Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [81]
I forget these people's plainness. Mother made her own bed at the hotel. She took us for dinner to a place called Paddy's Chop House. It was crowded and noisey and she enjoyed herself. When I'm with mother the bridge between the house in Wollaston, the farm, the apartment in Quincy, and the life I have or would like to have in New York seems broad and sometimes untenable.
With his father the bridge was nigh insurmountable, though perhaps there was a certain comfort in conceding as much. At least the man no longer threatened to drown himself or dive off a cresting roller coaster—on the contrary, after eighty years “on this oblate spheroid” (as he liked to say), Frederick seemed at peace with the world, wishing only to make amends. “John that's all that makes life worth living—someone else, other than just yourself,” he wrote, part of a larger paean to the wife he'd once despised. As a father, too, he was more dutiful than ever, avidly interested in his son's career, or at least careful to seem that way: he read The New Yorker at the library each week and would praise not only John's latest story, but everything else about the magazine (“its layout sure sparkles in all departments … and ads, are highest grade mdse. See Altman—Tiffany—etc etc”). For all his apparent mellowing, though, he never quite reconciled himself to idleness, forever plotting to make a comeback of sorts. Not long before his death, he tried to get a payroll job at the Bethlehem Hingham Shipyard, but as usual it didn't work out: “‘Too old’ as it looks,” he laconically noted in a letter to John; “1865 scares them when they read it in my formal application.” A week later, the episode had marinated a bit, and this time he related it to “John Mary and the Baby” as an extravagant escapade (much abridged below):
Got a phone call Th'sgiving at 10 AM … visions of folding money for Xmas … interview with Dept Head—who was to detail my tasks—arrange hours pay etc. Signed some 35+ papers—some call for 3 sigs to a sheet—talked or was talked to by 30+ window ladies … Then fingerprint both hand … then picture taken (with smile) … then physical exam—pulse, heart, sight, hearing, scars … Passed all above was to go to work 29 Monday … 7 Days a week … but in MD exam room “strip”—got down to BVDs—MD asks, “How old are you?”—told him honest … (he had OKd all tests—“very good very good indeed” earlier)—He barked … “You need not go further. Too old.”*
In subsequent letters he kept repeating the story every so often—in a comic, tragic, or tragicomic mode, according to mood—because, like his son, he was a born raconteur who couldn't help fine-tuning a tale until he'd nailed it, but also because he was old and getting a bit dotty. To the extent that he was aware of this (as when he misplaced a flashlight in the icebox), it made him sad: he was becoming a Burden. “My letters from now on will not be at as great length,” he mawkishly promised his son. “Am alone—very much alone—and start a brief letter but runs into words—words words and more words, but will not inflict it on you any more—(till next time).”
Death came on July 26, 1945; Frederick's heart stopped beating while he sat in a wing chair sipping tea. The son felt a sense of shock—such a profusion of letters, abruptly curtailed—as well as remorse for having failed his father in various ways over the years. (A little later he felt a pang of kinship, too, when his mother bitterly admitted that the old man had left a final indictment on his desk—clearly meant to be read after his death—”excoriating her” as a wife, mother, and housekeeper. “She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation. Sigh—how deep