Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [173]
He expressed both the pleasure and pain of being a homeowner—at last—with quasi-deprecating humor. A previous occupant had named the house Afterwhiles (inscribed on the gateposts), and Cheever took to calling it Meanwhiles, mocking the pomposity of naming one's house while calling attention to the fact that one lived, no less, in a house with a name. Perhaps he also meant to suggest the transitory nature of the arrangement. Things began falling apart as soon as they moved in. One day it was the water pump, then the oil burner, plus the roof leaked, and finally, when his publisher, Cass Canfield, came for dinner, a sewer line burst under the stairs and squirted the man. And while Cheever rallied to keep the house in repair, the grounds began to deteriorate too: the elm trees blighted and died, the pond (dubbed the Turgenev Memorial Tarn) clabbered into a swamp, the little bridge collapsed, and the overall effect “rivaled the jungles of Borneo,” as Federico put it. Within a few months Cheever was half seriously composing an advertisement to sell the place (“Stone ended 18th Century manor house, etc.”), though he was pleased to show it off to an old rival like Shaw. “Irwin came for lunch and said that we both got what we wanted,” Cheever wrote: “i.e. I got a picturesque old dump and he got a Swiss chalet and a taxfree two million in Geneva.”
Perhaps his first real houseguest was Josie Herbst, who would admire the place, he expected, “with gusto and sincerity.” In the past, Herbst had always been a vivacious presence, especially toward the children, but in recent years a strain of acerbity had begun to get the best of her. During their last encounter at Yaddo, in 1959, Cheever had noted how she “force[d] the conversation into a false and evasive vein” (“Yes, you say, we are all frustrated and miserable, we are all poor”); but mostly he was sympathetic, and afterward resumed his long campaign to get her a grant from the Institute—”not for her work,” he wrote then-secretary Louise Bogan, “but for a nonstop literary conversation that must have begun in Sioux City around 1912 and is still going strong. … She is also old, sick, poor and quite embittered.” No grant was forthcoming, however, and when Herbst arrived in Ossining two years later (hefting a cat carrier), she looked older and quite a bit more embittered. As Cheever drove her home from the train station, she immediately began blasting the Institute: “They're a bunch of stuffed shirts,” she said. “Nobody any good is a member.” At last Cheever told her that if she didn't desist he was going to stop the car and leave her on the side of the road. The next morning she stayed in bed so long that her hosts feared she'd died in the night.
Fortunately she survived the weekend, and in her wake left a large, balding “kitten” named Blackie who (she explained) had belonged to the poet Delmore Schwartz's estranged wife, Elizabeth Pollet. This was quid pro quo: many years ago, the Cheevers had unloaded on Herbst a cat named Harriet who'd proved ill-suited to their small New York apartment; the cat had thrived in the wide-open spaces of Erwinna, and it was Herbst's hope that Ossining would have the same tonic effect on Blackie. The latter—whom Cheever promptly renamed Delmore—spent a few days hiding under furniture and then began spraying the walls, until a veterinarian suggested he be neutered. “If the knife should slip,” said Cheever, “there would be no recriminations.” The castrated Delmore was not a whit more amiable: he pissed in Cheever's shoes and ate flowers off potted plants, and once made a point of “dump[ing] a load in a Kleenex box while [Cheever] was suffering from a cold.” Herbst, it seemed, had placed a curse on Cheever's house, and consequently the two friends fell out of touch for a while. In the end it was Cheever who made amends, writing to assure Herbst that he'd allowed Delmore not only to live but to prosper: “He is very fat these days and his step,