My father’s most famous story was published in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. Its hero, a Waspy, aging, and boyish suburban businessman named Neddy Merrill, is hanging out at a neighbor’s pool on a Sunday morning when he decides to swim home across the county from swimming pool to swimming pool. It’s a lovely, languorous, rich-boy idea.

Neddy begins the story and his afternoon adventure as the quintessential Cheever hero: the best of the patriarchy, the loving, prosperous father of beautiful tennis-playing daughters and the husband of a lovely wife, Lucinda. But in art as in life, this surface is nothing but surface.

The brilliant alchemy of narrative threads from myth, literature, and local gossip enabled my father to hit a watery nerve with the splash of an exuberant cannonball. He

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