• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4052 0

man who has risen from the dead,” Cheever wrote Art Spear on July 22. “Indeed, according to Dr. Schulman, that is what I am.” And what of Cheever's longtime physician and friend, Ray Mutter? He, too, was in possession of the dire facts, and would eventually—four months later—be the one to break the news. However, back in July, Mutter simply assumed that Schulman was maintaining a postoperative follow-up, which naturally would have entailed discussing the prognosis and treatment options. “To begin with,” Mutter explained, “this is a very complicated tumor and you needed a urologist to try to interpret it. Technically, it's a very difficult problem, and I'm sure that Schulman ducked it. He ducked telling John about it and he should have told John about it. It's shocking to me, too. I'm struggling with this because I'm sitting here thinking, ‘Where did the ball drop between July and December?’” When it finally came to light that Schulman had been less than candid, various family members (including Bill Winternitz, a physician) had urged Mary to sue, but by then her husband was dead and she wanted to put the matter behind her. When asked many years later what she thought of Marvin Schulman, Mary said: “I hated him! He was one of those yucky people up to no good. He was making much of his association with Cheever, because he thought it reflected on his own importance.” Then, ruefully, she added, “John liked people who played up to him.” Indeed, Schulman and Cheever cultivated a friendship of sorts (as we shall see), which might have been jeopardized if the urologist had told his patient frankly that he had less than a year to live. And if things were hopeless anyway, why not enjoy the friendship while it lasted?*

On some level, anyway, Cheever knew he was dying—whatever Schulman might say about little cauterizable bladder tumors—and he became severely depressed. “I conclude that these are the last weeks or months of my life,” he wrote a few days after leaving the hospital, though he couldn't quite bring himself to confess the extent of his despair. He didn't want to burden his family, for any number of reasons—because he loved them, certainly, and because he'd spent a lifetime filtering a lot of unspeakable feelings through a façade of formality and laughter. (“I still feel very frail from the defenestration of my kidney and the loss has left me quite sentimental,” he wrote Federico on July 24. “I sometimes cry when Edgar brings me a tennis ball.”) Essentially alone with his misery, Cheever began hoarding pills in the drawer of his bedside table, until one day he blurted out that he was “frightened” while lunching with Don Ettlinger: “I wake up at night and I'm calling out ‘Daddy, Daddy, help me,’ and I've never called anybody Daddy in my whole life.” He also told Ettlinger about the pills, which helped; afterward the thought of suicide began to seem “less important,” and he decided to see a psychiatrist.

Schulman referred him to Donald Van Gordon in Croton, whose main impression of Cheever was one of total, exhausted surrender: the patient had skipped the denial and anger stages of grief (though he would revert to them later), and seemed melancholy but “kind of relieved,” too, that the end was near; Van Gordon had never encountered a terminally ill patient who put up less resistance. Still, Cheever refused to succumb to an almost constant temptation to drink—”How nice it would be,” he kept saying—nor had he stopped worrying what others thought of him. During his first visit to Van Gordon, Cheever presented the stranger with an inscribed copy of the paperback Stories: “ To Donald Van Gordon, with profound gratitude.”

Around this time, Cheever and Mary went to the Katonah Library for a reading by Eudora Welty, and while waiting in line they were approached by Dana Gioia, the young man Cheever had met at Stanford several months after Smithers. As Gioia remembered of that final meeting: “[Cheever] looked thin, ashen, and painfully frail … seem[ing] half a century older than the quick, boyish man I had met only six years before.