Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [111]
This was perhaps her decorous New England way (“Feel that refreshing breeze”) of letting John know his older brother had a drinking problem, as he did. The brothers had rarely seen each other for the past ten years or so, but after one recent visit John had noted that Fred seemed “like a man in a labyrinth, who thinks that he is unobserved. Fumbling, lost, self-deluded.” By then Fred had begun to alarm his family and alienate his neighbors, but at the same time he was still advertising manager at Pepperell and about to be promoted to the head of the Sheet and Blanket Division—a promotion that would bring him to New York and closer to his brilliant little brother. Fred later wrote his daughter Sarah that the move to “an exciting place like New York” was “part of trying to deny [his] middle-class status,” and in fact Fred shared and even surpassed his brother's ambivalent snobbery. On the one hand, Fred was tired of small-town bourgeoisie and wanted to be introduced to bright, sophisticated people—writers and artists—and perhaps he expected Joey's help with that. On the other hand, he wasn't a writer or an artist, or even particularly sophisticated; he was a businessman who considered himself an intellectual, too, and wanted credit for both—his success and his intellect—to say nothing of his winning personality (“Where there's a Cheever, there's color,“ he liked to say). In 1952, Fred bought an ivy-bearded Tudor in Briarcliff Manor, about a half-mile from Beechtwig.
John was horrified. He'd spent almost twenty years reinventing himself, adopting his mother-in-law, Polly, “as a phantom parent,” ingratiating himself with the nobs of Scarborough—and here, lumbering out of the past, was his drunken Rotarian brother. “Hey, Joey!” Fred would hail him across a room of his peers, the local smart set, and what could John do but wave back and try not to wince? Nor did he overestimate his friends’ dismay: this was certainly not what they'd expected from a brother of John Cheever. Mimi Boyer found Fred “gross, roughhewn,” and actively avoided him, while for his part John urged the whole crowd to keep their distance, for Fred's sake as well as their own. Nor did it help that Iris and Mary Cheever despised each other. Iris sensed that Mary and her Scarborough friends didn't cotton to her and Fred, and she bitterly resented it—why didn't John and Mary help them more, and where did they get off anyway? Did they live in an elegant Tudor house? Did they have a daughter at Milton Academy, about to be presented to Boston Society at the Debutante Cotillion?* Besides, Iris was born in Canada to British parents, and knew plenty about the right way to serve tea and so forth; if anything Mary should defer to her.
Iris complained to her husband, but what could he do? He'd also picked up on the condescension and perhaps understood it all too well—at any rate he became more and more glum and drunken. Even John was startled by how badly things were turning out. “I think of F[red] who seems to me deeply unhappy,” he wrote in his journal.
I can't imagine how they think of me or how they anticipated thinking of me. It may have been little Joey; it may be unacceptable to them that I am not little Joey and this may again be vanity on my part. But why should I go to see him; with one exception, when we were alone, our meetings have been disastrous. He retires from a creative, a progressive human relationship into a drunken corner every time.
Fred may have been understandably chagrined that, far from being accepted on his merits as a successful, intelligent