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By Root 3840 0

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 the 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