Percy

by John Cheever, Adelaide Cioni (Translator)

“Uno dei membri che ricordo meglio del lato materno della famiglia era una zia che si faceva chiamare Percy e che fumava il sigaro. Non c’era nessuna ambiguità sessuale in questo. La zia era adorabile, bella e intensamente femminile.”
Frammenti di una storia sparita dalle cronache di una famiglia che tutto una zia che sceglie un nome maschile, dedita a un'arte che la farà tribolare per tutta la vita.
Finalmente in eBook i racconti di un grande maestro del Novecento. L’occasione per scoprire (o riscoprire) il più straordinario cantore dell’inquieta borghesia americana, vincitore del premio Pulitzer e ispiratore delle atmosfere di innumerevoli film e di serie di culto come “Mad Men”. Tratto da “I racconti”, pubblicato da Feltrinelli. Numero di 30.670

Genres: Short Stories

18 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 18, 2014

About the author

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.

His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.

Reviews

[Connie G · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cheever gets back to his New England roots after writing so many stories set in New York or Italy. A narrator is looking back on their family history, especially their Aunt Percy and her family in West Roxbury (Boston). Percy is a feminist who attended art school, although she has to paint sentimental pictures for magazines to make ends meet. Her husband is a doctor who sees very few patients . Percy loves him even though he is a philanderer. Her oldest son has an expensive music education but does not work in the field. Her younger son was institutionalized since he had some mental disorders at birth. The nostalgic story showed a family with unfulfilled potential, but each one was making choices that seemed right for them at the time they were living. While it probably was a realistic slice of life, it was a depressing story that didn't grab my interest.

"Percy" is story #57 in the collection "The Stories of John Cheever."

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un cuento atípico donde Cheever ahonda en la historia familiar y se detiene a hablar de Percy, una tia indómita y libre que quiso ser pintora. EStupendo.

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Cheever's "Percy" is about the strangeness of families and especially Cheeverish. One thing interesting to think about is the below comment and how Cheever brought the hardness of that time which would not be the best but to me troubles are for all times, what is more important is mind set. Our times are warped and lack common sense, truly upside down. Giving up freedoms when they should be treasured, giving confidence without knowing all the facts and being a sheep to be duped by others, Orwellian. So to me these times are indeed dark for the lack of voices worldwide to stop the madness. But in regard to this short story it shows that families are unique and each have their stories.


"My Uncle Hamlet—a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team—called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter—droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him."

"One of the most vivid members of my mother’s side of the family was an aunt who called herself Percy, and who smoked cigars. There was no sexual ambiguity involved. She was lovely, fair, and intensely feminine. We were never very close. My father may have disliked her, although I don’t recall this. My maternal grandparents had emigrated from England in the 1890s with their six children. My Grandfather Holinshed was described as a bounder—a word that has always evoked for me the image of a man leaping over a hedge just ahead of a charge of buckshot. I don’t know
what mistakes he had made in England, but his transportation to the New World was financed by his father-in- law, Sir Percy Devere, and he was paid a small remittance so long as he did not return to England. He detested the United States and died a few years after his arrival here."


❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌


Aunt Percy is an artist and her doctor husband who has affairs, plus their two children who the narrator doesn't really like. Aunt Percy doesn't like her son's choice in his wife and is grieved after her dies young.

"She began to call herself Percy in art school, because she felt that there was some prejudice against women in the arts. In her last year in art school she did a six-by-fourteen-foot painting of Orpheus taming the beasts. This won her a gold medal and a trip to Europe, where she studied at the Beaux-Arts for a few months. When she returned, she. was given three portrait commissions, but she was much too skeptical to succeed at this."

"Uncle Abbott’s practice was not very profitable, and I guess he was lazy. I remember seeing him eating his breakfast in pajamas at one in the afternoon. They must have been poor, and I suppose Percy did the housework, bought the groceries, and hung out the wash. Late one night when I had gone to bed, I overheard my father shouting, “I cannot support that cigar-smoking sister of yours any longer.” Percy spent some time copying paintings at Fenway Court. This brought in a little money, but evidently not enough. One of her friends from art school urged her to try painting magazine covers. This went deeply against all of her aspirations and instincts, but it must have seemed to her that she had no choice, and she began to turn out deliberately sentimental pictures for magazines. She got to be quite famous at this."

"The family used to gather, as I recall, almost every Sunday. I don’t know why they should have spent so much time in one another’s company. Perhaps they had few friends or perhaps they held their family ties above friendship. Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy’s old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile. The house was dark. It had a liverish smell."

"One afternoon, when the music was finished, Lovell, Uncle Abbott, and I got into the car and drove into the Dorchester slums. It was in the early winter, already dark and rainy, and the rains of Boston fell with great authority. He parked the car in front of a frame tenement and said that he was going to see a patient.“You think he’s going to see a patient?” Lovell asked. “Yes,” I said. “He’s going to see his girl friend,” Lovell said. Then he began to cry. I didn’t like him. I had no sympathy to give him. I only wished that I had more seemly relations. He dried his tears, and we sat there without speaking until Uncle Abbott returned, whistling, contented, and smelling of perfume. He took us to a drugstore for some ice cream, and then we went back to the house, where Percy was opening the living-room windows to let in some air. She seemed tired but still high-spirited, although I suppose that she and everyone else in the room knew what Abbott had been up to. It was time for us to go home."

"That winter, Lovell and Percy went on a tour that took them as far west as Chicago, and something went wrong. They may, as travelers, have been bad company for one another; he may have had poor notices or small audiences; and while nothing was ever said, I recall that the tour was not triumphant. When they returned, Percy sold a piece of property that adjoined the house and went to Europe for the summer. Lovell could surely have supported himself as a musician, but instead he took a job as a manual laborer for some electrical-instrument company. He came to see us before Percy returned, and told me what had been happening that summer."

“Daddy didn’t spend much time around the house after Mother went away,” he said, “and I was alone most evenings. I used to get my own supper, and I spent a lot of time at the movies. I used to try and pick up girls, but I’m skinny and I don’t have much self-confidence. Well, one Sunday I drove down to this beach in the old Buick. Daddy let me have the old Buick. I saw this very fat couple with a young daughter. They looked lonely. Mrs. Hirshman is very fat, and she makes herself up like a clown, and she has a little dog. There is a kind of fat woman who always has a little dog. So then I said something about how I loved dogs, and they seemed happy to talk with me, and then I ran into the waves and showed off my crawl and came back and sat with them. They were Germans, and they had a funny accent, and I think their funny English and their fatness made them lonely. Well, their daughter was named Donna-Mae, and she was all wrapped up in a bathrobe, and she had on a hat, and they told me she had such fair skin she had to keep out of the sun. Then they told me she had beautiful hair, and she took off her hat, and I saw her hair for the first time. It was beautiful. It was the color of honey and very long, and her skin was pearly. You could see that the sun would burn it. So we talked, and I got some hot dogs and tonic, and took Donna-Mae for a walk up the beach, and I was very happy. Then, when the day was over, I offered to drive them home—they’d come to the beach in a bus—and they said they’d like a ride if I’d promise to have supper with them. They lived in a sort of a slum, and he was a house painter. Their house was behind another house. Mrs. Hirshman said while she cooked supper why didn’t I wash Donna-Mae off with the hose? I remember this very clearly, because it’s when I fell in love. She put on her bathing suit again, and I put on my bathing suit, and I sprayed her very gently with the hose. She squealed a little, naturally, because the water was cold, and it was getting dark, and in the house next door someone was playing the Chopin C-Sharp-Minor, Opus 28. The piano was out of tune, and the person didn’t know how to play, but the music and the hose and Donna-Mae’s pearly skin and golden hair and the smells of supper from the kitchen and the twilight all seemed to be a kind of paradise. So I had supper with them and went
home, and the next night I took Donna-Mae to the movies. Then I had supper with them again, and when I told Mrs. Hirshman that my mother was away and that I almost never saw my father, she said that they had a spare room and why didn’t I stay there? So the next night I packed some clothes and moved into their spare room, and I’ve been there ever since.” It is unlikely that Percy would have written my mother after her return from Europe, and, had she written, the letter would have been
destroyed, since that family had a crusading detestation of souvenirs. Letters, photographs, diplomas—anything that authenticated the past was always thrown into the fire. I think this was not, as they claimed, a dislike of clutter but a fear of death. To glance backward was to die, and they did not mean to leave a trace."

"Then she looked at Lovell and said that it was time to go. Lovell drove her home and then came back to ask, I suppose, for some words of approval. Of course my heart was broken in two. Here was a great musical career ruined by a head of hair. I told him I never wanted to see her again. He said he was going to marry her and I said I didn’t care what he did. Lovell married Donna-Mae. Uncle Abbott went to the wedding, but Percy kept her word and never saw her daughter-in-law again. Lovell came to the house four times a year to pay a ceremonial call on his mother. He would not go near the piano. He had not only given up his music, he hated music. His simple-minded taste for obsceneness seemed to have transformed itself into simple-minded piety. He had transferred from the Episcopal church to the Hirshmans’ Lutheran congregation, which he attended twice on Sundays. They were raising money to build a new church when I last spoke with him. He spoke intimately of the Divinity."


“He has helped us in our struggles, again and again. When everything seemed hopeless, He has given us encouragement and strength. I wish I could get you to understand how wonderful He is, what a blessing it is to love Him....” Lovell died before he was thirty, and since everything must have been burned, I don’t suppose there was a trace left of his musical career."

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Percy by John Cheever
A special treat

The family that the reader meets is a rather odd one-
“Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead.”
An uncle calls the narrator to his deathbed and says that he has had the best fifty years of American history and his nephew can have the rest.
The name of the story is given by…an aunt, who smokes cigars but is very fair and intensely feminine- her real name is Florence and she calls herself Percy.
She wanted to be a painter and I guess that the decision that her mother took to send her to art school was rare for that time.
The narrator imagines the poverty, the little food consisting of lentils and the rare baths they must have taken.
Grandmother reads about the outrageous murder of a mother of four children by her butcher husband and she takes the kids in for a month.
The name Percy was taken to avoid being discriminated against as a woman in the art world, about a century ago...i think.
Percy wins a trophy, a trip to Europe and a commission upon return, but the latter is not finalized because of her skepticism.
A man wins her affection and after that she
“Languishes in his absence, his cigar cough sounded to her like music, and she filled a portfolio with pencil sketches of his face, his eyes, his hands, and, after their marriage, the rest of him.”
The husband is lazy and Percy has to do all the work and bring in money, while he has breakfast in pajamas at one pm.
And not just that, but the husband is also faithless and caught in the act by Percy, who had hired a detective agency.
A son born after this incident has “his brain or his nervous system damaged” but since mother smoked and drank in those days, that might have caused it.
His name was Beaufort and he was institutionalized.
And uncle Abbott caries on with his infidelities, once taking the kids with him and having them wait while he pretends to visit a patient.
Beaufort has a brother, Lovell who becomes a musician with good, but not raving reviews on account of his lack of sentiment when performing.
Lovell falls in love with the daughter of a fat couple, who speaks with a German accent and lives in a slum.
When he tells his mother that he wants to marry, she invites the bride-to- be’s family over and her impression is-
“She is twenty-one years old and works as a clerk in some insurance office. Her voice is high. She giggles. The one thing that can be said in her favor is that she has a striking head of yellow hair.”
And then the girl keeps giggling- when she is introduced, as she sat on the sofa and she has never had tea before this visit.
A long talk about the hair of the young girl follows and she appears to be interested in little else, driving Percy mad-
“Here was a great musical career ruined by a head of hair. I told him I never wanted to see her again.”
And there is much more to this marvelous short story.

[mark propp · Rating 2 out of 5]

i could not follow this story.
i found it dull & dreary to read.
cheever's stories usually have elements of happenstance & randomness & abrupt changes in them. usually i don't mind & often like that.
but the writing here was so dull & turgid & the people were bland & there were no laughs & the tragedy? well i couldn't have cared less because i was so bored & wanted this story out of my life.

worst one in the collection imo.