John Cheever (57 page)

On June 15, now enfeebled and fragile, he broke his leg while trying to get out of bed and walk. He went on morphine after that, while the family gathered round. Late in the afternoon of June 18, one of the longest days of the year, Cheever died in an overheated bedroom in his own home. Mary was at his side, as were Susan and Ben. Fred, in California, could not be there. The Reverend George Arndt of Trinity Episcopal Church came to administer last rites. The dying man was in physical turmoil, and struggling to breathe. But when Arndt made the sign of the cross on his forehead, he became absolutely peaceful, took one last breath, and died. For a moment longer Ben gasped for his father, trying to get him to breathe again.

It was decided to hold two memorial services, the first in Massachusetts, where Cheever was to be buried in what he used to call “the family hole,” the second in Ossining. The burial service was set for 1:00
P.M.
Tuesday, June 22, at Norwell First Parish Unitarian Church, directly across the street from the cemetery. John's niece Jane Carr made the arrangements, vying with a canny Yankee undertaker to keep things simple. Susan insisted on three don'ts: no gladioli, no fake grass, and no little wheels on the casket. As it happened, the aisles of the church were so narrow that the casket had to be rolled up and down, with the wheels concealed beneath the United States flag.

The afternoon provided much the same mixture of the comic and the serious, the irreverent and the deeply felt, that characterizes Cheever's fiction. It was a fine summer day, hot in the sunshine, pleasant in the shade. A spring runs through the middle of Norwell, and the sound of water was audible everywhere. The church itself is New England austere, a white wooden building with a square steeple containing a clock that works. Inside are no statues, no paintings, no stained glass. Mary and the children arrived fifteen minutes late after their four-hour drive from Westchester. About fifty mourners came, and half as many photographers were admitted to the balcony by the undertaker. Each of the children spoke. After wrestling to unlatch the door to the pew, Ben repeated Leander Wapshot's wonderful passage of advice to his sons. Susan read from Romans. Fred said a few words about what it meant to be John Cheever's son: “Part of him lives in me and in the other people who knew him well. So, though in one sense his journey has finally ended, in another it continues.” In mid-ceremony Max Zimmer was admitted to the Cheever pew. Then Updike, boyishly lean in a soft gray suit, rose to present the tribute, and the photographers filled the church with the exploding of flashbulbs. Updike spoke of “the magic certainty” of Cheever's prose and of the “willed act of rebirth” that made his last seven years triumphant. After the service the pallbearers accompanied the casket on the slight downhill trip to the cemetery across the street. They were practically running by the time they reached the family burial site. There Cheever was laid to rest between a noble maple tree and a parking lot. Susan touched the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Ben and Fred and Calvin Tomkins each shoveled in some dirt. “You can tell it's New England,” someone said, as the topsoil they dug up was full of stones. While the prayers were being read, John Hersey saw a group of people emerge over the crest of the hill in the graveyard. Suddenly a teenage boy, overcome with exuberance, tossed off a couple of cartwheels. That, he knew, Cheever would have loved.

Back in Ossining, Cheever's adopted hometown mourned his passing. By administrative fiat, flags flew at half-mast for ten days. (Ben and Janet Cheever lowered the flag at the Highland Diner themselves.) It was “as if the heart of Ossining were gone,” Aline Benjamin observed. “Cheever was as closely associated with Ossining as Emerson with Concord or Tolstoy with Yasnaya Polyana,” the local newspaper proudly pointed out.

On Wednesday, June 23, the day after the service in Norwell, two hundred friends and colleagues gathered at Trinity Episcopal in Ossining to pay their respects. Ben shyly introduced each of the three speakers. Saul Bellow spoke of his admiration for Cheever's growth as a writer and of the marvelous friendship between them that fed on air, “like a hydroponic plant.” Burton Benjamin remembered Cheever as “marvelous, funny, unpredictable, full-of-life John,” a graceful ice skater and formidable backgammon opponent who “could captivate a child with a smile and a story.” Life without Cheever would be difficult to imagine, Eugene Thaw said, for there was an abiding sense of “radiance” about him. It was the very word Updike had chosen on the Cavett show the previous fall, when challenged to say how he felt about Cheever's fiction. Then he had second thoughts. “I kept saying radiant on Cavett,” he wrote Cheever, “but it's more like the little star inside a snowball on a sunny day.” There were greater writers than Cheever, the
Boston Globe
acknowledged, “but painfully few of whose work it can be so emphatically said: It delighted us.”

Only a childlike man, perhaps, would have been capable of feeling such joy all his life, intermingled though it often was with a strain of sadness. He never lost his capacity for wonder, or his appreciation for “the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love.” Cheever was “a blessed man,” Raphael Rudnik felt as he sat through the stolidly overlong service in Ossining. Life would be lonelier for a vast number of people now that he was gone, not just for those who knew him. Among the messages of condolence that came to Mary Cheever were letters from former students of his and hers, from friends going back to the mid-1930s in New York, from fellow soldiers during the army days, from admirers in Bulgaria and Italy and England and Russia, from their close friends through the Westchester years, and from a great many people who had never met Cheever at all but who wanted to say a word about how much his writing had meant to them.

His threescore years and ten were not easy ones. Alcohol dimmed his days, depression dogged his path, and sometimes he could be cruel. Yet he was on balance “a
good
man,” as Malcolm Cowley wrote Mary, and one who grew as a human being just as he did as a writer. In the great judgment hall of Anubis where accusations were made, defenses offered, and souls finally measured on the scales, John's good deeds would surely outweigh his transgressions, Cowley thought. And that was to say nothing of Leander in full glory, Zeke rejoicing, and kings and elephants crossing the mountains.

NOTES ON SOURCES

Cheever rarely dated his letters, but their contents usually make it possible to estimate when they were written. Citations for stories and articles not collected in book form are to their first periodical appearance; otherwise, citations are to the first book appearance. Where the text makes the source of information clear, the source is not repeated in these notes.

Abbreviations: JC = John Cheever, MC = Mary Cheever, SD = Scott Donaldson.

PREHISTORY

F
ICTIONALIZING TENDENCY AND RETICENCE ABOUT BACKGROUND:
Interview William Maxwell, 9 April 1985; interview Arthur Spear, 17 July 1983; interview Edward Newhouse, 5 June 1984; interview Tom Glazer, 3 June 1984; interview Hortense Calisher, 17 September 1984; interview Katrina Ettlinger, 4 June 1984; JC, B
ULLET
P
ARK
notes, Brandeis library.

E
ZEKIEL
C
HEEVER LEGEND:
Elizabeth Porter Gould, E
ZEKIEL
C
HEEVER
, S
CHOOLMASTER
(Boston, 1904); Joshua Coffin, A S
KETCH OF THE
H
ISTORY OF
N
EWBURY
, N
EWBURYPORT AND
W
EST
N
EWBURY
(Boston, 1845), p. 221: it was thought that the sufferings endured by the people of Massachusetts during King Philip's War were inflicted upon them for the affectation of wearing wigs; Ralph Ellison quoted in Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” T
IME
, 27 March 1964, p. 67; JC quoted in Christina Robb, “Cheever's Story,” B
OSTON
G
LOBE
S
UNDAY
M
AGAZINE
, 6 July 1980, p. 27; Lewis Turco to SD, 19 September 1985.

R
EAL ANCESTRY:
Patricia Gross to Susan Cheever, 19 August 1983, Quincy Public Library; “The (Genealogical) Research Notes of Mary Adams Rolfe,” The Historical Society of Old Newbury; Robert K. Cheney, M
ARITIME
H
ISTORY OF THE
M
ERRIMAC
(Newburyport, 1964), pp. 51, 241; John J. Currier, H
ISTORY OF
N
EWBURYPORT
, M
ASS
., 1764–1909 (Newburyport, 1909), Vol. I, pp. 539–41, Vol. II, pp. 330–31; JC quoted in Susan Cheever, H
OME
B
EFORE
D
ARK
(New York, 1984), p. 27; JC to John and Mary Dirks, September 1974; JC to Elizabeth Ames, 1 February 1937.

A
ARON
W
ATERS
C
HEEVER
: John Callaway, “Interview with John Cheever,” 15 October 1981; Alan Dawley, C
LASS AND
C
OMMUNITY
: T
HE
I
NDUSTRIAL
R
EVOLUTION IN
L
YNN
(Cambridge, 1976), pp. 78–83; JC, typescript 21; JC, “Homage to Shakespeare,” S
TORY,
November 1937, pp. 73–81; R
ECORD OF
D
EATH
, Commonwealth of Massachusets Archives, 1882, Vol. 339, p. 195, item 5221; Robin Dougherty to SD, 4 October 1985 and 15 November 1985.

F
REDERICK
L
INCOLN
C
HEEVER
: JC to John Updike, 15 June 1976; JC, T
HE
W
APSHOT
C
HRONICLE
(New York, 1957), p. 99 and throughout: Leander Wapshot in the Wapshot novels is supposed to represent “a loving picture” of his father; Melissa Baumann, “John Cheever Is at Home,” B
OSTON
M
ONTHLY
, September 1979, p. 14; JC, typescript 21; JC, journal, Brandeis library; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, interview with JC, February 1969; Callaway, interview with JC, 15 October 1981.

M
OTHER, GRANDMOTHER, AND AUNT:
JC to William Maxwell, 1968; Frederick L. Cheever, Jr., to Dennis Coates, 20 October 1973; Coates, interview with Frederick L. Cheever, Jr., 22 September 1973; “John Hersey Talks with John Cheever,” Y
ALE
A
LUMNI
M
AGAZINE
, December 1977, p. 21; JC, typescript 21; JC, journal, Brandeis library; Shirley Silverberg, “A Talk with John Cheever,” W
ESTCHESTER
, May 1976, p. 67; JC to Laurens Schwartz, 3 January 1976; J. W. Savage, “John Cheever: The Long and the Short and the Tall,” C
HICAGO
T
RIBUNE
M
AGAZINE
, 22 April 1979, p. 31.

Q
UINCY
, M
ORTON, AND
A
DAMS:
H. Hobart Holly, ed., Q
UINCY
350 Y
EARS
(Quincy, 1974); Louise Randall Pierson, R
OUGHLY
S
PEAKING,
New York, 1943; the misbehavior of Thomas Morton is depicted in Hawthorne's story “The Maypole of Merry Mount”; Henry Adams, “Quincy,” the first chapter of T
HE
E
DUCATION OF
H
ENRY
A
DAMS;
JC to Max Zimmer, 1977.

CHILDHOOD

F
IRST YEARS
, W
ORLD
W
AR
I,
MAIDS:
JC, typescript 21; John Hersey, “John Cheever, Boy and Man,” N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
B
OOK
R
EVIEW
, 26 March 1978, p. 31.

M
OVE TO
W
OLLASTON, ATMOSPHERE:
City directories, Quincy; Rollin Bailey to SD, 2 September 1985 and 23 September 1985, provided details about the way of life in Wollaston during the early 1920s.

C
HEEVER AND PLAY, THEATRICS:
Rollin Bailey to SD, 25 August 1985, 30 August 1985, 2 September 1985, and 23 September 1985; Baumann, “At Home,” pp. 13–15; Mrs. Richard S. Dennison to SD, 9 August 1985; interview Dr. Raymond Mutter, 22 June 1984; interview Tanya Litvinov, 2 November 1986; Helen Perry to Patricia Hoxie, 1983.

E
ARLY STORYTELLING, COMMITMENT:
Jo Brans, “Stories to Comprehend Life: An Interview with John Cheever,” S
OUTHWEST
R
EVIEW
, Autumn 1980, p. 338; Marcia Seligson, “Portrait of a Man Reading,” B
OOK
W
ORLD
, 9 March 1969, p. 2; JC to Frederick Bracher, 15 July 1962; Helen Perry to Patricia Hoxie, 1983; Robert C. Daugherty to SD, 29 November 1984; Lloyd Moss, interview with JC, WQXR, 12 January 1980; according to his brother, Fred, at the age of fourteen Cheever won a short-story contest sponsored by the B
OSTON
H
ERALD
-T
RAVELER:
Dennis Coates, “The Novels of John Cheever,” Duke University doctoral dissertation, 1977, p. 25.

B
OYHOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH FATHER:
Savage, “The Long and the Short,” p. 31; Coates, dissertation, pp. 17–21; interview MC, 6 June 1983; JC, “The National Pastime,” N
EW
Y
ORKER
, 26 September 1953, pp. 29–35; interview Dr. David S. Hays, 14 January 1985; Federico Cheever's remarks at father's memorial service, 22 June 1982.

S
UMMERS IN
N
EW
H
AMPSHIRE
, C
AMP
M
ASSASOIT:
JC to Josephine Herbst, 1954; Baumann, “At Home,” p. 14; Rollin Bailey to SD, 27 August 1985; interview MC, 10 April 1985; interview H. Hobart Holly, 4 July 1985; interviews Harold Crowley, Jr., 15 July 1985 and 22 July 1985.

T
HAYER AND
A
NNA
B
OYNTON
T
HOMPSON:
T
HE
T
HAYER
A
CADEMY:
O
NE
H
UNDRED
Y
EARS
, 1887–1987; [Lillian H. Wentworth], “Anna Boynton Thompson,” T
HAYER
A
CADEMY
M
AGAZINE,
Spring 1984, pp. 3–5; Lillian H. Wentworth to SD, 30 May 1985 and 1 August 1985; JC, “The Temptations of Emma Boynton,” N
EW
Y
ORKER
, 26 November 1949, pp. 29–31; JC, “Thanks, Too, for Memories,” N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
, 22 November 1976, p. C6.