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to do so with his immediate family, toward whom he maintained a hopeful, humorous façade almost to the end (mixed with pardonable moments of sarcasm or petulance). As much as possible they responded in kind, lest they betray an awful despair toward the whole ghastly ordeal. “[T]here's never a word from the god damn doctors about life or death,” Susan wrote Elizabeth Spencer in April—”all they talk about are the miracles of modern medicine and the wonderful thing they are going to try next.” Indeed, certain oncologists were not only disingenuous but patronizing: the same doctor who'd told Cheever he had a “fifty-fifty chance” commented to another doctor, in Cheever's presence, that “anything we do from this point on will be palliative”—as if “palliative” were esoteric medical jargon.

“What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say, and Exodus, I think, is what I have in mind,” Cheever noted, prior to preparing his remarks for the American Book Awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall on April 27, when he would become the fifteenth recipient of the National Medal for Literature.* Cheever's colleagues—remembering the jaunty man who walked with a quick, seafaring swagger—were aghast at what cancer and its treatment had wrought: wearing a sheepskin cap on his bald head, shrunken into his overcoat, Cheever hobbled along leaning on his wife and a cane—looking, as Max observed, “as though he [were] more in pain from the impression of being lame than of being lame itself.” Otherwise he seemed in a fine humor. “Ah, Bill, just tell them I'm short,” he quipped to William Styron, when he noticed the two-page panegyric the man had written, which did in fact prove a little on the mawkish side. “In his stories and in his novels,” said Styron, “in prose often as sweet and limpid as Mozart but quietly and triumphantly his own, he has told us many things about America in this century: about the untidy lives lived in tidy households, about betrayal and deception and lust and the wounds of the heart, but also about faith and the blessings of simple companionship and the abiding reality of love. …” Styron went on like that, then turned to his subject (who'd let go of his cane to cover his ears) and concluded, “You are a lord of the language.” In the past, Cheever's remarks on these occasions had always been witty, self-deflating, and barely audible, and after that introduction he might have wished he'd taken such an approach this time, too—but this was his “Exodus,” after all, and he was entitled to a certain gravitas. “For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain,” he said, almost stentorian, startling those who'd gasped at his frailty when he first appeared on stage. “A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle. … A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” Exiting to explosive applause, Cheever tottered into an otherwise empty hall and was embraced by his eighty-three-year-old mentor, Malcolm Cowley “It was more than fifty years since John first appeared in my office at the New Republic,” Cowley remembered. “John was now older than I and was leading the way.”

AND STILL CHEEVER had days when he seemed quite certain he'd survive, almost as if it were a kind of mischievous secret. When Gurganus visited for the last time, in May, Cheever met him at the train station in apparent high spirits, and though he took a long time on the stairs (“Usually he sort of skipped up and down them like a boy in loafers”), his deliberation seemed rather graceful. But he soon grew tired, and rather than walk along the aqueduct as usual, the two sat on the porch while Cheever spoke of his dogs’ private lives (“Maisie sneaks off in the night and does sad and unspeakable acts with railroad mongrels, but we are not to know”). Back at the station, Gurganus said, “I guess I won't be seeing you again”—then added in a rush, as Cheever's smile died, “until I leave for Yaddo.”

It was