Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [159]
Sarah Schoales had been “puzzled” by Cheever's decision to send her friend Susan to the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry (“Dobbs for snobs!” she'd teased her), perhaps unaware that Pammy Spear also attended the school and Cheever very much wanted his daughter to emulate Pammy. “He was constantly engineering situations in which my imperfections would be highlighted vis-à-vis Linda and Pammy,” Susan remembered. One such occasion was when he took her and Pammy to hear the great classical guitarist Andrés Segovia at the Century Club—”hoping” (as he wrote a friend) “to prove to [Susan] that the pleasures of respectability are not necessarily boring. I think she was impressed although there was a certain amount of pushing at the sandwich tables.” This was cruel, but then Cheever only wanted the best for her: over and over he insisted that if she'd only improve her looks (lose weight, curl her hair, etc.) and her attitude—why then she'd have lots of dates, like Linda and Pammy, instead of sitting in her room all night reading books and stuffing herself. As it was, she seemed to be turning into the very sort of eccentric, precocious “sorehead” he'd been at Thayer, and (whether or not the similarity occurred to him as such) he wanted better things for her. When she'd complain about her insipid schoolmates and rotten teachers, the author of “Expelled” would advise her to be “still and patient and watchful”—but evidently she insisted on making trouble. “Susie comes home with the news that she is on some sort of probation,” he wrote when she was sixteen.
Her negativism, her digressive negativism are thought to be bad attitudes in class. Our conversation begins in soft voices but then I begin to shout, she cries and throws herself onto her bed, I order her to get up and eat dinner and tell her if this were in Italy I would hit her over the head with a piece of wood, and Federico, catching the harsh or ugly notes in my voice, begins to cry. We sit down to a gloomy table. I read. At eight o'clock sharp the wind springs out of the north with gale force, an inundation of snow and rain. Susie goes for a walk in the storm. Later I speak with her. “I'm indifferent,” she says. “I'm a mass of intelligence adrift. I don't care if I sleep in the street.”
“Oh, you don't,” say I, as the wind flings the rain against the windows. “Would you like to go out and sleep in the street this evening?” Here is sarcasm, fruitless and obscene.
Such unkindness (when he was aware of it) filled Cheever with remorse, and one of the ways he tried to make amends was with a sincere effort to be friends with the girl. His advice about her looks was, in a sense, meant to be friendly, and also they stayed up late at night discussing books and whatnot (often she was so exhausted in the morning that she could hardly stay awake at school). They talked about Yeats and Stendhal and the friendship of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and sometimes Cheever would digress about certain personal woes (wondering later if he'd been “merciless” in doing so). But even in the midst of such intimacy there were certain points of decorum which tripped the girl up like so many landmines (“S[usan] asks me who was the Marquis de Sade and I blow skyhigh again”)—though later, sober, Cheever was usually sheepish or downright miserable about losing his temper, if not quite able to apologize. Another touchy subject was the few but intense friendships the girl had made at Masters, a place where the headmistress had been fired