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By Root 4138 0

be sure, Cheever would call the boy a gluttonous slob or some such, and the boy would (tacitly or otherwise) concede as much: he was a gluttonous slob. When he wasn't at school, he sat in his room eating and reading, or eating and watching TV—at any rate, eating. “Fred is on a diet which seems to involve eating everything in sight excepting spinach,” Cheever wrote his older son. It was like that—all in good fun, mostly, and well meaning in the sense that it called attention to a real problem. The Lehmann-Haupts have an abiding impression of Federico playing on the library floor while his parents stand over him making ironical comments about his self-sufficiency and their relative ineptitude as parents. The boy seems not to notice. “There was something prodigious about Fred,” said Lehmann-Haupt. “He seemed to build a cocoon. I felt that he was the one who would get out alive.”

Behind the impassive façade was (among other things) enormous grief and rage, which had to come out on occasion. The first time Federico hit his father was after a soccer match. Exhausted and demoralized as ever, he returned home to find his father being drunkenly cruel to his mother, and when he began to protest, his father walked away. “I think I actually wanted some part of our life to be about me,” Federico remembered. “He was walking away and I said No, no and I hit him on the back.” Another time, Cheever was sitting at the head of the table in a special antique chair, which he smashed by falling over (drunk) when struck in the chest by his son, who was bigger than he as of age thirteen. (“If your father's going to be a drunk, it's good if he's five foot six.”) There were other such incidents, and they always seemed to have a calming effect on Cheever, who would then realize how low he had fallen. Also, he knew the boy loved him; each was pretty much all the other had. Federico had never been particularly close to his mother (“I remember trying to play games with her as a kid, but I couldn't”), whereas his father, if anything, was accessible to a fault: he sat through dreadful TV shows just so he could chat with the boy during commercial breaks; he even helped with homework. “He wanted to be a good father,” said Federico. “He wanted passionately to be a good father.”

Meanwhile Cheever's wife was becoming more independent than ever. Through her teaching she'd come to realize that others perceived her as charming and intelligent, quite apart from her being Mrs. John Cheever. More and more she was taking pains with her appearance, buying stylish clothes, and openly flirting with other men. “He's looking worse and worse,” said Susan, “and needing more and more nursing, just as she's ready to rock. Sort of a disaster.” At the time, perhaps the greatest tonic for Mary was her poetry writing, which not only served to reassure her that she was creative in her own right, but also brought her in touch with other talented women, most notably the poet-novelist Sandra Hochman. During a session with Dr. Silverberg, Federico pointed out that his father was especially moody of late because his mother was seeing a lot of Hochman, whom his father detested. To this day, however, Hochman is convinced that Cheever was one of her biggest fans. They'd met in the early sixties at a party. Hochman had recently won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and Cheever mentioned he was friendly with Dudley Fitts, one of the judges, who'd encouraged him to read Hochman's work. Then, in 1970, she completed a novel, Walking Papers, which Cheever also professed to admire—in fact, he liked it so much that he was willing to forgo his usual rule against blurb writing and provide her with two, no less, as follows: “I haven't been as thrilled by anything as much as Walking Papers since Jesus Christ Superstar;” “I love this writing. I think Sandra Hochman is terribly funny.” Hochman used the second one. (“Read Sandra,” Cheever noted while scanning her novel. “So what.”)

As if the woman's literary pretensions weren't bad enough, she was also a devoted feminist and hence a perfect scapegoat