Italian besides his English. The father also has a secretary who writes Charlie an answer for his abovementioned letter about his arrival to New York, which tells us that he is a businessman. It is obvious to see that he is a busy man, because he cannot even take time writing his own answer back to his son.
Charlie describes his father in the following way; “He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey and aftershave lotion, shoe polish, woollens and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together” . The smell of whiskey is the sign of alcoholism and the polished shoes and the smell of aftershave tells us that he is a man who takes care of himself and his look is like real businessmen’s look. At the same time Charlie thinks that his father is a stranger to him, but he also felt like it was his father when he saw him after his arrival; “But as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom” .
The father’s main focus is trying to impress Charlie by using his linguistic skills and by showing him that he is wealthy man by taking Charlie to some of the best and most attractive restaurants located in New York. He does not really know how to communicate with his own son and therefore he tries with noisy and extravagant behaviour towards the waiters in the restaurants and the seller at the newsstand to get closer to his son: “Is it asking to much for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimens of yellow journalism?” . This results in the boy’s “disgust” with his father and him wanting to delete every piece of memory of the time he spent with him. Charlie simply had enough of his father’s bad and weird behaviour and his lacking sense of occasion.
The well-known Grand Central Station in New York is where the setting and reunion between the father and son takes place, but it is at the same time also the place where Charlie decides never to see his father again. It starts out with being a place where Charlie is happy and very excited to see his father again and then turns out into being a sad place where Charlie left his father in a very unfortunate way. At the same time the place will be remembered as a place where Charlie starts a new chapter of his life, because of the new and updated view he now has on his father. He now knows that he will not see his father again. The situation at the restaurants and the newsstand are the changes of the setting of the short story; they both lie close to the station where Charlie came from.
This short story wants to tell us about people and how the big city life can change and have an impact on their personality. A well-known and loved person might turn into a stranger. It shows the struggles that a family with divorced parents might meet in the big city and how they choose to behave towards other people. It is telling us that all surroundings have a major impact on us people.