Reunion is a short story by the American writer John Cheever

John Cheever

John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy,...

, first published in 1962.

Summary

An unnamed narrator recalls his final, 90-minute meeting in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 with his father, an alcoholic, also unnamed. The narrator describes himself as a boy, but we do not get his exact age. The boy hopes to reconnect with his father because he has not seen him for three years, but he slowly comes to the realization of his father's obvious character flaws, which are centered around his poor treatment of service workers and his abuse of alcohol. Although the father orders one "Gibson Beefeater" for himself and one for his son at the restaurants, the reader is left to assume that the father drinks both because of the worsening of his speech and behavior. After four progressively more abusive exchanges with waiters and a fifth with a newspaper stand seller, the boy leaves his father with a curt goodbye, leaving the reader to assume he has decided never to meet his father again.

Themes

We do not choose our family

The first-person narrator writes early in the story, "He was a stranger to me [...] but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom" (183). Our parents determine our genetics, which in turn help determine our personality, traits, and habits. Even though the narrator says "that was the last time I saw my father" (185), his father will "return" every time he finds himself acting similarly to his father.

Intelligent people can be the worst

The father has a secretary, shows up on time, and at different points speaks French, Italian, and German. We do not learn his profession, but the father projects an educated air, albeit one which is abusive to the service staff.

The "sorrows of gin"

Cheever struggled with alcoholism himself, and the character of the father indeed drinks gin. While the reader is left to make sense of why the father acts like a raging alcoholic, at a simple level this character does not know how to relate to his estranged son in any sort of healthy, normal way, so he fills the void with abusive interactions with waitstaff, to the mild horror of his son.

Characters

Son and narrator

The unnamed narrator recalls an afternoon meeting as a boy with his father while transferring trains at Grand Central Station in New York City. The boy is innocent and naive and expects his meeting with his father to be an opportunity to reconnect. When he abruptly leaves his father, we assume he now understands why his mother divorced his father, and he also ceases contact with the man.

Father

An alcoholic who is abusive to waiters and a newspaper seller, he nevertheless uses three foreign languages to offend them. He is a loud talker and combative with strangers.

Setting

Grand Central Station is where the father and son meet, and they go to four separate restaurants and a newspaper stand. The setting of the train station builds a motif of the boy going in a new direction in his life after coming to a new understanding of his father.