Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [158]
He almost didn't make it. In the middle of the Atlantic, one of the airplane's port engines caught fire, and the captain turned around and tried to land in Shannon, then London, but both airports were fogged out. Finally they made it to Orly in Paris, where passengers were given coffee and reboarded on “another seedy-looking plane” that “labored across the heavens for another seventeen hours.” Cheever—”unafraid” the while—placidly read Lolita during the second flight and wasn't surprised when he phoned home from Idlewild and found nobody there but Iole and the baby: the others, naturally, were in New Hampshire with Mary's dying father. “I [had] not expected her to be [home],” he noted matter-of-factly in his journal—but soon he felt a touch of chagrin, calling his wife at the hospital in Hanover and (rather like Francis Weed in “The Country Husband”) trying to regale her with the story of his brush with death. She seemed too upset to pay much attention. He would have liked a little sympathy, at least.
Winter clung to life for almost a month, repeatedly asking to see his son-in-law, but Cheever stayed put. “I have seen him make a spectacle of a head-cold,” he remarked knowingly (hypochondria was another thing the two had in common). Mostly he was annoyed by the claim on Mary's attention: every time the doctors thought Winter was finally about to die, she'd have to drop everything and race back to New Hampshire; then he'd rally again, “to everyone's astonishment, some people's embarrassment and a few cases of indignation,” as Cheever wrote Herbst. He himself was among the indignant ones: “It gets me down, it gets me down,” he wrote in his journal. “The death watch of a great man but bathing the baby and washing the breakfast dishes forces me into a sullen frame of mind.” And still he didn't visit the man, though he could hardly claim anymore that Winter was faking: the latter had stopped eating a month ago, and must (as Cheever conceded) “be skin and bones.” In fact, as time passed, Cheever's irritation over the extra housework gave way to grudging admiration (“how great his energies and his powers of endurance”), though he was no more inclined to go to New Hampshire. Meanwhile he sensed some increased friction in his marriage. Mary refused to speak to him except in “biting and derisive” terms, and he suspected her of ruining meals on purpose—putting grenadine in an artichoke sauce, for example (“I do not mind a light supper,” wrote Cheever, “but I mind what I think is the sullenness that lies at the bottom of these spoiled dishes”). He might have been right; certainly she didn't see the point of discussing her complaints, such as they were. “Reproach Cheever?” she said, recalling the episode. “He was in a different world.”
Dr. Winternitz died the night of October 3, while the Cheevers were attending Phil Boyer's fiftieth-birthday party at Snedens Landing.* “Winter is dead,” said the pithy message awaiting their return (Cheever reflected that the man “always had some violence of poetry”). At the funeral in New Haven, Polly seemed cold toward Cheever, and he got the impression she was “in the process of casting [him] off”: “I am unhurt by this but I can't help wondering why.” As for Winter, whatever his thoughts toward the end, he went ahead and bequeathed his vast, dandyish wardrobe to his son-in-law—they were about the same size, after all—including some nice Peal shoes and silk bow ties and a vicuña coat Cheever would cherish forever.
CHEEVER'S RELATIONS with his children had become more strained since their return from Italy two years before—partly because of his drinking, and partly because they were older and more complicated. “Susie is in the throes of adolescence and not very good company,” Cheever reported that year to the Warrens. More than ever, he wanted her to be pretty