This is the fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
For our first podcast, we asked novelist and contributor Richard Ford to choose a story from the New Yorker archives.
He chose a very short story by John Cheever called Reunion.
It was first published in the October 27, 1962 issue of the New Yorker.
We asked Richard why he chose this story.
It's such a perfect specimen of a short story, in a sense, by being, in my view, so economical and yet has so much packed into itself that I just loved it for that alone.
But also what Cheever's story made clear to me was that if you said something in the concourse of Grand Central Station, you could plausibly have anything happen, any two people meet.
Not only did we ask Richard to choose a story, he's also going to read it for us.
We'll talk about the story a little bit afterwards, but first, let's hear Richard Ford read John Cheever's short story reunion.
The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central station.
I was going from my grandmother's in the Adirondacks to a cottage on the cape that my mother had rented, and I wrote my father that I would be in New York between trains for an hour and a half and asked.
If we could have lunch together.
His secretary wrote to say he would meet me at the information booth at noon and at 12:00 sharp.
I saw him coming through the crowd.
He was a stranger to me.
My mother divorced him three years ago, and I hadn't been with him since.
But as soon as I saw him, I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom.
I knew that when I was grown, I would be something like him.
I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.