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By Root 4044 0

acted in character,” Cheever reported. “Mary's unstable sister seized two vases of flowers and carried them out to her car. Her husband—a shy man—retired to a nearby saloon and got drunk at his own expense. Mary—very chic—upstaged Susie and nearly ran off with the groom. Fred, attended by his Italian [Iole], ate six pieces of cake and I kissed eighty-three women and drank a pint of bourbon.” In fact Cheever had rarely been happier—in marked contrast to the groom's parents, who sat dourly in a far corner of the tent: Muriel Cowley had been ill, and the cold, blustery day wasn't helping, and Malcolm was furious that Rob hadn't visited his mother once in the days prior to the wedding. “What a beautiful party it is!” Cheever kept exclaiming, hoping perhaps that his high spirits would prove infectious. “You,” said his wife, “are the spectre at the feast.”

THAT SUMMER Cheever was enticed by The Saturday Evening Post to interview Sophia Loren on location in Italy; in exchange for taking his first “hack job,” the magazine offered to pay expenses for him and his family as well as provide them with a car and driver. When Cheever told Mary as much, she agreed to accompany him but “[did] not seem cheered.”

Cheever was worried that his cafard would ruin the vacation, but it seemed to “miss the plane” and only caught up with him intermittently. Eager to use his Italian, he began “gabbling like a turkey” as soon as he, Mary, and Federico arrived in Rome, where a chauffeur met them at the airport and drove them to the fishing village of Sperlonga: “This is all white-washed staircases leading to the sea,” he wrote Litvinov, “and at six in the morning, American time, we were eating tomatos and mozzarella and sporting in the waves.” Afterward Cheever went his own glamorous way for the most part, leaving Mary to show Federico around the ruins of Pompeii while he chatted up the movie crowd. He found Loren “intelligent and capable,” albeit unwilling to bare her soul for the sake of a little publicity, even at the behest of so famous and charming an author. “She has the tact and discretion of a public figure,” Cheever wrote for the Post. “She will not break the dishes, get stoned, do a belly dance or calumniate Lollobrigida or Mia Farrow.” Hoping to end the visit on a more personal note, he asked Loren for a kiss goodbye and she cheerfully obliged him. “She wrote, she wrote, she loves me,” he gushed to Maxwell that October, when his article appeared and the actress cordially thanked him for same. “Yesterday in the mail-box among the spiders, autumn leaves, bills and magazines was a vast envelope from the Palazzo Colona. … What a lovely child.”

By then he could ill afford to let himself get too excited about things, as he'd been afflicted by a severe case of prostatitis. For a week or two he weathered the worst of it (burning urination, painful swelling, worrisome discharge), before downing “three scoops of gin” and visiting a venerable urologist in White Plains, who sensibly advised him not to drink so much. Cheever conceded the problem, but wondered whether there was more to it than that—indeed, whether perhaps he'd “suffered from an unstable prostate since adolescence,” as he wrote his regular physician, Ray Mutter.

The infection seems closely allied to my basic sexual nature and it seems that the blowup could have been caused by alcoholic and other excesses brought on by my anxious and greedy urge to take more than my share of brute pleasure. … It has also occurred, to my uninformed mind that some of the phobias, from which I've suffered in the last years might have some connection with this capricious gland since the pain always begins in the scrotum. … I have felt, since my early twenties that that whole part of me was apt to be foolish.

One wonders what the amiable Mutter made of all that; in any event, Cheever remained disconcerted by some of the more sinister etiological implications: Was he being punished for his sins? Would he be racked with pain every time he became aroused (licitly or otherwise)? When the illness persisted,