Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [66]
But, again, the journal was both a laboratory for fiction and a means of exorcising demons and fine-tuning the work-in-progress known as John Cheever. That summer, so much alone, he brooded with particular anxiety about his earlier amethyst-ring-wearing self, and prayed that he would have the “courage and decency” to assume the “grave responsibilities” of married life: “I have been evasive, God knows, but I have also come of age.” So he hoped. Also—lying in bed between stories, smoking and scratching his bedbug bites—he indulged in idle reveries about the kind of bon vivant he saw himself becoming:
I find myself driving up the road to Treetops in a large car, creaming the Whitneys at tennis, a game I've never learned how to play, giving the head-waiter at Charles’ five dollars and instructing him to get some flowers and ice a monopole of Bollinger, deciding whether to have the Pot au Feu or the trout merinere [sic], I can see myself waiting at the bar in a blue cheviot suit, tasting a martini, decanting a bottle of Vouvray into a thermos bottle to take out to Jones’ Beach, coming back from the beach, burned and salty … moving among my charming guests, greeting the late-comers at the door.
But still he remained on Bank Street, though it was almost September, as if he was afraid of testing romance against reality. Only when the bedbugs had become “ravening” and carpenters descended on the place and began “pulling things apart” did Cheever hit the road at last for New Hampshire—not in a “large car,” of course, but the same old Model A.
He needn't have worried. After being treated as family by a lot of “amiable people,” he “shouted and sang” as he drove back to New York a week or so later. “We will have a good life darling,” he wrote his bride-to-be, “a wonderful and beautiful life.”
MARY WINTERNITZ wasn't so sure about that, but on the other hand it pleased her to marry “somebody considered a catch” by her family, who never thought she'd amount to much. For both her and Cheever, in fact, it might have seemed a happy outcome to ghastly protracted childhoods—and not a moment too soon, under the circumstances. “We just decided not to wait much longer with everything so uncertain,” Mary wrote her father in early 1941. “Why not take what you can get while you can get it?”
And so they were married on March 22, in front of the fireplace at 210 Prospect Street in New Haven. The Episcopal chaplain of Yale, Sidney Lovett, officiated, though the modest ceremony was not religious or even especially conventional, given that Mary (“serious-minded radical as I was”) wore a “severe” gray suit with a corsage on her shoulder. Fred was Cheever's best man, while Mary was attended by her troubled sister Buff. Most of the other guests were also immediate family. Frederick Cheever (Sr.), looking tinier than usual, glanced around the villa in a nervous, furtive way, and—bumping into Bill Winternitz—piped, “I'm the old one!”
“I do condescend to take thee as my wedded husband was the gist of her marriage vow,” Cheever wrote years later, in a characteristically bitter mood. At other times, he realized just how lucky he'd been: His wife, after all, was pretty and bright and talented all in her own right, and was moreover blessed with a very fortunate “grasp of ambiguities,” as Cheever observed. Mostly she was stoical. As she remarked to the New York Times (almost thirteen years after her husband's death), “My maternal great-grandmother came out of nineteenth-century New England, where you do what you have to do.”
*”Even now, in a family