Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [253]
That hungry look was well known to Ben's girlfriend, Lynda, who was about to become part of the family. While in high school, the girl had been a fetching cheerleader who was somewhat disaffected from her straitlaced parents, and hence amenable to her doting future father-in-law. “I spend a lot of time kissing her, and she doesn't mind,” Cheever gleefully mused in the summer of 1967. “What about a man making out with his son's date? What about that?” The idyll ended with a nasty shock, however, when Cheever found an unmailed letter from Ben to Lynda describing him and his wife as “the two most self-centered animals in the creation”—this after he'd given the boy a brand-new sports car (a white Austin-Healey Sprite)! Once Ben had departed for his freshman year at Antioch (in the sports car), Cheever sublimated his grief by drafting a high-minded rebuttal to “Tony Nailles” in his journal: “You say that we are the most self-centered people in the world when, in fact, our love for you verges on fatuity,” etc. At other times Cheever considered subtle forms of reprisal, such as “disinherit[ing]” his son as a correspondent: “I will deprive him of the delight and humor of my letters,” he reflected, but decided this was “contemptible petulance” and so continued to sign himself “Best, Father” and “Yrs, John.” (“There is some capriciousness in the love I feel for my children,” he'd observed some years earlier. “I seize their love greedily when I need it; and am indifferent, callous when my needs lie elsewhere.”)
That Christmas (1967) Ben had returned from Ohio with a beard and shaven head, having proved his mettle as a peacenik with his three-day stint in the Cincinnati jail. “You don't know anything until you've been roughed up by the Man!” he reportedly told his father, who called him Myshkin. Ben made it clear that he'd grown away from his elders, but, having said that, continued to keep his father company and talk about whatever was on his mind. Antioch students had to spend part of each year on a work assignment, so after Christmas Ben went back to the small Dayton suburb of Vandalia, where he was supposed to work as a newspaper reporter. As it happened, Vandalia didn't have much use for another reporter, and he was soon laid off. Far from taking the news amiss, his father promptly offered to send money. “If he was sober and you were in trouble,” said Ben, “he was great. It was always possible, though, in three months or four weeks from then, he'd get drunk and say, ‘Can't even hold a job!’”
By the summer of 1968, Cheever was often drunk, and his son had arguably become an even more representative member of his generation. The two didn't mix so well, though not exactly for lack of trying. Soon after he came home for a summer visit, Ben and one of his Antioch friends brought a guest to Cedar Lane—a somber thirteen-year-old named Ellen (the friend's sister), who'd run away from a strict father to the drug-ridden streets of the East Village. The Cheevers professed to keep an open-door policy (the Martha debacle was still a few months in the future), and Cheever did his best to be an engaging host. Clowning for the girl one night, he placed a cork table-mat on his head. “Queen for a day,” the girl quipped. “The remark, perhaps innocent, seems to fell me,” Cheever wrote in his journal, fretfully recounting a dream in which the girl told him, “Your whole life is a lie. I can see right through you. …” Still disconcerted, perhaps, Cheever threw a heavy crystal glass at another of Ben's friends, Doug Brayfield, a “beautiful young man” (Ben remembered) who fancied himself a poet; no one can remember the exact provocation—apart from the poetic airs—though later Cheever admitted to Dr. Silverberg that he'd been agitated by homosexual