"The Enormous Radio" was first published in the May 17, 1947 issue of The New Yorker. It begins:
Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester.
Sutton Place, for those who have not watched "Million Dollar Listing" on the Bravo Network, and so are uninformed about the New York City real estate market, is a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side (East 50s), where nowadays a one-bedroom condo offered at a low seven-figure price would cause the cognoscenti to wonder what was wrong with it: definitely no view across the East River. But note that Cheever says that the Westcotts lived near Sutton Place. Westchester County, to which they aspire, lies in the Hudson River valley just north of the city and is home to some of the most affluent suburbs in the country. Something about the way this opening is handled, the snide or nearly snide statistical precision, or over precision, indicates the author's reservations. That the Westcotts hoped someday to live in Westchester suggests they had no loftier goal than moving up the real estate chain and that John Cheever perhaps would recommend another way of life.
So is the story going to be a satiric take-down of the Westcotts? The sentence following upon the statistical abstract of their lives is a physical description of Irene, "a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written." Regarding her husband, Jim:
He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve.
Yes, it's going to be, already is, a satiric take-down. The next detail, however, concerns the Westcotts' love of "serious music": they attend a lot of concerts, and at home spend time listening to music on the radio. When their radio breaks, Jim buys Irene a new one, enormous, contained within an ugly gumwood cabinet, and the documentary realism of the opening is jettisoned. For this enormous radio, when turned on, picks up, in interludes between Mozart quintets and the "Ode to Joy" and Chopin preludes, conversations and goings-on in the other units of their apartment house, which include:
"For Christ's sake, Kathy," he said, "do you always have to play the piano when I get home?" The music stopped abruptly. "It's the only chance I have," a woman said. "I'm at the office all day." "So am I," the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door.
Instructions to a maid before the cocktail guests arrive: "Don't give the best scotch to anyone who hasn't white hair," the hostess said. "See if you can get rid of that liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars? I want to tip the elevator man."
"I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning," a woman said. "It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs Dunston was wearing last night." "We'll sell it," a man said. "Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell it. Mrs Dunston won't know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks."
Now and again the radio picks up the cooing, English-accented voice of a neighbor's nanny calming a baby with nonsense verse, the candle flame of goodness in a naughty world--and supplying also an ironic commentary on some of the other overheard bits, such as the plan to sell Mrs Dunston's diamond to the jeweler: "'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,'" the Sweeney's nurse sang. "'Halfpence and farthings, say the bells of St Martin's. When will you pay me? say the bells at old Bailey . . .'"
Sex and money, the Sweeney's nurse, money and sex and debauchery, the Sweeney's nurse: a fugue, with the defining contrapuntal themes, played on the enormous radio. At first, the Westcotts are amused and go to bed laughing, but the new knowledge begins to weigh on Irene. Something is finally being written on her wide, fine forehead. Home during the days with this radio, she hears more and more, and begins to feel discouraged and obsessed. One night, in the wee hours, her son calls for a glass of water:
All the lights in the neighborhood were extinguished, and from the boy's window she could see the empty street. She went into the living room and tried the radio. There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. "Are you all right, darling?" he asked. "Yes," a woman said wearily. "Yes, I'm all right, I guess," and then she added with great feeling, "But, you know, Charlie, I don't feel like myself any more. Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week when I feel like myself. I don't like to go to another doctor, because the doctor bills are so awful already, but I just don't feel like myself, Charlie. I just never feel like myself." They were not young, Irene thought. She guessed from the timbre of their voices that they were middle-aged. The restrained melancholy of the dialogue and the draft from the bedroom window made her shiver, and she went back to bed.
In the concluding scene, the Westcotts are themselves unmasked, more profoundly than we probably expected. Jim comes home from work more tired than usual and, already feeling irritable, is shoved across a line by Irene's new sensitivity. He complains about her spending--"fur coats and radios and slipcovers." He confesses, probably for the first time, his disappointment with his career and his worries about money, the kinds of things he thinks about. She pleads with him to stop, the neighbors will hear, but he hurdles on over this objection and demands to know why she has suddenly become "so Christly," a real "convent girl," and he proceeds to throw into Irene's face some incidents from her past that only an intimate would know--chicanery and theft connected with the probating of her mother's will, indifference to a friend in need, an abortion. Then the coda:
Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping that the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeney's nurse. Jim continued to shout at her from the door. The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. "An early morning railroad disaster in Tokyo," the loudspeaker said, "killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine."
We might have been expecting to be pleased to witness the humiliation of some Upper East Side deplorables and instead we get world-sorrow washing over the whole earth and a muffled call, in the action of some nuns and the songs of the Sweeney's nurse, for forbearance and love. Merry Christmas from John Cheever!
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