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By Root 3912 0

the trip—however “painful” in a logistic sense—was that he'd gone out of his way to get Susan a special present. As she remembered, “[He] knew I was a fan of New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren, and he surprised me with a drawing Koren had done at his request featuring a crowd of furry creatures shouting ‘Happy Birthday, Susie.’ “ It was a festive occasion for all but Cheever, who hadn't been to the Winternitz estate in almost ten years and felt haunted by the place. While Mary and her brother Bill swapped stories about their illustrious father, Cheever ruminated (as ever) about how the “great man” had beaten his children with belts and so on—the ur-trauma which explained so many of his difficulties with Mary. “Thirty years ago,” he sadly reminisced, “when we were courting, I used to leave the guesthouse, where everyone seemed asleep, and walk, naked, through the woods to this cottage, where we made love.” Thirty years later, the cottage was a less hospitable place, and Cheever caught an early ride home with Susan the next day, huddled with dogs and a bottle of Scotch in the cramped backseat of her car.

That year Mary was writing some of the best poetry of her life, she thought, and Cheever tried to be encouraging. Certainly his public utterances on the subject were meant to be politic. “Mm-hm,” he answered when asked on TV whether he read her poems. “Where is she published?” the interviewer pursued. “Not often,” Cheever said, after a flustered pause; “and I can't remember the names of the magazines.” At the time she'd never been published at all, though several years later her poems would be collected in The Need for Chocolate, and Cheever always declared the book “first-rate” when asked. “Oh, she writes about men, women, children, dogs, landscapes,” he ventured in a 1981 interview. “She writes not at all, as far as I can figure out, about her husband.” This was very disingenuous; as it happened, Mary's favorite poem was about her marriage, and Cheever despised it. Though it was originally titled (circa 1971) “A Long Time Married,” she changed the title to “Gorgon”—the better to suggest (as she explained) the “very powerful, slightly malevolent woman” who persisted in her husband's imagination, and appeared in his fiction, regardless of anything she said or did. The poem begins: “I have sometimes complained, husband, / that as you feinted, shadowboxed and blindly / jived to that misty monolithic woman in your mind /I have been battered, drowned under your blows.” But that wasn't the part that bothered Cheever. Rather, the narrator mentions how her husband “fuss[es]/and nicker[s] at [her] breasts”—which reminded Cheever of the time Mary had asked him (rhetorically) if he could “imagine how revolting it is to have an old man kiss her breasts.” Anyway, he thought “Gorgon” was in the worst possible taste, which might account for his tight grimacing smile (ten years later) while declaring her poetry “first-rate” on TV

He was less tactful about her latest job. Since leaving Briarcliff that year, she'd begun teaching an adult creative-writing workshop at the local high school. Sometimes she'd announce at dinner that one of her students (sensitive businessmen and the like) was especially gifted, and, if others seemed receptive, she'd produce an actual sample of prose and read it aloud at table. Cheever would light a cigarette. “Oh yes,” he'd murmur, “oh that's brilliance for you all right”—managing to suggest not only that the work was ghastly, but that the person whose teaching had resulted in such work was also a fair subject for ridicule. Which is to say, these impromptu readings had a way of ending badly: Mary would leave the table in tears, or else Cheever would rise with a sort of final, drunken exasperation and retire upstairs (followed by elephantine crashing noises as he negotiated the narrow halls). “Who do you think you are, she asks,” Cheever wrote of one such battle. “The voice is tremulous, musical, highly emotional. What am I. An imposter, usurper, a broken down alcoholic. I am your husband, I say.”

Given his writer's