Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [61]
But Cheever had made up his mind: 1940 would be a pivotal year. “[T]he girl I'm going to marry is on 67th street,” he informed Denney, “my roots are in the forgotten valley of the North River, my agent is on Fifth Avenue, and money burns a hole in my pocket.” The place on Sixty-seventh was a mansion with stained-glass windows (“and a cellar full of rats,” as Cheever recalled), where Mary rented the master bedroom—or rather had rented the master bedroom, until she lost her latest job as secretary and reader for Thomas H. Uzzell, proprietor of a correspondence school for aspiring writers and author of Narrative Technique. (“Thank you for letting us see your work,” Mary had typed to potential students, before an efficiency expert had advised Uzzell to let her go. “You will find my book Narrative Technique useful …”) After parting with Uzzell, she was reduced to living on a monthly allowance from her grandmother, and the landlady (“a bit of a bandit”) moved her to a tiny room in the back of the mansion.
By then Cheever had become something of a fixture around the place. “I was alone in the city,” said Mary, “and he kind of moved in. That's the only way I can describe it.” For Cheever it was a place that offered a warm body as well as an improvised meal of sorts (Mary, lacking a kitchen, cooked chops on a hot plate and fresh peas in a percolator). And when she was moved to the servants’ quarters, he saw a chance to be helpful—finding affordable rooms for both of them at Rhinelander Gardens on West Eleventh, a picturesque if not very elegant locale. The artist Robert Motherwell had an apartment beneath Mary's (a calling card with his Paris address was tacked to the door); Cheever's own studio was a few steps down the hall, near the noisy front of the building. (“Tomorrow will complete two weeks in which I have done no work,” he noted after moving in. “The comings and goings in an apartment house on Saturday and Sunday are distracting and I am broke.”) The main benefit was being near friends in the Village: the Werners also lived on Eleventh and promptly gave a party for the couple, and Cummings was around the corner on Patchin Place.
Cheever worried whether he'd be able to support Mary in the style to which she'd become accustomed—which, of course, was a style he longed to possess. Mary's family occupied an Italianate villa on Prospect Street, near Yale, but what might have been even more alluring in Cheever's eyes was their fifty-acre summer estate in New Hampshire, Treetops. Thomas Watson had bought the place and designed the little guest cottages that dotted the hillside, but it was Mary's father who hired a notable New York architect to draw up plans for the Stone House, where the staff was installed and Dr. Winternitz held court. Each night at six o'clock, the guests would convene at the house for drinks, and during his early visits, at least, Cheever was a somewhat wary and critical observer. His prospective father-in-law, he noticed, was often a vulgar tyrant, especially after a few drinks (“he would tell a pointless obscene story in mixed company,” Cheever wrote, “spit into the fire, belch”); as for the mistress of the house—never mind her children—she was a silly, pampered snob out of touch with a world that was verging on disaster. But withal Cheever was covetous, and knew it. While at Treetops he wrote in his journal:
The misanthrope thinks: You are all children of distinguished men and women. You went to the schools your fathers went to, you were introduced into their clubs, people will do much for you in memory of your