Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [129]
The All Saints rector was Reverend William Arnold, who presided at Cheever's confirmation on October 16, 1955. With this man at least somewhat in mind, Cheever once told his son Ben that it didn't matter if the minister was a jackass—though there were times, plainly, when it did. “I will not go to church,” Cheever recorded one Good Friday, “because B[ill] will insist upon giving a sermon and I will not have the latitude or the intelligence to overlook its repetitiousness, grammatical errors and stupidity.” Arnold was an affable, tippling bachelor who liked to insinuate himself as much as possible into the life of the community, participating in local theater productions and cadging meals among his flock. What he knew about Cheever was that the latter wrote “articles” for The New Yorker and served enormous martinis, such that the garrulous ex-army chaplain was sometimes slow to leave in the evenings. “I'd ask you to stay for dinner, Bill, but I don't even know what we're going to have,” Cheever once remarked, urging the man out of his chair just as Cassie wandered into the room with a leg of lamb clamped in her jaws (the meat was extracted and popped in the oven). Nevertheless Cheever stuck with All Saints, because it met his basic requirements: it used the Cranmer prayer book and was less than ten minutes away, and (as Susan Cheever pointed out) its altar was “sufficiently simple so that it [didn't] remind him of a gift shop.” Also, the eight o'clock service was sermon-free, so he could have at least twenty-three minutes of relative peace each week (“a level of introspection that's granted to me at no other time”). Not one to proselytize, he rarely mentioned his faith except at odd moments when visited by the same happiness that had moved him to become a communicant in the first place: “There has to be someone you thank for the party.”
HIS MOTHER clearly wasn't long for the world, and to the end Cheever chided himself to be kinder to the old woman: “He would have liked, somehow, to do it again,” he wrote a few months before her death,* “to have them both behave differently, to spare her, in her old age, the sharp teeth of loneliness, helplessness and neglect.” She was nothing if not proud, however: having been (relatively) deserted by her children and scorned by an ungrateful, dissolute husband, she clung to her independence with something akin to bitterness. “I am eating a capon in front of my fireplace and I am not lonely,” she proclaimed when Cheever phoned during her penultimate Thanksgiving on earth. He felt guilty about neglecting her, but not so guilty that he could bring himself to visit more than once or twice a year. At such times he'd keep a polite simper afloat while his mother chatted (perversely, he thought) about a lovely new mural at the corset shop, or a pleasant young man who was, after all, “a regular boy.”
Probably the woman had no idea of the bruises she was stomping on—certainly her son wasn't one to enlighten her—and simply figured the best she could do was not be a bother. Toward the end, she sold her little house (giving