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named Webster, a Brown dropout whom Cheever described as having tight pants and a “Bottom-the-Weaver haircut”: He and Susan “read Reich aloud to one another and play junky music. I keep routing them out of one another's bedrooms.” For years Susan had heard her father's speeches about what she ought to do (lose weight and curl her hair) in order to get lots of dates, like Pammy and Linda, so now it pleased her to canoodle with Webster in plain sight. “No necking in the parlor!” Cheever erupted, finding her tracing a finger along the hair beneath Webster's navel. They slept until noon, ate enormous meals, and forced Cheever into such a “bilious humor” that he'd have to leave the house and scythe away his grievances (“jockeyed into the position of a heavy fatherinlaw”). When Webster departed after one of his visits (walking with “his yachtsman's stoop”), Cheever noticed that his daughter seemed forlorn, and sought to commiserate after his fashion. “It is not possible to talk to you,” she said. “You say what you don't mean and you mean what you don't say.”

Ben, at least, was falling in line. “I cannot say truthfully that I have never felt anything but love for him,” Cheever reflected. “We have quarreled, he has wet his bed, he has waked strangling from nightmares in which I appeared as a hairy werewolf, dripping with gore. But all of this is gone. Now there is nothing between us but love and good-natured admiration.” Ben's love of the outdoors (his kayaking and whatnot) had gotten the ball rolling in the right direction, but his redemption was complete that fall, when he announced that he'd made the varsity football team. As a freshman! He forbore to mention that no junior varsity team existed for the six-man squad at Scarborough Country Day, or that he was probably the least popular man on the team, or, finally, that his status as a second-string center was “the athletic equivalent of wheelchair competition,” as Ben put it in sober retrospect. No matter. Cheever was thrilled that his son was staying after school for football practice, and more than happy to pick him up afterward, at whatever hour, and buy him a loaf of fresh bread at the Italian bakery. It helped that, as Ben recalled, his father never actually attended games (except once: “I go to see my son play football although he does not get off the bench”). And things just kept looking up from there. Later that year Ben was accepted to a boarding school in Connecticut, Loomis, whereupon his father (“beaming like a foolish swain”) escorted him to Brooks for a proper wardrobe: two suits, a tweed jacket, a dozen shirts, a raincoat, trousers, the works (“Never having been to boarding-school, and wearing at his age, tailless shirts, my underwear fastened with a safety pin, I am made very happy by this performance”). At Loomis, however, Ben was cut from the football team after two days. His father was crushed.

ANOTHER NEW YEAR DAWNED, 1963, and still Cheever struggled on with his novel. It wasn't falling into place, and was far too gloomy for a writer whose work had been celebrated for its “wonder” and “brightness,” a writer who was trying, once again, to hear the dragon's tail swishing among the leaves: “[L]ast night I dreamed I was a Good Humor man, ringing a small bell and urging people to try the seven flavors of discouragement,” he wrote Weaver. “There are, between you and me, more than seven.” By the end of March, he was able to report that the end and the beginning seemed all right: “But the middle, aiie, aiie. The middle is wreckage.” He'd taken to sleeping (he said) with the manuscript between his legs; he'd made bargains with the devil. Finally, as another spring came to an end, he didn't finish so much as arrive at a point where he couldn't think of anything else to write or revise. It was time to send the thing to Maxwell, who if nothing else would be sympathetic. In his journal, Cheever drafted a sheepish cover letter: “A great many people felt that the Chronicle was not a novel, and the same thing is bound to be said about this, perhaps more strongly. I do