Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [77]
Another Signal Corps veteran, playwright Arthur Laurents, characterized Cheever's frequent inebriation as “protective”—a way of dampening the discomfort he felt as a bisexual among “relentlessly macho” types such as Irwin Shaw, to say nothing of all the other gay and bisexual men in the Signal Corps.* “Lennie, your mascara's running,” Ettlinger was obliged to inform Major Spigelgass while the two filmed the invasion of an Aleutian island. Most knew about Spigelgass, who observed that it was “very clear to the ex-Hollywood and ex-New York people” who was and wasn't gay. Knowing it was one thing, admitting it another. Even the outré Spigelgass maintained a rather tongue-in-cheek public façade; Laurents saw a psychoanalyst for what was then viewed as a moral and mental sickness. Laurents could recall only one openly gay man in the Signal Corps—a “terrible drunk” in the animation department who concealed (or perhaps flaunted) his taste for rough trade by wearing a decorative patch over whichever eye happened to be black at the moment. As for Cheever: “He wanted to be accepted as a New England gentleman,” said Laurents, “and New England gentlemen aren't gay. Back then you had no idea of the opprobrium. Even in the Signal Corps, even in the film and theatre world, you were a second-class citizen if you were gay, and Cheever did not want to be that.”
What Cheever wanted, above all, was to be a successful writer and family man—not necessarily in that order—and things were going well on both accounts, or so it seemed. His life in New York had “never been so well regulated, moderate, and quiet,” he wrote in the autumn of 1943. “Mary meets me at the door with a floury apron in the evenings. We eat dinner, play with Susan, read the paper, and go to bed.” But even then there were a few things wrong with that picture. A fellow writer and drinking buddy, Ted Mills, remembered how “terribly intolerant” Mary was when her husband came in late, and the couple gave Laurents the impression that, at bottom, “they disliked each other”: “Both were always making these snippy remarks—always with a giggle. John always giggled when he said something mean.”
THE CHEEVERS’ SEEDY APARTMENT in a sinister part of Chelsea was far from ideal, but finances were as tight as ever, and there was a dire shortage of housing during the war—hence their decision, presently regretted, to move into a five-floor town house at 8 East Ninety-second Street with two other couples. The man who found the place was a Signal Corps acquaintance, John McManus, whose wife Peggy was the niece of Alfred Stieglitz and a schoolmate of Mary's at Sarah Lawrence. So that part made sense, but they still needed a third couple to split the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent and exorbitant fuel bills. When John Weaver and his wife, Harriett, declined, Cheever thought to approach Reuel Denney, then working as an editor at Time. The two had scarcely kept in touch since Denney's marriage five years ago, but Cheever was glad to vouch for his friend as a nice, bookish fellow who'd likely make a fine housemate. The unknown quantity was his wife, Ruth.
Mary took pity on the woman—who struck her as awkward and oddly dressed—and so invited her (with her small son, Randall) to Treetops in the hope of making friends. The visit was not a success: Ruth spent an inordinate amount of time scrubbing the bathroom floor in her cabin, and couldn't be persuaded to follow the family custom of appearing for drinks and dinner at the Stone House without toddlers; also—though the two women were hardly en rapport by then—she liked to confide certain details about her marriage that made Mary uncomfortable. As for the town-house arrangement, it soon headed for the shoals. The women