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By Root 4088 0

their leaves fluttering in a light wind. Perhaps forty people gathered in the pews of the First Parish Church, many of them the same local gentry who'd attended Fred's funeral six years before (“the world into whose umbrella stands my brother used to piss,” said Cheever, who'd done much the same thing in a figurative sense). The family entered the church with Updike, the eulogist, and a clamor of creaking wood and clicking cameras was heard from the choir loft, where the press had been crammed. Next came Cheever's almost child-sized, flag-draped coffin, and finally Max arrived, late and a little dazed, whereupon the family insistently made room in their pew.* The three children spoke first. Susan, who didn't feel up to making personal remarks, gave a short reading from Romans (“For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels … shall be able to separate us from the love of God”); Ben read Leander's advice to his sons from The Wapshot Chronicle, and told of how his father had once taught him to use ear wax to oil the joints of a fishing rod. Federico—all the more grieved for having come back too late to say a proper goodbye—reminisced as follows:

He was forty-five when I was born, an old man nearing the end of his journey, as he said for the last twenty-five years of his life. … When I would return home from school after some athletic fiasco or other he would tell me ‘Fred, remember you are a Cheever.’ I would ask what that meant and he would say ‘It means knowing who you are.’ … What I have discovered is that part of what I am is John Cheever.

Finally Updike rose amid a further racket of picture-taking. “America will miss him, the leading fabulist of his generation,” he began, while the congregation shot bitter looks at the choir loft. “His swift rich style never rested to belabor the obvious or to preen,” Updike continued, and went on to say many other kind and necessary things, until he made a personal observation that may or may not have surprised those Norwell mourners with their “sailboat tans, white hair and mannered wives”: “I saw a lot of him only on two extended occasions: in Boston in the mid-seventies and in Russia in 1964. It was in Russia, strange to say, that he seemed happier and more at home.”

There was a lighter side to the proceedings, as Cheever might have wished. When Ben's wife began to sniffle, Mary (who'd chosen to forgo the usual widow's weeds in favor of a cheerful beige suit and straw hat) remarked, “She cries easily, doesn't she?” Then, as the pallbearers followed the hearse across River Street toward the cemetery, the car gained speed and made them break into a staggering trot. “And I wonder whether you saw one touch that was absolutely out of a story by John,” observed one of the few writers present, John Hersey, in a subsequent letter to Mary. “While the graveside prayers were being read, a group went over the crest of the hill in the graveyard, and suddenly a teenage boy, overcome with mysterious exuberance, suddenly tossed off a couple of cartwheels.”

The last guest to leave was Gurganus, who sat with his back against a headstone and watched the gravediggers finish their work. He'd heard of Cheever's death on the radio while dressing for breakfast at Yaddo (“In his home in Ossining, New York, beloved novelist and story writer John Cheever succumbed …”), and downstairs he found a letter waiting on the mail table: “Dear Allan, Please call or come at once. Something I must tell you. Love J.” Sitting in the cemetery, Gurganus kept his eye on a particular gravedigger—a gorgeous, strapping, shirtless boy out of a Thomas Eakins painting—which seemed a suitable way to commune with the dead. “I still find myself suspecting that John actually escaped in some way or other,” he wrote a friend. “The baldness of mortality had never registered more graphically for me—than the sight of the decent box going under.”

THE OSSINING SERVICE on June 23 was larger (about two hundred mourners, according to the Times) though somewhat less satisfying. In the local Citizen Register, Cheever had been