• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4056 0

—but he was not laughing on the inside. “Where is my sense of humor?” he chided himself. “I can enjoy these antics but I think they threaten my happiness.” By far the greater part of his grievances, though, were directed against Winter, whom he'd come to blame for the precarious state of his marriage. He reminded himself, again and again, that the bitter old man had beaten Mary with a belt when she was a child, and now the memory of that violence had returned to haunt her—indeed, this was the true cause of her “capricious” depressions (“she cannot, quite understandably, face this”), which she saw fit to blame on Cheever. “I have come to think of [Winter] as the king of a hades where M[ary] must spend perhaps half her time,” he concluded. “There is no doubt about the fact that he is a source of darkness in our affairs.” Thus, after that last visit, he announced to his wife that he would not be returning to the “beauty and embarrassments” of Tree-tops: he loved Polly and Winter, he said, but he loved her and the children more, “and the two seem incompatible.”

True to his word—though Winter was very sick by then, and wanted to see him—Cheever arranged to spend most of the following summer (1959) in Europe, alone, first at a PEN conference in Germany and then (by way of the Brenner Pass) in Austria and Italy. “This is the best; this is it,” he wrote Maxwell from the Carlton Hotel in Frankfurt. “I go to cafes, dance with Dutch girls, climb mountains, attend passion plays. Oh boy.” Actually, he found the conference “very dull” and his fellow delegates “not much” (“wouldbe writers, former writers, the authors of cook books, etc”). And while he was, at first, almost as excited as he would have had Maxwell believe—Frankfurt seemed “literally risen from known ashes,” and the “comely, kind” citizens were nothing but hospitable—he soon began picking out unsavory details, such as the odd legless beggar, the one-eyed man renting boats, and so forth (“the tragedy is brought home to you sooner or later”). And of course the exhilaration of traveling alone soon began to pall, though he still had almost six weeks of vacation ahead of him. On his last night in Frankfurt, he ran into some fellow English-speaking PEN delegates in a bar and was mortified when he wasn't invited to join them: “I walked around the streets, looking for some place where I could get supper without being seen and so exposing my aloneness.”

The rest of the vacation followed the same pattern: excitement on arrival at some new place, followed by loneliness and boredom. He was delighted to return to Venice (“although I wonder if I am worthy of the spectacle”), and his high spirits were promptly rewarded with a happy coincidence: cruising down the Grand Canal in a vaporetto, he spotted his old Signal Corps buddy (whom he still met for lunch every so often at Sardi's), Leonard Field, drinking coffee on the terrace of the Hotel Gritti. As he wrote their mutual friend John Weaver, “I began to wave my arms and yell: ‘Lennieee, Lennieee,’ and he finally recognized me. I couldn't get off the boat until San Marco's but then I ran back to the Gritti and Virginia [Field's wife] came down and we went to the Lido and in the very next cabana was Nancy Mitford and Victor Cunard. Swam in the same water with them and everything.” That was precisely the sort of thing Cheever liked writing to his friends, but no further anecdotes happened in Venice, and soon he moved on to Rome, where he took a room at the Academy. “[Rome] is like coming back to a school where one had a tough time and finding it all small and pleasant,” he wrote in his journal. For the first week or two, he sat sipping gin in the golden dusk, savoring his own independence. His wife's letters had been full of complaints (finances, her sick father, etc.), and Cheever found himself remembering her “not as the loving woman [he had] known but as a threatening, derisive and unhappy figure.” He couldn't help wondering what it would be like to spend the rest of his life in Italy. But then he began to worry: What if Mary wanted to