like, but he found it a little dispiriting. The blond cheerleader type was a solemn ideal of his, and now that such a girl had married his son, Cheever expected them to have a brilliant, elegant life together. Instead, Ben's beard grew longer and more Christlike, while his fetching wife sat around sewing psychedelic patches on his bell-bottoms. But then, that was the ethos of Antioch in those days, and when the Cheevers came to Yellow Springs for a visit in early 1970, Ben took pains to soften the blow. He and Lynda bought a big roast beef (though they weren't sure how to cook it), as well as a new table, curtains, and an ounce of premium marijuana. The last was for themselves, to steady the nerves a bit; stoned out of his gourd, Ben drove his customized van to the airport that afternoon to collect his parents and younger brother—”a nightmarish ride”: “It was like I was talking Greek and he was talking Serbian,” Ben remembered, though perhaps he underestimated his father's own mellow intoxication. (“We take the plane to Ohio,” blandly noted the latter. “My beloved son meets us and we dine with his much beloved wife.”) Another treat Ben had planned was lunch with Louis Filler, an eminent cultural conservative whose dim view of the younger generation seemed to square with Cheever's. (When Ben had boasted about a paper he'd written on the subject of Chagall, his father erupted: “Five minutes from here at the Union Church there are nine of Chagall's windows! And yet you'd never bestir yourself to look at them, and that's the trouble with your generation!”) But of course this was an awful mistake: no academic alive was likely to ingratiate himself with Cheever, who moreover wasn't even able to weather the ordeal with a few cocktails because of the local blue laws. “So,” said Ben, “Daddy's thinking gin, and Louis Filler's thinking Meeting of Two Great Minds.” When Filler remarked that some modicum of sociological knowledge was imperative to the making of great literature, Cheever “laid him out”: Sociology hasn't a thing to do with literature! etc. Filler fell silent and pretty much stayed that way*
After the visit, relations with the couple deteriorated rapidly. Ben's wife not only stopped flirting with Cheever, she hardly spoke to him, and even refused his well-meaning invitations to dinner and whatnot. “I will not go over there for dinner!” he overheard her yelling in the background when he called Ben on the telephone. “I can't stand that old man!” Even worse was the cringing way his son tried to remonstrate with her, using a lot of unctuous endearments like “Monkey” and “Honeybear.” Cheever wondered in his journal, “Is it possible that because of the ups and downs of our marriage he has come to feel that married happiness even if it means the loss of intelligence and character is desirable?” In practice, the whole Cheever family did their best to help Ben see how silly and victimized he seemed. “That's the way Lynda likes it!” was the constant, singsong, mocking refrain, especially when there were other guests to be entertained. Of course, they knew it was the essence of Ben's nature to placate—after all, he'd spent his entire life trying to please a demanding father, who responded by dubbing him (a little backhandedly, perhaps) “the peacemaker.” Living up to his reputation as such, Ben solicitously followed his father out to the rock garden one night, since the man was very drunk and likely to fall and hurt himself. “You're pathetic,” said Cheever, when his son sat beside him.
For the next seven years or so, the two spoke only “in curt, telegraphic sentences” (as Ben put it), and for only one reason. After college Ben had found it necessary to cut his beard and get a job—a very ill-paying one, as it turned out, at the Rockland Journal News. Lynda's parents did their best to help the struggling youngsters—they paid some of the rent and finally bought them a house—so Lynda thought it only fair that the elder Cheevers do their part as well. Once a month, then, under considerable duress, Ben would visit Cedar Lane and spend