Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [80]
Sometimes he despised New York, and resented having to keep up with his dapper fellow tenants in the elevator—but they reminded him, too, that a writer was just as entitled to middle-class comforts as a lawyer or stockbroker. Though he could barely pay the rent, he'd presently insist on sending his three-year-old daughter to a private nursery school, loading her into a taxi each morning and instructing the man to drive, whatever her protests, twenty blocks uptown to the Walt Whitman School (“She enjoys herself tremendously when she gets there but she has decided that she does not like to leave the nest in the mornings”). By the time she came home in the afternoon, Cheever was free to take her on long walks around the city—indeed, his “favorite New York” was the one he'd discovered with his children in these postwar years. Sometimes they'd walk to the Central Park lion house, or the apex of the Queensboro Bridge, or the docks along the East River (“where I once saw a couple of tarts playing hopscotch with a hotel room key”). And when he felt like stopping for a drink, he'd take Susan along to the Menemsha Bar on Fifty-seventh, where she was enchanted by a little electric waterfall. Finally, at night, he tucked her into bed and told stories about Faustina, the perfect little girl who loved serving her parents breakfast in bed and keeping her room clean. So poignant were his memories of early fatherhood that Cheever would always associate a sense of homecoming with these few blocks near Sutton Place—the “happiness that clings to the shoeshine parlor, the laundry, the drugstore, the vacant store and the butcher's,” he later wrote. “[But also] an incurable longing, the basic loneliness implanted in [me] by the miserableness of early life.”
Cheever remarked to friends—with a mixture of wit and real self-pity, perhaps—that he thought his parents were “terribly disappointed” he'd survived the war. In fact, he and his parents were mutually well meaning, more or less, if a little bewildered by one another. At her shop in Quincy Square, Mary Cheever was a beloved figure: her granddaughter Jane remembers how people were always coming in from the street just to say hello and chat. But with her son, whom she rarely saw, she seemed divided between a pose of prideful self-reliance and a real need to confide her sorrows. Cheever didn't make it easy for her. Though always polite, he'd find himself boasting about his illustrious in-laws, the grandeur of Treetops, by way of reminding her of the better life he'd rather defiantly made for himself; she in turn would counterpunch with trumped-up claims of business success or her old friendship with Margaret Deland, the crusading novelist. Such visits left Cheever vaguely unhappy, wishing he'd been kinder—but he couldn't help it. The old woman embarrassed him. “The bars are down at Milton Academy!” she'd sigh, forgetting that her daughter-in-law was half Jewish. Cheever's remarks in his journal—after one of his mother's occasional buying trips to the city (during which she'd always insist on staying at the Martha Washington Hotel near Madison Square)—reflect an aching perplexity:
I haven't seen mother for eight months. When I first came into the