Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [165]
Minus his time in Italy, Cheever had lived almost eight years in Westchester and had wanted to leave for most of them. He was tired of being snubbed by businessmen at cocktail parties, and tireder still of what passed for cultured companionship. A rather good friend, Kenneth Wilson, was editor of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and though Cheever liked Wilson all right, it was jarring for him to consider that he squandered his time “in the company of people who condense books.” As for the rest of his circle—the Kahns and Boyers, et al.—he regarded them as “a society of the bored and disappointed,” and was now gaining a bona-fide reputation for saying “atrocious insulting things” (as Ginny Kahn put it) when drunk. By mutual agreement, then, Cheever's life among the local gentry had become a somewhat more solitary affair, and when he did attend the odd cocktail party, he couldn't help noticing the “cursory service” he received from part-time bartenders, who realized Cheever had not been asked “to the X's, the Y's and the Z's.” The main exception to all this was Art Spear (“the best company I have these days”), who shared a boyish delight in such escapades as swimming “beararse” in the Hudson and waving at passing trains. Cheever liked to woolgather over the prospect of taking Spear to Rome and showing him the sights (“Why that is a corker, he says”)—but really, when all was said and done, he had to admit that theirs was not a very profound attachment: “[I]f he moved to San Francisco tomorrow it wouldn't make much difference,” Cheever noted, a few pages after imagining Spear in Rome.
In April 1960 he went to Yaddo, and while walking along Union Avenue he noticed that a mid-Victorian mansion, the Drexel House, was for sale at the remarkably low price of fifteen thousand dollars. The house was something of a wreck, as Saratoga had declined since its fin-de-siècle glory days: a number of other rickety mansions along the street were also for sale, if not altogether forsaken. But Cheever liked the idea of savoring the vistas of his youth amid relative splendor, as well as having easy access to artistic peers at Yaddo. “There will be the boredom and the bigotry of a raffish small-town,” he conceded, writing a friend, “but I think it's about time that we tried another way of life.” A week later, he brought his family up and showed them around the Drexel House—the airy bedrooms and porte-cochère and large, creaking veranda. “Mary seemed to like the house,” or so he thought, oblivious perhaps to the dim glare she'd given that whole gloomy block, to say nothing of her impression of the Worden, where they stayed in a suite that (as Cheever observed) “smelled of old poker-decks and cigar ends.” Nevertheless, he met with a banker and was all set to sign the papers when, a few nights later, he noticed his wife weeping over the dishes: she did not want to live in Saratoga, she said, and that was that. “I'm quite pissy about my disappointment,” Cheever wrote.
Just because Mary was opposed to living in a moribund spa town did not mean she was opposed to moving per se. “I was tired of living in someone else's playpen,” she said, and in fact had been looking at houses for years, perusing the real-estate news almost every night. Nothing had quite clicked, though, until one day late that summer, when she found a lovely stone-ended Dutch Colonial farmhouse on five acres of the Van Cortlandt estate in Ossining.* “M[ary] claims to have dreamed of [the house] long before she saw it,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “It's the most wonderful thing ever to happen to me, she says. I will faint, I will swoon.” For Mary the best part was the natural beauty of the place—what with its view of the Hudson,