The Father Lode


February 11, 2010

THE SNAPSHOT WAS UNDER THE GLASS ON MY DESK, so I saw it only when I cleared all the papers away. This didn't happen often, but when it did, I felt an icy hand on my heart. Where did that little boy go? I wondered. In the picture, I've just finished the New York City Marathon. I'm in aqua tights ("so we can see you," my wife said) a long-sleeve shirt—also aqua—and shorts. My son is wearing a heavy coat and a hat with dalmatians and fire engines on it and a pom-pom on the crown. The sort of headgear you can get away with only if you're 5, or you're a pothead. John has his arms wrapped around my legs, his little face turned up. You can see he's lost one of his front teeth. His eyes are closed, and the smile is so sweet it never fails to make me blush. I am hugging him too, jackknifed at the waist, leaning down to embrace a child who has known very little trouble, a boy who hasn't yet learned to hide his heart.

Trouble was coming. And often as not, I was to be the trouble in my little son's life.

No, I'm not aiming for an appearance on Oprah. I wasn't a binge drinker or an adulterer, but I was his father. Seems it was my especial job to socialize this creature, to tame him. Domestication is never painless nor is it an unalloyed good. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes that fossil records show that when an animal is domesticated, the brain shrinks. The horse's brain shrank 16 percent. The pig's brain by 34 percent.

Civilization is fabulous. The diseases that used to slaughter our babies are mostly defeated. We've got brilliant watches, smart phones, smart bombs, and smart wool. We've got paper towels and central heating. But in a civilization, you can't just do what you want. They'll flunk you and they'll flunk you, and then they'll toss you in jail.

It was my job to make sure that this didn't happen to my son. It was my job to be civilization's first line of defense. I wasn't the strictest father in the world, but I was strict enough. I needed John to stand up straight. I needed John to clean his room. I needed John to do his homework. If he were ever impolite to a shopkeeper, or a waitress, I would explode.

John used to collect action-figure cards, and I once thought he was arrogant to the card shop owner, who was giving his regular lecture about how children who bought cards and comic books always went to Ivy League colleges. Because I didn't want the man who had already been insulted to also lose business, I bought the cards but wouldn't give them to John. I kept them in my own desk drawer. There they stayed for years, and could be counted on to make me feel wretched whenever I opened the drawer.

Nor was it always about John. Often it was about me. Because—like a lot of parents—I was trying to live my own life. I had an inkling back then that I might at any moment write a passage of deathless prose. Like the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I was "waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter." My laptop, actually, but I was waiting.

I didn't like to be taken from my work. John often took me from my work. His school was five minutes from our house, and since I was a novelist (read unemployed) and my wife had a full-time job, I'd drive the boys to school. Took 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops. Unless John forgot his eyeglasses. Or his permission slip for the Friday trip to Ellis Island. Or the history of China—with pictures—in three pages. Then it would take me 10 minutes to drive to school and back, and another 10 minutes to drive the eyeglasses to school. The eyeglasses took longer, because I had to park. I couldn't just let the eyeglasses out at the curb.

John and his brother would get out of the car, and he'd pause and look at me with blue eyes that seemed preternaturally vivid. They were vivid, because he wasn't wearing his glasses. I'd grind my teeth. I'd threaten to take away a favorite TV show.

I never showered before I ran, and I never ran before I'd written for a couple of hours. So I was always slouching into the back of his homeroom in shorts and tights, with matted hair and a craven grimace on my face. Looking for all the world like a sexual predator from central casting.

Finally, I stumbled on a ceremony that worked. I'd have John and his less forgetful brother, Andrew, stand in the kitchen with their right arms in the air. "I, John Cheever," I would say.

"I, John Cheever," he would say.

"And I, Andrew," said Andrew.

"I, John Cheever, do solemnly swear that I have everything I need for school today!"

I had the terrible thought that Andrew was less forgetful because I put less pressure on him. Pressure can backfire, and I put a lot of pressure on John. As soon as he could write, I had him writing stories. As soon as he could walk, I'd race him to the car. When do you let your child win? Because I let him beat me when we raced. Not always, but often enough to keep his interest.

I was a novelist (read unemployed), and so I was always around. And not having an office to go to, I was lonely. So John and I spent a lot of time together. I saw Lady and the Tramp more than anybody in his 40s should, and John saw Eddie Murphy more than anybody else who was 5.

I get cabin fever, so whenever they forecast a winter storm, I'd grab John and hustle out for one last adventure before the roads were closed. This happened during the blizzard of 1992. We went to The Distinguished Gentleman. That's the movie in which Eddie Murphy runs for Congress as an unlikely black candidate who promises "change." I had to explain to my 5-year-old what Congressman Jeff Johnson was doing just before he died. The Congressman, played by James Garner, had a legislative aide named Kimberly Meadows all spread out on his desk. Nor was she wearing many clothes. Congressmen were said to do that sort of thing a lot, I explained, although it wasn't usually lethal.

We got stuck in a snowdrift on the way home and so set out to finish the trip on foot. A truck pulled up beside us. The driver cranked down his window.

"You can't walk with a boy that small on the highway."

I explained, and the man offered to give us a lift home. Turned out he was a policeman who used to sometimes moonlight as my father's driver. "Carmie" is what my father called him.

Carmie was tickled when he found out who I was.

"Your father was a good guy," he said.

"Yeah," I said, "he was."

"I mean I really liked the guy," said Carmie.

"Me too," I said. "But it was different for me. He was also my father." I don't know if Carmie understood, but John certainly did. And John was 5 then.

THE TAMING PROCESS WOULD HAVE BEEN rough under any circumstances, but school didn't help. We hit our first serious bump in the fourth grade. John wrote a poem about suicide, and the school psychologist phoned me at home. No, I wasn't worried. "Most everybody's first poem is about suicide," I said. What do they want me to do? I thought. Hide his belt and shoe laces?

That's what I thought. I trust I didn't say it. But I might have. When he was furious at somebody, Abraham Lincoln used to write a "hot" letter and then set it aside until he cooled off. I could see the wisdom of this, but when I had a good line, I liked to try it out. John inherited his father's need to crack a joke no matter how inappropriate the moment. When he was 7, he came on a cable TV show with me while I was promoting one of my books. When the host said, "Of course you love your father a lot," John held his hand out flat, then tilted it one way, and then the other, then shrugged. When he was 8, our village had a fun run—I think it was five miles, and it was on my birthday. For my present, he agreed to run it with me. "Do you think this will be a good birthday?" he asked at mile three.

"Yes," I said. "It already is."

"Why's that?" he asked.

"Because today's the day you ran your first race," I said.

"Don't count on it," he said. "I haven't finished yet." And no, he wasn't suffering. He just couldn't resist a good line.

By sixth grade it was clear that John wasn't swallowing his best lines at school either. At one point he came up to bat at a game watched by school administrators. He looked at the pitcher. "You're mine, Bitch," he said. Because of incidents like this, I was told that my son had a bad attitude. This was clearly my fault. I should be harder on him at home, I was told. But I was hard on him at home.

By the seventh grade we seemed to be in a state of almost perpetual crisis. John wasn't doing well at school, nor was he neat. Just for instance, the kid would never pick up a towel.

When I found a towel in the hall or on the floor of my office, I'd call him in. "John, come here. There's something I want to show you." When he appeared, I'd ask, "What's that?"

"My towel," he'd say.

"All right then, hang it up."










"It's not as easy as it sounds," the editor said. Nor was it. All runs are memorable, of course. But if you've run most every day of your adult life, then how to pick? The marathon at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, when it was 11?F and runners' frozen beards and mustaches looked like tugboats with frozen rope bumpers? Janet, my not-yet-wife, had come to cheer. When I missed the 2:50 cutoff to qualify for Boston by seconds and was still smiling, she liked that in me. (Boston, it just so happened, let me in.) Or the run I took the day after my father died? Or the run I took when my second son was born, and I dropped and broke my new Walkman? Or the run I took while listening to Lord Jim? The vivid picture still in my head—as if I'd lived that scene where Jim and the crew abandon a ship full of pilgrims, because it looks as if the hold will burst, and there aren't enough lifeboats. How to pick? I was stuck. Then I thought of John.

Despite all those wet towels, he had graduated from middle school and high school. He'd even graduated from Kenyon, a college that his towel-hanging father could never have gotten into. He's now sharing a Manhattan apartment with two friends who are also paralegals.

I told him about the assignment. "So can I come in for a laddad run? It can't fail. We've always run together. Manhattan is to running what Bordeaux is to wine, what Dijon is to mustard."

"Sure," he said. "I get out of work at 5. I'll be home by 5:30."

John's room has a bed in it, a stack of plastic storage bins, and just enough room to stand up between them. Instead of a window, he has a black wall with a poster on it. The picture is of Eddie Murphy in The Distinguished Gentleman.

I changed and we went out along the East River. As far as I'm concerned, Manhattan is a living museum, a place where the artifacts of a glamorous past are slotted in cheek by jowl with the machinery of the future. The Manhattan skyline is always breathtaking, but the Manhattan skyline is particularly breathtaking at dusk. As we ran, I pointed to the 59th Street Bridge. I told John that I'd come home from the hospital to an apartment right off that bridge. "And later staged some of my sweetest dreams there. I was an innocent." Then I told him, "When you run the New York City Marathon, you come down off that bridge into a terrific crowd, all cheering their hearts out for you."

John must've been about four feet tall in that snapshot taken after the 1992 marathon. He's 5'11" now, and weighs 195 pounds. I'm still 5'7" and 150. He doesn't let me win at racquetball, but sometimes he will give me a point. Just to hold my interest.

When he runs, he lays his shoulders back in a way I never learned to do. He looks people in the eye. And he's polite, extremely polite, but without being apologetic. A runner going the other way must've figured us for father and son, and gave a vigorous thumbs up.

"How do you know this is going to be your most memorable run?" John asked.

"I just do," I said. "It already is." The world looked great to me that night, the universe seemed to be falling into good hands.

"When the cynics list all the reasons that our species won't survive," I said, "they say that we can't get along together at close quarters. But here we are in this city with 8 million people, speaking a dozen languages, and we get along famously."

"Not without incident," said John.

"No," I said. "Not without incident, but pound for pound, New York City isn't any more violent than Kansas City."

John is working in the New York County District Attorney's Office, and loves it. He's the authority, and so I don't have to be the authority anymore. I can tell him how we used to call policemen pigs because they gassed us at antiwar demonstrations.

"There are bad policemen, just as there are bad people in every job," he told me, "but New York City's cops are some of the best in the world.

"They're guardians," he said. A girl he went to Kenyon with is working with him in the D.A.'s office; her brother is on the force. "I see him all the time," said John. "He's an excellent cop. I just gave him my copy of The Economist."

We ran together for an hour. Started out when you could see, ended in the pitch black. Saw the sunlight drain out of a gray sky. Watched red and green and yellow lights flick on across the dark water in Brooklyn. Back at the apartment, John let me use the shower first. I went to his room afterward, dried off and dressed. Then I settled into the living room and read while he showered. They have one TV, a Nintendo Wii, several bottles of designer water, and a full set of Seinfeld on DVD. All the jewels of contemporary culture

"Pop," said John, when he got out of the shower. "Come here. There's something I want to show you."

Reluctantly, I stood and walked to the hall where he was standing. John opened the door to his bedroom with a flourish, and there in a crumpled heap on the floor was a bathroom towel.

"What's that?" he asked.

"My towel," I said.

"That's a towel," he said. "In its natural state. Maybe if we startle it, it'll jump up and hang itself."

We both laughed. "The world goes round," he said.

We went to dinner at Thai on Two on Second Avenue (get it?). "You won't believe how small the bill is," he said with that same joy I remember having 40 years ago, when as a suburban kid I discovered that decent, even exotic food was cheaper in Manhattan. John didn't have time to escort me to the subway, but he walked me to 14th Street and pointed in the right direction.

"I can't get lost?" I asked. "Because your father has a talent for getting lost."

"No," he said. "All you have to do is stay on this street."

I had just reached Union Square when my phone rang. It was John. "Where are you?"

"About to go down into the station."

"Just checking," he said. "I love you, Pop. Good to see you."

And yes, I read this story to John. He liked it, although there were facts that needed correcting. "It's good, Dad," he said later, when we were heading off to play racquetball and run. "Heartfelt. But—and I'm sure you know this—it is sentimental."

"Yeah," I said. "I know. It's also how I feel."