Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [387]
… He explained that he hadn't been to see my therapist. This, he said, was “partly because I was busy and partly because I didn't see why I couldn't tell you what I had to tell you face-to-face.” He hadn't been busy, he'd been sick, but we both honored this fiction. “What I wanted to tell you,” he said, “is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I'd tell you that, because sooner or later somebody's going to tell you and I'd just as soon it came from me.” …
I was forgiving, but mostly I was just bewildered, and I remember now that my reply came almost in a whisper: “I don't mind, Daddy, if you don't mind.”
• • •
TOWARD THE END, after many years, Cheever moved back into the master bedroom with Mary, who devoted almost every waking moment to his care. She cooked three meals a day whether he could eat them or not, and would sometimes crouch over him in bed and shout a little fearfully—“John! John!”—when he wouldn't wake up. Once, she stepped outside just long enough to get the mail and check on her garden, and when she came back he was groaning on the floor. While staggering to the bathroom, he'd fallen and broken his leg. With the help of a neighbor, Mary got him back on the bed; then a hospice nurse was summoned to clean him up, put his leg in a splint, and keep him out of pain for the few days he had left. He rarely regained consciousness. One of his last visitors was Don Ettlinger, who found his friend in a fetal position, wizened and comatose (“To see that vital, brilliant, charming man reduced to this was awful, awful”). The nurse asked how long they'd known each other, and Ettlinger murmured, “Forty years,” with a touch of wonder at how fast the time had gone by.
Cheever died late in the afternoon on June 18. Susan remembered a peculiar burning odor in the master bedroom—hard to describe, except that it gave her a sense of impending death. When Mary remarked that Federico was about to leave for a ten-day rafting trip in California, Susan called him and burst into tears; he was in the middle of packing, but arranged to take the first flight to New York. Susan then phoned Reverend George Arndt at Trinity Church in Ossining: “I don't think your father wants me,” said Arndt, who'd been sent away once before, angrily, since Cheever wasn't ready yet and despised the man besides. Sure enough, he began thrashing when he noticed Arndt standing there in his white robe; Mary, Ben, and Susan joined hands around the bed, reciting the Lord's Prayer, while the priest administered last rites. “[Cheever] was struggling, whether for breath or what, I don't know,” Arndt remembered. “He was in physical turmoil. I made the sign of the cross on his forehead and he became absolutely peaceful and took one last breath and that was it.” Susan had turned around to give her daughter a bottle, and when she turned back, her father was gone (“like he'd left the room and shut the door”). A shriveled corpse remained. Ben tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then put his arms around the body, with the others, and began to cry.
When the coroner asked the family to leave the room, they refused. Mary went to the closet and picked out her husband's clothes for the funeral: his favorite gray suit with the Academy badge in the buttonhole, a blue shirt, and a pink-and-gray-striped necktie that Alwyn Lee's widow, Essie, had knitted for him. “I just saw him on the Cavett show,” the coroner mumbled as he worked. “Gee, it must have been a rerun.” Meanwhile, in Bronxville, Dr. Robert Schneider—the young oncologist