John Cheever (14 page)

On the first of August, Cheever fled from the heat and the bedbugs of New York. After a night of trying to sleep in the bathtub, he left Bank Street at six in the morning and went north to Quincy. The New England countryside “looked like God's own,” compared to the city in summer. He drove his mother down to Cape Cod, where despite the commercialization of the “quaintee countree,” the ocean remained beautiful as ever. En route he “tracked down the aromas” of an inn called the Pemaquoddy House and put them into a story called “A Border Incident.” He wrote “the Pemaquoddy saga” for
Harper's Bazaar
and a Christmas story for
Mademoiselle
; both magazines paid rather better than
The New Yorker
.

His fame had preceded him to Quincy. A reporter from the
Quincy Patriot-Ledger
came by to write a feature on the local boy. As he was often to do in later years, Cheever spoke only briefly about himself before getting away from the subject. He was an “author of exceptional modesty,” the interviewer reported. He really hadn't “written anything worth reading yet,” he told her. It took years to get anywhere, he added. You had to keep polishing until you had something. That was what he had been up to—that, and working on a contemporary novel he hoped to finish by the following spring. Actually he was making no progress on the novel at all. By the time he left Quincy he was ready to abandon it in disgust.

Back in New York, Cheever continued cranking out stories. He was scheduled to go to Treetops late in August, and he suggested that perhaps Mary could drive back from New Hampshire with him and they could stop in Saratoga. Clearly, he hoped that she might come to share his fondness for the place. In any case, he felt sure that he and his bride-to-be would have “a wonderful and beautiful life.”

At Treetops, Cheever charmed everyone. Polly immediately recognized that he had the right clothes and manners, and adopted him as an amusing drinking and gossiping and backgammon-playing companion. Winternitz, impressed by the stories his future son-in-law was publishing in
The New Yorker
, spirited him off for long talks in the study. They both were surprised, Mary thought, that she had managed to snare so acceptable a catch. John himself responded as to the parents he might have wished for: an accomplished and well-respected father, an engaging and socially prominent mother. The scenery and weather at Treetops were magnificent. Best of all, John was briefly reunited with Mary after long absence. But she stayed in New Hampshire when he left, his car packed with flowers and vegetables from the gardens at Treetops. These were deposited with his mother in Quincy, much to her delight. Then John kept going down the coast to New York, where he wrote Mary that he hardly knew how to thank her parents. He'd had a wonderful time.

Privately he harbored a few reservations about marriage. The problem wasn't with Mary. He talked glowingly of her; in his eyes, she could do no wrong. He worried about himself. He wondered, after observing the country gentleman's life at Treetops, whether he could provide for Mary in the fashion to which she must have become accustomed. He wondered, too, if he would be able to live up to the image of male sovereignty projected by her father. He understood that he was marrying up the social ladder, and so did most of his friends. “When John decided to marry,” Lib Collins (the artist Elizabeth Logan) commented, “he picked a nice girl from a respectable upper-middle-class family.” It seemed to Lib that by doing so he aimed to work his way back into the social position his own father had drunk and failed him out of.

“A Present for Louisa,” his Christmas story for
Mademoiselle
, addresses the issue of whether to get married without a firm financial footing. Roger and Louisa are considering marriage, but he's not making enough money, and though she has a college degree she can't find a job. They ought to hold off, Roger thinks. “Marriage isn't a lark. It's a serious contract between two adults.” In the end, though, love has its way and they take the plunge.

By the time John and Mary were married in the spring of 1941, they were in rather better shape than his fictional characters. Through her father's connections, Mary landed a job at G. P. Putnam's Sons. She worked first as a secretary to T. R. (Timmy) Coward, but lacked the requisite typing and shorthand skills and was transferred to editing and proofing manuscripts for the publishing house. (She stayed on the job until shortly before their daughter, Susan, was born in 1943.) John, meanwhile, continued his remarkable outpouring of publishable stories, mostly but not entirely for
The New Yorker
. Never again would he match the creative fecundity of the time of his courtship and early marriage. After the fifteen stories of 1940, there were eleven more in 1941 and ten in 1942.

In the fall of 1940, John and Mary resumed their premarital domesticity in Greenwich Village. They even acquired a cat named Harold, after Harold Ross; the name was changed, after a revelation from the veterinarian, to Harolde or Harriet. John paid a last bachelor pilgrimage to Yaddo in the dead of winter. He was ashamed of himself “for gallivanting off” while Mary worked, he wrote her, but the setting was as stimulating as ever. Sharing his pleasure, among others, were his good drinking companion Flannery Lewis and Katherine Anne Porter. At breakfast he heard Porter put down the overtures of a leering playwright. Porter was wonderful, he decided. A few nights later he and Lewis and Porter went downtown to the bars, where she held forth in self-inflating style on her friendships with the great. Porter wasn't so wonderful, he decided.

He had a far better time the night he went to an amateur talent show with Nathan and Carole Asch. Writing Mary about that, he sang Saratoga's praises. Living was cheap, and there were plenty of civilized people to talk to. Why didn't she come up for the weekend and have a look?

On March 22, 1941, John Cheever and Mary Watson Winternitz were married at the Winternitz home in New Haven. The Reverend Sidney Lovett, chaplain and “Uncle Sid” to decades of Yalies, performed an ecumenical ceremony to suit Cheever's Episcopalianism, Dr. Winternitz's Jewish background, and Mary's lack of religious commitment. It was not a large wedding, or a conventional one. Fred served as his brother's best man. Mary's sister Elizabeth was her only attendant. Serious-minded radical that she was, Mary “didn't believe in white or a veil.” She wore a severe gray dress with a corsage at the shoulder. Polly organized “a very nice house wedding” with little sandwiches and champagne. John's parents came down from Quincy. His father seemed a little fuzzy mentally, and Mary's pretty stepsister Louise was deputized to look after him. Everything went smoothly. Afterward John and Mary Cheever returned to Greenwich Village and their new apartment at 19 East Eighth Street.

In reporting on the wedding, the Quincy newspaper was inexact about the educational accomplishments of the Cheevers. “The bride-elect was educated in Switzerland and New York,” the story read, while the groom “attended Thayer Academy and studied at Harvard.” The effect was to imply that John was Mary's equal in educational background, though she graduated from Sarah Lawrence and there is no record of his having enrolled at Harvard. This imbalance created certain tensions, even during the halcyon days of courtship. One night in the fall of 1940, they had dinner with Helen McMaster, who (along with Horace Gregory) had taught Mary in writing courses at Sarah Lawrence, and with a young male instructor from the college. The two academics took the occasion to attack Cheever's
New Yorker
fiction, particularly a story called “Happy Birthday, Enid” that was based on one of Mary's willful stepsisters. Confrontation was the style at Sarah Lawrence. At college Mary was encouraged to express her opinions even when—especially when—they ran counter to received wisdom. But with John and the other men they saw—almost all of them older than John, who was six years older than she—Mary learned to hold her tongue. When she did speak up, they would say, “Oh, that's just Sarah Lawrence” by way of dismissal. The peculiar timbre of Mary's speaking voice also militated against her being taken seriously. Her voice is high and sweet, rather like that of the pianist-singer Blossom Dearie. And since she sounded like a little girl, people were often deceived into thinking her intellectually immature. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Once they were married, John was eager to make himself the breadwinner of the family. He had “very old-fashioned ideas” about marriage, Mary said, foremost among them the conviction that the male should earn the money and the female should make the home. The example of his own family undoubtedly solidified this feeling. His father had not succeeded as provider, his mother had gone to work, and to John's mind, this reversal of roles had disastrous consequences. So, although Mary had a job when they first were married, he wanted to establish himself, start a family, and relieve her of the obligation/privilege of working as soon as possible.

For the most part, he and Mary were very happy together as newlyweds. John possessed then what he always had: the capacity to say the surprising thing. “Most people say what's expected of them, and you can anticipate what's coming,” Mary points out. It was not that way with John. The way he talked about things and people was so amusing, and so beautifully said, that it more than made up for their occasional disputes. As Bill Maxwell recalls from visits to their Eighth Street apartment, “in those days John was terribly funny and charming, and certainly not like anyone else.”

Social life in the Village involved a great deal of drinking. John drank more than Mary, but she participated too. They drank at the party the Werners gave to welcome Mary to their literary and artistic circle. They drank with artists Niles Spencer and Stuart Davis at the marble tables of the Lafayette, where Spencer, “a darling gentle man,” liked to play bagatelle. They drank with Flannery and Claire Lewis, who lived above a nightclub called the Black Cat. Lewis had been banished from Yaddo, the story ran, for drinking too much and urinating into the pool outside the mansion. They drank with Pete and Lib Collins, who were always broke but had a lot of style and didn't mind that the Cheevers were somewhat better off. They drank and ate at the parties Dorothy Dudley used to give on Friday nights. Dorothy, a large hospitable woman with a down-Maine accent and a good job at the Museum of Modern Art, loved to cook. At her invitation the Cheevers and Collinses came over on Thanksgiving eve to stuff the turkey. Lib cut herself slightly on a piece of dry bread, put a small Band-Aid on her finger, and continued stuffing the bird. When the job was done, the bandage had disappeared. All four of them hoped it might turn up in the helping of one particularly stuffy guest the following day, but it never turned up at all. After Thanksgiving dinner Cheever and Edward Lazare, who ran a bookstore nearby, lay down on the floor, themselves stuffed.

Throughout the summer of 1941, the Cheevers spent their weekends looking after Josie Herbst's place at Erwinna in her absence. Venery Valley, they called it, and some drinking was done there too. John worked around the house himself, and hired a neighbor called Foolish—who showed them his “collection of twisted roots” that resembled lewd animals—to mow the field and weed the garden. Just how much these outings in the country meant to John and Mary is suggested in a midsummer 1941 story called “Run, Sheep, Run.” Dave and Ramona, the couple in the story, are flat broke, but Dave steals eight dollars from a Greenwich Village bookstore, enough to pay for a Sunday journey by train and bike to the fresh air of Bucks County. All too soon it is time to go back to the city.

“I wonder where we'll get the money next time,” Ramona said when she heard the train whistle.

“Don't you worry, honey,” Dave said. “We'll get it.”

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, all merely personal matters faded into insignificance. John and Mary heard the news at Edward and Monie Lazare's on Sunday, December 7. Within a week the country was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. “Never before,” President Roosevelt declared, “has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty, and civilization.” The draft was extended to all men between eighteen and sixty-four. By the first of the new year, both Cowley and Herbst had gone to work in Washington, and Cheever asked them to look for openings there. When nothing developed on that front, he determined to enlist. He and Mary made a final trip to Josie's place on Washington's birthday where as usual they warmed themselves in bed with hot bricks wrapped in newspaper. Someday, he hoped, they might all foregather there again when the papers were carrying no war news at all. For the time being, though, all the news was bad. Bataan fell on April 9. John and Mary spent a long weekend together at Treetops. Corregidor surrendered on May 6. The next day Cheever went off to war.

ARMY

1942–1943

At the Fort Dix reception center in New Jersey, Cheever began to undergo the demeaning process of depersonalization immemorially employed by the military to transform civilians into soldiers. Nearly thirty, he was a good deal older than most of the recruits, but the army was no respecter of years. He stripped naked for the medics, was examined twice for gonorrhea, and was given the first of his shots for smallpox, typhoid fever, and tetanus. He had his hair sheared to regulation length, took standardized tests to measure his mechanical aptitude and general IQ, and put on the GI clothing he'd been issued. He saw the obligatory movie on venereal disease and was read the Articles of War, reminding him that the penalty for desertion in time of war was death.

On his third day in the service he got up at 4:30
A.M.
for a fifteen-hour day on KP. Afterward, refreshed by a shower and a glass of beer, he felt completely peaceful and more than a little sad.

Within a week after induction, Private Cheever was shipped south on a troop train to an unannounced destination that turned out to be Camp Croft, five miles from Spartanburg, South Carolina. He was assigned to thirteen weeks of infantry basic training. That would be rough, but—he reassured Mary—there would be plenty of stories to write later; he hoped that he could continue to average forty dollars a week on his fiction even in the army. The army experience itself provided fresh material. Eleven of the fourteen stories he published between the middle of 1942 and the end of 1944 were directly based on characters and incidents he encountered in the service. For the moment, though, he was fully occupied with the business of basic training. Don't bother to send magazines, he told his wife. He didn't know when he'd be able to read them.