Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [379]
The first dose would require a week in the hospital, and Cheever asked whether this (as well as the radiation) might henceforth be administered at Northern Westchester in Mount Kisco, since the long days of convalescence at Sloan-Kettering made him homesick, and never mind the logistical difficulty. He was therefore referred to the thirty-two-year-old Robert Schneider, who'd recently interned with Cheever's regular oncologist. “I am so pleased to meet you!” Cheever said, springing up from a stretcher (en route to a bone scan) to shake the young man's hand. The two immediately warmed to each other. Schneider was “the only doctor who didn't say it was all right for me to start drinking again,” said Cheever, grateful for such manifest faith in his survival. “To Robert Schneider, with whom I share an uncommon hopefulness,” he inscribed his most cheerful book, The Wapshot Chronicle.
He needed all the reassurance and friendship he could get. Edgar had also been diagnosed with cancer, and if anything the coughing dog regarded Cheever as a bad omen, rather than vice versa. When her master had come home from his kidney operation the previous summer, Edgar had given up her place at the foot of his bed and gone to sleep in the living room. At length Cheever coaxed her back, and later forced himself to crawl painfully under his car to dislodge her when she'd gotten stuck in the snow. Edgar died, finally, in March. “I don't even have a correspondent to whom I can write letters,” Cheever lamented afterward. For months he'd been writing little notes to people he cared about, most of them long out of touch; the notes tended to say goodbye, in effect, or else (depending on his mood) that he “fully expect[ed] to recover”—at any rate he let his friends know that he was sick and missed them. A year after his death, Shirley Hazzard found such a note (Won't you come see us?) stuck inside a book; she showed it to her husband, Francis Steegmuller, and both were reminded of how they'd meant to visit Cheever but hadn't gotten around to it in time. “We were both so grieved by that,” said Hazzard. “We had quite close feelings, though we didn't see a great deal of each other. John's a person I'll always think quite tenderly of.”
All too often we are forced to live apart from the people we love most in the world, and this was Cheever's fate to an uncommon degree. His little address book was largely composed of Russian and Bulgarian names—soulmates whose company he'd enjoyed for a few weeks over the course of a lifetime—and one of the first persons he'd called in December, after Mutter had told him the bad news, was a dear friend he hadn't seen in some three years (and rarely before): Saul Bellow. “Since we spoke on the phone I've been thinking incessantly about you,” Bellow wrote him a few days later.
… What I would like to tell you is this: we didn't spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it's in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade. Let me try to say it better, we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it's this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America that brings us together. … Neither of us had much use for the superficial “given” of social origins. In your origins there were certain advantages; you were too decent to exploit them. … You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially. … Love, Saul
The feelings ran even deeper—and far darker—in the case of Maxwell, whom Cheever didn't write until the end of January, when he learned that chemotherapy wasn't working. A few months before, he'd had an erotic dream about his old friend (“I pursue Hope and