John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson

“I enjoyed it very much and I mean it!”
    As he grew up, he was sent as a matter of course to dancing classes and to the junior and senior assemblies that succeeded them—experiences he memorialized in a 1937 memoir for The New Yorker entitled “In the Beginning.” The central figure in the memoir is Miss Barlow, a venerable dancing instructor who wore jet-black dresses that hiked up a little in the rear and who spoke as if addressing hundreds. Every Saturday afternoon during his middle school years, John had trouble finding the serge bag that held his patent-leather dancing shoes. He would kneel and pray to God that he’d find the shoes in time to be driven down to the Masonic Temple for the two-o’clock class. There ensued the same drill followed by upper-middle-class youngsters in every American city of the time. The boys gathered in the locker room, the girls in the ladies’ room. They then marched upstairs, entered the ballroom in pairs, and bowed to the observing matrons. After an hour of instruction, the children practiced what they had learned by dancing in couples.
    When Cheever was fifteen, he graduated to the junior assemblies held at the country club. These “began at eight and ended at eleven, and you could clap as hard as you wanted to but the band wouldn’t play any encores.” Miss Barlow insisted on at least one cotillion and one elimination dance, the latter usually won by a good-looking boy who danced on the balls of his feet. Next came the senior assemblies, which were formal and lasted from nine to one. By this time the stock market had crashed, and along with it “most of the institutions our fathers had lived by.” But Miss Barlow did not change. She still wore the same black dresses and the same ankle-high beaded shoes; she still carried a corsage in her left hand and a whistle in her right. She was seventy at least, and had her dignity. One evening in her last season, she had the ballroom decorated with balloons. Seeing their opportunity, the teenagers began to break the balloons with matches and penknives. Miss Barlow sounded her whistle and commanded their attention with her sarcastic voice. “This is extraordinary,” she said. “I can’t understand you young people.” Never before, she told them, had her guests taken so much pleasure in destroying her decorations. “Your amusement is really a revelation. Next week we’ll have rattles. Alphabetical blocks the week after that.”
    Cheever himself was the cause of Miss Barlow’s final outburst. He used to dance a lot with a girl named Hope, and one night she asked the band to play “Diga-Diga-Doo”—so he wrote—and they “went all over the floor until that shrill whistle blew” and he heard Miss Barlow’s confident and stagy voice address him. “John Cheever,” she said, “your dancing is atrocious.” She had seen a great deal of dancing, but never anything like his. “I am ashamed of you, John. I am ashamed of you. I’m glad your mother isn’t here. I will give you an illustration of your dancing.” The illustration was not funny at all, and he did his best to dance on the balls of his feet the rest of the evening.
    That night he went home and dreamed that Miss Barlow had died. A week later he found out that the dream had come true. “Of course I killed her,” he wrote in hyperbole, and he thought about it sometimes when he was with a girl who danced as if she had been taught in the assemblies “outside of Buffalo or Baltimore or Boston or Philadelphia.” He thought about the corsage and the whistle, and the dance music that had been popular, and the smell of the locker room, “and the black elms and the mansard roofs, and that whole world that has become … fugitive and strange.…”
    He did not so much want to return to that world as to memorialize it, and to understand his