Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 153
from the back. They were always stamping indignantly out of
concert halls, theaters, sports arenas and restaurants, and he, as the
youngest, was always in the rear. “If Koussevitzky thinks I’ll listen
to that…” “That umpire is crooked.” “This play is degenerate.” “I
don’t like the way that waiter looked at me.” “That clerk was
impudent.” And so on. They saw almost nothing to its
completion, and that’s the way he remembered them, heading, for
some reason in wet raincoats, for the exit. It had occurred to him
that they may have suffered terribly from claustrophobia and
disguised this weakness as moral indignation.
They were also very bountiful, especially the ladies. They were
always raising money to buy skinny chickens for people who lived
in tenements or organizing private schools that often went
bankrupt. Farragut supposed they did some good, but he had
always found their magnanimity painfully embarrassing and he
knew for a fact that some of the people who lived in tenements
had no use for their skinny chickens. Farragut’s only brother,
Eben, possessed both of the family traits. He found most waiters,
barmen and clerks impertinent, and to meet him for lunch in a
restaurant almost always meant a scene. Eben didn’t distribute
chickens, but he had informed Farragut that on Saturday morning
he read to the blind at the Twin Brooks Nursing Home. On this
Saturday Farragut and Marcia drove out to the country where
Eben and Carrie lived. It had been more than a year since the
brothers had met. Farragut thought his brother heavy and even
gross. The lives of his two children were tragic and Farragut
resented the fact that Eben claimed these tragedies to be merely
the nature of life. When they arrived Eben was about to leave for
the nursing home and Farragut went along with his only brother.
The Twin Brooks Nursing Home was a complex of one-story
buildings with such a commanding view of some river and some
mountains that Farragut wondered if this vastness would console
or embitter the dying. The heat when they stepped into the place
was suffocating, and as Farragut followed his brother down the