Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [225]
On New Year's Eve that year (a week or so after Cheever had given Ned Cabot a lift from the airport), Ben and Lynda had some friends over and were listening to loud music, while Cheever hovered nearby and his daughter cloistered herself upstairs, “eating Triscuits [as she remembered] and reading Hawthorne.” At some point she came down and asked if they could lower the volume a little, as she couldn't find a room in the house where she could read in peace. “S[usan] complains about not having a room in which she can read,” Cheever wrote. “I say that if she had a date I'd see that she had a room.” This went over badly. “Fuck you!” his daughter replied, bolting upstairs and out the terrace door and into the snowy night, her father in shambling pursuit. “Do I have to hide in the woods to get away from you?” she cried, while he called and called her name. The rest of the holiday she spent reading in the attic with a chair propped against the door. “Christmas was for some reason not as pleasant as I had hoped,” Cheever reported to Litvinov. “I love the children passionately and the house was full of them and their guests but something went wrong.” He didn't elaborate.
Federico, not quite nine at the time, was largely exempt from his father's occasional cruelty—though on the surface, at least, he was an ideal candidate. Chubby, clumsy, glum, and unpopular, he was a veritable catalogue of flaws crying out for his father's correction. “I am teaching Fred how to pass and catch a football,” Cheever solemnly announced when the time came, though it wasn't long before he had to admit it was hopeless. Federico made his older brother look like a prodigy: Ben could catch the odd ball if one really persevered, but Federico never did—he defied the law of averages. Next Cheever tried bowling: “F[ederico] has no grace, no aptitude and I display the impatience of a father. There's no point in my paying good money to watch you roll the ball down the gutter. … Later he cries. ‘All I have is a good memory,’ he says. ‘I'm fat, people make fun of me.’ The force of this remark.” Federico, in short, was poignantly inept, and perhaps he reminded Cheever of himself at that age: much the youngest, that is, and generally regarded as a lost cause. Whatever the reason, his love for the boy was “massive.” After Cheever's death, Ben was approached at a party by Harold Brodkey, who consolingly told him how much his father had loved his children. “Oh no,” said Mary Cheever, overhearing the exchange. “The only one of the children he ever really cared about was Fred!”
THE SCREENWRITER ELEANOR PERRY had read “The Swimmer” when it first appeared in The New Yorker, and immediately decided it would make a wonderful movie. She and her husband, Frank, a director, had made a critical splash with their first effort, David and Lisa (1962), but Eleanor's script for “The Swimmer” floated around the studios for almost a year before it was finally picked up by Sam Spiegel at Columbia. In the spring of 1966, Cheever was notified that shooting would begin that summer in Westport, Connecticut (less traffic noise than Westchester), and his first response was to make plans for leaving the country. On the other hand, Burt Lancaster had agreed to play Neddy, and the prospect of meeting the famous actor and any number of other glamorous Hollywood types (and perhaps telling Maxwell about it afterward) proved an aching temptation, and in the end Cheever became a frequent visitor to the set. At first, though, he was daunted, and asked Spear to come along for moral support; he also stopped in Greenwich and bought a pint of whiskey. “This helps to settle my nerves but my drinking seems erratic,” he wrote in his journal. “After several