Word: winternitz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
...Watson, come here"). Dr. Winternitz himself was in a state of passionately transferred loyalties. Born a Jew, he had become what Freud, in his study on the technique of wit, called ante-Semitic. "When my mother died, he thought he would improve his social position by marrying a Whitney, but I don't think he did," Mary says drily, leaving no doubt as to her opinion of the high life at New Haven, Conn., which the Winternitz-Whitney family maintained...
...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, and led him eventually back to the Wapshots of St. Botolphs. True to the paradox...