Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [293]
“If I just leave you awful people,” he said to his disgusted family, “everything will be fine.” At the same time, he seemed to be hoping they'd come to their senses and beg him to stay. “He was an invalid,” said Federico. “The notion that he was going to leave his oppressive wife and be happy was obviously absurd. He was no more capable of doing his own laundry than …” He paused. “I won't make the dangerous and inflammatory similes. We let him go. Fatigue was a big item.”
* For Orphanos, Cheever simply removed the section that had already appeared in Falconer: “[I]n my considered opinion,” he wrote the publisher, “the story is improved by this deletion.” Certainly it wasn't harmed by it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
{1974}
BY WAY OF DECLARING his independence, one of the first things Cheever did in Boston was order stationery: “John Cheever / 71 Bay State Road / Boston, Massachusetts 02215.” This enabled him to write despondent letters about how much he despised his new lodgings, and never mind the “sinister” part of town where he found himself, Kenmore Square (“part student, part slum”), whose most prominent feature was a school for embalming, or so he rarely failed to point out. At his (peremptory and belated) request, an apartment had been found for him in a handsome bow-front brownstone on a leafy street near campus, though it was hardly ideal for a lonely alcoholic with a bad heart: not only was it four flights up, but the interior was bleak and Cheever was disinclined to personalize it. “[There] is no point in listing the contents of these two rooms,” he wrote shortly after his arrival. “It is much too decorous and efficient although there is dirty clothing on all the chairs.” His main attitude was one of bewilderment: he'd worked hard all his life—attained the pinnacle of his profession!—only to be banished by his family to two furnished rooms in Boston, where he expected to “end up penniless and naked” like his poor grandfather Aaron, what with the predations of the Plymouth Rock Laundry.
He found some consolation in long walks beneath the shady elms of Commonwealth Avenue: “I start with the Lief Ericson [sic] monument and go on to the president of the Argentine who is massive. He is followed by [William Lloyd] Garrison (with whom my great uncle was tarred and feathered).* … Then we have George Washington and the Ritz Bar. I return here by the river and clock it at about six miles.” But even these constitutionals were tainted by memories of happier days—those jolly walks along the Iowa River with Allan, swapping jokes and feeding the buffaloes. “He hasn't sent me a thing,” Cheever remarked that first lugubrious week, gazing teary-eyed at the Charles. In the absence of some suitable companion, he was thrown back all the more on memories of his miserable youth, when he'd considered himself “a patsy, a Joey, basically a second rate clown.” The whole abortive return to Boston, in fact, called to mind “the last pages in Proust”: he kept running into people from the past—or their ghosts—who knew him as the wayward son of a gift-shop proprietress, rather than a world-renowned author with a supposedly patrician pedigree.
As for his relations with the university, they began with delinquencies on both sides and went downhill from there. As a last-minute replacement for Jean Stafford (who was allegedly drinking even more than Cheever), the relatively obscure Ivan Gold had been hired to teach the other workshop section; consequently most students had requested Cheever, whose classes were swamped.