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By Root 4051 0

at Mrs. Zagreb's, and, waiting on the phone, he glanced down and spotted a half-pint of gin in one of Cheever's boots. Ever more vigilant, he began accompanying his father to parties, though Cheever was less amenable to “signals” than he'd been with Elaine in Iowa. “Oddly,” said Federico, “one of my memories of that summer was to think that, because of everything that had happened, I would have lines on my face when I returned to school and that would bring me more respect.” But then the very fact that he now had a refuge of sorts, another life to return to, made him less apt to panic over his father's heedless self-destruction; because of the boy's relative detachment, Cheever tended to accuse him, too, of being unfeeling. For Federico it was more like exhaustion: “I remember Susie and I taking a walk,” he remarked, “and her saying, ‘He's dying.’ I felt no surprise.”

Susan had also begun to distance herself, with arguably better reason. That spring her marriage broke up, and she was chagrined to find her father going out of his way to console her ex-husband, who also found it “kind of appalling.” One day the two men sat commiserating in a gas line, passing a flask, and Cheever freely admitted that he'd always wanted a blond “Linda Boyer type” for a daughter. He even urged Rob not to pay alimony, since the man was already burdened with two children from a previous marriage. As for the married man Susan had “[run] off” with—Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle—Cheever referred to him as a “wretched buffoon,” citing the time he'd squashed a banana into Federico's typewriter. For her part, Susan seemed to respond to her father's latest rejection by working harder than ever to step out of his shadow. While at the Tarrytown Daily News, she won an Associated Press writing award (“People stop me on the street and ask if I'm really her father,” said Cheever), and in 1974 she was hired as religion editor at Newsweek. Toward her father she was alternately solicitous and bullying. Particularly at the dinner table—“the shark tank”—she let him know in quite pointed terms what she thought of his manipulative self-pity, and Cheever seemed at a loss to respond: “He would look hangdog, as if he deserved it,” one guest remembered.

The more wretched he became, though, the more incessantly he talked about his young “mistress” Elaine. Here, after all, was a person who loved him as he deserved to be loved. More than once his son called him a “shit” and told him to shut up already (“It's one thing to have affairs,” said Federico, “another to trot them out exclusively to cause pain”), which only seemed to validate Cheever in his roguish-ness. When Mary announced that she was going to Treetops, as always, for a few weeks in August, he reached for his usual cudgel: Elaine would come stay with him, he said, and he wouldn't even require Iole on the premises. Mary seemed all in favor of the idea, and even phoned Elaine in Maine: John was rather ill, she explained, and hated to be left alone; would Elaine be willing to come and take care of him for a few weeks? Not only did Elaine decline, she declined vehemently: “Why don't you divorce him?” she said. “How can you stand him?” Perhaps Mary chose not to relate the girl's exact response to her ailing husband, who at any rate claimed to have been swayed by the better angels of his nature: “[Elaine] is not here,” he reported to Coates. “In a fleeting moment of common sense I realized that this is Mary's house and that [Elaine] is unwelcome. [Elaine] is sulking in Maine.”

In August, then, Federico was again left alone to care for Cheever, who was finding it harder and harder to get out of bed and whose ankles had swollen ominously. Finally the boy burst into tears and demanded his father go to the hospital and dry out, or else he was leaving for good. When Cheever kept insisting he was fine, his son got in the car and drove away, while Iole berated her employer with a lot of histrionic Italian; by the time Federico had driven around the block, Cheever was willing to go. According to his admission report at Phelps,