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By Root 4117 0

his heart would break (“Is this all, is this all there is?”), and matters soon took a turn for the worse. Eleanor Clark had found them a temporary two-room apartment at La Residenza, an expensive pensione near the Villa Borghese Gardens; they'd been there all of four days when Ben's beloved mouse, Barbara Frietchie, died. Aboard the boat, the eight-year-old and his pet had been inseparable, winning second place in a hat contest (the hat featured Barbara clinging to the brim with a piece of cheese). Now, however, in the close quarters of La Residenza, the mouse's odor was especially pungent, and one night, after the children had gone down to dinner, Cheever stole into their room and sprayed the cage with perfume. The next day, Barbara Frietchie was dead. “Mary bought violets in the Piazza di Spagna,” Cheever wrote Herbst. “Barbara was laid out in a candy box and I was commissioned to bury her in the Borghese gardens but the ground was hard and she got a sordid resting place.” Worried that he'd be caught digging in the public garden with a spoon, Cheever finally chucked the mouse into a trash can, and when he returned to the apartment, his children were weeping hysterically and begging to go home.

The bigger picture was also grim. They'd learned in Palermo—where a pack of newsboys had run screaming through the streets—that Israel had invaded the Gaza Strip in response to Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal, and another world war appeared imminent. This was the substance of Cheever's daily reading while he sat on a ratty sofa sipping bad gin and tap water; it also dominated the conversation at cocktail parties, where Cheever encountered a colony of Americans every bit as tedious and provincial as the ones he'd left behind in Scarborough: “They talk gaily about the certainty of war,” he wrote Maxwell, “and with their Roman clothes and jewelry and their knowledge of good small restaurants they seem to be fulfilling ambitions that must have been formed in the kitchens and backyards of small and lonely American Towns.” Given, too, that he was running through his money at a harrowing rate, that he could scarcely buy a newspaper without getting shortchanged, that he lacked the linguistic skills to remonstrate, and that “the dash of Roman men … reminded him of his own contested sexual identity,” Cheever already felt so homesick that he couldn't imagine why he'd ever left Westchester in the first place. After an especially dreadful cocktail party, he almost decided to cut his losses and go—this after a week or so in Rome—but resolved to stick it out like “Scout camp” and see if the “storms of strangeness” would pass.

By then he'd looked at some twenty-five “indescribably dismal apartments” and was about to sign a lease on a “cubby-hole in the outskirts,” but Eleanor Clark persuaded him to stay in the middle of town (bus service was terrible). With her help they found a rather stunning place: the piano nobile on the fourth floor of the Palazzo Doria, directly across from the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini had hailed the multitudes. The place mostly consisted of a cavernous, gold-ceilinged salon, divided by screens into reading, living, and dining rooms, in the last of which Cheever sat typing his letters (and little else) at an ormolu table: “There is only one chair in the salon where I can sit and have my feet touch the floor and there are two chairs where my feet don't even hang over the edge.” Such grandeur didn't come cheap, but then Cheever had the added pleasure of regaling guests with tales of his romantic landlady, the Principessa Doria, an anti-Fascist who'd escaped the Nazis by hiding in a Trastevere cellar during the occupation. On the other hand, gas leaked in the grubby little kitchen, the drains were clogged, and there was only one water closet, with a toilet seat that pinched (“impulsive or hasty guests could be heard howling in pain behind the closed door”).

Within a few weeks, Cheever was “on thin ice financially” and had to borrow from The New Yorker. As for his children, they were still crying themselves