Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  Mary had offered to stay in Ossining to nurse her husband, but John said, “No, I can get Max to stay with me.” He had followed the same pattern when it was time to come home from Phelps. Mary could have come to get him, but she had an etching session that morning and he did not want her to miss it. Ben could have taken a half day off from work to run the errand, but John did not want to disrupt his routine. Instead he called on Max to fetch him home. The younger man, “the beloved” in the relationship, felt increasingly circumscribed by his services to Cheever, the more so now that he was compensated for them. It began to seem as if he were being held captive. John was, naturally, sensitive to those feelings. He was torn between wanting to bind Max to him as strongly as possible and wanting him to achieve his own independent future. On some days he told Max that if he left, it would certainly not kill him but would make his life terribly hard. On others he joked with him about appropriate farewell speeches Max might use. “Goodbye, old man,” he might say, “you can’t even change a flat tire.”

  As summer wore on into fall, Cheever’s cancer spread to bone and robbed him of his vigor. The bicycle trips and hikes that he depended upon for their restorative effects became exercises in agony, and had to be curtailed. Almost daily he grew weaker. On a crisp autumn day late in September, Eudora Welty came to read at the Katonah library and the literary establishment turned out to do her homage. Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark were there, along with William Maxwell, Robert Fitzgerald, and John and Mary Cheever. Dana Gioia spoke to Cheever in the line outside the library, but Cheever sounded so tired and looked so painfully frail that Gioia soon excused himself. “He seemed half a century older than the quick, boyish man” Gioia had met at Stanford in 1976.

  Cheever knew when he left the hospital that the tumor was malignant, and his body told him every day that his cancer was still accomplishing its deadly work. As the disease pervaded his system, he became terribly depessed. Dr. Schulman sent him to see Dr. D. J. Van Gordon in Croton for counseling. Twice a week for four months, Cheever talked to Van Gordon, a psychiatrist. He made less resistance to impending death and less protest against it than any other terminally ill patient Van Gordon had treated. Of the classic stages of dying—shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, preparatory grief—he seemed to bypass anger entirely. He did not, like most patients, “fight back.” He did not fly into rages or talk volubly about it or drive too fast. If Cheever had one constantly recurring thought, Van Gordon remembers, it was how nice it would be to take a drink. But he did not do that either, and even resisted taking drugs for depression. He kept his dignity and was “kind of relieved” at the prospect of dying, Van Gordon thought. “There wasn’t any emergency in it for him.”

  Family weddings and two television shows in the fall helped keep his mind off his illness. Susan was married to Calvin Tomkins on October 1, and plans were under way for Ben’s marriage to Janet Maslin at Christmastime and Fred’s to Mary McNeil in February. On Halloween, WNET arranged for a screening of The Shady Hill Kidnapping, and Cheever invited a substantial company of friends to attend. When the lights went down he was as nervous as George S. Kaufman on opening night. “It’s really rather good, isn’t it?” he whispered to Bud Benjamin only a few minutes into the one-hour screening. Then he could not sit still, and paced up and down outside the screening room with Ann Blumenthal. Afterward the author said a few words. He liked to think of his one-shot, low-budget show, he said, as Westchester’s answer to Dallas.

  Soon thereafter he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show again, this time in company with John Updike. The two authors outdid themselves in admiring each other’s work. Cheever had just finished reading Rabbit Is Rich in bound galleys, and thought it was one of the best American novels in years. Updike was driven almost to stuttering in his eagerness to praise Cheever’s excellence. Both of them were conscious of the older man’s failing health. Updike was at the peak of his powers, while Cheever—as he said of himself for the thousandth time—was indeed “nearing the end of his journey.” He looked the part on the screen. Besides the continuing discomfort of pain, he discovered at showtime that his zipper was stuck and so he kept his legs virginally crossed during the entire show. On November 17 the Cavett show aired, and Cheever watched it alone in the kitchen at Cedar Lane. He looked like a viper trying to break wind, he wrote Updike.

  On December 4, Cheever was back in Phelps for another operation. Dr. Schulman found at least thirty small superficial tumors all over the bladder, and burned them off with electric current. Now there was no question that the cancer was spreading. It fell to family doctor Ray Mutter to tell the Cheevers what they had known and tried not to admit since midsummer: John had perhaps six months to live and could not expect any improvement. Cheever had but one question. “My son Fred is getting married in California on Valentine’s Day,” he said. “Will I at least be able to go to his wedding?” It was a promise Mutter could not make.

  Max Zimmer was at the house when John and Mary returned from the doctor’s office. Both looked completely gray and drained. Cheever managed to smile. “The news is all bad,” he said. “The news is very bad.” He took off his coat, settled in the wing chair in the living room, and asked for a glass of tea. Max knew then that he was in for the duration, and because he wanted to be.

  A long winter lay ahead. First there was Christmas to get through. On December 24, Ben and Janet were married at Cedar Lane. Edgar, John’s favorite dog, perched on the newlyweds’ feet throughout the wedding. Mary had to prop John up during the standing parts of the ceremony. The next day he wrote her a brief note arranged as verse:

  CHRISTMAS MORNING 1981

  You gave your son his wedding

  In an old House, impeded

  by a Hamstrung husband you

  gave him a ceremony that was

  positively shimmery.

  You gave your son his wedding

  to a twice-chosen bride. Sitting in

  a mulberry tree in New Haven

  you may never have wished to

  bear a handsome man and give

  him a wedding but this is what

  you have done.

  When Bud and Aline Benjamin came to call on Christmas afternoon, they went up to see Cheever in his bedroom. Aline grasped his big toe, briefly. Parchment-thin, John made a valiant attempt to be his usual charming self.

  With the new year he began to receive state-of-the-art treatment for his cancer: chemotherapy, cobalt radiation, platinum. Max drove him down to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on East Sixty-eighth Street for his initial stay. Susie met them at the hospital, and waited with her father while his room was being made up. Dressed elegantly in a tweed suit and cashmere overcoat, he spoke quietly of suicide. He’d saved up his pills until he had enough, he told her, and hid them in the drawer of his bedside table. Then he told Don Ettlinger about them, that seemed to make him feel better, and he put the pills back in the medicine cabinet.

  He and Ettlinger, close friends since the mid-1940s, met occasionally for lunch on days when Cheever could manage the outing. One day when he could barely stand up—the cancer had metastasized to his left hip and right rib cage—they met at a diner near the Tappan Zee Bridge, and Cheever unburdened himself.

  “I’m frightened,” he told Don. “I wake up at night and I’m calling out Daddy, Daddy, help me. The thing is, I’ve never called anybody Daddy in my whole life.”

  After that first stay at Sloan-Kettering, treatments continued on a three-times-a-week basis. Max, living in Manhattan, took an early-afternoon train to Ossining, spent an hour or two there, and drove Cheever to the hospital in his Volkswagen Rabbit. He dropped Cheever off at the entrance while he parked the car, and then took him up to the treatment room. There he helped John out of his clothes—he invariably dressed in suit and tie for these trips—and into his hospital gown. Waiting for his turn, they watched the other cancer victims in gowns, Magic Markers indicating where they would be irradiated that day. One beautiful
Puerto Rican woman, with only a single breast, walked around trying to cheer people up. As always, Cheever spoke about what the others must be thinking and feeling, imagining their stories, hypothesizing the details of their lives. He was writing in his mind right up to the end.

  At 7:00 or 8:00 P.M. it would be time for Cheever to go into the cobalt room. He came out looking as if he’d walked out of the desert. Sometimes he did not know who or where he was. Limping badly from his hip and leg pain, he walked with Max down a long corridor, took the elevator to the ground floor, and returned to Ossining. Sometimes they stopped en route to make love. Even when he was in acute distress, Cheever’s sex drive remained active. At Cedar Lane, Mary kept dinner waiting for the two of them, and then Max would catch the late train back into the city.

  This numbing routine gave way by mid-February to daily treatments at Northern Westchester Hospital Center in nearby Mount Kisco. These were successful in arresting some of the pain, but he was far too ill to travel to California for Fred’s wedding. On many days it was difficult for him to get as far as his typewriter in Ben’s old bedroom. The only way he could motivate himself to work, he told Bill Luers, was to create characters—young girls, old men—who somehow managed to overcome cancer.

  On rock-bottom days he could write nothing at all, and Max was assigned to answer correspondence. Cheever’s work was finally getting considerable critical attention. A fifteen-thousand-word discussion of his fiction appeared in the Scribner’s American Writers series. Samuel Coale and Lynne Waldeland both wrote monographs about him for other established series. Father Hunt was working on a long book, eventually to appear as John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Company of Love (1983). Robert G. Collins was collecting material for Critical Essays on John Cheever (1984).

  While this academic recognition was gratifying, Cheever was not at all receptive to the idea of a critical gala in celebration of his seventieth birthday on May 27—a proposal advanced by professors Collins, Frederick Karl, and, spearheading the effort, Richard Rupp. Rupp’s letter to Cheever about the proposal could hardly have been more ill-timed. It arrived less than a week after Cheever got the bad news from Ray Mutter. Rather brashly, Rupp suggested that following a day-long symposium at the New York Public Library on his birthday, Cheever might receive his diploma from Thayer Academy, say a few words about his life as a writer, and adjourn with the celebrants for dancing until midnight in Bryant Park to old Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller recordings. As a point of honor, Rupp observed, the organizers would “not accept a nickel of Cheever’s own money toward this enterprise.” Unimpressed, Cheever scotched the plans in two curt letters to Collins, the second signed by Max.

  Cheever’s mood darkened with the sudden decline and death of his favorite dog, Edgar. Edgar, a.k.a. Shithead, was in reality a spayed female whose original name was Tara. “I changed his name,” Cheever explained, “because I was an old man and thought I ought to have a male dog.” Edgar was “very accommodating,” he added, “urinates on trees and all that.” They were close companions, dog and master. For breakfast Cheever fixed English muffins and bacon for both of them. They took walks together in the afternoon, Edgar’s jaws clamped around a tennis ball. On trips to Carvel’s after dinner Cheever bought Flying Saucers and Lollapaloozas for Edgar and the other family dogs, Bathsheba and Maisie. So he was naturally distressed after his return from Sloan-Kettering when Edgar abandoned his accustomed sleeping place at the foot of his master’s bed. After that the dog rapidly weakened, losing mobility and appetite and coughing frighteningly. Within a month, Edgar was dead of lung cancer. Cheever took it hard.

  Not knowing the news, Ben called his father. “How’s Edgar?” he asked.

  “Edgar died,” Cheever answered. Silence.

  Later that evening, Ben called again. “I’m sorry about Edgar,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” Cheever said. And hung up.

  Preparing for the end, Cheever rarely permitted himself such incivilities. Instead he was eager to cement old friendships. He sent a conciliatory note to William Maxwell. He played backgammon regularly with Arthur Spear and Roger Willson and Bud Benjamin. Alerted to his condition, Updike called with words of encouragement and support. Bellow offered to fly to New York whenever it was convenient. His illness, Cheever pointed out in interviews, linked him with thousands of others “seeking some cure for this deadly thing.” It was neither depressing nor exhilarating, he said. It was simply “a critical part of living, or the aspiration to live.”

  He also joked about his baldness, brought on by chemotherapy. “I had a full head of hair a few weeks ago,” he said. “Then I woke up one morning and there it was on the pillow.” When he showed up at the barbershop in Briarcliff, he reported, the barbers nearly died laughing. Exposed to landscapes of pain he had never imagined, he was determined to be upbeat in public. Moreover, he would no longer resign himself to the inevitable. In letter after letter he insisted that he fully intended to recover. Late in March he wrote Jim McConkey that he planned to celebrate his eightieth birthday “by walking to Croton dam.” When Susie produced his granddaughter Sarah in April, he declared that his cancer was finished. “I’ve licked it,” he told his daughter. He had two months left to live.

  ENDINGS

  Cheever’s last two major works conveyed the powerfully affirmative statement of a dying man. It was as if the prospect of leaving this life confirmed his appreciation of its great gifts. Both The Shady Hill Kidnapping and Oh What a Paradise It Seems hymn the glory of the natural world and the wonder of family love. The teleplay (first shown on January 12, 1982, as the opening performance in the American Playhouse series) begins with a series of spats among members of the Wooster family. Father quarrels with son, mother with daughter, and finally father with mother. “We must stay together for the sake of the children,” the senior Woosters say, but this is an old family joke and it is love that keeps them together through all arguments and trials. George Grizzard, as the father, most clearly speaks for his creator in two early passages. “What a paradise,” he says, stepping outside his home on a beautiful summer morning. And later, from the heart, “How wonderful it is to have so many people I love sleeping under one roof.”

  After a number of comic complications, all the Woosters are together at the end, bound by the force of love. At dusk they go to the station where the daughter is to greet the man she loves coming in on the train. In the closing voice-over, Cheever warns that “we cannot overlook the universal loneliness of our times.” Some of the people getting off the train will be met by dark houses, recriminations, and cruel mates, others by beautiful women who will serve them drinks on a tray. Yet there can be nothing more moving than a homecoming, he concludes, even if “not many of those getting off the train have achieved what one could call home.” Home was what Cheever had been seeking all his life, though other objectives distracted him along the way.

  His most striking innovation in Kidnapping was to intersperse five fake “commercials” into his script. At well-calculated breaks in the plot, the actress Celeste Holm—Cheever had wanted Hope Lange, but she was unavailable—appears on screen to hymn the virtues of Elixircol. Elixircol, the same expensive nostrum Moses wrote advertising copy for in “The Death of Justina,” claims to restore youth, assure fame and social success, and protect against atomic waste. But the panacea will not work to ward off loneliness, and may have disastrous side effects. As Holm cattily purrs in the final commercial, the surgeon general has discovered that Elixircol causes cancer in animals, “but who knows the surgeon general or his wife?” Then she shifts from plugging the product to a message from the heart. Supposedly reading the ingredients from the bottle, she articulates sentiments very much like those in the ritual grace Cheever fashioned for himself: “We should consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus may we live happily with ourselves and each other and the gods, whoever they may be. Thank you, and good night.”

  Che
ever was proud of Kidnapping, and particularly pleased with Holm’s insinuating style in reading the commercials. He was much less sure of Oh What a Paradise It Seems, which Knopf published early in March. It was not up to his best, he feared, and he was right. Paradise reads rather like a reprise of earlier Cheever fiction and lacks the power of a full-length novel. Yet there are many wonderful passages, even in this novella written under siege. “The tone” of it, as Allan Gurganus observed, is quintessential Cheever. Like Kidnapping, this book sings the joy of creation. And it goes beyond Kidnapping and even Falconer in its portrayal of the capacity of love to work miracles.

  The old man Lemuel Sears, living alone in the city after the death of his wife, comes back to his former suburban home to go ice skating on Beasley’s Pond. It is an invigorating experience. “Swinging down a long stretch of black ice” gives him a sense of homecoming. “At long last, at the end of a long, cold journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth.” So he is appalled to discover that commercial interests are conspiring to turn this pond into a dump. He sets out to battle against those interests, and in the end, after a complicated struggle in which he is aided by a young mother named Betsy Logan, he is victorious and the pond is restored to its pristine beauty.

  At this stage the narrator delivers a generalization. “The liveliness of the landscape had been restored. It was in no way distinguished, but it could, a century earlier, have served as a background for Eden or even the fields of Eleusis if you added some naked goddesses and satyrs.” In effect, Paradise drifts back to mythical times, bypassing nostalgia en route. More than anything Cheever ever wrote, it rejects celebration of a historical past in favor of the present. He was as aware in 1982 as in 1962 of the depredations that nomadism and money-grubbing were causing. “That things had been better was the music, the reprise of Sears’s days,” Cheever writes, but he recognizes the futility of looking to an idealized past for relief. If miracles are to be worked, they must come through love, and through a love for the creation and all those who inhabit it.