Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  By far the most memorable farewell party was held at the Riverview Terrace apartment of their friend Margot Morrow. Cheever, tipsily complacent, was sitting on a first-story window ledge with his legs dangling outside when, suddenly, he went hurling through space and just missed being impaled on an iron-spiked fence. Ten years later, in an essay for Esquire, Cheever claimed to have jumped “in an exuberance of regret,” but actually he went to his grave believing he'd been pushed by his great friend and New Yorker editor. Maxwell denied it: “I was standing on the sidewalk [at the time], talking to some of the guests,” he said, then cited the testimony of a fellow guest, Jack Huber, who claimed a man from Minneapolis had done the pushing. Jack and this man “were standing at the window, and Mary Cheever joined them, and, indicating John, and in a joking manner, said ‘What a poseur! Why doesn't somebody give him a push.’ … None of them could see the spiked fence.”

  To Cheever, however, Maxwell's urge to push him was part of a deep-seated (and potentially deadly) ambivalence. “There's this chap named Marples who keeps saying that he loves me and then he tries to kill me,” Cheever wrote in his journal, refining the episode for fictional use.* “He's a very quiet man, terribly sensitive, but he's a murderer.” Maxwell later told the story for laughs, though he sensed Cheever was rather serious in his suspicions. “There was a paranoid side to him,” he observed. “He was paranoid.”

  * A polka tune Mary Cheever still remembered fifty-five years later.

  * At the time Cheever was fascinated and appalled by Shaw's flair for being a “money player.” As Newhouse pointed out, Shaw lived in the “real world” of “cause and effect” that dictated the three-act plots of movies and radio serials and best sellers; Cheever, however, “operated in a fantasy world” that was conducive to a more subtle artistic (and social) approach. “Put it this way,” said Michael Bessie, Cheever's future publisher. “What Irwin couldn't have known about John was quite a lot, whereas I don't think there was much about Irwin that John couldn't easily know.”

  * Despite (as he wrote in his journal) his wife's finding it “pessimistic and morbid”—piqued, no doubt, by this portrait of wistful losers who bear at least a passing resemblance to her own family.

  *I Want You, with a screenplay by Irwin Shaw, no less.

  * Finally incorporated in Falconer as one of several attempts at fratricide on the part of Farragut's egregious brother.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  {1951-1952}

  THE CHEEVERS MOVED to “the chicken house in Scarborough” on May 28, 1951, and Cheever predicted—with gloomy accuracy—that they'd live there for at least ten years. The house was located in a small corner of a vast estate, Beechwood, purchased in 1906 by the National City Bank tycoon Frank A. Vanderlip, who'd essentially invented the surrounding town of Scarborough. The gatehouse, Beechtwig, had been built as a machine shop and later converted to a cottage, occupied in 1939 by Vanderlip's daughter Virginia (“Zinny”), shortly after her marriage to Dudley Schoales*; the Cheevers, however, paid their monthly rent of $150 (sans utilities) to another daughter, Charlotte, who'd inherited the place “as a sort of booby prize” when her “marriage went blooey,” as Cheever put it. Charlotte had added two upstairs bedrooms and a bath; downstairs were another two bedrooms, one of which was taken by the seven-year-old Susan and the other used as Cheever's workroom. Perhaps the best feature was a spacious living room (spacious because it had once housed two large drop-forges), whose walls would occasionally tremble and crack from the perpetual rumble of traffic on Route 9, the Albany Post Road, separated from the house by a low brick wall.

  Cheever felt a little disoriented at first—broke and lonely (“wanting someone, anyone to come and drink my martinis”)—but was heartened as always by the idea of living amid luxury, however paradoxically. From his front door he could look out on the lush “manorial lawns” leading to a large swimming pool that was “curbed with Italian marble, luscent [sic] and shining like loaves of fine sugar.” He also liked the fact that he no longer had to bury himself in a basement storage room during working hours. Mary, too, was pleased by all the extra space, and promptly bought a used concert grand (“full of cigaret butts and moths”) to grace the living room; lest it be strictly ornamental, Cheever took piano lessons from one Lavena MacClure, who in time would teach him to grope his way through some of the easier Chopin preludes.

  There was a certain amount of piano playing and other cultural diversions in the amorphous Vanderlip mansion up the hill, where respectable neighbors and their children were invited for dinner and dances in the William Welles Bosworth ballroom. Frank Vanderlip's widow, Narcissa, was a formidable Swedenborgian who'd assumed a matriarchal role in the community, seeing to it that Susan and her friends (who called the woman “Monie”) learned the forks, as well as how to rumba and fox-trot and waltz. Toward adults Mrs. Vanderlip tended to be somewhat more austere: a former suffragette who used to ride around in a chauffeur-driven Pierce Arrow, children in tow, berating the citizenry (“If I can raise six kids and still stand up for women's rights, why can't you?”), she was not one to suffer fools. Cheever wrote that “she played the meanest game of chopanose [he] ever saw,” affecting to be deaf when convenient and treating unwanted guests like servants. Cheever, of course, was largely exempt from such bullying, adept as ever at ingratiating himself with grandes dames. With both fondness and writerly curiosity, he made a point of attending the woman's genteel gatherings and observing the local personages. As he wrote Eleanor Clark:

  Mrs. Vanderlip passed tea and sherry to celebrate the retirement of the local station master; a nice old man with the neck and head of a turtle. It was rainy outside and dark in the library where the rector, the banker, the church organist, the postmaster and his wife, the broker, the lawyer and the doctor raised their sherry glasses in the gloom and shouted: “Happy days, Kedney!” When the station master spoke his voice was very clear. “I didn't like it when I first come here,” he said. “I said to my wife, I can't stand that bunch. I stuck it out for forty years so I guess I must have liked it.” Applause, etc.

  Before long Cheever had all the social life he could handle, as his friend Jack Kahn was the hub of a raucous (and not especially literary) group of neighbors. Cheever remarked to Herbst that these were “kind and gentle people,” if a little too kind and gentle (“What I'd like is a good quarrel”); Kahn, however, remembered Cheever as “the most gentlemanly” of them all, at least in the early days. He was nice about chatting up bores and at least outwardly a good-natured loser at backgammon—paying up on the spot (as Kahn insisted) and totting the result on a score sheet the two maintained in an old copy of A Bell for Adano.

  Through Kahn he met his first great friends in the area, Philip and Mimi Boyer, who lived in a large, ramshackle house in nearby Croton. The Boyers’ echt Waspiness was enough to fill even Cheever's striving heart: Philip was a tall, hard-drinking Bostonian who'd attended both Groton and Harvard; he raised retrievers, played tennis, and drove Cheever to the Harvard-Yale game in a vintage Plymouth named Apple Pan Dowdy. Putatively a public-relations man, he was a great reader and friend of various New Yorker writers—St. Clair McKelway, Maeve Brennan, Geoffrey Hellman—but thought Cheever the most talented by far. Certainly the Boyers helped dispel any lingering notion on Cheever's part that his suburban neighbors would all be dull. Mimi Boyer was from old money—her father had been head of the Morgan Bank in Paris, where she'd grown up between the wars—and comported herself like something “out of Edward Gorey,” as Federico put it. “I dress like this,” she'd say, indicating the rags she wore in layers (old bath towels, pajamas, etc.), “because my mother is one of the best-dressed women in the world.” In constant rebellion against her upbringing, and with the doting cooperation of her husband, she gave dogs, birds, and other beasts the run of her house until everything was covered in hair and feathers—not that one was apt to notice while in the presence of the woman herself, whose layered style of dress was due in part to th
e chills she suffered as a lifelong anorexic. “She has a discerning and a sensitive intelligence but she is a woman so wasted, so frail that she seems pitiable,” Cheever mused. “She has gotten very eccentric in her middle age, wears several dresses, one on top of the other, serves her guests dog food by candlelight and wears carpet slippers to the theatre.”

  Mimi Boyer's family had a compound on Whiskey Island in the St. Lawrence, where Cheever would sometimes visit a few days in the summer. Here on this private island, with a view of Canada on one side and New York on the other, was a style of living to which Cheever could easily become accustomed. “I don't think the Kaiser will declare war, do you?” he'd suavely remark, reclining in the stern of an old mahogany launch, The Wild Goose, which ferried guests between Whiskey and Clayton, New York. Mostly Cheever chose to relax by himself on the island, away from the hateful sound of tennis balls, in an old Swiss chalet that was said to be haunted—said by Cheever, that is, who was reputedly able to describe certain of Mimi's bygone family with uncanny accuracy. His main company on the island, though, were not ghosts but dogs—an affable pack of Labradors who complained fearfully each night when rounded up to return to their pen, called Gomorrah. “You ought to call it Eden,“ Cheever suggested, and when they did, the dogs practically clambered over one another (said Cheever) trying to get back in.

  Dogs, in fact, were the main thing he had in common with the Boyers. When the latter's black Labrador bitch, Queen Sable of Teatown, gave birth to a litter in 1952, Cheever bought a puppy and named her Cassiopeia, after the mother of Andromeda. For the next sixteen years, Cassie would be his most faithful and beloved companion—a dog whose “fleeting, warm and imperious smile” led Cheever to speculate on her various former lives. “She is rumored to have been a wealthy Jewess who left Leningrad in 1918 for Finland, her underwear stuffed with worthless Provisional Government Bonds,” he wrote Tanya Litvinov. “She also claims to have been Chekhov's mistress, the Grand Duchess Anastasia and a Los Angeles prostitute called ‘The Black Dahlia.’ “ At one point, the dog even seemed possessed by the spirit of Cheever's mother—whose heavy necklace looked remarkably like Cassie's tag-laden collar (“John, can't you try to be a little neater?” he thought he heard the dog say, shortly after his mother's death)—and in this incarnation, perhaps, she went on to found the Northern West-chester chapter of Dogs for Goldwater. Meanwhile she faithfully wrote lower-case letters to her “aunt mimi and uncle philip”: “it wasn't too safe,” she remarked of a family drive to Treetops, “because the old man [Cheever] had been booze-fighting since practically before dawn.”

  Another dog descended from one of the Boyers’ bitches, Minerva, belonged to a man who would arguably become Cheever's closest friend, Arthur Prince Spear. At least weekly the two got together to walk their dogs to the Croton Dam, or skate on the Boyers’ pond, or go for a swim, usually followed by martinis and backgammon at ten cents a game. In certain respects the lanky, crew-cut Spear was the kind of upstanding Yankee that elicited a wistful (though not unequivocal) admiration on Cheever's part: “Arthur is a fishing and drinking companion,” he wrote Litvinov, “he votes the conservative ticket, goes to church twice on Sundays and is an impacted member of our traditional middle class but I find him excellent company. His wife Stella is the daughter of a Bishop and I won't attempt to describe her beyond saying that she plays the viola.”* Whatever his credentials among the Westchester middle class, Spear was no Babbitt. His father and namesake had been a well-known painter of the Boston School, and Spear himself was born in Paris while his father was studying at Académie Julian. Later an art editor for the World Book, Spear was forced into comfortable retirement in the mid-fifties (when his company merged with Harcourt, Brace) and spent the rest of his life dabbling in rather arty avocations. In addition to his dutiful organ playing, he wrote books (anonymously) for local historical societies, studied architecture, and spent many assiduous years transcribing old family journals. † And though he was a model of rectitude in his everyday conduct, Spear was hardly averse to a bit of ribald humor and had a “quick eye” (Cheever noticed) “for the rearends of lady bicycle riders.” Cheever couldn't help wondering if their easy affinity was too good to be true: “We seem to delight one another and I think—ah—there must be something wrong with this … there must be some deep unrequition that we share, we recognize, not one another's excellence, but one another's wounds. But this is baloney. We enjoy one another's company and there is nothing more to be said.”

  For their hikes to the dam, Spear and Cheever would often bring small bottles of bourbon or Gilbey's gin (“mother's milk”) to enjoy while pondering the water, and indeed what all these people had in common, other than dogs, was a terrific fondness for alcohol. Every Saturday at noon, Philip Boyer would arrive at Cheever's house (or vice versa), and the two would spend an hour drinking martinis and talking about dogs, while Mary occupied herself in the kitchen (“No matter what else needed to be done or had been planned for the family, the gin had to be drunk first,” she recalled with abiding annoyance). “I cringe to think how much we drank,” said Virginia Kahn, whose husband was in the casual habit of throwing up each morning before he fixed his coffee. The nice part was that none of them neglected their children. Boyer liked to bring a daughter or two along for his Saturday “errands,” and Cheever taught his son Ben how to measure a drink by placing his little fingers along the side of a glass. One of Ben's early memories, in fact, was the sight of their bibulous neighbor Dudley Schoales crashing down the stairs into the dining room: “It wasn't the fall that made the evening remarkable,” said Ben, “but rather the fact that the banker's highly polished shoes left scuff marks up above the handrail—scuff marks which could be seen and admired the next morning.”

  Usually Dudley was more graceful. A star athlete at Cornell in the twenties, he used to entertain the children by hurdling a sofa without spilling a drop of his cocktail. He and his wife, Zinny, both heroic drinkers, lived in a large renovated barn on the other side of the estate, and the two families saw a lot of each other. Cheever and Dudley were backgammon chums, but otherwise had little to talk about; the son of a Cleveland farmer, Dudley had married into the Vanderlips and become a partner at Morgan Stanley, for which he spent much of his time traveling abroad and philandering. “D[udley] still has the grace of an old athlete but the fine profile and the golden curls are long gone,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “He rubs his hairy stomach and boasts of his sexual prowess. He is indebted to Z[inny] for her financial support.” Cheever much preferred the wife (“a heavy kindly and intelligent woman”), and felt rather protective toward her; only a decade before, she'd worked with Ralph Ingersoll at the leftist newspaper PM, and now she passed her days caring for children, reading, chain-smoking, and drinking. Cheever joined her for the latter activities, taking a pleasant afternoon stroll across the estate to her house—the Cow Barn—where he and Zinny would sit for hours watching the light fade over the Hudson.

  The pastoral aspect of Scarborough lent an almost wholesome dimension to the bacchanalia. Whatever the season or relative lack of sobriety, everybody loved playing in the gorgeous outdoors. Even the smallest child could romp around the walled Beechwood estate “without a leash” (as Dr. Winternitz put it), its wilderness an orderly world of slate paths and gardens and sheep, while young and old alike came from around the neighborhood to gather at the pool on sunny days. In autumn the sport was touch football, which Cheever continued to play with an almost antic zeal despite his size and pitiful wing. (In later years—feeling even more ill-used by The New Yorker—he'd cast back to a game of touch chez Kahn, when he'd found himself on the same team as Ross's successor, the diminutive William Shawn: “[O]n the third play I threw a wobbly pass in his direction. He tried to catch it, slipped and went down, crashing and tinkling like a tray of dishes.”) And finally, best of all, winter came and Cheever went skating at the Boyers’ or Kahns’ or Schoaleses’. Young Joey Kahn was a playmate of Ben's, and often saw Che
ever looking tired and unhappy in those years, but while skating at the Kahns’ he was “charming, dashing,” swishing around the ice with a radiant smile. One snowy day when there wasn't enough ice for a skating party, a happily plastered Cheever raced another guest down the pond's embankment, using aluminum row-boats as toboggans.

  Amid all the revelry, though, Cheever never forgot that he was a writer, an observer as well as a participant. The suburbs of the Northeast were still an experiment of sorts—”an improvised way of life,” as Cheever liked to say—and he was quite earnestly curious about things: given the cultural vacuum, what sort of traditions would be established by such a diverse group of educated, affluent people? Drinking was a common thread, of course, but there was also a certain amount of semi-sober grappling with civic issues and so forth. In Cheever's community it was almost de rigueur to concern oneself with the fortunes of the Scarborough Country Day School—a tiny progressive school in a perpetual state of fiscal embarrassment—and Cheever was no exception: Not only did he send all three of his children to the school, at one time or another, but he also served as trustee and faithfully attended PTA meetings and the like. For the benefit of old left-wing intellectual friends such as Cowley, Herbst, and Eleanor Clark, he affected to view the proceedings with a lofty, tongue-in-cheek detachment. “There has never been a more conscientious or a more difficult trustee [of the school],” he wrote Cowley.

  While we were arguing at a board meeting last week about the arrangements for a fund-raising dance at the country club (The Apple Blossom Fete) one of the reasons why I like this community occurred to me. It's a great deal like the Village of Z in the Province of X in a second-rate Russian novel. We have all the stock types; the Governor-general, the Governor's socially ambitious wife, the drunken station-master, the old lady who once entertained the King of Siam, the over-worked doctor, the fortune teller and the idiot.