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By Root 4214 0

though a natural resource was being wasted. Although the covetousness in me, and stony heart, kind of rejoiced to see one less writer to compete with.”* Cheever likewise noted the “conspicuous ego clash” between the two, and yet remained galled as ever by Updike's failure to cultivate warmer relations. “Updike never calls me,” he complained. “We bump into each other and it's like old times, but he never calls me!” Updike did, in fact, call him—but at measured intervals. There was that night at Symphony Hall when Updike had helped the naked Cheever get into his clothes, and another time when he took him to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an old Garbo film, which proved to be sold out; after dining instead at the Café Budapest, Updike was startled when Cheever bolted out of the car in Roxbury to buy cigarettes “at a dark and heavily grated corner emporium.”

Later, reading Falconer, Updike seemed to recognize the novel's first sentences as the very ones he'd spotted on a sheet of paper stuck in Cheever's typewriter—always the same dusty sheet, unaltered. Whether Cheever made any further progress in Boston is unlikely* A visitor from nearby Bradford College, James Valhouli, had read parts of Cheever's Boston journal (later destroyed) and found them “incoherent,” while Laurens Schwartz observed that Cheever could hardly type: “He used his forefingers, punching out each letter at one-second intervals. … He wrote two lines and suddenly faded out.” The reason he made that one attempt in Schwartz's presence—drunk, late at night—was that he intended to rewrite one of the young man's stories (“I'm going to get it published for you”), having mentioned that he'd rewritten “Minor Heroism” and even parts of Updike. This, of course, was the pathetic braggadocio of a man who hadn't done a first-rate piece of work (as he saw it) since Bullet Park six years before, and had begun to suspect his career and perhaps his life were over. When Candida Donadio sent him a copy of the acclaimed new novel by Joseph Heller (another of her clients), Something Happened, Cheever read a few pages and threw it out the window. Because he liked it.

EVEN CHEEVER HAD TO CONCEDE a “Vesuvian maternalism” on Mary's part while he languished in Boston. She brought him groceries almost every weekend, and would stay the night to tidy up and take care of his immediate needs. One day Schwartz was holding down the fort while Cheever was out buying vodka, when Mary suddenly swept into the apartment with a large bag of apples she'd brought from New Hampshire. Identifying herself to Schwartz, she proceeded to collect the empty bottles from the kitchen table and replace them with apples (even though a number of old apples and oranges were still there, gathering mold). “That's good,” said Schwartz, casting about for some pleasantry. “I try!” she said, and walked out the door.

Though it was only a short bus ride from Andover, Federico visited his father in Boston perhaps a total of two or three times. It was true Cheever made an effort to pull himself together (“He didn't answer the door naked,” Federico noted; “I should consider myself relatively fortunate”), but the whole picture was “just too depressing”: his apartment was always a shambles (Mary's efforts withal), and in the midst of what was obviously an excruciating bout of semi-sobriety for his son's benefit, Cheever was not only dour but a little senile, or so it seemed. They'd eat at a nearby Greek place (Aegean Fare) where Cheever took most of his meals, and would talk about anything but “the gorilla sitting on the table,” as Federico put it; that the boy no longer bothered to scold his father for drinking was a measure of how hopeless things had become. As for Ben and Susan, they couldn't bring themselves to visit at all, and the disenchantment was mutual. Cheever often remarked that his older son didn't have any push: he was a henpecked husband who seemed content to waste his life in a worthless job, sponging off his parents. Which was mild compared with what he had to say about Susan, whose affair with Hinckle