Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [308]
Perhaps as a further goodwill gesture, Cheever returned with her to Treetops early that fall. Another incentive might have been the absence of Mary's “mad sister,” Buff, who in 1972 had been hit by an express train in Pennsylvania—her body obliterated without a trace, or so legend has it. (“I will not speculate or comment,” Cheever noted on hearing the news, “except to say that Mary loved her very much.”)* The visit served as a final reminder of why he'd declined to go back (but once) these many years: the house was frankly shabby, its furniture and rugs having “missed their date at the municipal dump,” and the main topic of conversation, still, was the Winternitz patriarch, to whom everyone pithily referred as “MCW” (“Remember when he tore down all the windowshades and jumped up and down on them”). Driving back from New Hampshire with his wife, Cheever felt “relaxed and happy”—perhaps because he knew he'd never return, or bother to complain about his wife's returning.
He began to get along with his children a little better, and to speak of them with pride rather than rueful malice: “Fred got honors at Andover and is (by my lights) marvelous,” he wrote Weaver. “Susie is an editor at Newsweek and Ben, very handsome and expensively dressed, is on the staff at Readers Digest.” It was a particular relief whenever Federico came home, since it meant that Mary was civil for the sake of appearances and Cheever had someone other than the dogs to keep him company. His relationship with Ben remained problematic. Even though the young man had gotten a better job at Reader's Digest, he still borrowed money on an almost monthly basis, as a matter of both necessity and principled hostility. Cheever was alternately bewildered (“I think he has felt that to succeed as a husband and father he must find me contemptible”) and hostile in turn. While a visitor bemusedly watched, Ben drove up to the house one day and asked his father, on the porch, if he needed anything in town: “Get me the number one best-selling nonfiction book,” Cheever muttered, whereupon Ben went inside, spoke with his mother, and departed without a further word (possibly to retrieve the book). Meanwhile Cheever enjoyed an enduring truce with his daughter. To a friend who'd recently sired a baby girl, he wrote advising the man to “put her little feet on the path” leading to a job like Susan's: “Thus she will have perfect teeth, lovers, husbands, a large salary and unlimited expense accounts.” This was admiration, albeit a trifle backhanded. Susan's “lovers,” after all, still included the “charming, corpulent alcoholic” Warren Hinckle, and Susan's own drinking made her father “uneasy.” “I got two clues that he was aware of this,” she remembered. “He took me to [AA] meetings, but he may have just liked having the company. Also, when we met for lunch, he'd already have ordered my drink. That's something alcoholics do for each other.”
Despite a slightly improved domestic life, Cheever was often bored, lonely, and beset by terrible longings. Once his morning work was done, he'd invent reasons to get out of the house and go to the post office, the bank, the laundry—anything that brought him into contact with other people. Sometimes, still, he'd drop by Lang's hovel and invite the ex-convict to come