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jumble of exquisite art, Susan was immediately taken aback by what she read; she rented a vault of her own and kept reading for a month or so. It only got worse (“I'd read parts aloud to Calvin and the color just drained out of his face”), and not only because of the gloomy, relentless sexual stuff; there were relatively few references to her own existence, and many of these were scornful. She'd pretty much decided to forget the memoir and write another novel instead, when Cheever's prospective biographer took her to lunch and revealed that he knew all about her father's bisexuality, and naturally would be putting that in his book. Meanwhile, too, she'd begun to receive badgering, drunken phone calls from Exley, who appeared to want money for some of Cheever's letters (“John wouldn't have wanted me to be this poor”), which, he implied, were damningly candid. Finally Susan decided to go ahead and write a memoir after all: if anybody was going to tell her father's secrets to the world (the part of it that didn't know them already), it was going to be her. Lovingly. “I don't ever want to go in a grocery store and see a tabloid headline: JOHN CHEEVER A FAG,” she said at the time.

Home Before Dark, published in 1984, aroused a certain amount of controversy among those who'd known Cheever principally as a celebrant of sunlight. As the Boston Globe noted—not a little incredulously—Susan had characterized her father as “a sexual omnivore who was attracted to both groupies (female) and protégés (male), and an acerbic and sarcastic husband whose 41-year-old marriage was often filled with resentment.” Cheever's old friends in Westchester were, to put it gently, startled: Aline Benjamin (Burton's wife) had always assumed that Cheever's preoccupation with good and evil was a literary thing (“totally cerebral”), though she and others were bound to admit that the man had, for whatever reason, drunk a great deal for many years. Barrett Clark, an occasional Friday Clubber, remarked that Art Spear would have “dropped John like a hot rock” if he'd known about the bisexuality, and in fact Spear would not stand for any talk of Susan's book around the Friday Club or anywhere else. “Oh, that's just Susie!” he'd say when his daughters mentioned it. Phil Boyer, who'd always considered Cheever his “best friend,” was more saddened than resentful—forced to accept that all those years of giddy suburban squirearchy, the martinis and dogs and such, had been something of a sham. The consensus among objective readers, however, was overwhelmingly positive. As Justin Kaplan wrote in the Times Book Review, Susan had treated her father “with a quality Walt Whitman once described as ‘tenderness, blended with a curious remorseless firmness, as of some surgeon operating on a beloved patient.’ “

Asked by the Boston Globe what he thought of his sister's book, Federico replied with his usual lucidity: “It's a realistic and sensitive portrait. As far as revelations go, it's all stuff that's going to come out anyway.” This would prove prescient, to say the least, as Susan wasn't alone in thinking there had been enough deception while her father was alive. Indeed, the more Ben considered the matter—the sheer breadth of it—the more puzzled and angry he became: “It made me think I must be bisexual, and the only reason I wasn't was because this guy had scared the wits out of me about how dangerous it was, and it turns out he's bisexual.” As with his sister (and Cheever himself, for that matter), Ben would make peace with his father by writing about him—the first completely successful writing he'd ever managed, what with the daunting standard of his father's work. “It turns out you can write a book without being him,” said Ben, who described the commentary he wrote in the Letters as “the beginning of identity”: “Because I'd write something he'd written, copy it, and then write something I wrote under it. And I could see how I could write something that wasn't as good, but was useful, and belonged there, and could exist on a page with something he'd written.” Eventually