Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [155]
The story appeared in the March 21, 1959, issue of The New Yorker, at a time when Fred had pretty much retired to his bedroom to drink full-time.* Shortly before, Iris had summoned John to Connecticut to discuss her husband's condition, and at one point Fred lumbered into the room and joined them. “His face is swollen almost beyond recognition,” John wrote afterward. “I think his brain is damaged. … His conversation makes no intellectual or human sense.” After a few minutes, Fred gave up trying to make sense and called his dog—a toy poodle, dressed in a tutu, that Fred had taught to dance on its hind legs while he waved a cracker in the air. (“For a moment F[red] seems happy and I do not mean anything uncharitable by observing this.”) Finally Fred went back to bed, while John and Iris agreed that a thorough physical examination was in order, “to see how far gone he is.” But matters came to a head before anything definite was arranged. As Susan Cheever remembered, either Iris called to say her husband was killing himself, or Fred called and slurred something like “She's trying to kill me, Joey!” In any case John drove back to Weston with his daughter and found a fraught domestic scene. “Something terrible had happened,” said Susan, “like [Fred had] thrown something at [Iris] or she'd thrown something at him. And she was kind of skulking around.” With his daughter's help, John got the bloated, red-faced Fred into the car and drove him to New Haven Hospital, where Dr. Bill Winternitz had his office. “Well, Joey, nice of you to drop by the club,” Fred muttered (more or less) as he was poured into bed. Throughout the ordeal, according to Susan, her father's demeanor was mostly stoical: “He wasn't cranky to Fred, just Ugh: exasperated. Looking up to the heavens to make sure God saw that he was taking care of his brother, who he wanted God to know was a real pain in the ass.”
Fred was found to be suffering from alcoholic malnutrition and an enlarged liver; on the brighter side—according to Bill Winternitz—he “laughed a lot and seemed apologetic.” Why was such an affable man bent on destroying himself? As Bill reported to his brother-in-law, a psychiatrist thought it was due to some obscure childhood trauma—which, John reflected, must have been his own birth: “He was happy, high-spirited, and adored, and when, at the age of seven, he was told that he would have to share his universe with a brother, his forebodings would, naturally, have been bitter and deep. … I have felt for a long time that, with perfect unconsciousness, his urge was to destroy me. I have felt that there was in his drunkenness some terrible cunning.” Alarmed that his brother's fate could prove to be his own, John pored over his journal and was appalled by the obviously “progressive” nature of his disease. “I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous,” he noted, after taking Fred to New Haven. “Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin, and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.”
* One could argue that Macdonald played kingmaker that year. He lavishly praised James Agee's posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, which went on to win the Pulitzer.
* Among Cheever's papers is a draft of a speech he wrote for some unknown occasion subsequent to the March 11, 1958, National Book Award ceremony: “It is very gallant of you to come here tonight and it