Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Her negativism, her digressive negativism are thought to be bad attitudes in class. Our conversation begins in soft voices but then I begin to shout, she cries and throws herself onto her bed, I order her to get up and eat dinner and tell her if this were in Italy I would hit her over the head with a piece of wood, and Federico, catching the harsh or ugly notes in my voice, begins to cry. We sit down to a gloomy table. I read. At eight o'clock sharp the wind springs out of the north with gale force, an inundation of snow and rain. Susie goes for a walk in the storm. Later I speak with her. “I'm indifferent,” she says. “I'm a mass of intelligence adrift. I don't care if I sleep in the street.”

  “Oh, you don't,” say I, as the wind flings the rain against the windows. “Would you like to go out and sleep in the street this evening?” Here is sarcasm, fruitless and obscene.

  Such unkindness (when he was aware of it) filled Cheever with remorse, and one of the ways he tried to make amends was with a sincere effort to be friends with the girl. His advice about her looks was, in a sense, meant to be friendly, and also they stayed up late at night discussing books and whatnot (often she was so exhausted in the morning that she could hardly stay awake at school). They talked about Yeats and Stendhal and the friendship of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and sometimes Cheever would digress about certain personal woes (wondering later if he'd been “merciless” in doing so). But even in the midst of such intimacy there were certain points of decorum which tripped the girl up like so many landmines (“S[usan] asks me who was the Marquis de Sade and I blow skyhigh again”)—though later, sober, Cheever was usually sheepish or downright miserable about losing his temper, if not quite able to apologize. Another touchy subject was the few but intense friendships the girl had made at Masters, a place where the headmistress had been fired because she was suspected to be a lesbian; Susan was also enamored of a charismatic teacher (female) who lived with another teacher (female), all matters that made her father nervous “for reasons [she] didn't understand.” Under the circumstances, he might have been relieved when she finally decided to transfer to a boarding school (Woodstock) in Vermont, where at least she was happy, but he was very disappointed and told her so. One advantage to her absence, however, was that he could sustain himself with reveries of her returning as the daughter he'd always wanted (“Her figure is perfect, her face is slender and lovely”), though it only made matters worse when his hopes were dashed all over again. As he wrote that spring, he didn't understand Susan at all: “I've fed her, bathed her, taken her up in the night, plucked thorns and splinters out of her feet, loved her … but now when I speak to her she weeps and slams the door, hides in the woods on a fine Sunday morning, seems on the one hand merry and on the other to carry some unanswered question.”

  Ben was now old enough to be a considerable disappointment in his own right: as his father was at pains to remind him, he too needed to lose weight and do better in school and (especially) take an interest in sports like other boys. As Federico remarked many years later, “Ben, poor Ben, bore the brunt of all this masculine hoopla and accepted it with the fatalism [with which] he has accepted almost everything in his life.” Cheever, a great reader of Freud, was not consoled by the news that homosexual tendencies are somewhat innate in all people; rather he became even more vigilant in cultivating a proper ethos for his older son. “Speak like a man!” he'd say, driven up the wall by the boy's high-pitched voice, not to mention his giggling (“You laugh like a woman!”). And while perhaps a little boy can't help what his voice sounds like, he didn't have to choose to speak that way—as Ben sometimes did, forming little two-legged creatures out of his hands and making them talk to each other in tiny piping voices (“Stop that nonsense!”). Also, he liked to dance in front of the bathroom mirror—pretending he was a gunslinger who could dance so well that he dodged bullets—until one day his father walked in: “That,” said Ben, “was the end of my dancing in front of the mirror.”

  In addition to such ominous behavior, the boy had a bed-wetting problem and couldn't read very well. His parents decided to invite his “hated teacher” to dinner, the better to discuss their concerns in depth and perhaps ingratiate themselves in some helpful way. It soon transpired, however, that Cheever's romantic interest in the teacher “pretty much blotted out” (as Ben put it) any immediate academic matters. (“Ben's teacher for supper—how pretty girls refresh and compliment our feelings—and later to a concert and, during a Bach chorale, guess what I was thinking about.”) Years later Ben was diagnosed with exophoria, which causes one eye to wander and diminishes depth perception (affecting athletic endeavors too); at the time, though, his parents didn't know what to make of his terrible marks in school, and deemed it best for him to repeat second grade while in Italy. Since his old, pre-Italy friends had all been promoted, the boy grew even more lonely, depressed, and apt to wet his bed, and finally (like his sister before him) went to a psychiatrist.

  Cheever's worries deepened when the ten-year-old Ben befriended an effeminate boy named Rick, whose family had moved to the carriage house next door.* For two years or so, the boys were almost inseparable: they'd disappear for hours, playing Monopoly or reading in the basement, or else go for long bicycle hikes and stop by the woods to explore. As for Cheever, he couldn't help seething whenever he laid eyes on Rick: “[He] often stands with both hands on his hips in an attitude that I was told, when I was a boy, was the sign of a congenital queer. … He is attached securely to my son and I do not like him.” But of course the source of his misgivings was a taboo subject, such that Cheever's erratic behavior was an all-but-total mystery to the boys. Once, they returned from a long bicycle hike and were sitting under a tree when Cheever “came rip-snorting out of the house” and began shouting at Ben about some nominal grievance—this while looking at the other boy, whose bicycle he kept shaking for emphasis: “He seemed to be directing his anger at me” Rick remembered, “and at the end of his tirade he threw my bike on the ground. I was flabbergasted.” Nor could he fathom Cheever's coldness one Halloween, when the boys went trick-or-treating together; Rick was already in costume when he came for Ben, and Mr. Cheever gave him a very hard stare before finally calling his son to the door. As it happened, he was “rigid with indignation”: “A friend of Ben's,” he wrote Weaver, “who has always seemed to me on the delicate side, showed up at the door in high-heeled shoes and an old evening dress, rouged to the ears and blooming.” Ben, especially, was nonplussed by it all. His father seemed forever berating him over trifles: You've been gone how long picking blueberries? And that's all the blueberries you've picked? And why didn't you go to the football game with everyone else? Where have you been all this time—? “What I claim to feel is that he has turned his back on the beauty of the autumn day, the green playing field, and the decent people,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “but what I really fear is that he has been indulging in the vices of my own youth, smoking cigarettes and masturbating in the moldy-smelling woods. … So I seem to pour onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt.”

  He wanted to be the right kind of father—not like his own father, in short, the dreaded “passive father” of Freudian lore. This meant enticing his son onto fields of glory: reminding him to practice his soccer passes (“although he would sooner take his tame mouse for a walk”), kick a football, and by all means learn a seemly love for baseball, that sine qua non of American manhood. “When I was seven years old,” Ben remembered, “he told me that if I picked a team, he would take me to a game, and after that he'd help me follow the standings in the newspaper. He gave me a list of teams.” Ben picked the Baltimore Orioles, and Cheever asked why. “Because Oriole is such a pretty name,” the boy explained. And yet Cheever persevered. One of the great morbidities of his own youth had been an effeminate wing (the fault of a passive father), and his own son would be spared that, if possible. As Ben wrote in “The Boy They Cut,” Cheever would often coax his indifferent, exophoric son to play catch with him.

&n
bsp; We'd go outside. He'd throw the ball at me. I'd drop it.

  “I'm sorry,” I'd say and pick the ball up and throw it back.

  He'd throw the ball again. Again I'd fail to make the catch. “Sorry,” I'd say. …

  “For Christ's sake, stop apologizing,” he'd say. “Okay,” I'd say. “I'm sorry.”

  But at last they discovered a mutual love of the outdoors: Cheever delightedly taught his son how to fish, and Ben became an avid reader of Field & Stream (which, he said, “you could read without having any questions about your sexual identity”). When he expressed interest in a twenty-two-dollar kayak kit (“Hours of Paddling Fun!”), Cheever bought it for him at once, and wasn't the least dismayed when Ben wrecked the thing a week later in the Croton River; he promptly bought him another, better kayak. Ben—nothing if not eager to please, and sensing he was on a roll of sorts—zestfully took up a lot of manly chores, like felling trees and splitting wood, for which his grateful father paid him fifty cents an hour. Sometimes after these exertions the boy would reward himself with a bubble bath—until one day his father found him reclining among the suds. “Who do you think you are?” he roared. “Some kind of STARLET?!”

  Nobody could say he didn't care—and really, at bottom, he had almost nothing but sympathy for the sensitive little boy. When Ben would leave the dinner table in tears and go hide under his bed, his father would sometimes lie on the floor beside him and (as Ben recalled) “talk to [him] through the dust bunnies.” And there were many times when the boy would get scared at night and crawl between his parents—then wet the bed. “We did the best we could,” Ben decided, many years later.

  FRED CHEEVER WAS TRYING to stay sober, but he was having a hard time finding work, and he still had children to support. One day in early October 1959—Dr. Winternitz had just died—John got a call from his brother asking if they could “discuss some business,” and the two met for lunch. “Fred talks on about his trip across the country in August and finally I ask him, as gently as possible, what is on his mind,” John wrote. “‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘nothing,’ but as I press him a little I find that he plans to open a men's-clothing store in either San Juan, Puerto Rico, or Palo Alto, California. … I ask him if he would like some money. No, this will not be necessary; but we drive back to the house and I write him a check for five hundred dollars. He puts this in his pocket and leaves.” Within a few weeks, Fred got a salesman job for the Hearst Sunday supplement, American Weekly, but he seemed in poor health (“fat and very lame”) and of course he could always start drinking again. John had borrowed from The New Yorker to make up the “loan” to Fred, which he realized was likely the first of many: “[A]t the moment I have nine dependents,” he wrote Weaver. “This is one hell of a burden for my childlike sense of wonder.”

  It was a bad time to be strapped for cash. In the past few months, Cheever had flogged himself into writing as many stories as possible (“wanting to prove to myself that I can”), but the work wasn't very gratifying anymore, except materially. He often felt as if he'd done about as much as he could in the short form, at a time when most writers of the first rank were focusing almost exclusively on novels. Also, he was more embarrassed than ever to be associated so closely with The New Yorker—appearing constantly amid the “bland poetry” and “bad cartoons,” he wrote, had begun to seem a kind of “confinement”: “I must realize that the people who read my fiction have stopped reading The New Yorker; I must realize that the breach here is real and happy.” And yet, three and a half years after finishing The Wapshot Chronicle, he had only the vaguest idea what his next novel would be about. A story he'd published earlier in the year—”The Events of That Easter,” about an egg-hunt contest gone awry—seemed part of something bigger, but he was far from certain what; all he knew, more or less, was that he wanted to write a Wapshot sequel treating “Coverly as Apollo and Moses as Dionysus,” since the theme of fraternal competitiveness was on his mind at the moment.

  He refused, however, to say even that much when he asked Harper for an advance at the end of the year, or, for that matter, when he applied for another Guggenheim: he simply stated, as was true, that he wanted to work on a novel without (“for once”) having to support himself with story writing at the same time. Harper gave him $6,850—a paltry sum for a writer of his stature (though Cheever might have wanted it that way)—and meanwhile he worried that he'd queered his chances for a second Guggenheim by “smashing] into” the foundation's president, Henry Allen Moe, at the Century Club (“what with the gin and one thing or another”). When he was, in fact, awarded a fellowship, Cheever asked for the same amount he'd gotten ten years before—three thousand dollars—since he only needed roughly ten thousand (he said) to “feed, shelter and educate” his family, and he hoped the Harper advance would account for the rest.*

  “My one New Year resolution,” he wrote Herbst at the beginning of 1960, “is that I Will Not Write Anymore Short Stories, so help me God.” It was a resolution he'd soon break, but first he tried his hand at writing a play, which, if he could bring it off, might sell for big money. A few surviving notes indicate The Rules of the Game was to be a three-act teleplay satirizing the nuclear age in some mysterious way; there was a scientist named Simon who “could be employed by [Edward] Teller,” and evidently this character was to appear on a quiz show involving soundproof booths (the Game of the title, though Cheever had yet to invent the Rules). Between acts, Cheever planned to include a couple of mock commercials for a tonic called Elixircol that restored youth and protected one from “excess radioactivity.” After a few weeks, though, Cheever gave up (“The play just seems to lack density and everything else”) and cannibalized the commercials into a story, “The Death of Justina,” which he quickly finished with great satisfaction: “I think B[ill] will say tearfully that it is brilliant,” he noted (then added a little doubtfully, “It will be interesting to see”).

  The core story of this complicated tour-de-force is suggested by the title: Justina, an elderly cousin of the narrator Moses's wife,† dies during a visit and sits gaping on the sofa while Moses learns, to his chagrin, that he is prevented by a zoning ordinance from disposing of the body. As his doctor explains, “A couple of years ago some stranger bought the old Plewett mansion and it turned out that he was planning to operate it as a funeral home. We didn't have any zoning provision at the time that would protect us and one was rushed through the Village Council at midnight and they overdid it. It seems that you not only can't have a funeral home in Zone B—you can't bury anything there and you can't die there.” The doctor suggests that Moses drive his guest to Zone C (“beyond the traffic light by the high school”) and “just say that she died in the car.” When Moses indignantly appeals to the Mayor, the man objects that such “morbidity” could easily get out of hand (“People don't like to live in a neighborhood where this sort of thing goes on all the time”), but finally agrees to make an exception when Moses threatens to bury the woman in his backyard. The funeral, however, is a very gloomy affair on the outskirts of town, where the dead “are transported furtively as knaves and scoundrels and where they lie in an atmosphere of perfect neglect.”

  Such anyway is the pretext for an elaborate rumination on the denial of death in a pre-apocalyptic world. At the outset Moses informs us that he's just given up drinking and smoking on doctor's orders, as a result of which his senses are so dreadfully heightened that he sees a face in his breakfast muffin (“As you can see, I was nervous”) and for the first time perceives the awful breadth of despair beneath the paralyzing gentility of Proxmire Manor: “Above me on the hill were my home and the homes of my friends, all lighted and smelling of fragrant wood smoke like the temples in a sacred grove, dedicated to monogamy, feckless childhood, and domestic bliss but so like a dream that I felt the lack of viscera with much more than poignance—the absence of that inner dynamism we respond to in some European landscapes. In short, I was disappointed.” Even the “anthracite eyes” of a melting snowman s
eem to regard the scene with “terrifying bitterness.” The same malaise prevails at Moses's office, where he is prevented from attending to poor Justina by his gum-chewing tyrant of a boss, who insists he stay behind to write a commercial for Elixircol, “the true juice of youth.” Rebelling against a world in which “the solemn fact of death” cannot be respected or even admitted, Moses writes a scathing parody: “Are you growing old? … Are you falling out of love with your face in the looking glass? Does your face in the morning seem rucked and seamed with alcoholic and sexual excesses and does the rest of you appear to be a grayish-pink lump, covered all over with brindle hair?” And so on, hilariously. (There are three commercials in all, the last consisting verbatim of the Twenty-third Psalm.) A further element in this zany (yet somber) fantasia is a dream Moses has on the night of Justina's death: in a vast supermarket he sees thousands of shoppers—obviously citizens of his own “beloved country,” there being a farrago of races, colors, and creeds, all dressed with “sumptuary abandon”—pushing their wagons amid harshly lighted aisles and deliberating over ambiguous victuals: “Nothing was labeled. Nothing was identified or known.” At the checkout counters they are met by “brutes” who rip open their parcels and cause the shoppers to show “all the symptoms of the deepest guilt” at the sight of what they have chosen, whereupon they are pushed out the door and taken away, moaning and crying, into the darkness. “What could be the meaning of this?” Moses asks, and the answer seems to lie somewhere in Hawthorne's injunction at the end of The Scarlet Letter: “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” Or, as Moses reflects after Justina's oddly shameful funeral, “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?”