Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [193]
Fittingly, the novel ends with a Last Supper of sorts at Honora's house in St. Botolphs, attended by eight guests from the Hutchins Institute for the Blind. These wretches have been invited at Honora's behest—her last request as she proudly drinks herself to death, departing a heartless world embodied by the Internal Revenue Service, which has hounded her all the way to Europe and back. Indeed, an entire way of life seems to be passing with Honora, beginning with her beloved old house, which like a “carapace” seems to dwindle into “cobwebs and ashes” along with its tenant. Her posthumous hospitality toward the blind Christmas guests—”the losers, the goners, the flops”—seems a final act of ceremonial kindness, as well as a timely reminder of human misery and death. One thinks of Cheever's injunction in “The Death of Justina”: “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?” At this late hour in history, we are thus urged to consider our fragility, and mutual dependence, as well as our ultimate purpose as immortal beings. Not to do so is to end up like poor Moses, a hopelessly drunken reprobate who can no longer bear to consider his life in the sober glare of (Christmas) morning: “The brilliance of light, the birth of Christ, all seemed to him like some fatuous shell game invented to dupe a fool like his brother while he saw straight through into the nothingness of things.”* At the end of the novel, the temporal world is fading away, and Cheever's favorite bit of Plato in the final paragraph (“Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal …”) seems a relinquishment of all that. “I will never come back,” the narrator concludes, “and if I do there will be nothing left, there will be nothing left but the headstones to record what has happened; there will really be nothing at all.”
AFTER MONTHS of grueling anxiety—redeemed at last by “booming” sales† and mostly excellent reviews—Cheever decided he needed a vacation and asked Mary if she'd like to visit Italy again. She countered with the suggestion that they go to Paris instead—she'd yearned to return for some thirty years now—but Cheever petulantly refused (“I am fatuous and disgusting”) and even decided to stay home rather than travel alone. When he announced as much to his family, however, “They seemed so terribly disappointed”—he wrote Weaver—”that I announced again that I would leave for Rome on Sunday and so I shall.” The first thing he did was savor the grandeur of Porto Ercole again, staying with the Australian writer Alan Moorehead (Gallipoli) and his wife, Lucy, whom he'd befriended in Italy seven years before. After a few days of sitting on the beach with Mrs. Moorehead—who discussed her husband's “ruthless infidelity” with a kind of doting detachment—Cheever proceeded to Rome and took an apartment at the Academy. Lonely as ever and searching for love (“someone who will take care of my needs”), Cheever ended up dining with fellow guests almost every night and feeling the “institutional blues, those old Yaddo blues.” He returned to Ossining at the end of January.
Through the Mooreheads he'd recently met another Australian, Alwyn Lee, who, after a picaresque career as a Melbourne journalist, had come to the States during the war and joined the staff of Time. As a former colleague reminisced, Lee “had a unique reputation even among the extraordinarily alcoholic group of writers” at the magazine. One day in 1958, a researcher had passed Lee's