John Cheever (54 page)

During his work on
Kidnapping
, Cheever became fascinated with the technical side of television. At parties he began buttonholing
CBS News
producer Bud Benjamin with questions about the most detailed mechanics of the craft. And had he lived, Ann Blumenthal felt sure, he would have written more for television. “He was very good at it, and learning very fast.” Both she and Bogart remain enthusiastic about
Kidnapping
. “It's a very odd, very angular, very literary film,” Bogart says. “I love it.” Cheever was proud of it too.

With
Kidnapping
in production, Cheever wrote one last very short story for
The New Yorker
. Called “The Island,” it told of a small imaginary island in the Caribbean—well off the routes of the cruise ships—where were assembled “the greatest trombonist, the movie queen, the ballplayers, trapeze artists, and sexual virtuosos of yesterday leading happy and simple lives.” They were engaged in catching shellfish, weaving baskets, and reading good books. “We were only on the island for a few hours,” the narrator concludes, “but I keep thinking about this little-known place where everybody was having such an easy time of it, reading the classics and eating shellfish.” Perhaps that was where Cheever was headed, too.

His energy was on the wane, and
Paradise
turned out to be a much shorter book than he had anticipated: only one hundred pages. In May he interrupted his writing briefly to accept an honorary degree from Skidmore. As an old man, he wrote Joe and Anne Palamountain afterward, he enjoyed “accomplished men and women.” More and more, his remarks took on a valedictory tone. “I am an old man nearing the end of his journey,” he had been telling his children for twenty-five years. Now that comment lost some of its humor as a succession of physical ailments—possibly related by metastasis to his seizures—conspired to weaken him.

On April 20, Cheever went to Phelps Memorial Hospital for a prostate operation. At that time, Dr. Marvin Schulman detected blood in the right renal pelvis, but thought that the bleeding had probably been caused by the passing of a kidney stone. Back home from the operation, he managed to finish
Kidnapping
. He was determined to get that job done, he told John Updike with casual indelicacy, “even if his prick fell off.” In fact he passed blood with his urine long after the effects of a kidney stone should have ceased. Still, Cheever was casually upbeat when he wrote Schulman on July 3 about collecting urine samples. Two specimens of his “vin ordinaire” were in the refrigerator, he said. And his “plumbing” seemed to be in good working order. A week later he was back in Phelps, first for exploratory surgery and then to have his cancerous right kidney removed. A carcinoma the size of a walnut came out with the kidney. His doctors hoped they had caught the cancer in time. They had not.

There is no human difference so great, someone has observed, as that between the sick and the well. After his July operation, it was clear to everyone who saw him that Cheever was unwell. Soon after his return from the hospital, the Updikes swung through Westchester on a research trip for
Bech Is Wed
and stopped for lunch at Cedar Lane. Ravaged by pain, Cheever had no appetite but sat through the meal with his guests, courtly and witty as ever, and afterward took them on an excursion to the Croton dam. In August, Professor Robert G. Collins of Ottawa and his wife, May, came to make a tape recording. Collins, who had seen a vibrantly healthy Cheever in Canada in 1978, was startled at the transformation that age and disease had wrought. Thinner now and shaky of limb, Cheever was nonetheless genial and cheerful throughout the visit. He spoke with satisfaction of having just sent off the galleys for
Paradise
, as if completing that chore had somehow qualified him for last things. There was a “sunset quality” about him, Collins thought. At the same time he looked like a little boy alongside the patently fit Max Zimmer, there to care for him during Mary's vacation at Treetops.

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).