Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  The actual event, according to one eyewitness, was a good deal less sinister. Some liquor had been drunk. Cheever was installed in the window, looking terribly handsome, and more or less on view. Two friends—psychologist Jack Huber and Stewart Wells, a merchandiser from Minneapolis—were chatting nearby with Mary Cheever, when someone remarked in a joking manner of the figure in the window, “What a pose! Why doesn’t somebody give him a push?” So Wells did. None of the three of them, from inside, could see the spiked fence below.

  The alternative that he had jumped Cheever adopted in an article he wrote for Esquire about the family’s move from New York City to Westchester. “The farewell parties were numerous and sometimes tearful. The sense was that we were being exiled … to a barren and provincial life where we would get fat … and spend our evenings glued to the television set. What else can you do in the suburbs? On the night before we left we went to Riverview Terrace for dinner where I jumped, in an exuberance of regret, out of a first-story window.”

  “Exuberance of regret” captures something of the ambivalent feelings with which the Cheevers packed for the twenty-five-mile trip up the Hudson to Scarborough. For John Cheever, who had lived in New York City for seventeen years, it may have been the most important journey of his life, but he could hardly have known it at the time. What he felt was a kind of pleasant apprehension—in the words of their Hungarian moving man, “Who knows what brings the future?”—mingled with the city dweller’s scorn for the presumed conformities and dullnesses of suburban living. After the party that last night at Margot Morrow’s, Cheever reported, he took a long walk to make his private farewells. It was his thirty-ninth birthday.

  On a sidewalk somewhere in the Eighties I saw a Cuban going through the steps of a rhumba, holding a baby in his arms. A dinner party in the Sixties was breaking up and men and women were standing in a lighted doorway calling good-by and good-night. In the Fifties I saw a scavenger pushing an enormous English perambulator—a carriage for a princess—from ash can to ash can.

  A heady, vernal fragrance rose from Central Park.

  In the morning he took a shorter walk, encountering the Italian shoeshine man who was convinced that shoe polish made him randy, and the old lady who fed and watered the pigeons year-round and would become jealous if anyone else did. The city and its inhabitants were “raffish and magnificent,” he thought. Westchester, surely, would be very different. At noon the moving men came and the Cheevers—John, Mary, Susan, almost eight, and Ben, three—joined the postwar migration that carried nine million Americans to the suburbs between 1947 and 1954.

  Most of the nine million consisted of families with young children, attracted to the suburbs where the air and the schools were better and the youngsters would have room to learn and play and grow. It was odd, then—or it would have been odd of anyone less inclined to countenance both sides of a question than John Cheever—that in his only extended piece of writing about New York City he addressed the issue of raising children in the city and came down, though rather hesitantly, on the side of growing up urban. The New York he enjoyed most was the one his children knew. “They liked the Central Park lion house at four o’clock on February afternoons, the highest point of the Queensboro Bridge [which they could see from the windows of their apartment at 400 East Fifty-ninth Street], and a riverside dock in the East Forties” where he’d once watched two “tarts playing hop-scotch with a hotel room key.” Those were Sunday walks, and on weekdays he’d sometimes take the children up the block past the Nedick’s stand to the Japanese store, where they could spend their allowance on boxes with vanishing coins, rubber spiders, and water flowers.

  In his article “Where New York Children Play,” however, Cheever acknowledged that most children beginning life in the city were “usually set out to play in a naked asphalt lot within a steel link fence.” Their mothers came along to keep watch from a park bench and—often enough—to reminisce about their own upbringing in the country or theorize about a future exodus to the leafy exurbs. “Pity the poor children,” said passersby. Pity the children, said many of the mothers, unwilling to accept for them an “environment of tugboats and gutter bonfires.” Pity the children for their lack of space, air, light, and foliage, said psychiatrists, city planners, architects, doctors, and social workers.

  But what of the children themselves? “The air was so bad the plane trees that had been put out by the Parks Department had begun to sicken, but the children’s cheeks were red, their eyes were bright, their voices sounded as hard and clear as the voices of country kids.” As Christmas approached, they sent and received cards reproducing Currier & Ives scenes of snowy sleigh rides. “Over the river and through the woods …” City children would not remember such trips to grandmother’s, but they would remember

  wishing on the evening star as it appeared above Hackensack; they would remember a moth-eaten lion [Susan’s] and that, at the instant the lights go on over the Queensboro Bridge, a double track of light appears in the river. They would remember the smell of back yards in April, the day they wrote their initials in fresh concrete or picked up a dollar bill on the escalator in Bloomingdale’s, and they would, perhaps, conclude that memory is not a greeting card, that childhood is where you spend it, and that it is time to discard the country Christmas and the buffalo robe and let the city playgrounds into our consciousness as a legitimate place to begin life.

  Holiday ran Cheever’s article in August 1951. By then the author and his wife had decided to let their children spend their childhood, if not in the country, at least in the near-approximation that Scarborough offered.

  Both John and Mary Cheever felt the pull of the countryside. Some of the happiest times in the first ten years of their marriage had been spent during weekend visits to Josephine Herbst’s house in Erwinna, and during long summer weeks at Treetops. Sometimes Cheever left Treetops in midsummer, in order to work alone in the city. These trips were rarely successful. On one such visit the air smelled “like a piece of dirty grey felt.” On another the inhabitants looked “like the citizens of hell,” and he soon fled northward.

  However the Cheevers felt about resuming city life, the very fact that they could weekend in Erwinna and that the children could count on summers in the New Hampshire countryside made staying in Manhattan more tolerable. They might have stayed permanently except for the financial and spatial pressures of apartment living. They moved finally because Susie and Ben were crammed into one tiny bedroom in the Fifty-ninth Street apartment and they could not find a larger apartment they could afford.

  It seemed to Cheever, in retrospect, that they had been driven out of the city along with most of the rest of the middle class. Their apartment house changed hands and the new owners prepared to turn the building into a cooperative. The Cheevers were given eight months to find another home. Most of the people they knew, he then realized, lived either in elegant River House flats or in tenements downtown where you had to put out pots and pans when it rained. The search for an apartment of intermediate cost and condition did not go well. In March of 1951 he failed to pay the electric bill and the lights were turned off. The children enjoyed their baths by candlelight, but the dark apartment had a somber effect on Cheever. “We simply didn’t have the scratch” to stay in New York City, he decided, even after word came through of his Guggenheim grant. A week later, he went out to Westchester “and arranged to rent a little frame house with a sickly shade tree on the lawn.”

  The description hardly did justice to their new home in Scarborough, for theirs was no ordinary move to the suburbs. To be sure, the house was not large, though the children had their own bedrooms. Only an eight-foot-high brick wall protected it from the traffic roaring down the Albany Post Road (Route 9) a few yards away. Once a truck crashed through the wall but subsided short of the house. Nor was it in especially good shape: the drains often clogged, the heating plant was infirm, and the roof sometimes leaked. But these were minor disadvantages when measured against th
eir new home’s setting as one of the outbuildings of Beechwood, the vast Vanderlip estate on the Hudson.

  According to E. J. (Jack) Kahn, Jr., the New Yorker writer who preceded the Cheevers in the small house, the Vanderlips “practically created Scarborough.” In 1906, Frank A. Vanderlip, of the National City Bank in New York, bought Beechwood. Soon thereafter, he bought much of the surrounding territory, including the Sleepy Hollow Country Club. He even owned the red-brick building in the railway station plaza where John Cheever settled in to write. The Scarborough train stop itself, it was rumored, had been arranged to accommodate Mr. Vanderlip. He installed two granite columns from 52 Wall Street, site of the first City Bank office, in front of the great ninety-room mansion and transformed the interior with furniture and decorations imported from Europe. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover came for dinner. The Prince of Wales swam in the pool. Isadora Duncan danced alfresco on the great lawn that stretched down toward the Hudson. Ignace Paderewski came to play at the opening of Scarborough School, a private institution established primarily for the education of the Vanderlip children and grandchildren who lived on the estate or nearby. Sheep grazed in a pasture, and a brook wound through woods and fields. There was a rose arbor, an Italian garden, and, immediately adjoining the Cheevers’ house (Beechtwig, it was called, or sometimes—by John—Beechnut), a large converted garage used as servants’ quarters. Beechtwig itself had been converted from a toolshed.

  The Cheevers came to Scarborough largely through the auspices of Jack and Jinny Kahn, who were good friends of Narcissa Vanderlip Street and her husband, Julian. John and Mary had come to dinner parties at Beechtwig when the Kahns were in residence and met some of their circle. When the Kahns decided to move out and build a house at the corner of Holbrook and Scarborough roads, the Cheevers were invited to replace them as renters, and were instantly accepted as part of the community. Though the great days were over, Frank Vanderlip had died, and the paint was peeling in some of the mansion’s rooms, Beechwood still represented a world of wealth beyond anything they had ever known. John was the son of a shoe salesman and manufacturer whose business had failed, and of the keeper of a gift shop in Quincy, Massachusetts. Mary’s father had been successful, but hers was a small inheritance and it had not yet materialized. They were making do precariously on the money John Cheever earned as a writer. In Scarborough, where the natural and social amenities were freely extended to the family and the rent remained modest, he sometimes detected a whiff of patronage.

  Cheever demonstrated a certain wry humor in describing his new circumstances. “In the spring Mary and I are moving into a garage,” he wrote Malcolm Cowley. In fact they were not moving into a garage or even a former garage, but Cheever did not let such nicety of detail get in the way of entertaining his correspondents. He was moving, he wrote author John D. Weaver, his close friend from Astoria days, to a refurbished honeymoon cottage (it had in fact served that purpose for Charlotte Vanderlip, another of Frank’s daughters) in “a place called Scarborough which is near Ossining where The Big House [Sing Sing] is.” The house was located “behind the manorial garages and right beside the manorial garbage pail, but from the front door we have a nice view of the manorial lawns and the manorial swimming pool. The swimming pool is so big that it has a groundswell and makes waves in a northeast wind.” The surroundings were magnificent, but—he assured Josie Herbst—“we haven’t forgotten our beginnings.”

  The situation provided obvious opportunities for social comedy, as on one occasion when the Kahns were still in residence and held a dinner party. They then employed two black sisters as cook and nursemaid, and these women luckily made friends with the butler at Beechwood. When the guests were about to foregather, Edith the cook sent out an SOS to the butler in the mansion for additional silver and wineglasses. He obliged, and Narcissa Street sat down to dinner at the Kahns’ table a few hours later, looked around, and said, “I recognize some things at this table.” Cheever loved that story, and enjoyed playing the role—knowing it was a role—of lord of the manor. When guests came to call, he took them on tours past the pool, the parade of trees, the greenhouse where Virginia (Zinny) Vanderlip Schoales’s husband, Dudley, cultivated orchids. It was not Cheever’s estate, he owned not the smallest portion of it, and yet he seemed to appropriate the surroundings even as he deprecated them. The children, confused, sometimes wondered if they were rich or poor.

  In Scarborough, they had moved far enough out to be exurbanites and not suburbanites, as A. C. Spectorsky defined the terms in his 1955 book on the subject. They lived in northern Westchester, beyond the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Cross Westchester Expressway, in an area that was typified—Spectorsky wrote—by a rat race of “local politics, PTA activity, and genteel socializing, not all of it entirely voluntary.” The style of life supposedly involved a strong measure of conformity, compulsive participation in charitable organizations, devotion to the Republican Party, long daily commutes to the city, and skyrocketing taxes as the new residents demanded better schools and public safety for their growing families.

  This picture may have been accurate for most in northern Westchester, but not for the Cheevers. As renters they paid no taxes. As a writer who worked either in a quiet room at home or a short walk away at the station, John Cheever did not commute. He did not, then or ever, belong to a country club. Both he and Mary were Democrats, and felt no pressure to conceal their political preferences. On the other hand, there was plenty of social life, they did rapidly become involved in various community organizations, and much of daily existence revolved around the children, just as the social scientists had predicted.

  Susan and Ben had no difficulty in adapting to Scarborough. They found plenty of companions: Susie played with Sarah Schoales, Ben played with Joey Kahn, both played with the children of the Italian-American gardener who lived in the remodeled garage next door. They roamed the grounds and explored ruins along the Hudson. Nine months a year, they walked through fields and woods and across a brook to Scarborough School, where two exceptional elementary school teachers—Miss Daniels and Miss Sheridan—managed to inculcate in their charges a love of reading and an appreciation of the world of nature. That world was spread out around them.

  The first fall in Scarborough, less than an hour from Grand Central on the fast train, was glorious. It was “the only autumn” he’d seen in twenty years, Cheever reported; he was also enchanted, characteristically for him, by the smells. But even the Beechwood estate could not completely satisfy the fondness for the outdoors that John and Mary Cheever shared. In the summers they drove up to Treetops for the mountain air, and increasingly during the 1950s, they contrived a visit to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket as well. In the summer of 1952 at the Vineyard, Susie and Connie Morrow were both horse-crazy. When they weren’t actually learning to ride, they took turns pretending to be horses, whinnying and galloping about.

  The following summer, Susie went off to camp for the first time. John and Mary drove up to Camp Kaioria from Treetops to see her. They watched her participate furiously in a series of camp activities on land and water and horseback. When it was time for her parents to leave, Susie let her father know how desperately homesick she was. When they returned a few days later, however, the homesickness was over, and their distraught daughter was all smiles.

  If social life for the Cheevers was not so compulsively organized as Susie’s at camp, nonetheless there was a lot of it and, associated with it, a lot of drinking. “I cringe to think how much we drank in those days,” Jinny Kahn recalls. The Kahns functioned as the hub for a group that included the Cheevers, Burton and Aline Benjamin, Don and Ginger Reiman, Phil and Mimi Boyer, and David and Sally Swope, with half a dozen other couples occasionally included in the gatherings. As a group it was not particularly literary: Cheever and Kahn were the only professional writers, and they wrote very different kinds of things. But on the whole they were clever, talented, and attractive people who lived either in Scarborough,
in Briarcliff Manor immediately adjoining, in Ossining, the city that in the complications of New York jurisdictions swallowed up both Scarborough and Briarcliff for some governmental purposes but not for others, or in Croton, the hilly town to the north studded with lakes.

  In the suburbs the weekend served as a release for those who were liberated for two days from the rigors of commuting to the city. The drinking started promptly at noon on Saturday, when Phil Boyer (who was to become one of Cheever’s closest friends) pulled into the Cheevers’ driveway. Mary did not always approve of these visits: whatever had been planned for the family or needed doing, “the gin had to be drunk first.” Still, liquor consumption seemed to do no real harm at the time, and often the parties involved a measure of physical activity that helped work off the effects of the alcohol. There were touch football games and softball games and swimming and skating at the Boyers’ pond in Croton or the Kahns’ in Scarborough. One night the Kahns held a masquerade party on ice with skating waiters and artificial moonlight. In celebration of such gatherings, Cheever inscribed the Kahns’ copy of The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, the book of stories he published early in 1953:

  Here’s to Jack and Ginny Kahn!

  Bless the chairs they sit upon,

  Bless their Edith, bless their sons,

  Bless their talent for Home-runs,