Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [36]
CHAPTER FIVE
{1934-1935}
YADDO, FOR CHEEVER, was a majestic summons back to his true calling. There was his artistic calling, of course, but more: a Gatsbyesque aspiration to the good life—in this case embodied by a fifty-five-room Tudor mansion situated among 440 acres of pleasant woodland and gardens and statuary and lakes, all within walking distance of the famous Saratoga Race Course and other mansions along Union Avenue (the most beautiful street in America, or so Henry James considered it). It was true that the mansion bequeathed by Spencer Trask for artistic purposes was a bit of an eyesore, but from Cheever's perspective it was a big improvement over a freezing ramshackle farmhouse in the sticks or a seedy bachelor flat on Beacon Hill.
The origin of Yaddo is a well-known and remarkably bleak story. Trask (the Wall Street financier who backed Thomas Edison) bought the property in 1881 as a place of summer respite for his poetic wife, Katrina, after the death of their first son. According to lore, it was the Trasks’ second child, Christina, who came up with that beguiling name, Yaddo—the four-year-old's version of “shadow,” as in the flickering shadows of wind-tossed trees, which the girl took to be the spirit of her dead brother: “Call it Yaddo, Mama, for it makes poetry!” Little Christina was soon among the shadows, too, as was her little brother, Spencer Jr., since both were ill-advisedly allowed to kiss their mother when she was thought to be dying of diphtheria. Katrina survived; the children died within two days of each other. A year later a fourth child died, whereupon Katrina devoted herself to more ethereal pursuits. One day, walking with her husband, the woman had a vision: “Here will be a perpetual series of house parties—of literary men, literary women and other artists. … Look, Spencer, they are walking in the woods, wandering in the garden, sitting under the pine trees—men and women—creating, creating, creating!” The man saw her point and set up a nonprofit corporation to maintain the estate as a retreat for people “usefully engaged in artistic and creative work”—but before the dream was realized, a freight train ran a red signal near Croton and smashed into Spencer Trask's private car. He was the only person killed. For a few more years, Katrina mourned her decimated family, comforted by the couple's mutual friend, George Foster Peabody, whom she finally married (“the romantic culmination of a rare triangular friendship”) less than a year before her death on January 7, 1922. Her ghostly presence still abides in the mansion, or such is the impression created by a portrait of the woman in a billowy white shift (“poor Katrina's shower curtain,” as Cheever called it).
A year after Katrina's death, Peabody was still in the process of carrying out her wishes with the help of an eighteen-year-old assistant,* Marjorie Waite, when the two were visited by Waite's widowed sister from Minnesota, Elizabeth Ames. Peabody was struck by Mrs. Ames's enthusiasm for his project and asked her to draw up a plan, which she accomplished with such insight and energy that Peabody named her executive director on the spot (or, in Cheever's more picturesque version: “When a beam of light caught Mrs. Ames's lovely face, Mr. Peabody decided that it was she who had been chosen”). In most respects he chose wisely. By 1926, Mrs. Ames had refurbished the mansion, erected outbuildings, hired a large and efficient staff, and was ready to welcome her first group of artists as the hostess of Yaddo.
“Hostess” was one way to put it. “For the first twenty-five years,” said Malcolm Cowley, “Elizabeth Ames was Yaddo.” No detail, however niggling, was likely to escape Mrs. Ames's notice. With her guests as a whole she communicated via bits of advice tacked on the mail table; more intimate