A Circular Journey

Shutting the Door on Someone

Shutting the Door on Someone It’s been a long time since I’ve cared to remember the day I shut the front door of our Croton house in John Cheever’s face. My weird response to his ring and to seeing him on our porch, dwarfed by the columns of that large, four-square grey stucco house, so dismayed me at the time that I chose to obliterate it. I never mentioned it to anyone. Nor did I ever refer to it on any occasion I ever saw John again, not to apologize, not to explain, not even to laugh it off as I might have since he was forever amused and indulgent at the bizarreness of everything. And so I have never known what he thought as the door closed. Did he imagine that I might have been sheltering the FedEx man? That I was batty? A prude? Maybe he was wise enough to see a young woman thoroughly discomfited and taken aback by the unexpected presence of a well-known writer saying, ‘‘I’ve brought back your stories,’’ as he held out a thick manila envelope. He had driven over from Scarborough to give me the packet. I gasped, ‘‘Oh!’’ said ‘‘Thank you,’’ and immediately shut the door. I panicked. I was not only taken by surprise, I was also terrified by what John might have said. In a colossal failure of nerve, and in a split second, it must have flashed through my mind that he could—politely, of course—dismiss the stories, wipe out what confidence was burgeoning, turn off those tentative beginnings of mine. He might have said something like, ‘‘Look, if you have anything better to do, why don’t you.’’ He might, on the other hand, have said ‘‘I think these show promise.’’ But at that point in my 155 life, having receded into the shadowy recesses of translating my husband’s stories and camouflaging my voice with his, my hold on my own work was too fragile to risk losing through any words that might have pushed me further into the morass of self-doubt. All this occurred at mid-morning on a fall day years ago after we first met the Cheevers, and just before we moved from the stucco house in Croton to the barn house we purchased from Aaron Copland at Shady Lane Farm in Ossining Town. I still remember the acrid odor of faded, once-blooming geraniums from the boxes on the front porch in Croton that hit my nostrils when I opened the door. It was the end of summer; sun and light were lower on the earth. There must have been a chill—perhaps a frost?—John was wearing a camel’s hair coat. I was alone at home since my husband had gone off to his office in New York on the commuters’ 8:02 from Croton-Harmon as usual; and our two girls were at school. It was because they were enrolled at Scarborough Country Day School that we met the Cheevers. Ginny Kahn, who was then married to E. J. Kahn Jr., long of The New Yorker, was at a parents’ function Antonio and I attended. The minute we were introduced to the Kahns and Antonio opened his mouth, Ginny exclaimed, ‘‘You’re Italian!’’ followed by, ‘‘You’ll have to meet the Cheevers who’ve just come back from Italy.’’ And so we did. And, in a strange conjunction, when we moved into the Copland house, John and Mary Cheever were about to move into their own new home just over the hill from us, which made us neighbors. In many ways John and Antonio had similar natures. They both had a natural gentleness and fragility from privation in boyhood— Antonio had lost his father, a naval officer when he was only nine and John’s New England family had begun coming apart when he, too, was young and susceptible. Both had genteel families who had seen better days. Both were natural and hilarious storytellers who embellished deft embroideries on the stories they told. They 156 were also both very religious, and haunted by loss. They communicated in versions of either English or Italian depending on who was using which language. They enjoyed each other’s company, and there was that counterpart of Antonio’s ongoing discovery of America and John’s just having...