Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [62]
But Cheever liked the brandy, and found himself softening toward the people who offered it—extraordinary people, whatever their shortcomings, and obviously fond of him. Whenever he visited the villa in New Haven, Dr. Winternitz would take him away to the den or laboratory and speak brilliantly on some medical topic for exactly fifty-five minutes. After listening to one such lecture on “the chemistry of courage,” Cheever observed in a letter to Herbst: “He would like to reduce personality to terms of salt and potassium, being a man who has always been overwhelmed by the mysterious forces of his own temperament.” Cheever had his own temperamental forces to contend with, some of them not dissimilar to his future father-in-law's. Meanwhile he came to view the man's wife as a soulmate of sorts. In her company—drinking martinis and gossiping over games of backgammon—Cheever became all the more attractive, whatever his social insecurity; in fact, it might even be fair to say that his boulevardier persona was partly evolved as a result of Polly's influence. Nor did the couple object to the charming young man's relative poverty; he was writing stories for The New Yorker, and a distinguished person at a dinner party had assured them that was a big deal.
Perhaps to force the issue, Polly came to New York one day and confronted her stepdaughter over lunch: “Your sweater is on backwards,” she said, “and I hear you are living in sin.” With respect to her sweater, the young woman replied that she liked it that way, and at least technically she was innocent of the other charge. Dr. Winternitz didn't bother to consult his daughter at all. “What are your intentions?” he sternly inquired of Cheever, who was happy to put the man at ease. The only problem was that Mary herself wasn't at all sure she was ready for marriage, and once (in response to some cutting remark) she told Cheever she wanted to “end the business” then and there. But he ignored this—he already had the family's blessing, after all—the way he ignored most of her contrary opinions. “Oh, the Sarah Lawrence girl!” he'd say, or words to that effect.
WRITING FOR The New Yorker was one thing, but Cheever knew that his reputation as a serious (and commercial) writer would remain suspect until he'd published a novel, an even more urgent matter now that he was getting married. Casting about for a subject, he vacillated between something “topical” and something more personal—close enough to his own experience, that is, to hold his interest for a few hundred pages. Again and again, rather in spite of himself, he reverted to his humble origins in that forgotten valley of the North River. “My heart is in a stuffy living room in a middle class suburb after a heavy dinner,” he wrote, “listening to the philharmonic, dealing a hand of bridge or making talk. My heart is there and Polly's drawing room and the blinding tennis courts in the July sun and the fox hunt in Rockleigh and the track at Saratoga and the slopes of Cannon Mountain and all the rest of it seem thin.” And lest he forget his colorful, troubling family history, his old Yankee father was at pains to remind him of its narrative possibilities. The man offered his son all kinds of “material” in the form of yarns about maritime New England, the post-Civil War era, the glory days of the shoe business, on and on. Likewise, when Cheever considered registering as a New York