Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [221]
Two years later, the Cheevers went to Christopher and Natalie's wedding at the Algonquin, and that December (1965) Lehmann-Haupt published one of his first pieces in the New York Times, reviewing a new edition of The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead. At the subsequent Christmas dinner on Cedar Lane, the young man asked Cheever what he'd thought of the review. The latter was “polite but definite”: “You failed to catch the spirit of the book,” he said. Lehmann-Haupt felt “soundly rebuked,” but decided not to take it amiss—especially in view of Cheever's touching devotion to Natalie. Every year the two would sit in front of the fireplace, hugging and holding hands, at perfect ease with each other. “I felt his need to hold on to me,” she remembered, “as if it grounded or anchored him.”
Mary Cheever was also warm and motherly, and it occurred to the couple that they'd been adopted as “surrogate children.” As such, it struck them as odd that they “never saw” Cheever show any affection toward his own children, for all his blatant doting on Natalie; the contrast was so uncomfortable that Ben once said something bitter to Lehmann-Haupt, later explaining that his father acted as if he loved Christopher and Natalie more than him. And indeed the couple had to wonder: Was Cheever's restraint some sort of Wasp thing? Was he warmer to Natalie because she was Jewish? If so, it soon became clear that Jewishness per se was no guarantee of his favor. One Thanksgiving he asked Natalie to bring her mother, a middle-class widow from New Jersey “whose idea of good fiction was Danielle Steel”: “She was totally bewildered by the Cheevers, who didn't accommodate her at all,” Lehmann-Haupt recalled. “In the car going home she burst into tears. She couldn't understand their attitude. They were mean to her, both Mary and John—making sarcastic remarks. It was the only time we can remember them being mean.” (“Natalie's mother comes,” Cheever wrote. “She is the sort of woman who speaks in clichés, asks the price of everything. What a charming setting she says of our diningroom. That highboy was a nice purchase.”)
Despite the (mostly) good times, the couple now wonder whether their friendship was ever anything more than “superficial.” It was true Cheever played the role of “literary father” to Natalie—but then Lillian Hellman had been a literary mother of sorts: “She'd always ask me for pictures of my children,” said Robins, “but none turned up among her effects after her death.” Rudnik, too, had reason to wonder about the man he regarded as a revered mentor. “Rafael [sic] calls from a bar,” Cheever noted in 1966. “I guess he is drunk or drinking. I am troubled to think that what appeared to be a simple friendship is becoming unsimple.” Apart from whatever transpired at their holiday meetings on Cedar Lane (that “great good place” for Rudnik), Cheever realized he knew “very little” about the poet and was more or less content to keep it that way.
When he wasn't cultivating the young and gifted at Yaddo, or enduring another lunch with the Friday Club, or meeting (more and more rarely) some literary acquaintance at the Century, Cheever was alone, except for a small son and a wife who often wasn't speaking to him. During “seizures” of loneliness in the past, Cheever would occasionally ride the train and chat “anxiously with strangers,” but he didn't like the train anymore; there was also Mrs. Zagreb, but that only worked in moderate doses. Desperate for almost any company at all, he'd sometimes respond to letters and calls from random admirers with invitations to visit.* As he was reminded again and again, however, people who presume to make friends with their favorite authors tend to be a little on the eccentric side. “An admirer arrives on Saturday,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “He has a bad facial tic and has been confined to Bellevue and Hillsdale. He rants, shouts, attacks President Kennedy and has some nice