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desire for one of Ben's friends.* In what might have been a further attempt to rally himself, Cheever dropped his trousers at a subsequent party and began chasing one of Mary's comelier Briarcliff students. The girl was a good sport about things, but Ben was appalled and tried to intercede. His father paused, pants around his ankles, and regarded his son with considerable asperity. “When did you start wearing a red necktie?” he demanded at last. Rather than remind Cheever of his own sartorial lapse, Ben found himself abashed: “Oh my God,” he thought. “What am I doing wearing a red necktie?” (“Never wear red necktie,” Leander Wapshot had bluntly advised his sons.) Observing that Ben often seemed cowed by his famous father, certain of his friends tried to be protective—especially a “fearless and bohemian” girl named Nina, who made hay of the fact that Ben had broken up with Lynda that summer. “I'm coming to rescue you from your father,” she'd say, before conspicuously dragging him upstairs to bed for hours on end, reappearing only for dinner. Cheever—doubtless more offended by the girl's dislike of him than by her brazenness—laid down his fork one night and called her a whore. He was very drunk, of course, but it still caused a ripple.

A year later Ben had reconciled with Lynda, who in turn was getting on better with her parents, while all concerned had cooled toward Cheever. When he returned from Deya on September 2, 1969, his son informed him that he and Lynda were to be married two days later. For the occasion Ben had hastily purchased a suit at an Ossining haberdasher that fit him “the way suits fit bears and chimpanzees in the circus,” as his father put it; because of the suit, Ben's mother wept bitterly during the ceremony. When it was over, Cheever merrily rang the church bell while the newlyweds roared away on a motorcycle; the guests repaired to a reception at the home of the bride's parents, where Cheever's old friend Sally Swope swore that she'd seen actual plastic flamingos on the front lawn. “Her Father is in charge of security at IBM,” Cheever wrote Litvinov. “He is a pleasant, slender man with a thin and absolutely permenant [sic] smile. … She must have been quite a pretty woman. They neither drink nor smoke nor do they read.”* Sizing up the flamingos and so forth, Cheever weaved over to Lynda's mother and contrived to put her at ease over what he perceived to be their relatively modest means: “He's never going to make any money,” said Cheever, meaning his Myshkin-like son, “but it doesn't matter, because I have plenty of it!”

In the months and years that followed, Cheever observed with bemusement while his son defected more and more to his in-laws, alleged flamingos and all. Lynda's parents liked to visit the couple in Ohio and even attend classes with them, and during holidays Ben seemed to ration his appearances on Cedar Lane as frugally as possible. His mother-in-law fussed over him as if he were her own darling boy; his father-in-law taught him how to tune cars and such. Since the man really didn't bother with much in the way of intellectual diversion, he spent most of his leisure hours happily engaged in home improvement. Cheever once gave the couple a lift to Lynda's house, where he was intrigued to find her father meticulously patching holes in his driveway with a little caulking gun; indeed, the driveway was so immaculate “you could eat breakfast off it,” as Ben recalled. “If that's what you really like to do,” said Cheever affably, “you should come over to our house, because we have a much larger driveway and much more satisfactory holes!” Lynda's father might have kept his permanent smile afloat, but the rest of his face turned crimson with rage. “A few of those incidents went a long way,” said Ben. “My older son seems seriously to have switched his allegiance from me to his father-in-law,” Cheever wrote shortly after the wedding. “This is no cause for feeling, merely something to be observed.”

As for the whole hippie thing, Cheever tried to make light of it with remarks about “Myshkin” and the