"The Sutton Place Story": 02/01/25

"The Sutton Place Story" by John Cheever (1946) is a missing child story. Deborah Tennyson lives in a high rise apartment with her socialite parents who often suffer through hangovers. She has an elderly nurse, forced to take this job because of financial reasons. She mostly lives in parallel with her parents as they do their best to keep up with their pre-child lifestyle.

As with the other Cheever stories this one draws its horror from routine. They have their schedule and Deborah has hers and sometimes they overlap but those times are a drunk couple and a mostly unsupervised child.

Then there's Renée Hall, a friend of the Tennysons whose unhealthy interest in Deborah feels like a precursor for The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992). The parents, though, are self aware enough to realize Renée's obsession is unhealthy and forbid her from seeing Deborah.

Throughout this story, the adults put themselves before the needs for Deborah, who is a toddler. Mrs. Harley does this by leaving Deborah with various adults so she can attend church. And it's on one of these Sundays that Deborah goes missing.

Given events in "The Hartleys" (1949), I had no hope for Deborah. Given the height of the building, the open window, her being left alone, I expected her body to be found on the sidewalk below.

Instead, Cheever draws out the final act of the story with the slow awakening of the adults in her life. Mrs. Tennyson especially comes around to realizing what she has lost.

Although I would normally see the entire Tennyson family as the travelers in this Road Narrative Spectrum story but Deborah's parents are so removed from her life that she is a solo, marginalized traveler (66). Because her disappearance is the central driving feature of this story, her destination is utopia (FF), in that it remains an unknown to us destination. Her route there, though, is the interstate (00) as represented by the elevator, the one piece of her route we knew she took.

Four stars

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