Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 48
Louisa came directly to the house and, standing in the hallway,
exclaimed: “You cannot pump gasoline!” “Why not?” asked
Farragut’s mother. Aunt Louisa’s chauffeur came in and put a box
of tomatoes on the floor. He wore puttees. “Because,” said Aunt
Louisa, “you will lose all your friends.” “To the contrary,” said
Farragut’s mother. “I shall discover precisely who they are.”
The cream of the post-Freudian generation were addicts. The rest
were those psychiatric reconstructions you used to see in the back
of unpopular rooms at cocktail parties. They seemed to be intact,
but if you touched them in the wrong place at the wrong time they
would collapse all over the floor like a spatch-cocked card trick.
Drug addiction is symptomatic. Opium eaters know. Farragut
remembered a fellow opium eater named Polly, whose mother was
an on-again off-again recording and club singer. Her name was
Corinne. When Corinne was way down and struggling to get back,
Farragut took Polly to her mother’s big breakthrough in Las Vegas.
The breakthrough was successful and Corinne went on from a hasbeen
to the third-biggest recording star in the world, and while
this was important, what he remembered was that Polly, who had
trouble with her size, ate all the bread and butter on the table
during her mummy’s first critical set and when this was finished—
Farragut meant the set—everybody stood up and cheered and
Polly grasped his arm and said: “That’s my mummy, that’s my
dear mummy.” So there was dear mummy in a hard spot that
blazed with the blues of a diamond and would in fact prove to be
the smile of the world and how could you square this with lullabys
and breast-feeding except by eating opium? For Farragut the word
“mother” evoked the image of a woman pumping gas, curtsying at
the Assemblies and banging a lectern with her gavel. This confused
him and he would blame his confusion on the fine arts, on Degas.
There is a Degas painting of a woman with a bowl of
chrysanthemums that had come to represent to Farragut the great
serenity of “mother.” The world kept urging him to match his own
mother, a famous arsonist, snob, gas pumper and wing shot,