Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [37]
And yet Mrs. Ames's Victorianism was a bit on the quasi side. She herself was something of a feminist and radical, and hardly averse to a little fun: in August she made time for the horse races like everyone else and sipped her share of champagne. Nor was she a prude in her own affairs, nor was she likely to object if (as Cheever noted) “a distinguished man or woman took a lover”—key word “distinguished,” as talent was everything, or anyway a great part in gaining Mrs. Ames's favor. Charm was important too, so that the woman's paradoxes were nicely reconciled by the following (oft-repeated) observation: “If Elizabeth Ames was fond of you, she'd do anything for you. If she wasn't, forget it.” And if you protested, well, she was pretty much deaf as a post for most of her adult life, and would simply elect not to listen. To the very end, though, the likes of Cheever were encouraged to shout amiably into her ear.
Mrs. Ames hewed to the Trask vision of a “house party” in those early years, and a stay at Yaddo was (as Cowley recalled) like a summer visit “to a Newport ‘cottage’ owned by robber barons.” If guests chose to sleep in, then breakfast trays laden with Trask silver were placed outside their doors with a gentle knock; as for the elaborate dinners, one reported in proper attire or not at all. After the stock market crashed, standards were necessarily lowered. Most artists could scarcely afford a new pair of shoes, and were grateful to have a roof over their heads, much less a platter of confiseries when they gathered downstairs at four o'clock. Yaddo's budget was strapped too, and some of the more enduring guests were asked to work for their room and board. John Cheever, in fact, became the first in a permanent tradition of “SAPs”—”Special Assistants to the President,” as they were later called, a position that in Cheever's case involved chopping wood, shoveling snow, and doing whatever other donkey work needed to be done. Fortunately, the rigors of Hanover had prepared Cheever well for such labor, which he never minded in any case, since it was manly and distracted him from dark thoughts.
The privations of the outside world, as well as a not-so-subtle “climate of repression” (as Cheever put it) under the Ames regime, led to what has been called “the Yaddo effect”: an obsession with food and sex and high jinks in general. Cheever was something of a pioneer in this respect, too. Each morning he slid down the banister and whacked the bronze Aphrodite on her rump; he left hats on statuary and splashed naked in the atrium pool; and once he installed the left-wing author Mary Heaton Vorse in a souvenir sleigh (given to Katrina by the Queen of the Netherlands) and shoved her down the grand staircase: “Hooves of fire!” the woman cried. As for sex, he often reflected on the “practical and colorless fucking” that he and a certain writer's wife used to practice, when young, on every flat surface in the mansion (not to mention “every garden, field and streambed”). From such exertions a naked Cheever tiptoed back to his room one night, bumping into a startled group of guests in the hallway: “[M]oving with great Hermian grace,” Gurganus