Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [34]
John's parents went their separate ways: Mrs. Cheever took an apartment on Spear Street, near the gift shop, and the wretched Frederick washed up at the desolate old farmhouse in Hanover, where he slept in front of a fireplace to keep from freezing to death. Hardly able to care for himself, Frederick might have perished if not for a shell-shocked veteran named McDonough who used part of his pension to buy groceries and cigars for the poignant old man, and also helped shovel snow and chop wood. A lot of wood: in winter the temperature dropped to thirty below, and (since there was no running water) Frederick had to “bathe” by stripping naked and rolling around in snowdrifts; so galvanized, he spent the rest of his waking hours stoking the five fireplaces to such an uproarious glow that drivers slowed along the highway a quarter-mile away, wondering if the place was on fire. “Never a one of them stopped to see the prisoner,” Frederick lamented.
Before cruel Pinkham had sent the bulldozers to Winthrop Avenue, Mrs. Cheever arranged for some leftover furniture to be hauled to her sons’ new apartment at 6 Pinckney Street, on Beacon Hill near the Common. She pretended to be nothing but pleased that John was striking out on his own (under Fred's protective eye), but as the brothers backed out of the driveway for the last time, their headlights struck the old woman's face—”gleaming with tears,” as John recalled, though neither brother remarked on it at the time. The better part of their sympathy remained with their father. Every weekend they drove to the farm in Hanover, despite its forbidding lack of creature comforts. “I still remember,” wrote Cheever, “I will remember forever, shivering and reading by the fire long after everyone else had gone to bed, getting up and walking down the cold hallways, the odd flights of steps, out to the woodshed and peeing off the stoop.” By day, the brothers picked up where the helpful McDonough had left off—chopping wood and planting gardens in warm weather—and for a while it pleased John to be such a good son to his forsaken father. But the man wasn't especially grateful. When he wasn't gloating over plans to raise goats and make a fortune on cheese, he'd maunder in a tipsy, self-pitying way: “I can't smell a rose!” he announced one day. “I have grown old. If I can't smell a rose I can't smell the east wind, I can't smell rain, I can't smell smoke and if the house catches fire I will burn to death …” On it went. Other times he'd retire to his room and read to the cat (which he'd found on the road with a broken hip and nursed back to health).
Nor were things much better in Boston. The brothers’ apartment wasn't as cold as the farmhouse, perhaps, but it didn't have five fireplaces either; at one point they took a hacksaw to the main heating pipe and diverted steam with a rolled-up magazine. Such hardships might have been romantic if the rest of life were going well; by then, however, John had taken a dreary newspaper job and dropped his persona as a South Shore Rimbaud.* The company he kept as a cub reporter was decidedly less glamorous than the Werners’ circle in New York or the languid bohemians of Beacon Hill. “I can remember night after night,” he wrote a couple of years later, in very different circumstances, “drinking parties on Milton Street, leaving my place half-cocked, going out for supper with a bunch of people I didn't want to see then and never wanted to see again, coming out of night-clubs in Copley Square, impatient with the girl I was with, glad to get away from the dance music and not wanting to go back to the place where I lived.” The main reason he didn't want to go back (“lurching into lam-posts [sic]”) was “mortal boredom”: “To finish the day's work and pass a football in the failing light was not enough for me.”
But even boredom might have been bearable if not for a mortifying love triangle involving the brothers and a pretty Canadian named Iris Gladwin, whom John had met a few years back