“His face was blazing. He loved the world, and the world loved him.” Fiction by John Cheever, from 1949. NewYorkerArchive
Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought.
It was quiet then, and Charlie lighted a cigarette. The heating plant in the basement encompassed the building at that hour in a regular and profound vibration, and the sullen noises of arriving steam heat began to resound, first in the lobby and then to reverberate up through all the sixteen stories, but this was a mechanical awakening, and it didn’t lighten his loneliness or his petulance.
Charlie thanked them, and their generosity surprised him, but he wondered if, with the arrival of friends and relatives, they wouldn’t forget their offer.“It isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Gadshill,” he said. “Christmas is a sad season if you’re poor. You see, I don’t have any family. I live alone in a furnished room.”
On the way home from work a few nights earlier, Charlie had seen a woman and a little girl going down Fifty-ninth Street. The little girl was crying. He guessed she was crying, he knew she was crying, because she’d seen all the things in the toy-store windows and couldn’t understand why none of them were for her. Her mother did housework, he guessed, or maybe was a waitress, and he saw them going back to a room like his, with green walls and no heat, on Christmas Eve, to eat a can of soup.
At half past one, 9 rang, and when he went up, Mr. DePaul was standing in the door of their apartment holding a cocktail shaker and a glass. “Here’s a little Christmas cheer, Charlie,” he said, and he poured Charlie a drink. Then a maid appeared with a tray of covered dishes, and Mrs. DePaul came out of the living room. “Merry Christmas, Charlie,” she said. “I had Mr. DePaul carve the goose early, so that you could have some, you know.
By three o’clock, Charlie had fourteen dinners spread on the table and the floor of the locker room, and the bell kept ringing. Just as he started to eat one, he would have to go up and get another, and he was in the middle of the Parsons’ roast beef when he had to go up and get the DePauls’ dessert.
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