John Cheever (19 page)

President Truman's election did little to halt the advance of the postwar Red scare. Earlier that year the left-wing
Partisan Review
began a brouhaha over the award of the Bollingen Prize to the pro-Fascist Ezra Pound. In the summer the Russians blockaded Berlin. In August, Whittaker Chambers publicly accused Alger Hiss of treason. The climate was right for witch-hunts: in February 1949 Robert Lowell accused Yaddo's Elizabeth Ames of harboring Communists. Ames was “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning the whole system,” he declared, and he went to the Yaddo board to ask for her dismissal. Lowell, then in one of his manic phases, persuaded three other colonists to join him in bringing his indictment. Cheever was among those who rallied to her defense.

The trouble began with a news report alleging that Agnes Smedley served as a contact for a Soviet spy ring. Smedley, a social scientist with a particular interest in the Far East, had in fact lived at Yaddo for almost fifteen years as the close friend and confidante of Ames. But Ames had sent her away nearly a year before the story broke in the
New York Times
. By the time Yaddo's board of trustees met late in February, the
Times
had withdrawn the accusation against Smedley. Lowell persisted in demanding Ames's dismissal anyway. She had consorted with Leonard Ehrlich, a “proletarian novelist,” it was alleged. Suspicious jokes had been made about “Molotov cocktail parties.” Ames's private secretary, for five years a paid FBI informant, had heard “people talking very brilliantly red,” and reported them. After thirty pages of testimony of this sort, the board decided to postpone a decision until a meeting in New York on Saturday, March 26.

The delay gave Ames's friends and supporters time to mobilize under the leadership of Eleanor Clark. A group of five—Harvey Breit, Cheever, Clark, Alfred Kazin, and Kappo Phelan—composed a letter to former colonists asking them to sign a petition on behalf of the director. They were firm “anti-Stalinists,” the petition proclaimed, but were also “outraged” by the “smear-technique” that threatened the welfare of the Yaddo where they all had lived and worked. Seventy-five letters went out on March 21. Five days later, the group had fifty-one signers lined up. With these documents in hand, the five defenders went down to Wall Street on March 26 and saved the day for Ames and Yaddo. Cheever had been sought out as one of the five organizers, Clark recalled, because of his own apolitical stance and because of his deep sense of loyalty to Elizabeth Ames. “He was wonderful in his loyalties,” she said.

Back in his tawdry basement workroom, Cheever managed only an occasional swipe at his novel. What he really wanted to write were some long stories in which he could build on the progress he'd made in “The Enormous Radio,” “Torch Song,” and others. In November 1950 he applied to the Guggenheim Foundation to sustain him while he wrote these stories. He had been trying to support himself writing fiction since he was twenty-one, Cheever pointed out, and it had been a chancy enterprise at best. His connection with
The New Yorker
helped, but still there was a terrible “financial uncertainty.” He was confident that he'd grown in his craft over the years. Now, though, he needed a block of time to make a further advance. He proposed to write four or five long stories, using the material that another writer might put into a novel.

In supporting Cheever's candidacy for the grant, Cowley pointed out that his stories were already “much better than they would have to be to be sold to
The New Yorker
.” And he stressed that the thirty-eight-year-old writer was at a turning point in his career. “He can go on to new things or go back; he can't stand still.”

SCARBOROUGH

1951–1955

“I got the horse right here,” one of the gamblers in
Guys and Dolls
insisted on the phonograph. There was bean dip and vegetable curry to eat, and whiskey and gin to drink. No one in the spring of 1951 served wine or water. Like most parties at Margot Morrow's, this one was attended by a mélange of the successful and promising, mostly from the theatrical and literary worlds. The party was for the John Cheevers, who were moving to the suburbs the next day. The William Maxwells were there, as were John Becker, Dr. Dana Ashley, the Paul Osborns, perhaps a dozen others, and the hostess, of course—an attractive divorcée who danced and acted and was for the time “more or less camping out” at her house at 4 Riverview Terrace on New York's East Side.

It was a beautiful May evening, and some of the guests spilled out onto the sidewalk, admiring the view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Cheever sat on the outer sill of a first-floor window, with his legs dangling over the areaway, talking to those outdoors. Then, suddenly, he came flying out of the window and narrowly missed being impaled on the spear-sharp iron fence that enclosed the areaway. His injuries were not serious: he suffered only a bruised knee and twisted ankle. But he might have been killed.

As in all cases of defenestration three possibilities obtained. Cheever knew he had not fallen. He also knew he had not jumped, though in a 1960 magazine article he wrote that he had. He had been pushed, though by whom and why were questions he never knew the answers to. As time wore on, he became convinced that whoever had done it wanted him dead. Perhaps, he speculated two decades later when his long and close association with
The New Yorker
and his friend and editor Bill Maxwell was drawing to an end with a series of story rejections, Maxwell himself had pushed him. But like everything in his experience, the incident was subject to alteration for artistic purposes. In his 1976 novel
Falconer
, his protagonist, Ezekiel Farragut, attributes a similar malevolent act to his brother, Eben, the dark brother—a pervasive figure in Cheever's fiction and thoughts—for whose murder he was serving time in prison.

The actual event, according to one eyewitness, was a good deal less sinister. Some liquor had been drunk. Cheever was installed in the window, looking terribly handsome, and more or less on view. Two friends—psychologist Jack Huber and Stewart Wells, a merchandiser from Minneapolis—were chatting nearby with Mary Cheever, when someone remarked in a joking manner of the figure in the window, “What a pose! Why doesn't somebody give him a push?” So Wells did. None of the three of them, from inside, could see the spiked fence below.

The alternative that he had jumped Cheever adopted in an article he wrote for
Esquire
about the family's move from New York City to Westchester. “The farewell parties were numerous and sometimes tearful. The sense was that we were being exiled … to a barren and provincial life where we would get fat … and spend our evenings glued to the television set. What else can you do in the suburbs? On the night before we left we went to Riverview Terrace for dinner where I jumped, in an exuberance of regret, out of a first-story window.”

“Exuberance of regret” captures something of the ambivalent feelings with which the Cheevers packed for the twenty-five-mile trip up the Hudson to Scarborough. For John Cheever, who had lived in New York City for seventeen years, it may have been the most important journey of his life, but he could hardly have known it at the time. What he felt was a kind of pleasant apprehension—in the words of their Hungarian moving man, “Who knows what brings the future?”—mingled with the city dweller's scorn for the presumed conformities and dullnesses of suburban living. After the party that last night at Margot Morrow's, Cheever reported, he took a long walk to make his private farewells. It was his thirty-ninth birthday.

On a sidewalk somewhere in the Eighties I saw a Cuban going through the steps of a rhumba, holding a baby in his arms. A dinner party in the Sixties was breaking up and men and women were standing in a lighted doorway calling good-by and good-night. In the Fifties I saw a scavenger pushing an enormous English perambulator—a carriage for a princess—from ash can to ash can.

A heady, vernal fragrance rose from Central Park.

In the morning he took a shorter walk, encountering the Italian shoeshine man who was convinced that shoe polish made him randy, and the old lady who fed and watered the pigeons year-round and would become jealous if anyone else did. The city and its inhabitants were “raffish and magnificent,” he thought. Westchester, surely, would be very different. At noon the moving men came and the Cheevers—John, Mary, Susan, almost eight, and Ben, three—joined the postwar migration that carried nine million Americans to the suburbs between 1947 and 1954.

Most of the nine million consisted of families with young children, attracted to the suburbs where the air and the schools were better and the youngsters would have room to learn and play and grow. It was odd, then—or it would have been odd of anyone less inclined to countenance both sides of a question than John Cheever—that in his only extended piece of writing about New York City he addressed the issue of raising children in the city and came down, though rather hesitantly, on the side of growing up urban. The New York he enjoyed most was the one his children knew. “They liked the Central Park lion house at four o'clock on February afternoons, the highest point of the Queensboro Bridge [which they could see from the windows of their apartment at 400 East Fifty-ninth Street], and a riverside dock in the East Forties” where he'd once watched two “tarts playing hop-scotch with a hotel room key.” Those were Sunday walks, and on weekdays he'd sometimes take the children up the block past the Nedick's stand to the Japanese store, where they could spend their allowance on boxes with vanishing coins, rubber spiders, and water flowers.

In his article “Where New York Children Play,” however, Cheever acknowledged that most children beginning life in the city were “usually set out to play in a naked asphalt lot within a steel link fence.” Their mothers came along to keep watch from a park bench and—often enough—to reminisce about their own upbringing in the country or theorize about a future exodus to the leafy exurbs. “Pity the poor children,” said passersby. Pity the children, said many of the mothers, unwilling to accept for them an “environment of tugboats and gutter bonfires.” Pity the children for their lack of space, air, light, and foliage, said psychiatrists, city planners, architects, doctors, and social workers.

But what of the children themselves? “The air was so bad the plane trees that had been put out by the Parks Department had begun to sicken, but the children's cheeks were red, their eyes were bright, their voices sounded as hard and clear as the voices of country kids.” As Christmas approached, they sent and received cards reproducing Currier & Ives scenes of snowy sleigh rides. “Over the river and through the woods …” City children would not remember such trips to grandmother's, but they would remember

wishing on the evening star as it appeared above Hackensack; they would remember a moth-eaten lion [Susan's] and that, at the instant the lights go on over the Queensboro Bridge, a double track of light appears in the river. They would remember the smell of back yards in April, the day they wrote their initials in fresh concrete or picked up a dollar bill on the escalator in Bloomingdale's, and they would, perhaps, conclude that memory is not a greeting card, that childhood is where you spend it, and that it is time to discard the country Christmas and the buffalo robe and let the city playgrounds into our consciousness as a legitimate place to begin life.

Holiday
ran Cheever's article in August 1951. By then the author and his wife had decided to let their children spend their childhood, if not in the country, at least in the near-approximation that Scarborough offered.

Both John and Mary Cheever felt the pull of the countryside. Some of the happiest times in the first ten years of their marriage had been spent during weekend visits to Josephine Herbst's house in Erwinna, and during long summer weeks at Treetops. Sometimes Cheever left Treetops in midsummer, in order to work alone in the city. These trips were rarely successful. On one such visit the air smelled “like a piece of dirty grey felt.” On another the inhabitants looked “like the citizens of hell,” and he soon fled northward.

However the Cheevers felt about resuming city life, the very fact that they could weekend in Erwinna and that the children could count on summers in the New Hampshire countryside made staying in Manhattan more tolerable. They might have stayed permanently except for the financial and spatial pressures of apartment living. They moved finally because Susie and Ben were crammed into one tiny bedroom in the Fifty-ninth Street apartment and they could not find a larger apartment they could afford.

It seemed to Cheever, in retrospect, that they had been driven out of the city along with most of the rest of the middle class. Their apartment house changed hands and the new owners prepared to turn the building into a cooperative. The Cheevers were given eight months to find another home. Most of the people they knew, he then realized, lived either in elegant River House flats or in tenements downtown where you had to put out pots and pans when it rained. The search for an apartment of intermediate cost and condition did not go well. In March of 1951 he failed to pay the electric bill and the lights were turned off. The children enjoyed their baths by candlelight, but the dark apartment had a somber effect on Cheever. “We simply didn't have the scratch” to stay in New York City, he decided, even after word came through of his Guggenheim grant. A week later, he went out to Westchester “and arranged to rent a little frame house with a sickly shade tree on the lawn.”

The description hardly did justice to their new home in Scarborough, for theirs was no ordinary move to the suburbs. To be sure, the house was not large, though the children had their own bedrooms. Only an eight-foot-high brick wall protected it from the traffic roaring down the Albany Post Road (Route 9) a few yards away. Once a truck crashed through the wall but subsided short of the house. Nor was it in especially good shape: the drains often clogged, the heating plant was infirm, and the roof sometimes leaked. But these were minor disadvantages when measured against their new home's setting as one of the outbuildings of Beechwood, the vast Vanderlip estate on the Hudson.