Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [315]
In the meantime he'd been distracted by graver matters. On May 28, his brother had died of a massive heart attack (his third). Just a few weeks before, Fred had moved into “one of the dandy little apartments” of Wheeler Park, a subsidized housing development for the elderly in Scituate; then he'd paid a last visit to his brother, who knew immediately that Fred was near death. “This is a commonplace evening, a great improvement,” John noted afterward, while Fred was characteristically more effusive: “Just back from a fine visit with John who is in great shape,” he wrote his son. “He asked about you, as always, for he has a most sincere and proud interest in all the kids. Remember?—he took Nan [Fred's daughter Ann] to a short trip to Europe a few years ago and still talks about what a wonderful gal she was.” Fred had constantly mentioned Ann's trip to Majorca over the years, extravagantly proud of this rare intersection with his brother's family; he also mentioned the novel John had just finished, though he didn't refer to their parting exchange (as John often would): “Fred, I killed you in my novel.” “That's splendid, Joey. That's splendid.”
John had been struck by a memory of his mother's decision to end her suffering by drinking herself to death (“[I] think of her as uncommonly clear and strong”) at almost the exact moment, he later learned, that Fred had died. “I cry,” he wrote in his journal.
He seems, as most people I love have seemed, to be lost, to be suffering a loneliness more painful than anything experienced in life. I read the prayer book, but—other than that God will not be a stranger—the descriptions of life everlasting are not what I have in mind. The next day my sorrow seems visceral. … Susie and I talk about the family. I am inclined to make a legend of the Cheevers, and this can easily be done, but it seems idle to me. I will write a eulogy, including the fact that my brother wasted half his life. … We seem to have got the provincial eccentricities of New England, but we seem to have got them wrong.
Philip Schultz said that his friendship with Cheever really began when the latter remembered his brother tenderly—”instead of (as usual) belligerently”—a few days after Fred's death. John spoke of the “communion” between them in the old days: how “protective and fatherly” Fred had been; the way he'd thrown gravel against John's window on Hudson Street. Schultz had been moved to tears, and felt as though he were crying for Cheever, too, who as usual found it difficult to express sorrow except with a kind of constrained cheerfulness.
On June 3, however, when he attended Fred's funeral at the First Parish Church in Norwell, he became cheerful in earnest. Looking around the seventeenth-century church at the flowers (“Yes, yes, Louisa Hatch did the flowers”), the high, lighted windows, the mourners with their “sailboat tans, white hair and mannered wives,” Cheever gleefully realized that this was “the world into whose umbrella stands [his] brother used to piss”: “The text was Tillich, Cummings, and Eliot and not a tear was shed,” he wrote Gurganus. “It was splendid.” Nor was Cheever inclined to shed any more tears, confessing to himself that he didn't really miss Fred—for whom life had been “mysterious and thrilling,” after all, whereas “death was of no consequence”: “Some