Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [377]
Susan was vacationing in California with Calvin Tomkins when Cheever called to give her the news; he told her that he'd also phoned Federico, who was coming home as soon as possible. “Some parents will do anything to get their kids to come home for Christmas,” he quipped. Susan returned to New York and found her father lying resignedly in bed, waiting to die. She couldn't bear it: “I called Bill [Winternitz] and he told me to get him to Sloan-Kettering, and hurry. I went to Mutter, got the records, and was off to the races. Ray seemed surprised at the suggestion.” Mutter's surprise was not unwarranted: the time for action had arguably passed months ago, even before Marvin Schulman had discovered the deadly malignancy in July 1981. At Sloan-Kettering, however, Cheever's case was picked up “enthusiastically” by a renowned expert on genito-urinary cancer, who seemed to think that an intensive program of chemotherapy and radiation stood a good chance of shrinking Cheever's tumors and possibly saving him. As Bill Winternitz recalled, “John was told by [the oncologist*] that his treatment would fix it: ‘You'll be riding your bike in two weeks.’ I thought that was obnoxious, and I've never felt good about Sloan-Kettering's treatment since then.”
For much of that snowy winter, Max took a train to Ossining three times a week in order to drive Cheever to Sloan-Kettering at Sixty-eighth and York, where Cheever would doff his navy cashmere coat, tweed suit, gloves, and hat, then put on a gown (“those rags that are mandatory hospital dress”) and go sit with other cancer patients in what he described as “a kind of laundromat,” where he'd listen for hours to “vulgar and banal music” while waiting to have “a bolt of cobalt fired through [his] diseased bones.” The waiting room wasn't altogether dreary, though. Looking around at his fellow sufferers, Cheever felt a powerful sense of solidarity with the “thousands and thousands” who were thus clinging to life, and meanwhile he couldn't help regaling Max with quick little stories about what these strangers were thinking, what their lives were like, on and on (“the guy's mind never rested”). Then at last Cheever's turn would come. “It was brutal,” said Max. “They'd take him down this long corridor, with this strange aquarium lighting, and twenty minutes later he'd come back down the hallway in silhouette, dressed again in his tweed jacket, but just looking fried—lost, disoriented, his hair just [Max fluttered his fingers around his head and made a crackling noise] like he'd been electrocuted.” Around ten o'clock, the two would drive back to Ossining, where Mary always had dinner ready, and Max would either spend the night or take a late train back to Manhattan.
“While my beloved wife and my good friend set the table for lunch I conclude that I will simply spend the rest of my life under the happy power of drugs,” Cheever wrote after a few weeks of this. “That this is obscenely self-destructive seems a possibility. The pain in my chest is, at this hour, my main occupation.” Cheever wanted desperately to believe what his doctors were telling him, but he suspected he was being a little deceived and that his suffering was pointless. As it was. And yet, for Cheever, it was no small triumph to recover his tenacity and go down fighting, though it made him cranky at times. “Get out! And don't come back!” he shouted at a doctor who'd proposed a lot of bothersome tests (and worn tasteless clothing, or so an observer remembered). “Clare Thaw called and asked me the same thing,” he said in a seething voice, when Max called to ask how he was doing after a session