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By Root 4166 0

jovially wrote Litvinov that they were all “basking in the reflected light” of Cheever's fame; for his part, Cheever reminded himself to feign interest in his friends’ affairs (though they hadn't asked a single question about his Harvard degree) and be “as yielding and generous as possible in any controversy.” There were limits, however. When Spear presumed to observe that he received “exactly the same mail” as Cheever, fame or no, the latter was forced to “snap at [his] dear friend,” assuring Spear that he (Cheever) received “checks, love letters and invitations” in relative profusion. As for his long-standing animus toward Tom Glazer, it got worse in spite of himself, at least on paper. Cheever hadn't been very supportive when Glazer's wife left him in 1974, and ultimately Cheever decided the man was a “homosexual spinster” who chose to live in wretched, homophobic isolation rather than admit his true appetites. Nor did Cheever soften much when he heard a rumor that it was none other than Glazer's body that had been found recently, charred by the third rail at the Scarborough station; Glazer had been missing for a while, and certain neighbors had long considered him a likely candidate for suicide. “He was quite famous until he was discovered to be alive,” Cheever noted in his journal, after the putative corpse had returned from an obscure folksinging gig in California.* “I can't judge the sincerity of my regrets. … He fills me with a dismay that I seem unable to conceal.”

Always at his best with dogs, Cheever was comforted in these final years by a golden retriever named Edgar, whom his daughter described as a “boisterous, leggy, badly bred dog with a square head and a habit of dropping wet rocks on your feet.” Edgar, a bitch, had been named Tara when she belonged to Ben, who'd “loaned” her to his parents when his son was born in 1972; Cheever changed the dog's name to “Shithead” before settling on “Edgar,” and the two became almost inseparable. On summer nights Cheever would occasionally take Edgar to Burger King (fries for her, a sandwich for himself) and then to a Carvel stand for her favorite treat, a chocolate flying saucer. “Brisky-frisky!” he'd call, coaxing the dog upstairs to his bedroom, which would have been a very lonely place without her. “When [s]he wakes me, late at night, rooting noisily amongst [her] dingle-berries,” Cheever wrote his daughter, “we exchange the most profound and tender smiles before we both return to sleep.”

More than ever, Cheever took pleasure in being a familiar face in his adopted hometown, the virtues of which he extolled with impressive zeal. When Cheever was profiled by People in 1979, the magazine described Ossining as a “gritty enclave, dominated by Sing Sing penitentiary;” Cheever, indignant, rushed to disavow the slur in the local Citizen Register: “Paradise on earth,” he said, “with its fine views of the Hudson, its unpretentious people, its good restaurants, its nearness to New York …” He meant every word of it, too, especially the part about unpretentious people, many of whom regarded Cheever as simply a nice (if eccentric) old man who didn't have a job; indeed, until the years of his greatest fame, even the more literate townsfolk had a hard time placing their most illustrious citizen. Cheever noted how once he'd been approached in Kipp's Pharmacy by a man who thought he was Burgess Meredith, then David Wayne; finally the man became flustered and said, “But you're somebody …“ “I am somebody,” Cheever replied, “and I like living in a community where everybody is somebody.” And this, in a way, was true—poignantly so. In 1935, at the outset of his lifelong exile from home, Cheever had written Reuel Denney: “I think, with a lot of satisfaction, about the town I came from with its ship-building plant and two-storey bank-building. And if you mention our name to the bar-tender or the clerk in the drug-store he'll say ‘yeah, old man Cheever, had two boys etc’ “ This, after all, was the world evoked in the Wapshot novels—what Seymour Wolk (owner of Kipp's Pharmacy, who considered