![\"The-Stories-of-John-Cheever\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/The-Stories-of-John-Cheever-194x300.jpg?resize=194%2C300\")
One of David Foster Wallace\u2019s stories, \u201cThe Devil Is a Busy Man,\u201d concerns the nature of charity and whether true altruism is really possible, given our natural compulsion to seek validation in our good deed (which ostensibly robs the charitable act of its purity).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is so difficult to do something nice for someone,\u201d Wallace writes, \u201cand not want them, desperately, to know that the identity of the individual who did it for them was you, and to feel grateful and approving towards you, and to tell myriads of other people what you \u2018did\u2019 for them, so that you can be widely acknowledged as a \u2018good\u2019 person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wallace\u2019s conundrum, worked out over several characteristically fraught pages, came to my mind while reading John Cheever\u2019s much lighter and cheerfully caustic holiday tale, \u201cChristmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,\u201d which was originally published in the December 24, 1949 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n Unlike Wallace\u2019s tortured protagonist, however, Cheever\u2019s dour elevator operator doesn\u2019t spend much time examining the motives of charity \u2014 but he will exploit them, to humorous effect.<\/p>\n The story begins with Charlie Leary waking to his alarm in a fit of self-pity: he is \u201cpractically the only one\u201d who has to get up at 6 a.m. and go to work on Christmas morning, escorting rich people up and down their ritzy apartment building, where he is informed that since the doorman is sick he\u2019ll be asked to hail cabs, too.<\/p>\n Not that he isn\u2019t making the best of his situation:<\/p>\n He, Charlie, was a prisoner, confined eight hours a day to a six-by-eight elevator cage, which was confined, in turn, to a sixteen-story shaft. In one building or another, he had made his living as an elevator operator for ten years. He estimated the average trip at about an eighth of a mile, and when he thought of the thousands of miles he had traveled, when he thought he might have driven the car through the mists above the Caribbean and set it down on some coral beach in Bermuda, he held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers, as if were not the nature of the elevator but the pressure of their lives that confined him, as if they had clipped his wings.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Out of some mixture of boredom and resentment, as tenants board his elevator and wish him a Merry Christmas, Charlie begins offering each the same pitiable spiel: \u201cChristmas is a sad season when you\u2019re poor. I don\u2019t have any family. I live alone in a furnished room.\u201d<\/p>\n This naked appeal generates some mild sympathy and well-wishes, and one tenant, Mrs. Gadshill, genuinely seems to understand his plight since she too is without family on Christmas. Charlie is unmoved:\u00a0 \u201cMaybe she was lonely,\u201d he thinks, \u201cbut she had a ten-room apartment and three servants and bucks and bucks and diamonds and diamonds . . .\u201d<\/p>\n Charlie recalls a scene earlier in the week with a woman and a young girl walking down 59th Street. The girl was crying \u2014 at least he thinks<\/em> she was crying \u2014 and he can just imagine the reason why: the mother probably works long hours, can\u2019t afford the toys in the shop windows or the heat in their apartment or suitable clothes for the girl, can only pay for a little can of soup and will have to scrape around for something to put in the girl\u2019s stocking . . . oh, the injustice! On this day of all days, when we are told it\u2019s our duty to buy expensive gifts for our children and worship a big fat bearded mascot! What are the poor supposed to do?<\/p>\n Now sufficiently worked up, Charlie takes a different tack with his sob story, inventing out of whole cloth a disabled wife and four children (two of them dead!) who are at home decidedly not feeling Christmas cheer.<\/p>\n It works: soon enough Charlie receives more gifts than he knows what to do with. The DePauls offer him a cocktail and some extra goose from their Christmas table. Mrs. Fuller tearfully hands him an arm-full of silver-wrapped packages, including a wallet with her husband\u2019s name on it. The Westons give him a turkey dinner and a dressing gown. The lady on 14, now living alone, lets Charlie take her husband\u2019s neckties.<\/p>\n Charlie has so many presents and so much food that he has to make sure it\u2019s all hidden safely out of sight, for \u201cthe quality of charity is exclusive\u201d and the tenants (touching on the dilemma in DFW\u2019s story) \u201cwould have been disappointed to find that they were not the only ones to try to lessen his loneliness.\u201d<\/p>\n Drunk on all the liquor and his newfound faith in humanity (the elevator is no longer a prison but the vehicle for a birdman who can soar freely through the skies!), Charlie picks up lonely Mrs. Gadshill on 12 and turns his elevator into a roller coaster, going up and down the building at full speed and scaring the pale old woman to death. She notifies the superintendent, and Charlie is fired.<\/p>\n When he comes back down to earth, he finds himself ashamed of the lie he told his tenants to engender their sympathy: \u201cHe had abused the goodness of the people upstairs. He was unworthy.\u201d His thoughts turn to his landlady and her three \u201cskinny\u201d children, whose Christmas joy had \u201cpassed them by\u201d sitting in their basement; looking around at his unworthy bounty, Charlie takes some of the gifts and resolves triumphantly to bring a little Santa Claus into their lives.<\/p>\n Charlie seems to operate on a festering indignation at the injustices of the world and how he can correct them, but it\u2019s worth noting how many of these injustices are as imaginary as his four children: he assumes the woman and her daughter on 59th Street are having a desolate Christmas, and he projects a similarly bleak tableaux for his landlady\u2019s family (who in fact are not going hungry and have received plenty of toys to make them happy).<\/p>\n After Charlie leaves, the landlady tells her children that they are going to take those gifts and walk over to the Deckkers on Hudson Street, who \u201cain\u2019t got nothing,\u201d and suddenly, like the tenants in their mink coats and Charlie in the haze of his hangover, she is suddenly seized with that generous feeling:<\/p>\n A beatific light came into her face when she realized that she could give, that she could bring cheer, that she could put a healing finger on a case needier than hers . . . first love, then charity, then a sense of power drove her . . . it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn\u2019t rest, she couldn\u2019t rest.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another classic ending from Cheever, packed with perfect turns of phrase (\u201cbeatific light,\u201d \u201clicentious benevolence\u201d) and that final punchline, \u201cwe are bound . . . for only a single day, and that day was nearly over.\u201d The landlady has to rush because the gifts won\u2019t mean as much if they\u2019re given a day later.<\/p>\n So what is this story supposed to be? A corrective to the rampant commercialism of the Christmas season? A riposte for us feeling good and charitable only on one assigned day of the year? A DFW-lite fable about the hidden selfishness of giving?<\/p>\n Maybe all of those things, to some extent, but Cheever\u2019s story is told with such warmth and good cheer that it reads more like an inverted Christmas carol than as a blistering critique of human nature. It\u2019s a story that should receive more recognition in the holiday canon, and it\u2019s one of my favorite stories in the collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"