Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [117]
Then as later, Cheever had his own way of seeing things, or at least of telling them. Around that time, he sent his daughter to summer camp (Kaiora) in Piermont, New Hampshire, about thirty-five miles north of Treetops. After visiting for a parents’ weekend, he painted a desolate picture for Maxwell's benefit:
[Susan's] smile was broad and forced. She kept seizing my hand and saying: “I'm participating in everything, Daddy.” She was shrill. … We watched her swim, stuff a balsam pillow, row a boat, play box-hockey and plunge into a game of kick ball in which she was the only enthusiastic participant (several of the players hid under the lodge) and the last member of the team—when it began to rain—to give up. … Then [after saying goodbye] Susie called after me and I went back. She was not crying but her eyes were full of tears. “You understand Daddy, don't you,” she said “that I am homesick every minute of the day.” I said that I did. … On Saturday Susie was to be in a play so we returned to see this. She smiled at us from the stage, sang Green Grow the Rushes Oh with a choir, kissed us lightly and ran off with a little girl named Justine Eliot. I've never seen her so happy.
Susan doesn't remember any second visit, and definitely no play or Justine Eliot. According to the journal, however, it does appear they returned at least once for her birthday—a visit that wasn't as bleak as the first, though hardly a red-letter day either (“It was not easy to talk with S[usan], but there was nothing sad”). As for that touching set piece he wrote for Maxwell, it was also characteristic of Cheever that he should castigate himself for having written it: “I yearned to discharge with competence and strength the responsibilities of a family man … [and] I glimpsed the lacks I show in turning my daughter's loneliness into a poor anecdote.”
He would go on telling such anecdotes, though, which generally portrayed himself in a more or less sympathetic light. Twenty years later, while drinking with Raymond Carver and others at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he was effectively in exile from his family), Cheever mentioned that once, after yet another marital spat, he'd woken the next morning to find a message his daughter had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: “D-e-r-e daddy, don't leave us.” Someone remarked that he'd seen that in one of the stories,* and Cheever replied, “Probably so. Everything I write is autobiographical.”
Asked whether she'd ever written “D-e-r-e daddy” in lipstick, Susan was bemused: “I know how to spell, and I think what we wanted was for him to leave us. One thing about my father was he was always there, you could not get rid of him. He worked at home, he ate at home, he drank at home. So ‘don't leave us’?” She laughed. “That was never the fear.”
“I WOULD LIKE TO MOVE ALONG,” Cheever wrote, after a couple of years in Scarborough. “This may be some fundamental irresponsibility; some unwillingness to shoulder the legitimate burdens of a father and a householder. … It is partly the provincialism in the air that makes me want to kick over the applecart.” Having spent much of his youth among writers and artists at Yaddo or in the Village—or wherever it struck his fancy to go—Cheever was disheartened by the effort of finding sustenance among the burghers of Westchester, even the best of them. After a typical dinner with the Schoaleses, for example, he wanly observed of Dudley: “And the rich banker, the man who negotiates loans of millions that will bring iron ore out of the mountains and carry natural gas across a continent is utterly delighted to have found in his garden a squash that is shaped like a sexual organ. I am not hurt or perplexed; I am only bored.” For some time Cowley had been hectoring him to go abroad, suggesting his future as an artist was at stake, but Cheever simply couldn't afford it. As he wrote Eleanor Clark (who divided her time between Connecticut and Rome), “I keep writing a story that begins: ‘We lived in Westchester