Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [104]
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