Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [223]
That she always got to her feet when I entered the room. That she enjoyed men very much and was conspicuously indifferent to women. That her dislikes were marked and she definitely preferred people from traditional and if possible wealthy origins. That she had begun to resemble those imperious and somehow mannish women who devilled my youth: the dancing teacher, the banker's wife, the headmistress of the progressive school I attended.
In her dotage the dog had become all the more loving toward her master. She lay at his side and made comforting wheezing noises while he brooded in his wing chair, and when it came time for bed, he'd push and coax the whimpering, arthritic beast up the stairs so that neither of them would have to sleep alone. One day she fell in the snow and couldn't get up again, and Cheever carried her home and presently called the vet to put her down. “She was a wonderful companion and I loved her dearly but I shed very few tears,” he wrote Litvinov. “Fred cried for about an hour. We had her for fifteen years and she led a very active and useful life …”
THE SUMMER OF 1965, after her graduation from Pembroke, Susan went to Tuskegee, Alabama, in order to “teach the Antigone to negroes,” as her father put it. When she returned—joining the family in Wellfleet—she spoke excitedly of her often dangerous encounters with white segregationists, while Cheever nodded and sighed and wished she were married. For years he'd been arranging the details in his mind: he, wearing a morning coat, would guide her down the aisle while an eighteenth-century pavane played (“I give her away first at All Saints, then at St. Pauls in Rome”) and a crowd of “substantial” guests from the Social Register watched in admiration. As it was, she would have to go on teaching in the fall at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. (“My guidance counselor at Pembroke told me, ‘All our best girls are engaged. Sorry, but you have to look for a job.’ It wasn't just my father.”) All was not lost, however: one of her fellow teachers, as luck would have it, was none other than the young Ned Cabot, of the Boston Cabots. Tippling in the wee hours, Cheever gloated over the possibilities: first, of course, he'd have to discuss the union with Ned's father …
[W]e meet at my club. He has the bony face of his caste, his family but is pleasant. He explains to me the difficulties of becoming Mrs. C[abot] and hopes S[usan] understands them. In the nature of things in Boston Mrs. C[abot] is bound to be an institution. She must be a director of the hospital, leader of the Sewing Circle, a member of the admissions committee for the Chilt Club and she must distribute one hundred thousand dollars a year among the worthy. Is S[usan] capable of this. I say that I know her to be capable but that she must herself express her willingness to be an institution. … How pretentious, vulgar and absurd is this revery but it seems to improve my spirits.
Absurd, perhaps—but what sweet revenge against all the Wollaston nobs who'd murmured about his drunken father and shopkeeping mother! What a swipe at Rollin Bailey and his tennis court! “He always wanted his children to belong,“ said Federico. “He wanted them to join country clubs, sail skiffs in Nantucket Harbor. That was important to him. But,” he added, “at the same time it was very threatening, and he did what he could to prevent it from happening.”
When Susan told her father that Ned would be flying back with her at Christmas and spending a night in Ossining on his way to Boston, Cheever was delighted and insisted on picking them up at the airport. For the occasion, of course, he'd fortified himself with gin, though this wasn't baldly obvious until Ned was crammed into the boot of Cheever's two-seat Karmann Ghia and inhaling Cheever's breath point-blank whenever Cheever turned around to make eye contact (his little car lurching this way and that). They were crossing the George Washington Bridge when Ned suddenly