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By Root 3984 0

have to earn the right to write in the first person.” Also, as Federico pointed out, their father's talent “emanated from the conflict in his soul, and it really isn't anything he would have wished on anyone else.” So he'd discouraged his children from being writers, but, whatever he might have said, the actual example he set was rather compelling. “One gift I got from my father,” said Susan, “was the lesson that writing was something you can do.” Almost every morning of his adult life, Cheever had eaten breakfast and then gone to a room and typed for a while; in Scarborough he'd occupied a room next to Susan's, and sometimes her hamsters would escape and nibble his ankles. “Writing,” his daughter concluded, “was something he did between rescuing hamsters and picking you up at school.”

While she was in France, Cheever sent her a clipping from a local paper in which he was quoted (alongside a photo of himself in a dinner jacket) as plugging her forthcoming novel: “But she doesn't have to read mine,” he'd added, “so I don't have to read hers.” In fact, Cheever was eager to read his daughter's novel—for a number of reasons—though it was a pretty circumspect business on both sides. “I never showed my father anything I had written until it had been bought by a publishing house and was in final manuscript form,” she remembered. “I didn't ask for help, and he didn't offer it. When he did read my novels, he was polite but perfunctory. ‘I liked it very much,’ he would say, or ‘I thought it was fine.’ “ Whatever else he might have thought, Cheever was gratified to learn that her protagonist's father was a Columbia professor who'd written a study of Gide, and not (as he put it) “an old man who is too drunk to dance the Charleston.” He'd remarked to a friend that he was aghast at the prospect of her writing a sort of Daddy Dearest roman-à-clef, and when this proved not to be the case, he underlined the point in a puff piece for New York magazine, “My Daughter, The Novelist”: “We have both agreed that fiction is not crypto-autobiography. … The father of the heroine in her splendid novel, Looking for Work, parts his hair in the middle. I wouldn't be seen dead with a center part.” Moreover—pace his caveats about being a writer—he noted that her career choice “seemed to prove that in some ways [he] enjoyed her esteem. One couldn't ask for more.”

Particularly in the last couple of years, he'd also made an effort to win back the esteem of his older son, and to that end (once Susan and Tomkins had returned from France in the spring) Cheever invited the whole family to stay at the Ritz and watch Ben run in the Boston Marathon. Since it was Patriots’ Day, April 16, they attended a re-enactment of Lexington and Concord, and later jostled among the crowd on Boylston Street trying to get close to the finish line—but it was hard to see much, and the day was chilly, so Cheever announced that he was heading back to the hotel. His daughter remembered watching him go: “As I look at his back in my mind's eye, I think, ‘There was something expectant about the way he left the race.’” Ben, for his part, had already crossed the finish line and gone back to the Ritz, where a stack of messages was waiting from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, even the Quincy Patriot Ledger. He was soaking in a hot tub when Cheever stuck his head in the door: “You finished the marathon?” he asked. Ben nodded: “And you won the Pulitzer Prize.”

The family assembled afterward in the Ritz dining room, where the chef produced an enormous blazing Baked Alaska. Cheever, chatting with reporters, was careful to mention his son's achievement as well as his own: “Ben finished the Marathon in under three hours and I won what is perhaps literature's most cherished prize. It was a day for athleticesthetic celebration.” To a Patriot Ledger reporter, however, he said what was perhaps foremost on his mind: “I never believed in my childhood days in Quincy that I would be sitting here as a fresh Pulitzer Prize winner.” But there he was.

CHEEVER STILL AWOKE most mornings with an awful