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By Root 4220 0

daughter, Ann, whom he'd ask to wait in the car while he went around the corner to buy meat or hardware; the waits became longer, until one day the fourteen-year-old girl noticed a telltale odor when her father returned (wreathed in smiles). Then, one Sunday afternoon in 1961, Fred paid his first visit to Cedar Lane; he was obviously tipsy and had a funny story to tell. “What is involved seems almost beyond my comprehension,” John wrote. “He is drunk. He has lost his job and will not be given another. And in his drunkenness he has tried to find a college roommate, an old friend of forty years ago, a homosexual friend for all I know* … and has ended up in the jail of the town where our prominent and respectable parents shaped a life for themselves and for us, and he refers to this whole series of events as an uproarious joke. I think this is insanity.” In fact, Fred may well have sought his old Quincy friend in the hope of getting some lead on a job, a matter that made him understandably desperate. He was pushing sixty, and his problems had become well known among former associates; he'd called every conceivable friend and connection, but no one could help. Almost every day he went into the city and sat around employment agencies, returning so drunk in the evenings he could hardly stagger off the train. Finally Iris called John in despair: Fred was back in his room and keeping himself drunk; she couldn't take him anywhere, since he'd only slip away and hide until the only thing she could do was go home and wait for the police to call. “But oh my god, my god how he must suffer,” John wrote. “Can I see it, can I feel it? He has completely lost his sense of reality.”

Iris eventually enlisted the aid of a psychiatrist, who advised her to leave home immediately and let her husband “sink or swim;” in the meantime the man would check on Fred every so often and try to keep him alive. Iris took the keys and cut off the telephone, then went to visit her mother in Florida. Ann went to live with sympathetic neighbors. Fred (except for the psychiatrist) was totally isolated. His daughter Jane lived in the South Shore town of Hingham, where she had a family of her own; David had “escaped to the west” (Boulder) and worked in a bank; Sarah had left home after her father's breakdown in 1959, when she was eighteen, fed up with playing buffer and go-between to her feuding parents (“Finally I thought, ‘This is not my problem’”). While her mother lingered in Florida, young Ann went by the house each day to feed the dog, but at least two weeks passed before she saw her father again. (“His favorite word for me was diffident. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but finally I looked it up. He was right: I was timid and intimidated. It was a put-down. He was a very bright man.”) When Fred emerged at last—to be hospitalized—he was scarcely recognizable: “His skin was sagging all over him,” said Ann. “White, pale. Just a bag of flesh.”

But Fred remained first and foremost a Cheever, and Cheevers were men of destiny and force: it was a matter of breeding. When he returned to Cedar Lane a few months later, he was fat and beaming and full of advice. John attributed his heartiness to alcohol, and observed him with exasperated detachment. “He has endured many disappointments, indignities, and injustices and in his determination to rally he has developed a crude mockery of cheerfulness. Everything is wonderful, simply wonderful.” At such times John tended to retire into his “fastidious” manner, though on this occasion he probably couldn't resist the odd sarcastic aside, which might have provoked Fred into an even more pointed heartiness; in any case, John would always refer to this conversation as an argument of sorts, and by way of having the “last word,” Fred remarked, “Whatever else I have, I have four beautiful children. Loving, wonderful children.” John guardedly allowed that his son David was “very loyal,” which angered Fred: “He lifts his face,” John wrote, “swollen now with years of drink, and says, ‘They're all loyal to me.’ I have seen them