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By Root 3926 0

the thread of his own well-worn stories, and lurching to embrace the woman, he almost burned a hole in her chesterfield with his cigarette. Meanwhile he observed that she wasn't as young as he recalled, nor as pretty: “Her backside is broad from all those years in libraries, there is a definite heaviness to her voice and her taste in clothing is dreary.” Alone again with his reveries, though, he decided that these “were trifling and opaque matters that love will cure,” and so wrote her a letter that seemed to lay his cards on the table: “[T]his is a proposal of marriage. … I will dedicate my new novel to you. I expect you to dedicate your book to me. We will appear together on the book jacket, photographed in the garden of our 18th century farmhouse on the grassy banks of the Limpopo River.” Perhaps he figured this was droll enough to be taken as a joke in case it didn't go over, but on second (and doubtless more sober) thought, he decided it was less than realistic, at least for the moment, and put the letter aside for later consideration.*

Susan and Rob Cowley were to be married on May 6, 1967, and as the date drew near Cheever's own marriage was pretty much at its nadir; he couldn't help wondering about the propriety of playing a principal role in a ceremony that, for him, meant “slander, contumely, mutilation, etc.” Nevertheless, he threw himself into the preparations with admirable zeal. At first he planned to hold the reception at the Century Club, but was reminded of a by-law forbidding such affairs; then he decided the ceremony would take place at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery, where a quaint little graveyard could be used for the reception—though the minister had warned him (said Cheever) “that if he didn't have a squad of policemen every bum in lower New York would crawl into the tent, piss in the punch bowl and throw empty Petri wine bottles at [his] Mother-in-law.” What was important to both Cheever and his daughter was that it be a proper Episcopalian service using the original Cranmer. Rob Cowley was therefore enjoined to write a letter to the bishop of New York “to the effect that [he] wasn't really married [previously] despite [his] two children,” as Cowley recalled.

The night before the wedding, Cheever and his wife took a hotel room in the city, and the next morning he attempted to engage her in a bit of amorous play: he crawled into her bed and she crawled out the other side and got into his bed; when he invited her to sit on his naked lap, she “[made] an exclamation of distaste” and grimly watched television. Thus rebuffed, Cheever spiked his orange juice with gin and went about his day (solitary martinis in a “dark, pleasant bar;” the pre-wedding lunch at Lüchow's), until the time came to pick up his wife and daughter in a limousine. Driven to the tenement on Waverly Place where Susan was living, Cheever couldn't find her name on the mailboxes and began ringing random doorbells and yelling “Susie! Susie!” from the street. Presently his daughter appeared in her wedding dress—she and her mother had been drinking champagne and getting ready—and at length they arrived at the church and hastily took their places while Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary began to play. Cheever noticed that his daughter seemed frightened (“I don't remember much,” she said, “because I was really lit”), and was glad to offer his arm: “In how many hotel and other lonely beds have I imagined myself greeting her at the church door (Why he might be her brother he looks so young) and leading her, with a superb mixture of ceremoniousness and humor, down the worn red carpet.” So he'd mused years before, and now the thing was happening at last.

Cheever had hired a fancy caterer who spread a green felt carpet around the graves and erected a tent, into which passing derelicts peeped at the festivities. There were some two hundred guests in all. An elderly Josie Herbst sat chain-smoking in her serape (she had less than two years to live), and Mrs. Zagreb “raked the male guests” and finally pointed to Peter Blume: “That's what I want next.” “Everyone