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alone and I like being alone.” Such prolonged introspection in her formative years—”I grew up leading other people's lives” (i.e., by reading books)—had, it seems, some curious results. In 1970 a psychiatrist puzzled over the fifty-two-year-old woman's “very little-girlish speech and behavior,” which Susan Cheever regards as “a need” on her mother's part to remain a child—the way, for example, she kept her youthful looks into her sixties, or the way her high-pitched voice used to induce strangers, on the phone, into asking if her mother was home. As for Cheever's view of the matter, he generally focused on the “violent father” aspect. As he alleged in his journal, his father-in-law had beaten Mary with a belt when she was a child, and even at the best of times the man's standards of perfection were daunting. “Mary is an average girl from most standpoints except for a rather keen intellect,” Dr. Winternitz noted for Sarah Lawrence. “She is fairly attractive, but this could be increased if her posture was better and if she took a little more pains with her appearance.” He was loath, however, to give such advice: “because” (he added) “I am fearful of imposing my will on the children.”

Things did not improve when Dr. Winternitz married, in 1932, the New Haven socialite Pauline (“Polly”) Webster Whitney, widow of Stephen Whitney. “MEDICAL HEAD CRASHES SOCIETY BY WEDDING SMART SET LEADER,” the Waterbury Herald announced. In keeping with her set, Polly esteemed people who were attractive—a catchall term for witty, good-looking, well-mannered, etc.—and while she thought Mary and her brother Bill were all right, the other Winternitz children were hopeless. Worst of all was the oldest, Elizabeth, called Buff because of the way she'd lisped her name as a child. When the girl dropped out of Vassar in 1934 and was subsequently diagnosed as manic-depressive, it was Polly's emphatic opinion that she should be sterilized. Polly's children from her first marriage—Stephen, Freddy, Louisa, and Janie—were tall, blue-eyed, and charming, hardly the type to consort with a bona-fide lunatic, or even the latter's relatively normal (but also short and awkward) siblings. “Perhaps Winter imagined the merging of the two families as a surgical transplant,” Susan Cheever wrote in Treetops, “a transplant that would bring together the worldliness of the Whitneys with the seriousness and intelligence of his own children.” It didn't work out that way. With the not-so-tacit support of their mother, the Whitney children patronized and persecuted their stepsiblings; and though Mary may have become all the more withdrawn and insecure, she also adapted in ways that would arguably serve her well in married life.

Rather than join her combative family at their estate in New Hampshire, Mary spent the last two summers of college broadening her horizons. In 1937, she toured New England with the Emergency Peace Campaign, a collection of young lefties determined to save the country from another ruinous foreign war. “Each breath you draw,” Miss Winternitz declaimed, “brings you nearer to organized slaughter. You face conscription. …” The following summer she and a friend went on a bicycle tour of France, and Mary was abashed to learn that the French were appalled at her for opposing American involvement in the war. Otherwise it was perhaps the happiest time of her life. Before college she'd attended the International School of Geneva and become fluent in French, which made her travels around the Provençal countryside all the more pleasant. Indeed, during the long domestic decades that lay ahead, she would often yearn to return to France, but her husband always refused. He claimed it was because of his comrades at Normandy and so forth, but, as his daughter wrote, “I think he avoided France because of my mother's infatuation with the country, and because she spoke the language and he didn't.”

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MARY DIDN'T LOSE TIME flexing her linguistic muscles with Cheever. “The folly of a fool,” she once murmured—in French—when her impoverished boyfriend waxed ecstatic over