"The Pot of Gold" (The Stories of John Cheever)

Money Money Money

This story is too clever and well-constructed. There's just enough to want to love it, but not nearly enough to remember. The first line sets the tone perfectly: “You could not say fairly of Ralph and Laura Whittemore that they had the failings and characteristics of incorrigible treasure hunters, but you could say truthfully of them that the shimmer and the smell, the peculiar force of money, the promise of it, had an untoward influence on their lives.” They are always on the brink of success and hopeful. Ralph had a modest job, but he knows that any day something bigger will come his way.

This opening is both great and unfortunate. Within a few lines, Cheever tells you exactly what Ralph and Laura represent. Ralph and Laura aren't gold diggers; they are average Americans under the thrall of the Protestant Work Ethic, hoping for the promised reward. Unfortunately, the paragraph also tells you exactly where this story is going. Ralph and Laura are going to get their hopes up several times, only to meet disappointment. By the end, Ralph is going to realize that the real treasure was the friends (wife) we made along the way, a cliché that might have been fresh in 1950.

Furthermore, one could read Cheever's depiction of a struggling middle class couple as condescending. By the publication date (1950), Cheever was living on the Upper East Side and publishing regularly in The New Yorker.. On the other hand, Cheever came from one of those families that only appear wealthy. After bad investments and slow years, they lost their big house to foreclosure and his brother had to drop out of Dartmouth because they couldn't pay for it.

Your sympathy might vary.

Ralph and Laura are not desperate. They live in a walk-up. Ralph has a modest job, but dreams of a better one. This is the dream fostered by LinkedIn articles and Amway pitches. Ralph probably recommends How to Win Friends and Influence People without irony. Ralph has a Willy Loman vibe, but the story is not a dreary Arthur Miller sermon. There's tension throughout. As Ralph tries to win capitalism, he has three familiar disappointments. First, there's the well paying job that practically gives Ralph the office tour before stringing him along and hiring someone else.

Laura has a kid. Laura has to get a job.

Then there's the entrepreneur gamble. Ralph paints his Venetian blinds with a mixture that blocks out the street noise. He thinks he's going to make millions. Only he has to buy the rights because someone else has a patent. Then the salesmen can't sell it.

Laura befriends Alice Holinshed, another woman with a striving soon-to-be-wealthy husband. Alice appears more successful, but ultimately she's been playing at wealth longer. The illusion wears off after the war. Laura notices Alice wearing the same dress three days in a row and finally Alice just hits up Laura for $5.

By the way, Ralph goes to war and comes back from the war and that's all you're ever going to hear about the war in this story. I'm increasingly tempted to read John Cheever's journals to see if he actually talked about WWII in his personal writing. As far as I can tell, he never wrote explicitly about the war except for “and then he went to war. And then he came home.”

At the end of the story, Cheever writes two scenes to underscore his message. First, Ralph meets a millionaire to interview for a dream job. Ralph's uncle saved the millionaire's life. The millionaie is just terribly lonely. He needs friends. His last hire was the other driver in a car accident. That's how he makes friends. He hires them. He can meet in a hotel that's too high to hear traffic, but he's so lonely.

Also he tells Ralph to call nine days later instead of just hiring him then.

Then Alice pops up at a party and rants about a fancy English “cake of soap.” She was going to use that soap to celebrate going to the Bahamas, going to Florida, paying off debts. She never had a reason to celebrate. Fifteen years later, she threw out the soap because she was never going to be happy.

She throws out perfectly good soap because she can't celebrate.

That's it. The lonely millionaire and pathetic Alice exist to tell the reader that chasing after money is isolating. So when the millionaire has a stroke and Ralph loses the job because theme, he realizes that his wife was the true “pot of gold.”

Had this story been written by a lesser writer, I would have hated it for that manipulation alone. Cheever improves on a hokey story with writing style and some great scenes. Instead of garbage, this story is merely annoying.

Next Week: Cheever does not like elevator operators.

If you’d like to read these stories yourself, here’s the book

Sorry for asking, but I am still behind on my rent, so here’s my Gofundme