Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [38]
As for the rest of “the Yaddo effect,” food was never as high a priority for Cheever as drink, no matter how repressive the climate. At first he abided by house rules and drank in his room, leaving an impressive pile of empties outside his door for the maid, or else he'd repair with other thirsty colonists to the New Worden Hotel in town. All too often, though, he had to suffer the company of bores at dinner—sanctimonious radicals, effeminate poets, and the like—a trial he was loath to endure soberly. The problem was solved when he broke into the Trask wine cellar and found a vast supply of brandies that had turned clear over time, which he then drank out of his water glass even when seated right beside Mrs. Ames.
Not surprisingly, the two were a little slow in warming to each other. Elizabeth Ames was forty-nine in 1934—when Cheever (twenty-two) first came to Yaddo—and took a dim view of puerile high spirits, at least in people she didn't like. “I am told that he is twenty-two years old,” she wrote in 1930 of the novelist Leonard Ehrlich (who would become the love of her life), “and somehow a twenty-two year old novelist does not greatly stir my enthusiasm;” most young novelists of her acquaintance, she primly continued, had proved “more infantile than anything else.” Far from being an exception, Cheever was a rule unto himself, and Mrs. Ames was obliged to lecture the youth about “unwise attachments” and so on. When his second of two visits in 1934 ended on a slightly sour note, Cheever wrote a friend about a dream he'd had in which he'd thrown a platter of jellied salmon at Mrs. Ames's face: “ ‘I'm glad you did, John,’ she said firmly and calmly, ‘I'm very glad you did it. I'm glad to know how you feel towards me.’ ‘I'm also very glad I did it,’ I said, going up and shaking her hand. ‘I'm sincerely sorry but I'm glad I did it. Now we both know how things stand. There won't be anymore subterfuge or deceit between us.’ “ Nevertheless, she kept inviting him back, and one day she began to cry as he said goodbye to her. “I realized for the first time,” said Cheever, “that our relationship was not simple.”
Not only would he become a favorite of Mrs. Ames—even a surrogate son—but the servants loved him too, and took to calling him Lord Fauntleroy This was important to Cheever for a number of reasons. “Only dogs, servants, and children know who the real aristocrats are,” he liked to say. Though artists were forbidden to mix with staff (as Marc Blitzstein had been sternly reminded), Cheever would appear in the kitchen almost every morning to gossip with the cook, Nellie Shannon, while she fixed his breakfast. He was also fond of the superintendent, George Vincent, whom he'd insist on helping with chores around the estate (whether it was expected of him or not) as well as any problems the man might have with a guest or underling. “Do you want me to talk to him?” Cheever would offer. “I'll talk to him.” Both Shannon and Vincent and certain other employees remained at Yaddo for fifty years or more, and became Cheever's lifelong friends. “[W]ho can come back to the scene of his early manhood,” he wrote in 1961, “and find not a chair, not a thread, not even the faded asters in the silver bowl have changed. … Someone has remembered all my favorite dishes; spare ribs, ham and turkey, peach soufflé.” One of his happiest memories was returning after a long absence and overhearing a parlor maid say, “Master John is back! Master John is back!” As Gurganus remarked, “He was living out some sort of magisterial fantasy of being master of the house, which he deserved to be in terms of his gift and his decency and his sweetness.”
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