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By Root 4144 0

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 Cheever 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.

To Herbst he reported, deploringly, that the country club in question was “a depressing place to which Jews are not admitted,” and that a vulgar five-and-ten-cent-store heiress named Mrs. Newberry had proposed that tickets to the Fete be sold at the incredible rate of forty bucks a head, and that people be seated by age, no less: “[I]t made the benefit in The Possessed seem like a picnic,” he concluded. “Now the neighborhood is in an uproar. It's wonderful.” Even Cheever's evening strolls around the leafy streets were in the nature of fieldwork, as he peered through lighted windows and witnessed, say, “a man in his shirt sleeves rehearsing a business speech to his wife who was knitting.” Chatting with such men in person, Cheever discovered that many seemed to consider themselves “the peers of Milton”: when Cheever identified himself as a writer, his interlocutors would almost invariably reply that, if only they had the time, they'd have written any number of novels by now.

Whatever their latent literary aspirations,