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By Root 4020 0

dollars before taxes that year, she suggested they sit down at the kitchen table and discuss giving the money away to a worthy cause (“We have never sat at the kitchen table,” he mused, “she hasn't spoken to me for weeks”). He was nothing if not generous when he was flush: one of his first major purchases with the Stories windfall was a Blackglama mink for his wife—she picked it out at Bonwit's that October—though by Thanksgiving the goodwill had already evaporated. The Thaws came for the feast that year (along with Philip Schultz), and were struck by an almost paralyzing tension in the air. When Cheever said grace, Clare recalled, he muttered “on and on”: “maybe [because] he could talk and didn't have to get down to the tension of sitting and eating. We got through it.”

Christmas was better for the simple reason that Federico came home from Stanford. “The equilibrium that Fred brings to this establishment is inestimable,” Cheever wrote. “[W]ith Fred here the enigmatic aspects of my life seem to be no more than shadows I have always hoped them to be.” Nor could he fail to notice that Mary was transformed in their son's presence, chatting at table with perfect ease after so long a frost (“I glimpse how difficult I am for her as a husband”). Amid the largesse that Cheever freely bestowed at the time—cars, televisions, minks (one for Hope, too)—was a brand-new BMW 320i for Federico, this because the young man's girlfriend had dumped him with the words “Grow up and get a car!” “He is a most judicious, loving and comely young man,” Cheever wrote that Christmas, while noting further that he (Cheever) had just given Bathsheba (the dog) “her check for $50,000.”

In fact, relations had vastly improved with all his children, who had turned out miraculously well: Ben was rising in the ranks at Reader's Digest and running marathons; Susan had gone to France to work on her first novel. “My enthusiasm for you three is boundless,” Cheever wrote her that autumn (signing himself “Yours, John”). He was especially pleased with the fact that Susan had finally broken up with Warren Hinckle. Two years before, when Newsweek was about to transfer Susan to San Francisco so she could marry Hinckle (who'd “sort of left his wife” but was still living with her), Cheever had invited his daughter to join him for a luncheon at the Ettlingers’ house in Rockland County. “What do you think of Tad?” he asked afterward, referring to the elegant older man whose name she hadn't caught. When he told her that “Tad” was Calvin Tomkins, the notable New Yorker writer, Susan's “jaw dropped”: not only was she a “huge fan” of Tomkins, but she'd once spoken to him at length on the telephone, when she interviewed him for a magazine piece on Buckminster Fuller. And so, while Susan renewed her acquaintance with Tomkins, Cheever “did some sleuthing” on her behalf—asking Ettlinger about the status of Tomkins's marriage (not so good). Things progressed nicely, and finally, in the summer of 1978, Susan took her father to lunch at Four Seasons and announced that she was quitting Newsweek and moving to France with Tomkins to write her novel; meanwhile she needed her parents to take care of Bathsheba, the dog. “And he said ‘okay’ “ she remembered, “and I felt it was him giving me his blessing, because running off to France was kind of a harebrained adventure. I had a really good job at Newsweek, and my father loved the fact that I had that job. But he was just thrilled.” France and Tomkins, after all, were not San Francisco and Hinckle.

Cheever was, at first, less than thrilled by Susan's literary ambitions. There were the obvious reasons—it was a tough life, lonely and often impecunious—and reasons that were somewhat harder to express. One way to put it, perhaps, was that Cheever regarded himself as the rare sort of writer who communed with an actual muse, and anyone else presuming to do so was “throwing up a clay pigeon,” said Ben, who'd once shown his father a story that his fifth-grade teacher had considered wonderful. “It's in the first person,” Cheever remarked, “and you