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By Root 4064 0

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