1956

1956 is a sharply marked narrative time rather than a broadly chronicled year: it separates a speaker’s recollection of the 1953 HUAC summons from a claim that the characters are now more mature, and it dates a passage centered on Cherie. The text later frames those heartfelt words as something The Playwright would write a decade afterward, giving the year a retrospective significance.

A Marker of Maturity

In recalling the 1953 HUAC summons, a speaker contrasts The Playwright’s costly Harvard lawyer with the speaker’s own Manhattan friend, remembered as the “lawyer of the communists.” The recollection emphasizes their different positions—idealist and realist—and the speaker’s near-imprisonment. Against that earlier danger, 1956 is presented as a more mature present: the speaker reassures a beloved Daddy that there is less reason to worry. The contrast gives the year its force without detailing what changed in the intervening years.

Cherie in 1956

A separate passage is explicitly headed “Cherie 1956.” Its speaker admires Cherie’s courage and distinguishes her from people who use alcohol or pills to fight fear. Cherie, as described, begins something knowing where it will lead. The later note that The Playwright would write these heartfelt words ten years afterward places the 1956 passage within a longer retrospective frame: the words belong to a moment in the story, but their later authorship makes that moment part of an act of recollection.