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By Root 4124 0

such that Cheever's erratic behavior was an all-but-total mystery to the boys. Once, they returned from a long bicycle hike and were sitting under a tree when Cheever “came rip-snorting out of the house” and began shouting at Ben about some nominal grievance—this while looking at the other boy, whose bicycle he kept shaking for emphasis: “He seemed to be directing his anger at me” Rick remembered, “and at the end of his tirade he threw my bike on the ground. I was flabbergasted.” Nor could he fathom Cheever's coldness one Halloween, when the boys went trick-or-treating together; Rick was already in costume when he came for Ben, and Mr. Cheever gave him a very hard stare before finally calling his son to the door. As it happened, he was “rigid with indignation”: “A friend of Ben's,” he wrote Weaver, “who has always seemed to me on the delicate side, showed up at the door in high-heeled shoes and an old evening dress, rouged to the ears and blooming.” Ben, especially, was nonplussed by it all. His father seemed forever berating him over trifles: You've been gone how long picking blueberries? And that's all the blueberries you've picked? And why didn't you go to the football game with everyone else? Where have you been all this time—? “What I claim to feel is that he has turned his back on the beauty of the autumn day, the green playing field, and the decent people,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “but what I really fear is that he has been indulging in the vices of my own youth, smoking cigarettes and masturbating in the moldy-smelling woods. … So I seem to pour onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt.”

He wanted to be the right kind of father—not like his own father, in short, the dreaded “passive father” of Freudian lore. This meant enticing his son onto fields of glory: reminding him to practice his soccer passes (“although he would sooner take his tame mouse for a walk”), kick a football, and by all means learn a seemly love for baseball, that sine qua non of American manhood. “When I was seven years old,” Ben remembered, “he told me that if I picked a team, he would take me to a game, and after that he'd help me follow the standings in the newspaper. He gave me a list of teams.” Ben picked the Baltimore Orioles, and Cheever asked why. “Because Oriole is such a pretty name,” the boy explained. And yet Cheever persevered. One of the great morbidities of his own youth had been an effeminate wing (the fault of a passive father), and his own son would be spared that, if possible. As Ben wrote in “The Boy They Cut,” Cheever would often coax his indifferent, exophoric son to play catch with him.

We'd go outside. He'd throw the ball at me. I'd drop it.

“I'm sorry,” I'd say and pick the ball up and throw it back.

He'd throw the ball again. Again I'd fail to make the catch. “Sorry,” I'd say. …

“For Christ's sake, stop apologizing,” he'd say. “Okay,” I'd say. “I'm sorry.”

But at last they discovered a mutual love of the outdoors: Cheever delightedly taught his son how to fish, and Ben became an avid reader of Field & Stream (which, he said, “you could read without having any questions about your sexual identity”). When he expressed interest in a twenty-two-dollar kayak kit (“Hours of Paddling Fun!”), Cheever bought it for him at once, and wasn't the least dismayed when Ben wrecked the thing a week later in the Croton River; he promptly bought him another, better kayak. Ben—nothing if not eager to please, and sensing he was on a roll of sorts—zestfully took up a lot of manly chores, like felling trees and splitting wood, for which his grateful father paid him fifty cents an hour. Sometimes after these exertions the boy would reward himself with a bubble bath—until one day his father found him reclining among the suds. “Who do you think you are?” he roared. “Some kind of STARLET?!”

Nobody could say he didn't care—and really, at bottom, he had almost nothing but sympathy for the sensitive little boy. When Ben would leave the dinner table in tears and go hide under his bed, his father would sometimes