Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [224]
But again it's worth bearing in mind, perhaps, that Cheever only wanted the best for his daughter, and was naturally worried about her becoming an old maid. “I think she is a courageous, intelligent and unhappy young woman,” he reflected. “I wish I could do more for her.” Meanwhile the little he could do, as ever, was remind her that fat girls don't get husbands. “I find S[usan] picking at scraps in the icebox. Oh kick it, I say. Go to hell. She hurls the line at me, laughing …” And with that, the pavane began to fade—the striped tent, the champagne—it was all going up in smoke. “I look for someone supple and lovely like the young women who pose for girdles and find myself up against a strong, independent and contentious spirit who does not seem to dream of children gathered at her knees, arranging roses, waiting at dusk for her beloved spouse.”
By contrast, Ben returned from his first year at Loomis a conquering hero. “Ben, who is my favorite, returned on Friday,” his happy father reported. “I damn near swoon every time I see him.” The seventeen-year-old had lost his baby fat and become stocky, handsome, and even rather athletic, holding his own on the wrestling and lacrosse teams. “I love you not for the person you are,” Cheever had told him as a boy, “but for your possibilities.” What he wanted was a young man who wasn't an Orioles fan because of the pretty name; what he wanted, above all, was a son who wasn't “hungry, artistic, worried and broke,” as the young John had been. And so his wish had come true—or, as Ben put it, “to some extent I was able to imitate that”—though there was little in the way of profound communication between the two. “The attachment seems to resist any analysis,” Cheever noted at the height of his somewhat abstract esteem. “I simply love him. His skin is clear, his face is muscular; we mostly joke.” Of course, there were still times when Ben would step out of character and startle his father with some unself-conscious remark, like the time he observed that boys at a school dance had seemed more attracted to one another than to girls. “Let us be manly and raise manly sons,” Cheever sternly intoned. (“I think he is fine and pray that he won't have a troubled life,” he fretted afterward.) And Ben, it seemed, was ever more determined to take such proverbs to heart; during a subsequent visit, he got off the train with a strange woman who appeared to be in her thirties. As he explained to his parents, he and the woman had struck up a conversation (Cheever had always advised him to make friends on the train), and finally he'd invited her to have dinner with him, perhaps see Ossining in the morning. And so dinner came and went—a bit of a strain, to be sure—and when Ben awoke the next morning, his new friend was gone.
For the most part, Ben had a pleasant relationship with his father during these years. Cheever was proud to have such an amiable, good-looking son, and proud of himself for “shield[ing]” the boy from the privations he'd suffered at that age. Above all, he was lonely, and thought it “very natural” to take “vicarious pleasure” in reliving his youth through Ben. The best times were summers, when Mary and the others were at Treetops and the two men had the house to themselves. For dinner they'd heat up some Stouffer's roast-beef hash and put the tray between them on the porch: “We'd each have a fork,” Ben remembered, “we'd eat toward the middle, and whoever ate fastest got the most. … We were always laughing, and he was in his fifties then.” Cheever's vicarious impulses were especially piqued by the presence of Ben's perky girlfriend, Lynda—the sort of girl who “waves to everyone,” Cheever noted with approval: “There's Charlie, there's Louise, there's Helen.