In this compelling companion volume to her acclaimed memoir Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever once again gives readers a revealing look into her famous family, whose secrets and eccentricities parallel their genius and successes. Set against the backdrop of Treetops, the New Hampshire family retreat where the Cheevers still summer, and going back several generations, this powerful remembrance focuses on Susan Cheever's mother's family, and includes portraits of her great-grandfather, Thomas Watson, who invented the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell, and her grandfather Milton Winternitz, a brilliant doctor who built Yale Medical School. And of course there is her beloved and talented father John Cheever, the accomplished author who became one of the most well-known writers of the century, often using his family as material. Perhaps most riveting about Susan Cheever's second biographical masterpiece is its exploration of the lives of the Cheever women. At once a unique family portrait and the tale of every family, Treetops draws us effortlessly into a fascinating yet endearingly familiar world. The Wall Street Journal Ms. Cheever's...coolly intelligent perspective...provides a clear, hard-edged picture of the snobbery, sexism, anti-Semitism adultery, alcoholism, and emotional dishonesty that were part and parcel of those swimming pools and tennis courts. The Washington Post Book World Engrossing...moving... Treetops is Susan Cheever's...most satisfyingly realized work to date. Houston Chronicle This smooth, articulate, inviting book takes us into the lair of a celebrated family. Susan Cheever, with keen observation and incisive character sketches, offers a tantalizingly spare memoir. Los Angeles Times Treetops may well be Susan Cheever's masterpiece. New York Daily News Because it's such a fascinating family, it's a fascinating book, but it's not always a pretty story, and one has to admire Susan Cheever's courage in telling it....Her greatest gifts come across in her memoirs.... Home Before Dark and Treetops have established her as a very accomplished writer. Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family. CHAPTER ONE TREETOPS was built out of my great-grandfather Tom Watson's dreams. Born grit poor in a Salem, Massachusetts livery stable, Watson got rich and famous in the 1870s, when he and his friend Alexander Graham Bell invented and developed the telephone. Watson was an inspired technician, a clever storyteller, a driven adventurer, and a man who lost a lot of money banking on the innate goodness of human nature. He spent the bulk of his Bell millions building a shipyard which employed most of eastern Massachusetts during the depression of the 1890s -- he joked that it would have been cheaper to pension off every ablebodied man in the state. His unorthodox management methods -- Watson liked to bid on huge navy battleships his Fore River shipyard wasn't equipped to build, figuring that if he won the bid he'd expand -- sent the shipyard's treasurer into a sanatorium with a nervous breakdown, but Watson managed to produce five of the cruisers and battleships in President Theodore Roosevelt's navy, and two of his ships went around the world with the proud Great White Fleet. When the shipyard's creditors finally foreclosed, Watson had saved enough to five on if he supplemented his income with writing and lectures, and to buy the fifty acres on a hillside in New Hampshire which is still the geographical center of his family. Watson believed that the rich owed the poor. With his friend Edward Bellamy, the American writer and socialist, he founded the Nationalist political party He also panned for gold in Alaska, studied classical music, committed most of Shakespeare's plays to memory, and became a geologist who had a fossil -- Watsonella -- named after him. In his fifties, Watson joined Frank Benson's traveling company of Shakespearean players and toured the small towns of England. Fully costumed in armor or togas, he proclaimed his lines -- "Ave Brutus!" was one -- from the ramshackle stages at Bath, Birmingham, and Liverpool. In my family, conventional success at formal education has always been taken as a sign of a dull, law-abiding nature. My father was expelled from school at seventeen and wrote his first story about it. My grandfather Milton Charles Winternitz graduated at fifteen. Watson quit school in Salem when he was fourteen. By the time his classmates were getting their degrees, he was chumming around with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm and tryin