Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [59]
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WHATEVER ELSE CHEEVER WOULD SAY about his marriage over the years, he wouldn't call it dull. “I think of how thrilling our life has been,” he wrote in 1979 (at a time when he and his wife were barely on speaking terms). “We have been welcomed all over the world, we have become rich, our children are splendid, and all of this began when we met in an elevator on a rainy autumn afternoon.” The elevator was at 545 Fifth Avenue, where Cheever had gone to visit his agent's office and check galleys of “The Happiest Days.” Going up, both he and the pretty young woman had noticed each other, albeit for different reasons. Hers was a heart easily moved to pity, and the young man standing beside her was vividly pitiful: “[H]e was kind of slumped over and he was little,” she remembered. “He was very little.” He was so little the sleeves of his tweed coat covered his hands, and he seemed the worse for hunger. Cheever, in turn, had noticed the young woman because—well, she was pretty, and about the right size, and when she got off on the same floor and entered Lieber's office, he thought, “That's more or less what I would like.” So he sat beside her typewriter and read his galleys. “And I asked her for a date. And presently married her.”
Mary Winternitz—the woman so randomly chosen—had a remarkable past. Her mother was Dr. Helen Watson, daughter of the co-inventor of the telephone, Thomas A. Watson (“Mr. Watson, come here—I need you!”), and her father was the legendary dean of the Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Milton Winternitz, known to friends as “Winter” or “Guts.” Helen Watson was one of the first women to take a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, and had shocked her gentile New England family by marrying her pathology professor—a brilliant, dynamic Jew who had entered college at age fourteen and begun teaching medicine seven years later. During his fifteen years as the Yale dean, Winternitz turned a failing school into one of the world's great research facilities, thereby prevailing over the rampant anti-Semitism of that time and place. For the most part he succeeded by refusing to make an issue of Jewishness one way or the other—to a fault, some would say, since Jewish students enjoyed no favor in his eyes, and their numbers continued to be restricted under his leadership. On his daughter's Sarah Lawrence application he listed his religious preference as “Congregational” (though he noted that the applicant's paternal grandparents were Jewish), and Mary herself had not learned of her own Jewishness until eighth grade, when she was asked by others (who knew) to play Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
Cheever summed up his wife's early life as follows: “a cruel and beautiful mother, a violent father, a miserable childhood.” Fair enough. “I was the child she didn't want,” Mary said of her mother, who let her know that she'd been hopefully conceived as a male playmate for her brother Tom; the mother's next attempt ended in miscarriage, but she finally gave birth to a son, Bill, the baby of the family and “everybody's favorite.” When Mary was seven, her mother was hospitalized with a mysterious illness, and the two hardly saw each other until the woman's death five years later.* At the time, Mary's older siblings (two sisters, a brother) were away at boarding school, while Dr. Winternitz sequestered himself in the laboratory (“My own work is extremely confining,” he wrote on that college application, “and so I fear I see little of the children”). “I really grew up alone,” said Mary. “My mother wasn't there, my father was busy, and I was an odd character in school. I was very much alone and got in the habit of being