Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [82]
CHEEVER'S PREWAR REFUGE had been Yaddo, and after the war it was Treetops, where he was again treated as Lord Fauntleroy While the Winternitz and Whitney children wrangled and vied for their parents’ approval, Cheever remained (for the most part) serenely above the fray. For years to come, his relations with Polly and Winter would be something of a mutual admiration society. These, after all, were the parents he deserved: a brilliant, eccentric scientist and a woman of wit and social distinction, the one holding forth on poisonous gases and such, the other remembering the night she danced the Castle Walk with Representative Hamilton Fish. And though Dr. Winternitz was given to “storms of petulance” and perverse cruelty, even this was strangely comforting to Cheever: He, too, had a rotten temper, truth be known, and was certainly a very odd person in his own right, and it was heartening to see a fellow eccentric make such a success of life. Besides, Winter went out of his way to mitigate his worst qualities where Cheever was concerned—in “penitence” (thought Cheever) “for all the unkindnesses he has done to his sons,” but also, perhaps, because his son-in-law was such a good companion to Polly. When dinner was over and the others drifted away, Cheever would mix a batch of martinis and pass the time swapping gossip with the woman. His own stories were benign enough (“My demeanor is generally tame”), but Polly became biting when drunk and would ruminate bitterly over some fresh tiresomeness on the part of her step-relations. She also liked to be naughty: “Polly was one of those decorous and witty beauties whose familiarity with dope-addiction and cock-sucking was consummate,” Cheever wrote. It was fun when she'd coax him into the library, say, to show him some dirty pictures—less so when she'd project her son Freddy's inclinations onto Cheever. “Was your friend nice?” she'd leer, when Cheever returned from a day's hiking, as if that were his usual ruse for a homosexual rendezvous. “Why yes,” Cheever would reply, jaunty as ever, and they'd laugh and break out the backgammon board.
In fact, the wistful pleasure Cheever always took in robust, manly activities was fully satisfied at Treetops, where he was positively eager to finish the day's writing so he could spend an afternoon chopping wood and scything with the family gardener, a Latvian communist named Peter Wesul. (“His name is pronounced weasel,” Cheever wrote Maxwell. “He was bitten by a weasel and he has to tell people that he was bitten by a mink.”) The man fascinated Cheever. A dead ringer for van Gogh, he had the proverbial mystic bond with the earth and single-handedly cultivated a garden that could feed twenty-five people every summer. Most beguiling to Cheever, however, was the man's wizardry with a scythe. “This was part of my father's self-invention as a man of the soil,” Federico explained. “The magic of a scythe is almost undeniable. It requires a kind of balance and grace to use, and with that very long blade there are elements of the whole masculine deal. Also, of course, he was well aware of that scene in Anna Karenina: Levin and the peasants was never far from my father's mind when scything.” This is true: “When I scythe I think of Tolstoy,” he admitted to Tanya Litvinov in 1977. “How universal is the experience, I think, when what I really think is that I am one of the last aristocrats in the county who can wield a scythe.” For the rest of his life, when Cheever was feeling blue about work or