John Cheever (20 page)

According to E. J. (Jack) Kahn, Jr., the
New Yorker
writer who preceded the Cheevers in the small house, the Vanderlips “practically created Scarborough.” In 1906, Frank A. Vanderlip, of the National City Bank in New York, bought Beechwood. Soon thereafter, he bought much of the surrounding territory, including the Sleepy Hollow Country Club. He even owned the red-brick building in the railway station plaza where John Cheever settled in to write. The Scarborough train stop itself, it was rumored, had been arranged to accommodate Mr. Vanderlip. He installed two granite columns from 52 Wall Street, site of the first City Bank office, in front of the great ninety-room mansion and transformed the interior with furniture and decorations imported from Europe. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover came for dinner. The Prince of Wales swam in the pool. Isadora Duncan danced alfresco on the great lawn that stretched down toward the Hudson. Ignace Paderewski came to play at the opening of Scarborough School, a private institution established primarily for the education of the Vanderlip children and grandchildren who lived on the estate or nearby. Sheep grazed in a pasture, and a brook wound through woods and fields. There was a rose arbor, an Italian garden, and, immediately adjoining the Cheevers' house (Beechtwig, it was called, or sometimes—by John—Beechnut), a large converted garage used as servants' quarters. Beechtwig itself had been converted from a toolshed.

The Cheevers came to Scarborough largely through the auspices of Jack and Jinny Kahn, who were good friends of Narcissa Vanderlip Street and her husband, Julian. John and Mary had come to dinner parties at Beechtwig when the Kahns were in residence and met some of their circle. When the Kahns decided to move out and build a house at the corner of Holbrook and Scarborough roads, the Cheevers were invited to replace them as renters, and were instantly accepted as part of the community. Though the great days were over, Frank Vanderlip had died, and the paint was peeling in some of the mansion's rooms, Beechwood still represented a world of wealth beyond anything they had ever known. John was the son of a shoe salesman and manufacturer whose business had failed, and of the keeper of a gift shop in Quincy, Massachusetts. Mary's father had been successful, but hers was a small inheritance and it had not yet materialized. They were making do precariously on the money John Cheever earned as a writer. In Scarborough, where the natural and social amenities were freely extended to the family and the rent remained modest, he sometimes detected a whiff of patronage.

Cheever demonstrated a certain wry humor in describing his new circumstances. “In the spring Mary and I are moving into a garage,” he wrote Malcolm Cowley. In fact they were not moving into a garage or even a former garage, but Cheever did not let such nicety of detail get in the way of entertaining his correspondents. He was moving, he wrote author John D. Weaver, his close friend from Astoria days, to a refurbished honeymoon cottage (it had in fact served that purpose for Charlotte Vanderlip, another of Frank's daughters) in “a place called Scarborough which is near Ossining where The Big House [Sing Sing] is.” The house was located “behind the manorial garages and right beside the manorial garbage pail, but from the front door we have a nice view of the manorial lawns and the manorial swimming pool. The swimming pool is so big that it has a groundswell and makes waves in a northeast wind.” The surroundings were magnificent, but—he assured Josie Herbst—“we haven't forgotten our beginnings.”

The situation provided obvious opportunities for social comedy, as on one occasion when the Kahns were still in residence and held a dinner party. They then employed two black sisters as cook and nursemaid, and these women luckily made friends with the butler at Beechwood. When the guests were about to foregather, Edith the cook sent out an SOS to the butler in the mansion for additional silver and wineglasses. He obliged, and Narcissa Street sat down to dinner at the Kahns' table a few hours later, looked around, and said, “I recognize some things at this table.” Cheever loved that story, and enjoyed playing the role—knowing it was a role—of lord of the manor. When guests came to call, he took them on tours past the pool, the parade of trees, the greenhouse where Virginia (Zinny) Vanderlip Schoales's husband, Dudley, cultivated orchids. It was not Cheever's estate, he owned not the smallest portion of it, and yet he seemed to appropriate the surroundings even as he deprecated them. The children, confused, sometimes wondered if they were rich or poor.

In Scarborough, they had moved far enough out to be exurbanites and not suburbanites, as A. C. Spectorsky defined the terms in his 1955 book on the subject. They lived in northern Westchester, beyond the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Cross Westchester Expressway, in an area that was typified—Spectorsky wrote—by a rat race of “local politics, PTA activity, and genteel socializing, not all of it entirely voluntary.” The style of life supposedly involved a strong measure of conformity, compulsive participation in charitable organizations, devotion to the Republican Party, long daily commutes to the city, and skyrocketing taxes as the new residents demanded better schools and public safety for their growing families.

This picture may have been accurate for most in northern Westchester, but not for the Cheevers. As renters they paid no taxes. As a writer who worked either in a quiet room at home or a short walk away at the station, John Cheever did not commute. He did not, then or ever, belong to a country club. Both he and Mary were Democrats, and felt no pressure to conceal their political preferences. On the other hand, there was plenty of social life, they did rapidly become involved in various community organizations, and much of daily existence revolved around the children, just as the social scientists had predicted.

Susan and Ben had no difficulty in adapting to Scarborough. They found plenty of companions: Susie played with Sarah Schoales, Ben played with Joey Kahn, both played with the children of the Italian-American gardener who lived in the remodeled garage next door. They roamed the grounds and explored ruins along the Hudson. Nine months a year, they walked through fields and woods and across a brook to Scarborough School, where two exceptional elementary school teachers—Miss Daniels and Miss Sheridan—managed to inculcate in their charges a love of reading and an appreciation of the world of nature. That world was spread out around them.

The first fall in Scarborough, less than an hour from Grand Central on the fast train, was glorious. It was “the only autumn” he'd seen in twenty years, Cheever reported; he was also enchanted, characteristically for him, by the smells. But even the Beechwood estate could not completely satisfy the fondness for the outdoors that John and Mary Cheever shared. In the summers they drove up to Treetops for the mountain air, and increasingly during the 1950s, they contrived a visit to Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket as well. In the summer of 1952 at the Vineyard, Susie and Connie Morrow were both horse-crazy. When they weren't actually learning to ride, they took turns pretending to be horses, whinnying and galloping about.

The following summer, Susie went off to camp for the first time. John and Mary drove up to Camp Kaioria from Treetops to see her. They watched her participate furiously in a series of camp activities on land and water and horseback. When it was time for her parents to leave, Susie let her father know how desperately homesick she was. When they returned a few days later, however, the homesickness was over, and their distraught daughter was all smiles.

If social life for the Cheevers was not so compulsively organized as Susie's at camp, nonetheless there was a lot of it and, associated with it, a lot of drinking. “I cringe to think how much we drank in those days,” Jinny Kahn recalls. The Kahns functioned as the hub for a group that included the Cheevers, Burton and Aline Benjamin, Don and Ginger Reiman, Phil and Mimi Boyer, and David and Sally Swope, with half a dozen other couples occasionally included in the gatherings. As a group it was not particularly literary: Cheever and Kahn were the only professional writers, and they wrote very different kinds of things. But on the whole they were clever, talented, and attractive people who lived either in Scarborough, in Briarcliff Manor immediately adjoining, in Ossining, the city that in the complications of New York jurisdictions swallowed up both Scarborough and Briarcliff for some governmental purposes but not for others, or in Croton, the hilly town to the north studded with lakes.

In the suburbs the weekend served as a release for those who were liberated for two days from the rigors of commuting to the city. The drinking started promptly at noon on Saturday, when Phil Boyer (who was to become one of Cheever's closest friends) pulled into the Cheevers' driveway. Mary did not always approve of these visits: whatever had been planned for the family or needed doing, “the gin had to be drunk first.” Still, liquor consumption seemed to do no real harm at the time, and often the parties involved a measure of physical activity that helped work off the effects of the alcohol. There were touch football games and softball games and swimming and skating at the Boyers' pond in Croton or the Kahns' in Scarborough. One night the Kahns held a masquerade party on ice with skating waiters and artificial moonlight. In celebration of such gatherings, Cheever inscribed the Kahns' copy of
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories
, the book of stories he published early in 1953:

Here's to Jack and Ginny Kahn!

Bless the chairs they sit upon,

Bless their Edith, bless their sons,

Bless their talent for Home-runs,

Bless their tact, their grace, their glories,

And teach this neighbor to write better stories.

Much of the partying was impromptu, spur-of-the-moment. “You always wanted to be with the group,” as Jinny Kahn says. But there were more formal occasions as well. Dances were occasionally held in the Beechwood mansion. Christmastime summoned forth so many cocktail parties and open houses and tea dances that it was hard to get any work done in Westchester. The grandest party of all was the New Year's Eve dance in the old stables the Swopes owned up in Croton. This was always a costume party with a theme, and preparations were extensive. Cheever didn't much like these parties. He could never find a decent costume himself. And once there was a crisis when Mary drove off with Rod Swope. So at least he recollected twenty years later, at a time when he was often jealous of Mary.

Cheever's own behavior during those early years in Scarborough was circumspect enough. He was flirtatious but also gallant. He disapproved of off-color jokes around the women, and was a stickler for proper manners. “He was certainly the most gentlemanly of anyone in our group,” Jack Kahn remembers. “He was the sort of person you would sit next to the dreadful aunt or boring sister-in-law at dinner. He might have too much to drink, and he would probably mumble—for he mumbled even when sober—but he would certainly be polite and do his best to please his dinner partner.” Usually he succeeded. Cheever was wickedly funny in conversation, with a keen eye and ear for the pretentious. He loved gossip, and in retailing it used his storyteller's knack to improve on the original version. Mumbling aside, it often struck his listeners that he spoke much as he wrote—in beautifully crafted language. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his patrician accent, more pan-Atlantic than Yankee; some assumed that he had acquired the accent as his fortunes improved, but Mary points out that in her forty-three-year experience he always spoke in those rather gargly tones. He dressed well, favoring Brooks Brothers clothes. He had excellent manners and knew all the forks. With his small and wiry frame—he was about five feet five and weighed 140 pounds—he looked rather like Burgess Meredith. All his life he had great charm.

Other talents he lacked, though: vocal talent, for example. Their first Christmas in Scarborough, Mary was asked to sing in a performance of Handel's
Messiah
at the Presbyterian church just across Route 9 from the Cheevers' house. So too were Phil Boyer and the Boyers' daughter Linda. Mimi Boyer and John Cheever were not asked to sing, and on rehearsal evenings they consoled themselves in the Cheevers' living room by giving private concerts on their recorders. John had an alto recorder and Mimi a “very cheap soprano” one. Neither was anything like expert, but gradually they learned the notes and labored through “800 Years of Recorder Music.” They also “drank quite a lot of whiskey during those evenings,” Mimi recalls. After the
Messiah
had been duly performed, John and Mimi continued their duets, except that now she determined to stop drinking. She doubts that she would have made it through that first dark and difficult month of January 1952 “had it not been for John and his recorder.”

Their relative lack of skill was brought home to them when they went to a musical evening for recorder performers in Croton. The other players opened velvet cases and carefully removed their recorders. “What kind of recorder is yours?” someone asked Mimi as she drew it forth from her purse, in two pieces. “It's a six-dollar recorder,” she answered. She and John limped along as accurately as they could, often getting left behind. Halfway through the evening, a loud and very sour note silenced the whole group. “Who did
that
?” someone asked. Blushing, John acknowledged the crime. “My name is John Cheever and I did
that
.” He and his recorder were quiet for the rest of the session.

His adventures in music were not ended, however, for with Susan he began to take piano lessons from a woman named Levina McClure. One of the first stories he wrote about Westchester, “The Music Teacher,” tells of a piano teacher who gives her male pupils a simple and annoying finger drill whose maddening repetition brings their wives to loving surrender. In the end the teacher is found strangled to death. In actuality, Levina was a genteel lady who served juice and cookies at her annual party for her pupils. Then they all gathered around the piano and sang the words to old songs off yellowed sheet music.