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By Root 3908 0

Bennett Cerf at parties and invariably being greeted (after a few fumbling moments of nonrecognition) with “Oh yes, of course—uhhh—Cheever! … How's that novel coming?” If Bessie saw fit to repay the advance, said Cheever, he must never ask how the novel is coming. As it happened the man was also on Nantucket that summer, and a few days later Cheever was gazing pensively out his window at the harbor, when suddenly he descried a dazzling yacht on the horizon. Presently the boat was anchored and a dinghy rowed ashore containing a dapper fellow dressed in flannels and a navy blazer: Bessie. “I'm looking for John Cheever!” he announced, and thus a bit of literary history was made. So Cheever told it. Actually, Bessie had simply phoned the author and asked where he should send the check. In due course, though, he did sail a modest catboat into the harbor and pay Cheever a visit. “He has a slender face, glasses, a nimble mind, I think, liberal and perhaps prosaic,” Cheever noted after their meeting. “I'm not sure that he will like what I do, and it doesn't much matter. I've got to get to work.”

The months that followed were among the happiest of Cheever's adult life. Four days a week he worked on The Wapshot Chronicle, and his leisure was savored all the more as a result of his steady progress. The grail was almost within his grasp—a novel!—and he felt a thrilling sense of “having overwhelmed [his] detractors … of having a headlong and exciting role to play.” Suddenly the suburbs seemed a golden place—a paradise of creativity and fellowship. On weekends he drank martinis and raked leaves and played piano or recorder in a Baroque ensemble—this amid the usual games of scrub hockey and touch (“A lovely afternoon; the women cheering; Tommy Brooks running with the football under his sweater”). He and Mary got invitations for parties almost every Saturday night, and the next morning at eight o'clock (no matter how bad his hangover) Cheever duly appeared at the communion rail.

Such was his renewed sense of belonging that he joined the Scarborough Fire Company and persuaded a few neighbors to follow his lead—a tight group, said Cheever, who “ate roast beef and drank India Pale Ale,” whereas Briarcliff firemen settled for baloney and Rhein-gold. What particularly appealed to Cheever, or at least piqued his interest, was the chance to mix with the indigenous population, the Italian and Irish who'd lived in Westchester long before the commuting crowd had moved in after the war. It always pleased Cheever to be accepted by working people: Peter Wesul at Treetops, Nellie Shannon at Yaddo, and Angelo Palumbo, the Beechwood superintendent and fire-company veteran, who organized cookouts and taught Cheever and his friends how to use the equipment. Cheever found it “smalltown stag and pleasant”: he got a kick out of whooping around in the Diamond T fire engine, playing the spotlight on his comrades when they ducked behind the truck to take long beery pisses. As a writer he was made secretary, and soon began typing his letters on Scarborough Fire Company stationery: “As you can see from the letterhead,” he wrote Herbst, “I have gone way up in the world. … I have my own exclusive club—a brotherhood of 29 manly, hard-drinking, courageous fellows. … As my father used to say: What a bully life!” Or so he liked to think. Worried that his new friends would doubt his commitment, he made a point of attending the many social functions—”and attending” (he wrote in his journal) “I must eat clams and drink beer and clams and beer make me sick. Life. Life.” After a few months he bestowed the office of secretary on his fellow writer Jack Kahn and promptly resigned.

By then, however, Cheever's thoughts were on higher things—not just his novel but his immortal soul, and indeed the one seemed to remind him of the other. “While I was writing the book I would walk around the streets,” he later recalled, “staring into the faces of embarrassed strangers and asking myself what glad tidings could one bring them? … I settled for a book that closed with praise of a gentle