Home Before Dark

by Susan Cheever

Until the 1960s he never made enough money to afford much elegance of his own. But at some level my father was always the homeless boy, the outsider, the one who stood at the edge of “respectable” life looking critically but wistfully in at his friends and neighbors. It didn’t make much difference that in i960, when he was almost fifty years old, he was finally able to buy his own house, with ponds and velvety lawns and big trees, in Ossining, New York. His anxiety equaled his euphoria. For years he roamed the house at night, convinced that it was about to burn down, or break down somehow, or just vanish into thin air. At the same time, he never stopped enjoying other people’s property. Although a swim was the center of his summer days, he didn’t build a swimming pool of his own, even when he could have afforded to.

He had a Yankee face, with bright blue eyes, puffy eyelids, and narrow lips, but his smile was so complete and so friendly that it changed his whole expression. As his fame increased, he developed another smile for cameras and people he didn’t especially want to talk to. This smile left out his eyes and involved exposing his lower teeth. He had a kind of tense heh, heh, heh laugh that went with it. No one except his family could ever tell the difference, as far as I could see.

It was obvious that he needed someone to take care of him. But he was a twenty-six-year-old who knew what he wanted, and for that moment there was no resisting him. My mother had little reason to resist. This pattern — my father as the alternately pursuing and rebuffed, resentful male, and my mother as the passive, coerced, resentful female — was held to as long as they were together.

When Bell excitedly called out “Mr. Watson, come here!” because he had spilled acid on his hand, and the words were transmitted to the next room, it was my great-grandpa Watson who came running.

My father’s intense concentration on what you can see and hear and smell and touch was at the core of his gift as a writer. He focused on the surface and texture of life, not on the emotions and motives underneath. In creative-writing classes, teachers always say that it is important to “show” and not “tell.” My father’s work describes the way people live, and the way he lived. It never tells.

Years after that, my father wrote a story about his fear called “The Angel of the Bridge.” “I felt that my terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed horror of what is becoming of the world,” he wrote in the story. He was troubled by the unhappiness of his friends, appalled at the rows of new houses going up where meadows and trees had been, disgusted by the substitution of freeways for country roads and fast-food burgers for home cooking.

Life for my father was either unbearable or transcendent. He watched the suburban women’s daily migration to the railroad station to drop off their husbands, and sometimes they were a band of angels wearing nightdresses under their coats, and sometimes they were the Furies, nagging and shrill at the wheels of their mortgaged station wagons. He watched the men coming home on the train, and sometimes they were successful gentlemen of good will, and sometimes they were debauched failures fleeing from their own lewd mistakes. Sometimes the lights and music from the suburban parties wafted out of pleasant houses where handsome men and women enjoyed each other’s company, and sometimes the parties were grotesque minuets of adulterous golfers and their promiscuous wives. My father noticed too well that the comfortable lives his friends and neighbors had so painstakingly fashioned for themselves were an ineffectual bulwark against the ancient human lusts and expectations that pick up men and women and dash them screaming on the rocks of their own desires. The stories he wrote during those years are so vivid, so alive with detail and pleasure and dread, that for a long time it looked as though that was all anyone would remember of his work.

A black and white piece of Japanese calligraphy in a gold frame hangs on the wall of the master bedroom at the house in Ossining. It’s a quotation from the writer Kawabata, who killed himself in 1972. “Do you know what that says?” my father asked me, as he lay there the Christmas before he died. I shook my head. Bright scraps of ribbon and paper from the Christmas presents littered the floor. My father looked up from the pillows. “Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.”

“I see a world of monsters and beasts; my grasp on creative and wholesome things is gone. To justify this I think of the violence of the past; an ugly house and exacerbating loneliness,” he wrote in his journal before we left. “How far I have come, I think, but I do not seem to have come far at all. I am haunted by some morbid conception of beauty-cum-death for which I am prepared to destroy myself. And so I think that life is a contest, that the forces of good and evil are strenuous and apparent, and that while my self-doubt is profound, nearly absolute, the only thing I have to proceed on is an invisible thread. So I proceed on this.”

teacher who stood there with us. The square is dominated by the stone building that houses the principal Jesuit church in Rome, and my father loved to horrify the French teacher with his favorite story about how the wind and the Devil were walking down the Via del Plebiscito, just as we were, when they reached the corner of the Piazza del Gesù. “Wait for me a minute while I go in here,” the Devil said to the wind, and he disappeared through the doors of the Jesuit church. They say that the Piazza del Gesù is the windiest square in Rome.

from 1935 until his death in 1982 — almost fifty years. His total income from The New Yorker during that time was $126,547.09 plus $46,167.90 from the COLA.

It tells you a lot about my father that he stayed at The New Yorker. He signed the New Yorker contract every year for the rest of his life, but he wrote fewer stories and those he wrote were often rejected. In the eighteen years after The New Yorker published “The Swimmer,” only seven Cheever stories appeared in the magazine (almost a hundred had appeared in the eighteen years before that).

“Then I ask Bill for more money, a scene that is embarrassing for both of us,” my father wrote in his journal. “Like many men of fifty I am obliged to ask for a raise and like many men of fifty I am confronted with a blameless, monolithic and capricious organization, hobbled it seems by its own prosperity. The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another; to understand one another. I am accused of improvidence and make several long speeches about how I am harassed by indebtedness. The Post has offered me twenty-four thousand; The New Yorker has offered me twenty-five hundred and I will take the latter. I’m not sure why.”

His aristocratic New England background was partly sham, and his patrician airs were mostly his own invention. He never came from the kind of fox-hunting gentleman’s world that he encouraged people to construct for him. But my father’s parents, for all their embittered shabbiness, were part of another generation — another century, really. They both had a kind of lunatic Yankee pride and rectitude that seems as outdated as memories of sailing ships and the China trade, steam locomotives and the acrid smell of smoke from factory chimneys along the Merrimack. In a lot of ways my father was still joined to that bygone world. He had a personal pride and a modesty and decency in dealing with other people that survived the twentieth century intact, like the Canton teapots on the corner shelves and the old ivory fan in the upstairs hallway that Captain Benjamin Hale Cheever had brought back from China.

“After they put Daddy’s picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something,” he wrote in his journal, imagining my thoughts. “I don’t mean like Dorian Gray or anything but like a savage who thinks that if he is photographed he will have lost part of his image. A man came up to the house . . . for a week, an artist I mean, and painted a picture of Daddy. It was painted in a definite style, a magazine cover style, and Daddy seemed to get himself mixed up with all the kings and presidents and so forth who had been on the cover before him. I mean he seemed in some way locked into the cover, fixed there, impressed on the paper. Once I lost my temper at him and said I don’t think anybody’s impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine. . . . They have all kinds of people; broken down ball players and crooks. It hurt his feelings, you could see.” But the high spirits never lasted. As the sixties waned and the euphoria began to fade, my father discovered the real secret of success: it doesn’t make any difference. No amount of money or adulation or Hollywood deals could diminish his depressions or his doubts. He was still alone. “He was a man who made his own world in relative isolation from most of his kind,” my brother Fred wrote when I asked him to put down what he remembered about our father. “As a result he had to live with his own impulses and perceptions in ways that most of us can avoid. No one, absolutely no one shared his life with him. There was no...

The prison had another important effect, I think. For decades my father had been wrestling with his own lusts. He found his desires unacceptable — and so did the society he lived in. When, occasionally, he was overpowered by the force of his instincts, he paid for his pleasure with agonizing periods of guilt. He had betrayed his family, he had betrayed himself, he had betrayed the laws of society. Teaching at Sing Sing made him think again about the wisdom of those laws.

In light of what had happened to Bullet Park, it seemed sad and ironic that The World of Apples, as the collection was called, was widely praised by the critics. This time the New York Times Book Review devoted its front page to a rave review. I remember that day too. The Sunday morning in 1973 that the review appeared, I took it to Phelps Memorial Hospital to show my father. He had just had his first heart attack, and he was hallucinating that he was in a Russian prison camp. He thought the review was a confession that he was being asked to sign, and he swore at me and threw it on the floor. The nurse came over and took it away.

Day after day he sat in the yellow wing chair in the living room, staring into space. Every now and then he would shake himself out of his daze, but it only took a second for him to remember who he was and how miserable he was and to reach for the big glass at his side. He seemed to be waiting for death, if he was clear enough to be waiting for anything specific. Oblivion was his aim. I think he would have gone anywhere with anyone at that time: a hospital, a rehabilitation center, a permanent sleep, it was all the same to him.

In the late 1970s, he also had begun to suffer from attacks of what he called otherness. He would be breaking an egg for breakfast and suddenly feel he was in a hotel room in Kiev, or standing in his mother’s kitchen in Wollaston. A smell or a sound could transport him out of time into a terrifying, unknown, other dimension. His brain missed a beat and he could not remember his name or where he was. “I do not know who I am or where I am,” he wrote after one such lapse. “This is easily corrected with movement — I efficiently plant a row of broccoli, but I think it should be observed should it worsen. I mentioned it to the doctor and got no response. It is the sense of a level of consciousness that I do not comprehend — some firmament beyond the mind very much like the structures in space — this is the imagery — but, for a moment, overwhelming. I am not in this world.”