Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [307]
The fact was, a part of him chafed at being perceived as “a fucking do-gooder”: it was galling to remember his mother's bandage-rolling for the Red Cross, her delight in giving “skinny chickens” to the poor and so forth; on the other hand, Cheever owed his life to the kindness of fellow alcoholics, and felt an inescapable sense of obligation. Perhaps his most extended effort was in behalf of Zinny's son, Dudley Jr., who'd opened a restaurant in the area and then (as Dudley Sr. put it) “took to sampling his own liquor.” Having watched the young man's mother drink herself to death, Cheever took Dudley to AA meetings and tried to be something of a father to him. “We play backgammon,” he wrote in his journal. “[Dudley] is so stupefied with drugs and drink that the game is meaningless. … I put my hand over his and say: ‘This is not right, this is not right at all. You are drugged, you are lost.’ He mumbles some agreement but I know from my own past how little he has heard, how little he cares.” Cheever took almost every possible measure to save the man: he phoned various family members (one of whom was in Jamaica at the time), confronted doctors, and finally drove to Dudley's house and insisted he get in the car. “You're an alcoholic like me,” he said. “I'm going to take you to Phelps, and that's going to be it.” After drying out, Dudley went to a rehabilitation clinic in New London, Connecticut, and was sober for almost a year—then relapsed, and relapsed again, until finally Cheever despaired of him. (“I preferred him to my own father,” said Dudley after Cheever's death. In 1987 Dudley himself died, age forty-five, of a brain embolism.)
As perhaps some Higher Power appreciated, it was burden enough looking after one's own salvation. A month after leaving Smithers, Cheever chided himself: “I make the sign of the cross a dozen times a day. Cleanse the thoughts of my heart, etc. Rejoice, rejoice. Can't you take this as a gift given? Must you, like a broody child, remark that the toy that fills your heart with pleasure will soon be broken and thrown away?”
IF CHEEVER HAD HOPED that sobriety would improve his marriage, he was soon disabused. “I've changed violently,” he wrote, “but nothing else seems to have changed. Looking for a good-night kiss, I find the only exposed area to be an elbow.” Mindful that his drinking had been “a grave problem,” and given that he was, by nature, averse to confrontation, Cheever tried to show his contrition with deeds rather than words. As his daughter recalled, he seemed to realize for the first time “that the house wasn't cleaned by gremlins,” and diffidently inquired how one went about working the dishwasher and such; he also learned to feed himself in some rudimentary way. His newfound self-reliance, however, would have to be its own reward. That first summer post-Smithers, he cheerfully welcomed his wife back from Treetops with a batch of groceries he'd bought all by himself: “I lean for a kiss. There is none. If my questions are answered at all they are answered with a sigh. The groceries I brought are worthless, the corn is questionable, and would I mind if it is thrown away? ‘Not at all!’ I exclaim, which means that it will be served. This is perversity and madness.