The Trip to Echo Spring (16 page)

How the gift shop smarted, though it's hard to tell whether what he most resented was the fact of his mother working or what he describes as ‘the odour of failure' that clung to her affairs. Spitefully, he lists her other business ventures: the restaurants in Hanover and Jaffrey where the lobster would spoil for want of customers; the factory that manufactured bags; the bizarre phase in which she painted roses:

. . . on almost everything that came her way. She painted roses on match-boxes, tin trays, table tops, chair backs, soap dishes and toilet paper containers. She was growing old and this extraordinary explosion of ungainly roses seemed to exhaust her tremendous energies. Almost no one wanted to buy the tin boxes on which bloomed her grisley and primitive roses. Her enthusiasm was immense but the gall and chagrin of failure was on it all.

All the while he keeps taking little jabs at the clinicians, with their pained smiles, their air of infinite condescension, their insistence on making heavy weather out of even the most innocent of his dreams. Then he comes abreast with the figure of his father. He remembers Frederick Senior threatening to drown himself at a funfair in Nangasakit; remembers him shooting at his firstborn son with a loaded pistol he kept in his handkerchief drawer. He remembers being taken out of school unexpectedly one day to go to Brockton Fair and watch the trotting races. His father placed illegal bets under the bleachers and probably won; he often did. He remembers him blowing on his wife's neck; remembers his sensuality and the romantic excesses of his speech. ‘Oh what a burden of light that cobweb holds,' he'd once exclaimed. Sensing, or perhaps just seeking kinship, his son adds: ‘It was his style and also mine.'

A few soft, typewritten pages later, he returns to the amusement park, which he'd previously claimed left him neither angry nor bitter, only bewildered. For a minute or two he spins his wheels, gathering momentum by venting a little spleen.

Not only do I find it difficult to write; I have this morning a mild nausea. Why can't I put down the things about my father. The clinicians, as they say have mined my past. I have spent a fortune recounting my autobiography. One of my difficulties is that the clinicians find my sufferings entertaining . . .

Item: I came in one night for dinner and found my father was not there. When I asked where he was my Mother sighed and said: I can't tell you. I sensed a crises and said that she must tell me. He left here at around five, she said. He said he was going to Nagasakit to drown himself. I left the house and raced the car to Nagasakit. It was late in the summer, the sea was calm and I had no way of knowing if it contained, full fathom five, his remains. The amusement park was open and I heard some laughter from there. A group of people were watching the roller coaster where my father, waving a pint bottle, was pretending to threaten to leap. When he was finally grounded I got him by the arm and said Daddy you shouldn't do this to me, not in my formative years. I don't know where I got that chestnut. Probably from some syndicated column on adolesence. He was much too drunk for any genuine remorse. Nothing was said on the way home and he went to bed without his supper. So did I. I mention this because one clinician, when I told the story, chuckled.

Cheever often told this troubling story, each time with a subtle embellishment of detail, though the ironic, distancing tone remains remarkably consistent. Towards the end of his life, he put it in his fourth
novel,
Falconer
, and in another disjointed story, ‘The Folding Chair Set', both of which add, with a certain grim relish, that the missed supper that evening consisted of red flannel hash and poached eggs. But even in this private account he fabricated the location. There is no Nagasakit or Nangasakit on any map, though they presumably conceal some real, no doubt long since defunct amusement park near his boyhood home of Quincy.

In such a situation one looks instinctively for fellow travellers, and so it's not perhaps surprising that in the late stages of his own alcoholism Cheever developed an intense interest in the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer whose background and sensibilities resembled his own. In the same journal entry in which he recounted his first session with Hays, he described an afternoon spent on the terrace reading about Fitzgerald's
torments.
‘I am, he was,' he wrote warmly, ‘one of those men who read the grievous accounts of hard-drinking, self-destructive authors, holding a glass of whiskey in our hands, the tears pouring down our cheeks.'

This sense of tearful kinship is palpable in a sketch Cheever was asked to produce for
Brief Lives: A Biographical Companion to the Arts.
Writing out of the common currency of their unhappy childhoods, he observed that as a boy Scott ‘considered himself to be a lost prince', adding for reasons that are all too hopelessly apparent: ‘How sensible of him.'

Both men felt an acute, and in Cheever's case physically scrotum-tightening sense of shame about their origins. ‘Straight 1850
potato-famine Irish,' Fitzgerald said of his mother's family, the McQuillans, though they'd been successful enough since their arrival in the new world to work their way squarely into the mercantile middle class. Both were unpopular children: unsporty and painfully conscious of being among the poorest boys at private school, though each also possessed a compensatory gift for telling stories that could spellbind a room.

As a biographer, Cheever isn't entirely to be trusted. There's no evidence, for example, that Fitzgerald's mother was ever ‘ruthless', and in the mention of ‘a serious writer working to support a beautiful and capricious wife' one suspects him of working off some dark resentment of his own. Nonetheless, he apprehends Fitzgerald's inherent goodness, peering past ‘the drunken pranks, pratfalls and ghastly jokes', ‘the appalling lapses in discipline', ‘the years of expatriation, booze-fighting, debt, sickness' to alight on the ways in which he maintained his seriousness and grace, his ‘angelic austerity of spirit'. In the stories, he discovers hopefulness, depth and moral conviction, an ability at once to conjure history and convey the hot thrill of being alive.

Unlike Cheever, Fitzgerald was very much a wanted child. He was born on 24 September 1896 in St. Paul, a couple of months after his sisters, Mary and Louise, died in quick succession during an epidemic of summer influenza. His father, Edward, was from an old Maryland family (the most famous of whom, Scott's namesake Francis Scott Key, wrote ‘The Star Spangled Banner'). In 1898 the company where Edward was president, the American Rattan and Willow Works, had gone under in a precursor of the Depression, and so the family moved from St. Paul to upstate New York in search of work. For the next few years they shunted back and forth between rented houses in
Syracuse and Buffalo; the same geographic instability that marked Tom Williams's childhood.

Edward's new job was as a wholesale grocery salesman at Proctor & Gamble, though in Fitzgerald's
Ledger
entry for August 1906 there's an ominous mention of him drinking too much and playing tipsy games of baseball in the back yard. Still, Scott liked his elegant, courtly father better than his mother, poor Mollie McQuillan with her mismatched shoes. Mollie was passionately concerned with her son's health (as one would be, having lost two infants) and in later life Fitzgerald felt in his self-pitying, blameful way that he'd been spoiled. There's a wincing reference in the
Ledger
to the times she'd made him sing in public, all gussied up in a sailor suit. ‘A neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry,' he described her later, and avoided contact whenever he could. When she died in 1936 he didn't attend her funeral, though five years earlier he'd travelled by ship from Paris to pay his last respects to his father.

Struggling up through the murky waters of his thirties, Fitzgerald once told a journalist a story he'd been carrying around since he was eleven, living in Buffalo in the spring of 1908. Mollie had given him a quarter to go swimming and he was on his way to the Century Club when the telephone rang. I imagined him bopping idly along the hall in stockinged feet, licking the coin and listening in the distracted way a boy listens when his mother's voice abruptly shifted in pitch. ‘He remembers the day,' he wrote in the
Ledger
, in the third person he almost always used there: ‘and that he gave his mother back his swimming money after he heard her on the phone.' Sure enough, his father came through the door soon after and announced he'd lost his job. ‘He came home that evening,' Fitzgerald told the reporter, ‘an old
man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive, his immaculateness of purpose. He was a failure the rest of his days.'

In the wake of this catastrophe the Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul, leaving their children (after another baby who'd died soon after birth, they'd had a daughter, Annabel) with Mollie's parents for nine months before reclaiming them. Supported by her family, they carried on the restless cycle of moves through nearly-smart addresses, pouring what remained of the McQuillan money into their children's education. Edward was from that point on virtually penniless, though he maintained at least the semblance of a tradesman. According to Andrew Turnbull's biography, ‘he kept his samples of rice and dried apricots and coffee in a roll-top desk in his brother-in-law's real estate office, but his wife was so clearly the source of all revenue that he was known to charge postage stamps at the corner store'.

Later, Fitzgerald came to wonder if the buried wreckage of his childhood had somehow influenced his adult career. In an essay he wrote in 1936 (two years after ‘Sleeping and Waking' and likewise published in
Esquire),
he approached the subject directly. ‘Author's House' is a magnificently bizarre piece of writing, in which the narrator offers the reader – a
you
who's evidently in the room beside him – a tour around his own house. He starts in the cellar, a damp, gloomy space crammed with boxes and empty bottles festooned in spider webs. Playing his flashlight over this melancholy cod-Freudian detritus, the author explains:

It's everything I've forgotten – all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman or a soldier . . . Why I chose this
God-awful metier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction. Why I would choose it again.

He draws
your
attention to a corner, adding: ‘three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don't know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer.' Then
you
spot a mound of dirt in another grimy corner and give a great start. Unwillingly, the author confesses: ‘That is where I buried my first childish love of myself, my belief that I would never die like other people, and that I wasn't the son of my parents, but the son of a king, a king who ruled the whole world.' This grave, it might be added, is recent; ‘too recent'.

Back upstairs, he spots some little boys playing football on a lawn and so gets to recounting a story about the day he was pulled from a football game at school. He was playing in the position of blocking back, and didn't like the cold. Also – also! – he felt sorry for the opposing end, who hadn't made a tackle, so he decided to let him catch a pass and then at the last minute changed his mind, but didn't intercept it either, out of some misplaced notion of fair play. The author remembers the desolate bus ride home, ‘with everybody thinking I had been yellow', and that afterwards he was inspired to make a poem for the school paper, which made him as much of a hit with his father as if he'd actually been a football hero.

Mulling this shift in fortune, he says something Cheever would have understood entirely. He says: ‘It was in my mind that if you weren't able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity – it was a backdoor way out of facing reality.' Later, of course, he'd find a different
backdoor way out,
the one hinted at by the list of drinks the author reels off in the dining room: ‘Clarets and Burgundies, Chateau Yquems and Champagnes, Pilsener and Dago Red, prohibition Scotch and Alabama white mule. It was very good while it lasted, but I didn't see what pap lay at the end.'

If he stopped to think about it, Cheever could generally convince himself that the desire to
tell about it
was a positive and noble thing. ‘The tonic or curative force of straightforward narrative is inestimable,' he wrote on an undated page I'd come across in the Berg:

We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping. We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose. When I find myself in danger – caught on a stuck ski-lift in a blizzard – I immediately start telling myself stories. I tell myself stories when I am in pain and I expect as I lay dying I will be telling myself a story in a struggle to make some link between the quick and the defunct.