Word: cheevers
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...family was not his own; it belonged to Mary Winternitz. As Cheever tells it, he picked up Mary in the street, simply because she was beautiful and he fell in love with her. Pressed for details, he says that it was at 545 Fifth Avenue. Actually, their meeting was rich in social comedy of the ironic kind that Cheever simply doesn't deal with or acknowledge when it is there. As Mary tells it, she was working as a sort of trainee-typist in the office of Cheever's literary agent, Maxim Lieber...
Separate Room. On the surface, the story of John and Mary Cheever is a period piece of the '30s. John called in a taxi at Mary's rooming house and swept her off to his Village apartment, where they set up housekeeping. Actually, with vestigial New England punctilio, Mary was installed in a separate room. In any case, events shifted the story into a pattern closer to John's anachronistic traditions. With all the pomp of an outraged Victorian parent, Mary's father descended upon the pair and demanded to know John's intentions. "Marriage...
Father was indeed a formidable man, the redoubtable Dr. Milton C. Winternitz, dean of the Yale Medical School, spectacularly dynamic and articulate, and full of the authoritarian traditions of his profession. In short, a character to delight Cheever's heart. To Mary's faint astonishment, John immediately became a member of the family from which she herself had fled...
...size was enhanced by their spacious way of life. They lived in a huge baronial mansion on New Haven's best street, had an estate in the New Hampshire hills consisting of a great central house and several flanking cottages to take care of the subfamilies involved. Cheever spent long weeks at both places, found a crackling and fond relation with old Dr. Winternitz, a man of astounding energy. In some curious way, immersion in the Winternitz family released Cheever from a kind of writer's block that he had had about his own strained childhood...
...Monogamist. The Cheever marriage is a subject of more than ordinary interest to their friends, seeing that the bulk of Cheever's work concerns somehow a vexation or a crisis in relations between husband and wife. The heart of the matter is probably best deduced from the fact that John Cheever, almost alone in the field of modern fiction, is one who celebrates the glories and delights of monogamy...