Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [51]
In May, he paid his family a lingering visit. His father—broken by the hardships of Hanover—had reconciled with his formidable wife and resigned himself to an obedient dotage in downtown Quincy, where he whiled away his days at the Thomas Crane Library. For the next twenty years, John would also affect a sort of obedience toward his mother, nursing a vast resentment in secrecy. And when he found himself losing patience with both parents, there was always Fred, who lived more and more prosperously in the nearby town of Norwell. In the old days he and Joey had often discussed the nature of their respective “Belle Isles,” but by 1936 Fred seemed content to the point of smugness. He and his family* lived in a well-appointed rental on Stetson Road, and presently Fred would build a Swiss-chalet-style house near the river. He treated his brother with a kind of jovial condescension, joshing him about his feckless hand-to-mouth lifestyle and dirty-neck friends. Fred was rooting for the fascists in Spain, while in his spare time he wrote a book titled A Song for These States, extolling the glories of his Yankee heritage and American democracy in general. “We disagree on everything,” John noted after that May visit. “Any desire, higher than that for warmth and security, seems to have died out in his frame and with that he has cultivated an immense contempt for those poor, sad fools, living on the fringes of society, who have been unable to rent a house in the country, stuff it with antiques, dress their wives attractively, produce beautiful children and come up the gravel drive-way at dusk to love, sherry, supper, wood-fires and the editorials of the Boston Evening Transcript.”
Cheever was coming to terms with his own sense of exile. “I'm a stranger here and I guess it's just as well,” he wrote Denney. There were times, though, when he felt overwhelmed by a nostalgia that would never quite go away, whatever he saw fit to say about it. “But my days here are numbered,” he wrote in 1936, and so they were.
WHILE ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD from Simon and Schuster (he was hoping they'd finance a second book so he could move to Maine “and have a boat and a girl and a lot of good liquor”), Cheever was relieved to learn that Mrs. Ames was willing, at last, to let him run the launch at Lake George. “My father keeps telling me,” he wrote her, “and asking me not to forget, that one whistle means a starboard passing, two, a port passing, three a salute and four means astern. I've also been studying Marine engine instruction books.” Mrs. Ames wasn't entirely reassured. Stiffly she replied that insurance on the old Fay & Bowen absolutely stipulated that he keep the speed under twenty miles an hour “at all times.”
The pleasant islands of Triuna are spanned by a fanciful ninety-two-foot bridge built by the Trasks, and for the first month of the summer Cheever had the place mostly to himself. He did chores and shooed away trespassers and ate big meals prepared by “a distinguished woman named Daisey MacAfee Bonner.” In July he was joined by a young writer named Eugene Joffe, and the little town of Bolton Landing filled up with “a lot of nice girls” on vacation from colleges such as Skidmore and Beaver