Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [156]
* The story is worthy of particular consideration because it was hitherto unpublished—that is, written specifically for The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and thus intended to tilt the thematic balance somewhat.
† Ossining is only a few miles away from Scarborough, though of course Cheever had yet to move there when he wrote the story. That Ossining is a famous prison town was perhaps deemed pertinent to the homesick protagonist's predicament.
* Within a week or two, Fred suffered the collapse that led to his hospitalization, described below. Was there any connection? It's impossible to say. At the time Fred was probably in no condition to read anything, though certainly he would have read the story later with (one imagines) something less than delight. But, as we shall see, Fred remained inscrutable on the subject of his various incarnations in John's fiction. The rest of Fred's family were less inscrutable. His daughter Sarah bitterly remarked that Uncle John used Fred as a “classic drunk” in his work, and Iris was enduringly furious. In his journal John describes her “exhaustive” attack on one of his stories (unnamed), as well as his own sheepish response: “She seems like one of the orphic harpies and I am driven into a regressive fastidiousness that I detest. She is predatory, lumbering, and faced with this massiveness I don't actually simper but I become retiring, wounded and feeble.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
{1959-1960}
CHEEVER ONCE REMARKED to his son Ben that he'd had many fathers and that Ben should try to have many fathers, too. In Cheever's own life, one of the “critical turning points” (his words) had been finding a father—Dr. Milton Winternitz—who commanded his utmost respect and affection and even reciprocated as much, after his own volatile fashion. Over the years Cheever had repaid the man's kindness by being, in effect, a good son: deferential, hardworking (scything with Peter Wesul and so on), witty and charming. From the beginning, though, he'd had serious reservations about both parents-in-law—Winter was a tyrant, Polly a shrew—and as Cheever's place in the world became more secure, he was less and less comfortable with the rather obsequious role he'd come to play at Tree-tops. Returning from his sumptuous year in Italy as a proper paterfamilias, he felt less obliged to laugh at Polly's “gossipy and uncharitable” remarks about Mary's mad sister (though of course he couldn't stand Buff either), and as for his father-in-law, Cheever now found the man almost insufferable. As Winter's storied tenure as dean of the Yale School of Medicine receded further into the past, he'd become all the more inclined to indulge his perversities at Treetops. He toiled like a bitter martyr in the kitchen, say, making breakfast and mopping the floor, as if he'd been forced to do so by the sheer worthless laziness of his family; but if anyone tried to help, he'd throw an “insane tantrum”: “Here are the unreasonable and insatiable hungers of our egotism,” his son-in-law mused.
Cheever's last visit to Treetops while Winter was still alive was in the summer of 1958. Winter greeted him at the Stone House with a petulant attack on The New Yorker, while Polly immediately began to impart “some gossip about Philadelphia”: “They talk loudly and at cross-purposes and when her back is turned he makes a face at her and says she is a stupid bitch.” Later Cheever and Polly went away for martinis and she resumed her usual waspish spiel about her ghastly stepchildren: Buff was crazier than ever, Tom a troublemaker, and Mary “obtuse and neurotic.” In the past Cheever would have obliged her with at least a chuckle—and probably did so on this occasion