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her exasperated husband would flee to Shady Lane Farm and commiserate with Barolini, who had similar problems with his American wife. She wanted to write, he said, she coveted his success, and being Italian he was far more mystified than Cheever: why would a woman not want to care for her husband and children? Cheever explained that American women of their generation were the most miserable in history, terribly bitter about giving away the best years of their lives to marriage, and eager to share their sufferings with men: “[E]ducating an unintellectual woman,” Cheever remarked, “is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. She cannot add a column of figures or make a bed but she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns.” He cited the case of his poor old friend Kenny, reduced to polishing silver while his wife poked away at her opus on the late novels of Henry James. And perhaps he mentioned, too, a time not long ago when Mary (hastening to teach debutantes) had left Federico home alone with a bad cold—or rather she'd left him alone with Cheever, who had his own work to do; her solution was to give the sickly boy a pot lid and wooden spoon with which to signal his father if things took a turn for the worse.

Such were the materials for a vindictive tour-de-force titled “An Educated American Woman,” which appeared that November in The New Yorker. The story opens with a sprightly, ingenious gambit—-Jill Chidchester Madison's verbose and pretentious “item” for her college alumnae magazine, wherein she breezily reports that she remains married to her “unintellectual 190-pound halfback” while writing a critical biography of Flaubert and serving as president of “every civic organization in the community”: “I still find time to band birds and knit Argyle socks,” she concludes. What she does not find time for, needless to say, is being a decent wife and mother. Her kindly ex-halfback husband, Georgie, not only is forced to polish the silver (while wearing an apron), but also does most of the caring, in every sense, for their adorable four-year-old son, Bibber. After a long night of housework—and never mind his day job—Georgie finally goes to bed, hoping for some well-earned lovemaking, but Jill interrupts their embrace with a spontaneous recital of Flaubert en bon français. Bewildered and hurt by Georgie's angry response (“God damn it to hell!”), she thereafter devotes herself wholeheartedly to stopping the construction of a four-lane highway. One night Georgie comes home to find Bibber abandoned and burning with fever: Jill is in Albany, appearing before the highway commission, while the babysitter (leaving a note on the bloodstained pillow) has been called away. Bibber dies, and Georgie never forgives his wife. “I thought then how inferior he was to Jill, how immature,” remarks the laughably unreliable (and hitherto invisible) narrator, who wants never again to see the “cruel and unreasonable” Georgie. Here again is Cheever's guileful irony: such a narrator is disingenuous if you like, or sincerely deploring if you don't.

Cheever might have suspected he'd gone too far this time—though perhaps not. Four years before, noting the constant presence of “predatory women” in his fiction, he'd conceded that this particular motif amounted to a “serious weakness in [his] vision; a crack.” But when readers asked Cheever, in person, why he seemed to dislike women so much, he'd look puzzled and protest that he loved women (“but”—as he wrote in his journal—”when I am kicked and spat on I must say so”). As for Bibber's death at the hands of a self-absorbed, civic-minded mother, Cheever once wrote the following in regard to Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread: “The death of a child seems to be idle and repulsive and I think that in fiction, much as in life, we may not, without good reason, slaughter the innocent, persecute the defenseless and infirm, or speak with idle malice.” That was in 1959. By 1963 he'd evidently changed his mind, or else felt there was “good reason” for disposing of Bibber. In any case,