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By Root 4016 0

who were his competition? He wanted nothing less, ever, than to be considered in the same breath with Bellow, Updike, Roth, et al., and yet The New Yorker was rejecting his work, while running almost monthly stories by his hated epigone, Barthelme. Cheever claimed to be writing an elaborate parody—sometimes a story, sometimes a whole book (The Man Who Rented Garter Snakes)—that was “meant to demolish Barthelme,” though in fact he wasn't writing much at all. While wooing (as it were) Shana Alexander, he'd promised to contribute something to McCall's titled “A Pure and Beautiful Story”—the genesis of what would become, very gradually, “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger.” “I am disappointed in Artemis,” he noted, after several months of work. “It lacks density and enthusiasm and my search for another method has not been successfully completed. Keep trying.”

One problem was that his working day was getting shorter and shorter, and of course he worked in the midst of ghastly hangovers. Still, coming down to breakfast at the start of each day, he tried to capitalize on the brief interval of sobriety by wishing his wife a pleasant “Good morning,” and it was disconcerting when even this was answered with contempt. For his son's benefit, he tried to mitigate such darkness by engaging the boy in a kindly patter of jokes, and persevering with a patient smile when his wife maintained her stony, unamused silence—but for what, he wondered, was he being punished? He hardly ever raised his voice, he didn't rant or rave, though perhaps he'd remark in passing, oh, on the quality of the roast, or some fatuous intellectualism on her part. “I was the grown-up in the house,” said Federico, “and I wasn't a very successful grown-up. I remember saying, ‘Okay, I've got a piece of paper and I'm going to put a black checkmark next to each of you whenever you say something mean to the other one.’ After half an hour he had about twenty-five checkmarks and she had about three.”

Both parents asserted that they stayed together for the boy's sake, and in fact the boy seemed unhappy in almost every department of life. As he recalled, “I was fat and unpopular and dyslexic and smart—an incredibly deadly combination.” Like his brother before him, Federico had to repeat a grade at Scarborough Country Day, where he was a laughingstock on the soccer field and often got in locker-room fist-fights, which he always lost. Miserable beyond words, he couldn't help bursting into tears from time to time, whereupon his father would invoke their ancient lineage: “Fred,” he'd say, with perhaps a heartening jostle, “remember: You are a Cheever.” When this didn't seem to work and—like his brother before him—Federico went on wetting his bed to boot, his parents sent him to Dr. Silverberg. (Despite the ineffectuality of his own recent treatment, Cheever liked the man: he was a good listener and laughed at the right moments.) Silverberg noted that Federico was a “fat rather depressed” child, and was struck by his behavior in the waiting room: for almost an hour he sat there staring into space; he hardly moved; there were magazines to look at, but he didn't seem to notice. As for the boy's observations, they were made with a kind of numb detachment, as if it hardly mattered one way or the other. He had few friends his own age, he said, but had managed to get by on his own, or in the company of adults, mostly his father. And what about his father? “He's fairly nice. He's a good father, but he lives in a world of his own.”

The adult Federico maintains this view: his father was nice enough, and usually they got along fine. “But you have to realize,” he added, “for most of my childhood I was like a bit part in a Eugene O'Neill play. I was furniture. Certainly I was fat and unpromising, and that was pointed out to me, but he had a wife whose themes were extremely well developed over thirty years; he had my brother, who would come over exclusively to borrow money, and Susan was married to his former editor's son. He could have much more fun with them than he could with me.” Often, to