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By Root 4048 0

had agreed to divide cooking duties, and Ruth was hurt when the others seemed to dislike her codfish. More serious, or anyway curious, was the woman's tendency to wash her hair in the kitchen sink even though there were eight bathrooms in the place. As for the boy, Randall, he would sit on the steps and spit at Peggy McManus for some reason, until one day she slapped him and was promptly rebuked by his mother, who refused to let anyone “touch or chastise” her child.* Reuel Denney, for his part, naturally sympathized with his wife and took her side, and even began to feel a bit persecuted himself, what with the way John McManus persisted in addressing him as “Whit” (after his Time boss, Whittaker Chambers). And the breach grew wider one night when neighbors called the police because little Susan Cheever was banging her head against the wall; the police assumed (according to Ruth Denney) that this was the sound of an illicit, radical printing press located in the Denneys’ bedroom, and they attacked the couple in bed. When Reuel resisted, he was pistol-whipped and dragged away in handcuffs to the Harlem station.

The only member of this strange ménage who benefited was Cheever, keeping his Signal Corps buddies in tears of helpless laughter each morning as he related the latest mishap. Indeed, it was too good not to share with the world, and so he began spending nights writing “funny, funny pieces for The New Yorker”—six in all—titled “Town House.” Apart from whatever satisfaction he took in making hay of his disastrous living arrangement, Cheever denigrated the serial as the sort of middlebrow fluff then in vogue (e.g., Life with Father): the literary equivalent of a sitcom. In fact, Cheever's own stories amounted to a stylish, nuanced comedy of manners—another increment in his chameleonic progress as a writer. “Look, I hope you don't mind,” he said to Ruth Denney before the first installment appeared. “I put you in a story and it's not terribly flattering.” This was a breathtaking understatement. “She ate as though she were participating in a contest, trying through practice to pare seconds and minutes from her eating time,” he wrote of “Esther Murray,” the character modeled on Ruth Denney (as she herself concedes). “She smacked her lips, overloaded her fork so that it sometimes spilled its load before reaching her mouth, and scratched her arm on the edge of the table.” Nor was Cheever's own wife spared. Though her “Town House” counterpart is mostly sympathetic, even in those days her husband was apt to score points through his fiction—in this case indicting what he regarded as her maudlin capacity for pity: “It was the naive, erratic, and indefatigable pity of an amateur social worker, and it had crossed their marriage with many stray animals and strange people.”

Though his domestic travails were sublimated somewhat into art, Cheever longed to escape and see the war before it was too late. Once again he was jockeying for a transfer to Yank, for which he hoped to cover the aftermath of the D-Day landings, ideally in the company of his old regiment. At the last moment, though, his superior in the Signal Corps, Manny Cohen, refused to let him go: “He used to be president of paramount,” Cheever wrote, “and he decided that Yank was RKO or 20th Century Fox and that he was not going to let them have one of his writers.” Cohen promised to make amends “any minute” by sending him abroad with the Signal Corps, and so Cheever was “given injections for everything but bubonic plague” and told, over and over, to wait a bit longer. Nearly a year passed, until finally, in April 1945, he was put on a train to Los Angeles, where he got a belated plague shot and woozily awaited transport in the Biltmore Hotel, next door to a roomful of younger servicemen (“hanging out of their windows, yelling, throwing bottles, glasses … singing obscene songs, and challenging one another to fights”). Such was the secrecy of his assignment—somewhere in the Pacific—that Cheever could only write about “dreams and reading” in his letters home, and mostly he stuck