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 began with summer and the myth of Narcissus. Then there was Odysseus in our family’s often-read Robert Fitzgerald translation. Like Neddy, Odysseus traveled home across the water to Ithaca with many fraught stops. My father also still relished that gossipy story from our neighborhood about a man whose wife left him and took the children and all the furniture. And most of all there were our friends’ and Westchester neighbors’ elegant swimming pools, many built in the glorious 1920s, when no country estate was complete without one.

Perhaps the idea for the story began at Yaddo, when my father, who had gone there to write, encountered the preternaturally boyish composer Ned Rorem at the writing colony’s pool. My father, also preternaturally boyish, embarked on an affair with Rorem. Although he once boasted that he had sex on every surface at Yaddo, gay affairs caused him a lot of emotional trouble. Ned became Neddy. The swimming pool at Yaddo became the Westerhazys’ pool.

It had originally been intended as a novel, worked on in the downstairs guest room of the house in Ossining where my father typed away all morning. It would have been his third novel, after The Wapshot Chronicle, which had won the National Book Award in 1958, and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, published in 1964. Both novels are set in the fictional town of St. Botolphs outside Boston, and both feature two brothers wrestling with their difficult fates. This would be something different, my father thought. It would be a contemporary novel about class and money, a novel about one man’s progress, a suburban pilgrim’s progress, from pool to pool. The novel would begin on a sunny summer day with cumulus clouds gathering like an army in the distance.

My father was a connoisseur of Westchester County swimming pools. He refused to build one for himself, although there had been times when he could have afforded to. Indeed, there had been a pool built from a pond in the original plans of the house my parents had bought in 1961. But my father had a wandering heart, the soul of a renter, and perhaps he knew that no pool he built could rival the neighboring pools, where we all swam as if we owned them.