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because she was suspected to be a lesbian; Susan was also enamored of a charismatic teacher (female) who lived with another teacher (female), all matters that made her father nervous “for reasons [she] didn't understand.” Under the circumstances, he might have been relieved when she finally decided to transfer to a boarding school (Woodstock) in Vermont, where at least she was happy, but he was very disappointed and told her so. One advantage to her absence, however, was that he could sustain himself with reveries of her returning as the daughter he'd always wanted (“Her figure is perfect, her face is slender and lovely”), though it only made matters worse when his hopes were dashed all over again. As he wrote that spring, he didn't understand Susan at all: “I've fed her, bathed her, taken her up in the night, plucked thorns and splinters out of her feet, loved her … but now when I speak to her she weeps and slams the door, hides in the woods on a fine Sunday morning, seems on the one hand merry and on the other to carry some unanswered question.”

Ben was now old enough to be a considerable disappointment in his own right: as his father was at pains to remind him, he too needed to lose weight and do better in school and (especially) take an interest in sports like other boys. As Federico remarked many years later, “Ben, poor Ben, bore the brunt of all this masculine hoopla and accepted it with the fatalism [with which] he has accepted almost everything in his life.” Cheever, a great reader of Freud, was not consoled by the news that homosexual tendencies are somewhat innate in all people; rather he became even more vigilant in cultivating a proper ethos for his older son. “Speak like a man!” he'd say, driven up the wall by the boy's high-pitched voice, not to mention his giggling (“You laugh like a woman!”). And while perhaps a little boy can't help what his voice sounds like, he didn't have to choose to speak that way—as Ben sometimes did, forming little two-legged creatures out of his hands and making them talk to each other in tiny piping voices (“Stop that nonsense!”). Also, he liked to dance in front of the bathroom mirror—pretending he was a gunslinger who could dance so well that he dodged bullets—until one day his father walked in: “That,” said Ben, “was the end of my dancing in front of the mirror.”

In addition to such ominous behavior, the boy had a bed-wetting problem and couldn't read very well. His parents decided to invite his “hated teacher” to dinner, the better to discuss their concerns in depth and perhaps ingratiate themselves in some helpful way. It soon transpired, however, that Cheever's romantic interest in the teacher “pretty much blotted out” (as Ben put it) any immediate academic matters. (“Ben's teacher for supper—how pretty girls refresh and compliment our feelings—and later to a concert and, during a Bach chorale, guess what I was thinking about.”) Years later Ben was diagnosed with exophoria, which causes one eye to wander and diminishes depth perception (affecting athletic endeavors too); at the time, though, his parents didn't know what to make of his terrible marks in school, and deemed it best for him to repeat second grade while in Italy. Since his old, pre-Italy friends had all been promoted, the boy grew even more lonely, depressed, and apt to wet his bed, and finally (like his sister before him) went to a psychiatrist.

Cheever's worries deepened when the ten-year-old Ben befriended an effeminate boy named Rick, whose family had moved to the carriage house next door.* For two years or so, the boys were almost inseparable: they'd disappear for hours, playing Monopoly or reading in the basement, or else go for long bicycle hikes and stop by the woods to explore. As for Cheever, he couldn't help seething whenever he laid eyes on Rick: “[He] often stands with both hands on his hips in an attitude that I was told, when I was a boy, was the sign of a congenital queer. … He is attached securely to my son and I do not like him.” But of course the source of his misgivings was a taboo subject,