Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [154]
AT LOW POINTS in his drinking career—whenever he made one of his children cry, for instance—Cheever would reflect on his brother's decline and wonder at how little he, John, seemed to be learning from Fred's example. The latter was seven years older, and his alcoholism was accordingly more advanced. Fred's phobias were such (John claimed) that he could scarcely board an airplane or go higher than the seventh floor of a building unless he was “pissed.” Also, because of the shakes, he'd come to dread business dinners where he was served soft drinks rather than cocktails: “I [used to] sit at a table with a bunch of big shots and be afraid to pick up the tomato juice,” he wrote John in 1967, ten years after he'd been fired by Pepperell. His dismissal was if anything belated. Apart from his obvious drinking problem, Fred had become openly contemptuous of the whole “corporate freeze,” as he called it. Like many drunks, he had a grandiose view of himself, and indeed was not without a certain intellectual flair. One day in the late fifties, John and Susan bumped into Fred at Grand Central Station; the brothers had been somewhat out of touch since Fred's move to Connecticut, and so repaired to a dark bar, briefly, to catch up. Susan, a perceptive teenager by then, was struck by her uncle's “brilliance”: “It was August, and Fred said, ‘Oh my God. I've just been up to the Frick, because when you look at those Constables, it really cools you off “ John, however, seemed uneasy at the thought of his tipsy, idle brother whiling away an afternoon at the Frick, and soon made excuses to part.
Now a “freelance advertiser,” Fred had become all the more determined to prove the world wrong. He'd revised and expanded A Song for These States—his paean to Yankee individualism, begun some twenty years before—and kept a copy of the enormous manuscript on his desk even as it was rejected again and again. At the same time, he seemed more thrilled than ever at his brother's success: they were both Cheevers, after all. His son David, in college at the time, remembered the “glowing” letter Fred had written when John won the National Book Award: “He had this outward pride,” said David, “but there was a lot of unexpressed conflict, too: why the hell didn't he have talent like that?” Which is not to say Fred despaired of his own talent, or lost faith in his fundamental excellence. His well-to-do neighbors had come to regard him as a drunken misfit, a perception Fred encouraged by drinking more conspicuously than ever and mocking any overture of disapproval or pity with the same “stupid and impenetrable smile on his face,” as John would have it. “I only want to educate my neighbors,” Fred liked to say, though he managed to educate (as in épater) more than his neighbors. Invited to Beechtwig for Thanksgiving in 1958, Fred arrived “like a blast, a thunderclap of obscene misery”: drunk before dinner, he indulged in a lot of fractious jocularity before passing out in a wing chair, whereupon (John observed) “His daughter pitilessly took a photograph of him, asleep with his mouth open.”
When John alluded to his brother's life in “The Five-Forty-Eight,” Fred let it pass without comment (despite his wife's indignation); but when “Journal of an Old Gent” appeared in 1956, and Fred recognized certain of their father's notes reproduced as “fiction,” he gave John a call: “What are you doing?“ he asked, clearly unnerved by the ramifications. John related this anecdote to his Barnard class and then appended a moral: “Ignore your family,” he said, “and just keep writing.” And so (shortly after that Thanksgiving debacle) Cheever wrote “The Scarlet Moving Van,” about a pedantic drunk named Gee-Gee (for “Greek God,” after the promising youth he used to be) and his long-suffering wife, who wear out their welcome in one “felicitous” suburb after another. “They've got to learn,” says Gee-Gee, regaling his “stuffy” neighbors