Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  * When asked how he knew Cheever was bisexual, Laurents invoked the play Bell, Book and Candle, by John Van Druten: “They [the witches in the play] know each other simply by looking in the eye. Yo u just know.”

  * Mary Cheever and Peggy (McManus) Murray and others have attested to the vagaries of Ruth Denney, who—alive and well and living in Hawaii as of 2004—denies almost everything: “Codfish was not a thing I cooked,” she said, nor did she remember washing her hair in the kitchen sink. And though she was “very sorry” that her child did, in fact, spit at people, “I certainly didn't defend him for spitting.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  {1945-1946}

  AFTER A RESTFUL VISIT to Erwinna, the Cheevers returned that summer to the town house and a “saga” of “disorder, hysteria, and vermin”—as Mary wrote Herbst—that “should be sung to the lyre.” One day Mary heard the unmistakable sound of a Flit gun being used in the Denneys’ room, and discovered that Ruth had been spraying a secondhand mattress she'd recently acquired, which explained the sudden infestation of bedbugs. Ruth Denney denied (and still denies) that bedbugs had traveled farther than her own room, but the other couples had already been bitten, and a terrible row ensued. Thus ended the unhappy experiment once and for all (though Cheever, at least, had a theme for his sixth and final “Town House” story).

  As luck would have it, the Cheevers managed almost immediately to find a nice, somewhat affordable apartment on East Fifty-ninth near Sutton Place. “Here we are,” wrote Mary in late July, “living like the wicked rich surrounded by swells and movie magnates and the reproachful stares of doormen and other dignitaries whom we can't afford to tip.” The place wasn't as posh as all that, but it was a definite improvement over their previous apartments: there was a sunken living room large enough for cocktail parties, a bedroom and bath for little Susie, and a ninth-floor view of the Queensboro Bridge (“the interminable funeral procession … to the enormous graveyards in Long Island”). Cheever even had an office of sorts. Almost every morning for the next five years, he'd put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he'd doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.

  Sometimes he despised New York, and resented having to keep up with his dapper fellow tenants in the elevator—but they reminded him, too, that a writer was just as entitled to middle-class comforts as a lawyer or stockbroker. Though he could barely pay the rent, he'd presently insist on sending his three-year-old daughter to a private nursery school, loading her into a taxi each morning and instructing the man to drive, whatever her protests, twenty blocks uptown to the Walt Whitman School (“She enjoys herself tremendously when she gets there but she has decided that she does not like to leave the nest in the mornings”). By the time she came home in the afternoon, Cheever was free to take her on long walks around the city—indeed, his “favorite New York” was the one he'd discovered with his children in these postwar years. Sometimes they'd walk to the Central Park lion house, or the apex of the Queensboro Bridge, or the docks along the East River (“where I once saw a couple of tarts playing hopscotch with a hotel room key”). And when he felt like stopping for a drink, he'd take Susan along to the Menemsha Bar on Fifty-seventh, where she was enchanted by a little electric waterfall. Finally, at night, he tucked her into bed and told stories about Faustina, the perfect little girl who loved serving her parents breakfast in bed and keeping her room clean. So poignant were his memories of early fatherhood that Cheever would always associate a sense of homecoming with these few blocks near Sutton Place—the “happiness that clings to the shoeshine parlor, the laundry, the drugstore, the vacant store and the butcher's,” he later wrote. “[But also] an incurable longing, the basic loneliness implanted in [me] by the miserableness of early life.”

  Cheever remarked to friends—with a mixture of wit and real self-pity, perhaps—that he thought his parents were “terribly disappointed” he'd survived the war. In fact, he and his parents were mutually well meaning, more or less, if a little bewildered by one another. At her shop in Quincy Square, Mary Cheever was a beloved figure: her granddaughter Jane remembers how people were always coming in from the street just to say hello and chat. But with her son, whom she rarely saw, she seemed divided between a pose of prideful self-reliance and a real need to confide her sorrows. Cheever didn't make it easy for her. Though always polite, he'd find himself boasting about his illustrious in-laws, the grandeur of Treetops, by way of reminding her of the better life he'd rather defiantly made for himself; she in turn would counterpunch with trumped-up claims of business success or her old friendship with Margaret Deland, the crusading novelist. Such visits left Cheever vaguely unhappy, wishing he'd been kinder—but he couldn't help it. The old woman embarrassed him. “The bars are down at Milton Academy!” she'd sigh, forgetting that her daughter-in-law was half Jewish. Cheever's remarks in his journal—after one of his mother's occasional buying trips to the city (during which she'd always insist on staying at the Martha Washington Hotel near Madison Square)—reflect an aching perplexity:

  I haven't seen mother for eight months. When I first came into the room she was sitting on the Hitchcock chair by the door looking ill at ease and so exhausted that her face seemed mottled. She was dressed in black, she wore a pair of corrective shoes curled a little with long use, the long underwear she was wearing reached to below her knees and showed as she sat there and the black enamel of her cheap stick had begun to wear off at the handle. …

  I forget these people's plainness. Mother made her own bed at the hotel. She took us for dinner to a place called Paddy's Chop House. It was crowded and noisey and she enjoyed herself. When I'm with mother the bridge between the house in Wollaston, the farm, the apartment in Quincy, and the life I have or would like to have in New York seems broad and sometimes untenable.

  With his father the bridge was nigh insurmountable, though perhaps there was a certain comfort in conceding as much. At least the man no longer threatened to drown himself or dive off a cresting roller coaster—on the contrary, after eighty years “on this oblate spheroid” (as he liked to say), Frederick seemed at peace with the world, wishing only to make amends. “John that's all that makes life worth living—someone else, other than just yourself,” he wrote, part of a larger paean to the wife he'd once despised. As a father, too, he was more dutiful than ever, avidly interested in his son's career, or at least careful to seem that way: he read The New Yorker at the library each week and would praise not only John's latest story, but everything else about the magazine (“its layout sure sparkles in all departments … and ads, are highest grade mdse. See Altman—Tiffany—etc etc”). For all his apparent mellowing, though, he never quite reconciled himself to idleness, forever plotting to make a comeback of sorts. Not long before his death, he tried to get a payroll job at the Bethlehem Hingham Shipyard, but as usual it didn't work out: “‘Too old’ as it looks,” he laconically noted in a letter to John; “1865 scares them when they read it in my formal application.” A week later, the episode had marinated a bit, and this time he related it to “John Mary and the Baby” as an extravagant escapade (much abridged below):

  Got a phone call Th'sgiving at 10 AM … visions of folding money for Xmas … interview with Dept Head—who was to detail my tasks—arrange hours pay etc. Signed some 35+ papers—some call for 3 sigs to a sheet—talked or was talked to by 30+ window ladies … Then fingerprint both hand … then picture taken (with smile) … then physical exam—pulse, heart, sight, hearing, scars … Passed all above was to go to work 29 Monday … 7 Days a week … but in MD exam room “strip”—got down to BVDs—MD asks, “How old are you?”—told him honest … (he had OKd all tests—“very good very good indeed” earlier)—He barked … “You need not go further. Too old.”*

  In subsequent letters he kept repeating the story every so often—in a comic, tragic, or tragicomic mod
e, according to mood—because, like his son, he was a born raconteur who couldn't help fine-tuning a tale until he'd nailed it, but also because he was old and getting a bit dotty. To the extent that he was aware of this (as when he misplaced a flashlight in the icebox), it made him sad: he was becoming a Burden. “My letters from now on will not be at as great length,” he mawkishly promised his son. “Am alone—very much alone—and start a brief letter but runs into words—words words and more words, but will not inflict it on you any more—(till next time).”

  Death came on July 26, 1945; Frederick's heart stopped beating while he sat in a wing chair sipping tea. The son felt a sense of shock—such a profusion of letters, abruptly curtailed—as well as remorse for having failed his father in various ways over the years. (A little later he felt a pang of kinship, too, when his mother bitterly admitted that the old man had left a final indictment on his desk—clearly meant to be read after his death—”excoriating her” as a wife, mother, and housekeeper. “She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation. Sigh—how deep were her sighs.”) “It was a very long association,” his mother remarked as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and Cheever stepped forward to recite Prospero's soliloquy (as requested)*: “Our revels now are ended …” Cheever got through the ordeal with the help of alcohol, which he needed for any number of reasons: “[T]his plainness for which whisky seems to be my bridge,” he wrote in his journal that day. “My mother was a nurse. My desire to escape seems constant. That's why I talk about the W[internitz]'s. These are plain, plain people and I am one of them.”

  CHEEVER'S PREWAR REFUGE had been Yaddo, and after the war it was Treetops, where he was again treated as Lord Fauntleroy While the Winternitz and Whitney children wrangled and vied for their parents’ approval, Cheever remained (for the most part) serenely above the fray. For years to come, his relations with Polly and Winter would be something of a mutual admiration society. These, after all, were the parents he deserved: a brilliant, eccentric scientist and a woman of wit and social distinction, the one holding forth on poisonous gases and such, the other remembering the night she danced the Castle Walk with Representative Hamilton Fish. And though Dr. Winternitz was given to “storms of petulance” and perverse cruelty, even this was strangely comforting to Cheever: He, too, had a rotten temper, truth be known, and was certainly a very odd person in his own right, and it was heartening to see a fellow eccentric make such a success of life. Besides, Winter went out of his way to mitigate his worst qualities where Cheever was concerned—in “penitence” (thought Cheever) “for all the unkindnesses he has done to his sons,” but also, perhaps, because his son-in-law was such a good companion to Polly. When dinner was over and the others drifted away, Cheever would mix a batch of martinis and pass the time swapping gossip with the woman. His own stories were benign enough (“My demeanor is generally tame”), but Polly became biting when drunk and would ruminate bitterly over some fresh tiresomeness on the part of her step-relations. She also liked to be naughty: “Polly was one of those decorous and witty beauties whose familiarity with dope-addiction and cock-sucking was consummate,” Cheever wrote. It was fun when she'd coax him into the library, say, to show him some dirty pictures—less so when she'd project her son Freddy's inclinations onto Cheever. “Was your friend nice?” she'd leer, when Cheever returned from a day's hiking, as if that were his usual ruse for a homosexual rendezvous. “Why yes,” Cheever would reply, jaunty as ever, and they'd laugh and break out the backgammon board.

  In fact, the wistful pleasure Cheever always took in robust, manly activities was fully satisfied at Treetops, where he was positively eager to finish the day's writing so he could spend an afternoon chopping wood and scything with the family gardener, a Latvian communist named Peter Wesul. (“His name is pronounced weasel,” Cheever wrote Maxwell. “He was bitten by a weasel and he has to tell people that he was bitten by a mink.”) The man fascinated Cheever. A dead ringer for van Gogh, he had the proverbial mystic bond with the earth and single-handedly cultivated a garden that could feed twenty-five people every summer. Most beguiling to Cheever, however, was the man's wizardry with a scythe. “This was part of my father's self-invention as a man of the soil,” Federico explained. “The magic of a scythe is almost undeniable. It requires a kind of balance and grace to use, and with that very long blade there are elements of the whole masculine deal. Also, of course, he was well aware of that scene in Anna Karenina: Levin and the peasants was never far from my father's mind when scything.” This is true: “When I scythe I think of Tolstoy,” he admitted to Tanya Litvinov in 1977. “How universal is the experience, I think, when what I really think is that I am one of the last aristocrats in the county who can wield a scythe.” For the rest of his life, when Cheever was feeling blue about work or finances or sexual temptations, scything was almost as great a balm as alcohol, and he owed his mastery of this neolithic wand to Wesul, who presented him with a sharpening stone (“kind of like a diploma”) when their lessons were done. Also, in a veiled way, Cheever sympathized with Wesul's contempt for bourgeois frivolity. “I got too much to do,” the gardener Nils rails against his employer in Cheever's “The Common Day,” one of several stories exploring the tension between a Wesul-like hired man and his alleged superiors. “Move the lilies. Move the roses. Cut the grass. Every day you want something different. Why is it? Why are you better than me? … You sit there. You drink. God damn you people.” Such a rant would have delighted Cheever in real life, though he'd be careful to condole with its victims afterward.

  When he wasn't scything with the resident man of the soil, Cheever was discreetly commiserating with the Whitneys in their war against the misfit Winternitz clan. Like Polly, he made (qualified) exceptions where his wife and her brother Bill were concerned, but the other three siblings were fair game. “There are a lot of Mary's family here now and a good deal of venom is generated at the dinner table,” he wrote John Weaver. “When I left the table last night Polly pulled me under a syringia and hissed: ‘They say he used to eat flies at Hamden Hall and now I believe it.’ “ Still in a category of her own was Mary's maid of honor, Buff, whom the Whitney children mercilessly abused because of her dumpy figure and odd behavior. Cheever, too, invariably described her as “Mary's unstable sister” and made amusing references to her overeating. That first summer after the war, it got so bad that Buff went berserk and threatened to kill the cook (“Mary's sister is as crazy as a bed-bug,” Cheever reported), whereupon she was driven away to a mental hospital in Rhode Island. At one such place Buff would meet her future husband, Walter, a chemist with a Ph.D. and social manner that made his wife seem glib by comparison. Once, the man misinterpreted (or understood all too well) one of Cheever's witticisms and challenged him to step outside and fight, but Cheever only laughed and resumed his conversation. There were times, though, when the whole internecine comedy became a bore, and then Cheever would escape to New York, alone, so he could work in peace and see a few friends. While Buff was still regaining her composure at Butler Hospital, Cheever was celebrating Ettlinger's marriage to Katrina Wallingford, heiress of a grain-elevator fortune: “[They] came into town on their way to Berne (Suisse) where they are going to live,” he wrote Herbst. “It was hot and we drank gin and champagne at the Plaza.”

  • • •

  THE ETTLINGERS SOON RETURNED to the city and took an apartment on Sutton Place. “I used to put a gin bottle in the window and an Edith Piaf record on the phonograph”—Cheever later remarked to the couple, only half in jest—”and hope that the Ettlingers might just possibly drop in to keep me company but you almost never did.” Cheever's working day usually ended at lunch, and the long afternoons made him restless. The fact was, he did see a fair amount of his friends Don and Katrina—the families often spent Christmas Day or New Year's together—but Ettlinger had resumed his busy career writing for Kraft Television Theater, and would soon find a permanent niche as head writer for the soap opera Lov
e of Life. Cheever, a loyal friend, would sometimes watch the show in various bars, and when Ettlinger sued CBS for ripping off his idea for a series titled Our Miss Booth (which CBS had rejected before making Our Miss Brooks with Eve Arden), Cheever would walk to Foley Square on fine afternoons and listen to his friend testify (“Now and then he flashes the jury a youthful smile with just a hint of modesty in it and you ought to see them lay back in their swivel chairs,” he wrote Weaver). On the surface, the two could hardly have been less alike: Ettlinger was tall and princely, Cheever short and rather plain; Ettlinger was wealthy, and Cheever struggled to get by. But of course they had talent and charm in common, not to say a tendency to conceal their deeper natures with artifice of one sort or another: “His split person,” Cheever observed of Ettlinger after a drunken evening. “That his social graces, his wit, spring entirely from evasion. The sense that he might commit a murder and that all my friends have been potential criminals.” Cheever might have been writing about himself, though there's only a slight implication of that in the context of these cryptic remarks.

  In those days—as Pete Collins's second wife Elizabeth pointed out—”Everybody drank like a fish, but Pete thought Cheever was an alcoholic as early as the late forties.” What with the long afternoons to kill, Cheever often began his evenings with a considerable head start, and the social results would sometimes (as he put it) have “all the characteristics of an automobile accident.” There was Cheever the antic, happy drunk, who one night in 1946 danced the “atomic waltz” with Howard Fast's wife, Betty, on his shoulders, until she put out a cigarette in his ear and he flung her to the floor. There was Cheever the mean drunk, whose dry wit would suddenly turn vicious at some vague point (“What right have I to calumniate these gentle people?” he reproached himself). And finally—more and more often—there was Cheever the bored and even boring drunk, pickled by the long day's drinking and wishing only for bed: “The conversation [last night] hit a very low level,” Cheever reflected in his journal (the only type of writing he could manage in the grip of his nastier hangovers). “I discussed with Dave some shirts I had bought at a sale and he told me about his disappointments with a tropical worsted suit.”