Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [15]
Unassisted by modern medicine, Cheever's lungs took a long time to heal, and he became even more of a loner and (reputed) mama's boy. Once his convalescence was over, he continued to plead ill health in order to excuse himself from gym class and other games, though such lies filled him with “self-loathing and remorse”—all the more so in light of his brother's vaunted athleticism and regular-guy charm: “[T]hat boy of summer,” Cheever recalled. “Quarterback … Captain of the undefeated hockey team. Happy with his friends, nimble with his girls, he loved his muzzy and dazzy” Fred's heroics even extended to sticking up for his delicate little brother, like the time he punched an Irishman at Braintree Dam for saying that John looked like a girl when he skated. But mostly Fred was too old and popular then to take much of an interest in John, who desperately wanted help with his “effeminate wing” so he could play baseball like the other boys: “I used to get out of bed in the middle of the night and practice pitching,” he wrote in his journal. “Neither my brother nor my father would help me; there seemed to be a conspiracy on their part to keep me out of their male demesne.” The trauma would become fodder for a bleakly amusing story in 1953, “The National Pastime,” which begins, “To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.” The narrator remembers having to beg a game of catch with his cold, unloving father (a malign ur-version of Leander Wapshot), who “stretched [him] out unconscious” with a throw to the back of the neck: “When I came to, my nose was bleeding and my mouth was full of blood. … My father was standing over me. ‘Don't tell your mother about this,’ he said.”
Later in life, Cheever's public remarks about his father were characterized by a sort of sensible regret that they weren't able to “requite” one another because of the “age difference,” and—after all—”in that particular period, intimacy between fathers and sons was fairly uncommon.” In his heart, though, he never forgave the man for rejecting him as a child. “I can't recall taking a walk at his side although I walked with the fathers of my friends,” he wrote, allowing, however, that his “memory may be blocked” in that respect (as indeed it may have been, since he'd once remembered those morning walks to the train station with the dog). “Baseball, football, fishing—we shared none of this.” The only father-son outings Cheever did recall were virile entertainments such as horse races and boxing matches, during which Frederick would shout, “Are you men sisters?” or “Hit him with a stool/”—this for John's benefit, perhaps, as Frederick was worried by then that he'd “sired a fruit.” His older brother, Hamlet, had practically told him so during one of his rare trips east (“as one of the founders of the Elks”) when Cheever was twelve. The old man looked over his runty nephew and said, “Well, I guess you could play tennis.” “That was all he said to me,” Cheever remembered. “My poor father, defending his own virility, said that his oldest son played hockey and football; but the lecherous, selfish old goat spoke with the authority of a tribal chieftain who, at a glance, had rejected me as a warrior or any other kind of man.” Hoping to prove otherwise, the boy went to a burlesque theater that afternoon, where the “jades with their flabby breasts” failed to arouse him. “My scrotum ached with dismay and I went home on a local in pain.”
With Hamlet's “tennis” crack somewhere in the back of his mind, the adult Cheever would often assert his manhood with a conspicuous interest in sports (except for tennis) and other kinds of strenuous physical activity. He flung himself into icy pools and skated with a masculine swagger; he professed to love the Red Sox (in fact he preferred