Letters

Susan Cheever

Portrait of My Father

From Home Before Dark

Susan Cheever (b. 1943) was educated at Brown University. She wrote as a professional journalist before she began writing novels. She also taught Creative writing at Hofstra University. Her novels are Looking For Work (1980) and A Handsome Man (1981). Her recent biography of her father, famous novelist, John Cheever, is entitled Home Before Dark. By a variety of means¾quo­ta­tions from his journal, statements regarding his philosophy, his contradictions and confusions, his fantasies, and his intimidating qualities¾Susan Cheever presents a moving portrait of her father, whom she deeply reveres.

“S

usan calls me,” my father wrote in his journal in 1952. “It is four or five in the morning. ‘I have such awful thoughts, Daddy,’ she says. ‘I think there is a tiger in the hall and that he will eat me.’ She laughs, but she is frightened. It is the hour before light. The dark is troubled for us both. There are no ghosts of men or tigers in the hall, but the dark is hard to bear. There will be great pain and labor before we see this obscurity transformed into sweet morning.”

      On a cold sunny Monday, about two months before my father died, I checked into New York Hospital and had my own first child, a daughter, Sarah. From the instant I saw her, a tiny red creature bathed in the weird underwater light of the hospital operating room, I loved her with an intensity that life had not prepared for me. As I had grown more pregnant, my father had become sicker. He lost a little every day, and that loss seemed to cast a shadow over all of us. The birth of the baby didn’t take away that loss, but it changed everything for me.

      My parents drove in to visit me at the hospital the day after she was born. My mother brought a calico mobile, I drank a glass of champagne, and my father’s gaunt unbalanced face beamed in at Sarah’s plastic bassinet through the transparent wall of the nursery. Her birth seemed to revi­talize him. He called the next morning and told me that he felt much better. It was early, but the hospital was already awake. My room was filled with flowers. The cancer was finished, my father had decided. “I’ve kicked it, Susie,” he said. “It’s over.”

      It’s a measure of human optimism that we all believed him. For a few weeks it even seemed to be true. He would never be well, of course, but the weakened, wasted father that was left seemed infinitely precious. My first post-pregnancy outing was to see him receive the National Medal for Literature at Carnegie Hall. He looked frail, but he spoke with great strength. Afterward my husband and I went backstage. He wasn’t there; we found him and the rest of the family en­sconced on the banquettes of the Russian Tea Room next door, laughing and eating and order­ing more. But early in May, when we took the month-old baby out to visit my parents in Ossining, he looked weaker.

      “Make your famous baby noise, John,” my mother urged him, and he curled up his lip in a comic high-pitched squeal. Then suddenly he seemed very tired. “Thank you for remembering, dear,” he said. That’s when I knew he was worse again. As the baby awakened to the world around her that first and last spring, my father waned and faded and grew more absent. The weather stayed warm and sunny. The cherry trees blossomed and shed their pink flowers like a snowfall on the paths in Central Park.[1] The trees turned lush and green. Babies keep odd hours, and often as I watched the sunrise colors well up from the East Side while I fed my daughter, I thought of my father who might be lying awake in his bed in Ossining. In the evening when the baby slept, I called him. By that time, he rarely answered the telephone.

      “He won’t eat anything,” my mother said. Her voice sounded ragged. “Here, Susie, you tell him he has to eat something.”

      “Hello,” my father said in the normal voice that he still managed for telephone hellos and one-word answers.

      “Hi, Daddy,” I said. “I think you should eat something.”

      “Yes.” His voice had subsided to a grating whisper, and the words were slow and drawn out. Sickness seemed to heighten his sense of social propriety. As his thinking became more chaotic, his manners became more impeccable.

      “Shall I call you after dinner?” he said.

      “Yes, Daddy.” The receiver banged against the telephone as he dropped it.

      I remember my father at the head of our family dinner table. First, when there were only three of us, he sat at the end of the plain pine table in the hallway that was the dining room of our apartment on Fifty-ninth Street in New York City.

      Later, after we had moved out to Scarborough, he sat at the black modern table next to the window that looked out over the lawns toward Beechwood and the green metal garbage pails be­hind the estate’s big garage. My brother Ben and I sat on opposite sides of the table. At break­fast, before we went to school, Ben would hold a napkin up to his face, slipping food under the bottom edge so that he wouldn’t have to look at me. At dinner, nothing like that was allowed. I set the table and my mother cooked and brought the food out in serving dishes and we all sat down and my father said grace.

      “Dear Lord, we thank Thee for Thy bounty,” he would say while Ben looked longingly at the protection of his napkin. If we children were fighting, as we often were, my father would add a pointed, “And bless this table with peace.” And if the dogs were grumbling for scraps under the table, he would also add, “both top and bottom.” Then he would say “Amen.” My father always said grace. Sometimes he stayed with the short and traditional, sometimes he improvised. Later on, for special occasions, he would base the grace on his favorite quotation, a paraphrase of a line from Jowett’s translation of Plato: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.” Then he would add a paraphrase of the words of the prophet Micah: “So let us live humbly and give thanks unto Our Lord God. Amen.”

      In the house at Ossining there was a long cherry dining room table with Italian wood and wicker chairs. I always sat on my father’s left, with my back to the wall, facing the fireplace with the wing chair in front of it and the long bench next to it that was piled precariously high with gal­leys of new books and newspapers and magazines: that day’s New York Times, the local Os­sining Citizen Register, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek (when I was working there), Antaeus, and sometimes The Smithsonian or the Brown Alumni Monthly¾or anything else that had come in the mail recently enough to have avoided being thrown out. Sometimes at the table my head bumped against the frame of the Piranesi etching that hung on the wall behind me.

      I went to school in 1960, the year my parents bought the house, and Ben went off soon af­terward. We three children were rarely there at the same time. When we were, my two brothers sat across from me on the same side of the table. The dogs warmed our feet, sometimes raising themselves for a halfhearted sally after one of the cats. At Christmas vacation, the porch outside would be piled high with snow. In the summer, delicious smells from my mother’s flower garden wafted through the open top half of the Dutch door at the end of the room.

      The family meal was always served onto our plates by my father from serving platters, and when everyone had said grace and we had all concluded “Amen,” my mother would say, “Oh, John, you haven’t left yourself anything but the carcass” (if it was a chicken), or “the head” (if it was a fish), or “the tail” (if it was a steak), or “the gristle” (if it was a roast). She was often right. My mother always felt that there wouldn’t be enough for her family to eat. Food was so rich and so abundant in our house that even the pets were all overweight. My father, on the other hand, was convinced that somehow he would go hungry¾that he would be left out, overlooked, not pro­vided for. He usually managed to make his fears seem legitimate, even if it meant heaping our plates to the edges so that there wouldn’t be quite enough left for him. “Oh, don’t worry about me, dear,” he would answer my mother. “This is plenty for me.”

      The food, however, was not the main event at our dinner table. Conversation was the main event. Sometimes there was a general discussion of one person’s problem: What would I do if Roddy Butler asked me to the dance at the country club? Should Ben major in English at school? Could Fred bring his friend Brad to New Hampshire? Advice, comments, and suggestions came from all quarters. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes it was friendly, sometimes it was harsh or sarcastic. Someone would certainly point out that Roddy had no intention of asking me anywhere, that Ben would be lucky to pass English, and that Fred might have trouble keeping his friends I he didn’t learn to keep his elbows off the table. There was a lot of joking and very little serious counsel. We learned to make real decisions privately, on our own. My parents’ problems were rarely discussed, because that usually ended in tears from my mother or recriminations and sarcasm from my father¾and nobody got dessert.

      Sometimes my mother or father would come up with an image, or a fragment of a story, and we would all weave imaginary plots around it. Sometimes we talked about books or movies or the poetry we recited to each other on Sunday afternoons. Often we talked and speculated about other people, our neighbors or friends. No one ever hesitated to be mean¾although the insults were usually also pretty funny. We were so mean to each other, in fact, that guests were often astonished and shocked. They didn’t catch the undertone of humor in our quick sarcasms, and there were times when we didn’t catch it either. Explosions and tears and sudden departures were not at all uncommon. My brothers called our dinner table “the bear garden.”

      “My daughter says that our dinner table is like a shark tank,” my father wrote in his journal one day in 1970, between a drunken lunch in honor of his friend Yevtushenko and an evening spent brooding over a bad review of Bullet Park. “I go into a spin. I am not a shark, I am a dolphin. Mary is the shark, etc. . . . But what we stumble on is the banality of family situations. Thinking of Susan, she makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong time and speaking lines I have not written. Does this prove that I am incapable of love or can only love myself? Scotch for breakfast and I do not like these mornings.”

By Thanksgiving of 1981, my father was already too sick to eat much. Of course we didn’t know how sick. He had had a kidney removed in June, and all summer he had seemed to get better, but in the autumn, as the air cooled and the leaves changed color, he seemed to be weaker again. When Richard Avedon took a picture of him for the cover of The Dial, the photograph looked stark and strange. He couldn’t ride his bicycle anymore, and so the doctor sent him to a chiropractor. He went twice a week and installed a primitive traction device on Ben’s bed upstairs, where he was working then. He wasn’t working much, though. Paradise had been finished in the spring, and he spent most of his time answering mail and keeping the journal.

      My father never quite trusted medicine. On the one hand, he always thought he was fine; at the same time, he always knew he was dying. His perception of physical reality was tenuous at best. Maybe his mother’s Christian Science had something to do with it, too. His solution was to stick to small-town doctors and small-town hospitals, where at least he was known and felt comfortable and where it seemed they often told him what he wanted to hear. As a result, when he needed sophisticated diagnosis and expert medical care, he seemed to prefer jolly talk and home remedies. As the pains in his ribs and legs got worse, he was often depressed.

      It was the beginning of December by the time he went back into the hospital for some X-rays. The shadows on these heavy plastic sheets showed that cancer had spread from his kidney up to his lungs and down into his legs; and that was why he felt, as he put it, “so lousy.” After they saw the X-rays, the doctors told him there was nothing they could do. There was no treatment. The cancer was too far along.

      My husband and I were in La Jolla, California, visiting my husband’s daughter that week. “It’s very bad,” my mother said when I called home to see how the X-rays had come out. “It’s very bad.” Her voice sounded strange. I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Southern California. There was a bureau with a few books on it, and my maternity clothes were thrown over a chair. The main street of La Jolla was outside heavily curtained windows.

      “They say I’m a dying man,” my father said. His voice was still strong, but the laugh in it seemed to fade as I listened. “They say my bones look moth-eaten.” There was an edge of irony to his voice, as if he were talking about someone else. The hotel room had been decorated in Spanish mission style, and the walls and the bedspread were orange. It was the end of the day. Downstairs, people were waiting to meet us for drinks in the Patio Bar. My father told me that my brother Fred would be flying home for the holidays. “Some people will do almost anything to get their children home for Christmas,” he said. I leaned back against the headboard, and the ridges of molded wood dug into my spine. A painting of a cowboy hung on the wall. In the distance, I could hear the sound of the sea. . . .

Suggestions for Discussion

1.     How does the quotation from her father’s journal set the tone for the chapter?

2.     What is gained by the juxtaposition of the author’s feelings about the birth of her daughter and the declining days of her father? What details sharpen the contrast between the beginning and end of life?

3.     In what different contexts are food and the dinner table the subject of discussion? What do these descriptions tell the reader about the writer’s father? about the family relationship?

4.     What contradictions does the writer see in her father, especially in regard to his attitude toward appearances?

5.     How does Cheever’s response to his daughter’s dating reflect his own conflicts?

6.     What was the nature of the father–daughter relationship when the latter became a writer?

7.     What does the author’s description of the setting in the last paragraph contribute to the tone? How does she make the reader know how deeply she cared for her father?

Suggestions for Writing

1.     Discuss the banality of family situations.

2.     Discuss the role that parental expectations play in fostering or inhibiting their children’s growth and development.

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[1] Famous park in the heart of New York City.