{"id":171877,"date":"2025-10-07T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T16:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171877"},"modified":"2025-10-07T11:46:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T15:46:30","slug":"my-parents-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/10\/07\/my-parents-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"My Parents\u2019 Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Cheever poses for a portrait with his wife, Mary Cheever, on March 13, 1964, at their home in Ossining, New York. Photograph by David Gahr\/Getty Images.<\/p><\/div>\n

Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene\u2019s interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man\u2019s voice break in. \u201cFor Christ\u2019s sake, Kathy,\u201d he said, \u201cdo you always have to play the piano when I get home?\u201d The music stopped abruptly. \u201cIt\u2019s the only chance I have,\u201d a woman said. \u201cI\u2019m at the office all day.\u201d \u201cSo am I,\u201d the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you hear that?\u201d Irene asked.<\/p>\n

\u2014 from “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever, originally published in The New Yorker<\/em> in 1947<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I was the model for a group of mischievous, neglected, wise-before-their-time prepubescent girls who did everything from getting lost to nabbing the nuts put out for cocktails, and my mother was my father\u2019s one-woman university for the study of women\u2014especially pretty, selfish women. \u201cThe Enormous Radio\u201d was written in early 1947, and it features the superficially attractive family that often opens my father\u2019s short stories, whether they are set in New York City or in the suburbs that line the Hudson River\u2014the Rhine of America. In this story, written when we lived in the brick apartment building at 400 East Fifty-Ninth Street near the East River, Jim and Irene Westcott and their two children live in an Upper East Side apartment building near the East River. They are an ordinary family except for one unusual thing: their love of music. They share an eccentric passion for Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. They love the Chopin \u00e9tudes and thrill to the Fifth Symphony. How can this be a problem? How could this enthusiasm unravel their perfect lives?<\/p>\n

If the Westcotts have a guilty secret, something that sets them apart from the neighbors in their prewar brick building with its doorman and awning, it is this music. They are moved by Schubert quartets in a world where many people have adjusted their ears to silence, traffic noise, or the ambient music piped into public spaces. But as the Westcotts find out when a new radio triumphantly bought to replace the old one comes into their living room, their neighbors have a less savory assortment of guilty secrets.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At first, when Irene Westcott realizes that her radio is broadcasting their neighbor\u2019s lives, she is thrilled. \u201cIsn\u2019t this too divine?\u201d she asks her husband, when the radio picks up a party in their building upstairs. \u201cTry something else. See if you can get those people in 18-C.\u201d The magic of the radio that broadcasts other people\u2019s lives seems to switch on something less than magic in the soul of Irene Westcott. She begins to wonder about other people\u2019s secrets. She is obsessed. She turns on the radio secretly late at night to see what\u2019s going on in the human hive that buzzes in the building around her.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Enormous Radio\u201d is an early story, but it has many of the characteristics of my father\u2019s later and most accomplished work. It depends on a twist in the laws of nature, a brush with the supernatural that seems entirely natural. Most radios do not actually broadcast neighbors\u2019 voices, whether they are, as in the story, the sweetly Irish syllables of the Sweeneys\u2019 nurse reciting Edward Lear in 17-B or the angry voice of Mr. Osborn beating his wife in 16-C. This messing with the world as it is, this exaggeration that spills over into fantasy, this sci-fi dimension, doesn\u2019t reappear in my father\u2019s stories until the sixties.<\/p>\n

In \u201cMetamorphoses,\u201d a trio of stories published in 1963, a man named Larry Acteon is killed by local dogs after he stumbles into a scene he shouldn\u2019t see, and a woman addicted to smoking literally turns into a cigarette. The revelatory epiphany that this kind of slipping in and out of reality can provide is at its most powerful in \u201cThe Swimmer,\u201d published more than a decade later.<\/p>\n

Of course, in \u201cThe Enormous Radio,\u201d the radio, once a source of feeling and pleasure\u2014like the swimming pools and country houses and sandy beaches in later stories\u2014becomes the source of bitter disappointment and anger. Jim comes home to find his wife addicted to other people\u2019s sorrows. Suddenly he is sick of the radio, which was expensive to buy and repair, and he is just as suddenly sick of her as well.<\/p>\n

The Westcotts\u2019 secrets begin to leak out of the pretty container of their young marriage. \u201cWhy are you so Christly all of a sudden?\u201d Jim yells at his wife. \u201cYou stole your mother\u2019s jewelry before they probated her will.\u201d What about the people she has made miserable, he demands, and by the way, what about her abortion? \u201cYou packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau.\u201d The story ends, as many of the stories end, with fortune reversed, the self-congratulatory couple disgraced, the happy turned miserable, all success transformed into bitter failure as the seemingly contented family at the beginning of the story sinks into the misery that is there for all of us.<\/p>\n

Almost every Cheever story features a major reversal of fortune. Even as the Westcotts are happily prosperous at the beginning of the story, by the end they are not. Sometimes reversals go in the other direction. The stories of Johnny Hake in \u201cThe Housebreaker of Shady Hill\u201d and the disdainful narrator of \u201cThe Angel of the Bridge\u201d start with a serious problem and end when the problem is magically solved. My father loved epiphanies and surprises, no matter which direction they headed.<\/p>\n

In another way, this story of a broken radio foretells the stories to come. My mother was the model for Irene Westcott; again the lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurry here. In some ways the sixty-one short stories in The Stories of John Cheever <\/em>trace the trajectory of my parents\u2019 marriage, or rather the arc that began with my father\u2019s enchantment with my mother and her family and the initial sweetness of being what the culture required\u2014a heterosexual young man courting a pretty woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am so proud of my family,\u201d he wrote soon after we moved to the suburbs. \u201cI love to walk with them on a Sunday.\u201d His children made him happy. His glimpses of a Norman Rockwell life with a handsome wife and children and regular dinner table scenes made him happy. There was safety and joy in the family rituals, and he added to them when he could. Every Sunday night, for instance, he decreed we would each recite a poem that we had memorized during the week.<\/p>\n

We started out reasonably\u2014I memorized Robert Frost, he went for a Yeats sonnet, my mother knocked off Alfred Lord Tennyson\u2019s \u201cCrossing the Bar,\u201d and Ben chimed in with Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s \u201cBed in Summer.\u201d At first we all sat in the living room chairs and on the couch, my parents with their drinks, a dog under the piano. Soon enough my father and I were furiously competing on Sunday nights. We stood at the dining room table and declaimed to the room. He memorized the endless Tennyson dirge about a nineteenth-century Crimean battle: \u201cThe Charge of the Light Brigade.\u201d \u201cCannon to right of them, \/ Cannon to left of them, \/ \u2026 Into the jaws of Death \/ \u2026 Rode the six hundred,\u201d he thundered out. I countered with John Greenleaf Whittier\u2019s \u201cBarbara Frietchie,\u201d a lengthy tirade in couplets about a pro-Union Maryland heroine and her indignant outrage at Stonewall Jackson. I too liked to stand up while reciting. \u201c \u2018Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, \/ But spare your country\u2019s flag,\u2019 \u201d I thundered.<\/p>\n

By the next Sunday my father had memorized Dylan Thomas\u2019s \u201cFern Hill\u201d: \u201cNow as I was young and easy under the apple boughs.\u201d I went for Longfellow\u2019s \u201cEvangeline\u201d: \u201cThis is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, \/ Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight.\u201d My mother and my brother dropped out.<\/p>\n

In the early stories, my mother is pretty, sometimes clueless, and always delighted by life\u2019s twists and turns. By the end of my father\u2019s writing career, the fictional wife is cold, sarcastic, and bitchy, a promiscuous and egomaniacal gold digger. My parents\u2019 marriage over forty years and three children turned sour, then bitter, with intermittent periods of peace and very occasional happy times. The stories follow suit.<\/p>\n

In real life, my mother was a pushover, a sweetheart, a woman whose love went out with unusual fervor and speed to anyone in need, sick, or downtrodden. She was sometimes an indifferent mother to me, but when I was sick, she was an angel. My weight and my eating habits, my failures at school and with other children, my difficult behavior, and my unwieldy looks were often the subject of her barbed commentaries. But when I was ill, as I often was, she cooked me delicious noodles and soups to tempt my appetite; she brought me presents and sat by my bed and read for hours. It was when I was sick during a vacation from college that my parents decided I should have a car, a red convertible VW.<\/p>\n

Perhaps my mother\u2019s sympathy for the ill and disabled was due to the fact that her own mother had been sick most of the time my mother was a child\u2014she died when my mother was twelve. As a result of her loving kindness toward those who had been ignored by others, she was often followed by people who had somehow wandered into her life and stayed to be taken care of. In later years, these strays would live for a while in the guest room off the kitchen, to my father\u2019s horror.<\/p>\n

When they met, he was twenty-six\u2014on his way. More importantly, seen through the eyes of this pretty, privileged, and traumatized twenty-year-old who had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence with a crush on her teacher Joseph Campbell and hoped to be a poet, he was a young man in need of a wife. They had both experienced the disintegration of their families.<\/p>\n

Did she know he was also gay? In his long campaign to tell a fictional story about his love of women\u2014a campaign that took as much energy as anything he wrote for The New Yorker<\/em>\u2014my mother was my father\u2019s most important audience. He did love women; he mostly loved and lusted after men. When did she realize that the needy, charming, electrifying young man she had met in the elevator at her first job\u2014typing for my father\u2019s literary agent\u2014was lit up by a secret?<\/p>\n

By 1947, when my parents went to see Tennessee Williams\u2019s A Streetcar Named Desire <\/em>on Broadway, a play that hinges on Blanche\u2019s former marriage to a gay man, she had certainly guessed. Still, in those postwar years, how could a woman with no experience in sexuality have imagined that the up-and-coming father of her children was also sexually interested in the handyman in their fancy Fifty-Ninth Street building? My parents had been married for almost ten years, and her marriage to my father had made it possible for her to be friends with her own father and stepmother.<\/p>\n

By marrying my father, my mother changed her family status from being the pretty wannabe poet whom no one took seriously, to being the wife of a man they took very seriously. He and she had lived together through the war and were now busy conforming to the postwar ideal. My father had become friends with my grandparents. My mother had met and disliked my father\u2019s brother. It wasn\u2019t even that she chose not to blow up their life together\u2014she didn\u2019t have the explosives to make it happen.<\/p>\n

For most of the twentieth century in this country, homophobia was endemic and almost universal. \u201cHomosexual acts were illegal in forty-nine states, with punishments ranging from fines to prison time, including life sentences,\u201d Kathryn Schulz writes in her New Yorker<\/em> essay about Jeanne Manford, a rare New York mother who did not cast out her gay son in the sixties and seventies. \u201cSame-sex attraction was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association and routinely mocked and condemned by everyone from elementary-school kids to elected officials.\u201d Men like my father lost their jobs and had no legal recourse; there were no gay politicians, teachers, or leaders; and the words homosexual<\/em> and pervert<\/em> were used interchangeably.<\/p>\n

With such a secret, as Jane Isay, a psychiatrist whose husband hid his sexuality from her and his children for decades, wrote in her book Secrets and Lies<\/em>, \u201cFragmentation is the rule. Honesty and closeness are the enemy.\u201d My father already had a secret life. To complicate matters, his livelihood\u2014writing fiction\u2014also redrew the truth. As he skillfully used both his storytelling ability and his desperate fear of discovery to manipulate the events of their lives, my mother became more and more isolated. Gaslighting was just the beginning when it came to the abilities of this fiction writer living another fiction that he drew on for his, well, fiction to create fiction. No wonder my father never wanted to write nonfiction! Truth was his great enemy; at the same time, he found a way to tell the truth of the human heart.<\/p>\n

My father\u2019s connection to my mother was overshadowed in many ways by his connection to her family and to the hillside in New Hampshire where we all spent our summers in what I still think of as one of the most beautiful places on earth. \u201cThe Day the Pig Fell into the Well,\u201d published in 1954, seven productive years after \u201cThe Enormous Radio\u201d but still more than a year before my father\u2019s first novel, is a kind of second-stage story about my parents\u2019 marriage and my father\u2019s love affair with my mother\u2019s entire family. That family was centered on their summer place, Treetops, in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, which, in \u201cGoodbye, My Brother,\u201d written in 1951, becomes Laud\u2019s Head on the New England coast and in the story of the Nudd family becomes Whitebeach Camp in the Adirondacks.<\/p>\n

When my father turned the story in to Bill Maxwell, his editor at The New Yorker<\/em>, Maxwell suggested a few changes that made him nervous. Usually Maxwell\u2019s edits were minimal. \u201cFinished the pig,\u201d my father wrote in his journals, \u201cbut by taking out Russell\u2019s alcoholism I may have weakened it. Mrs. Nudd would think that he was the only one of them who had grown old; the neon lights of the Motel burned in the distance like embers; the television voices carried across the water. He has jeopardized paradise. That most of their happiness and their understanding is centered in this season and this place.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time my father got to Treetops, the place and the family were run with an organized and hierarchical hand. My grandfather, Milton Charles Winternitz, had been the dean of Yale Medical School. Everyone called him Winter. His students built him a laboratory above his house in New Hampshire with a plaque that announced in Latin, UBI BRUMA VENIT HEIMS<\/small> (Where winter comes in the summer). Handsome and agile, he was a famous teacher who had built the medical school from scratch, married a student\u2014the beautiful and wealthy Helen Watson\u2014and set his course with five children, only to be derailed by his wife\u2019s death. Winter\u2019s second act\u2014his marriage to a brilliant New Haven social star, Mrs. Stephen Whitney\u2014was even more thrilling. Winter and my father adored each other.<\/p>\n

My father also adored Polly Whitney and her four children, and so his presence in New Hampshire made my mother\u2019s life easier. In the evenings, after a long dinner on the wide porch that looks down over the lawns of Treetops to the lake and the mountains beyond it\u2014a landscape\u2014dotted with white church spires and evening stars\u2014my parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents would loiter over coffee and a few more drinks and play backgammon and tell family stories. \u201cAs if the opening note of a sextet had been sounded, the others would all rush in to take their familiar parts, like those families who sing Gilbert and Sullivan, and the recital would go on for an hour or more,\u201d my father wrote in \u201cThe Day the Pig Fell into the Well.\u201d \u201cThe perfect days\u2014and there had been hundreds of them\u2014seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, as a child and later as an adult, the intense piney beauty of the setting, the undulating carpet of stars flowing below the Big Dipper down to the wooded horizon, the sunset blazing out as if fires had been banked just below the edge of the world, the smells of newly mown grass and the cool moss under the pine trees over by the rock shaped like a ship where my cousins and I played pirate, made the murmur of adult lamentations comforting and summery.<\/p>\n

My great-grandfather had bought the land hoping to establish a dynasty after he became rich from helping Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone. A fervent socialist\u2014he gave away the bulk of his fortune\u2014he built a group of rustic shacks around a central kitchen. His son-in-law, Winter, was not a socialist, at least when it came to summers. He built a much fancier architected two-story house with a tiled terrace and lily ponds under a huge sugar maple farther down the hill.<\/p>\n

This house\u2014Winter and Polly\u2019s house\u2014was the emotional and psychic center of the place, although it was set down a steep slope away from the others. The Stone House, as Winter named it, was fragrant with Polly\u2019s daily flower arrangements and redolent of the cigarettes everyone was smoking all the time. Within the Whitney-\u00adWinternitz family, everyone played a role. My aunt Buff, who had been brilliant at Vassar, was the rebel, while my uncle Tom\u2019s wife, Elizabeth, was the plain one. My aunt Janie was the baby, and her husband, Joe, was the all-\u00adaround Good Guy; my uncle Bill was the wise one, and my uncle Freddy was the gay one, although of course that was never said aloud. Freddy owned an antique shop in Bar Harbor and lived alternately with his mother and with a male friend. He had a dachshund. He was fun to be around and never scolded us. In this world of glamour, hard drinking, and very specific roles, my father had nothing to fear. He swam the crawl! He had a pretty wife and children! He despised antiques and bric-a-brac. He did not cook. He steered clear of pink clothes and went to the kitchen only to make drinks.<\/p>\n

My father\u2019s life and work followed parallel trajectories. The path of his marriage in life and in art went from his early gratitude for my mother and her sympathetic nature and the safety of her family, through decades of irritation and mutual torture in which she kept his secret and he punished her for that, to a kind of armed truce in which she became\u2014according to him as a man and as a writer\u2014an unreasonable and sharp-tongued and cheating bitch, and finally after he got sober and then after he got sick, to an exhausted, sweet truce.<\/p>\n

His two families\u2014his mother and father and Fred on one side and my mother\u2019s distinguished, difficult crowd on the other\u2014also seemed in sharp contrast. My father and Fred drove up to Boston to help their mother move to a smaller house as her circumstances diminished. First the two brothers drank all the whiskey they could find. Then they got into a fight. \u201cI spoke sharply, partly I suppose from some old sibling jealousy,\u201d my father confided to his journal later in the week. \u201cThe feeling that I have here is not comparable to the feeling that I have at Tree Tops; it is filial sentiment once removed at TT. With Mother I cannot strike a completely satisfactory relationship because many of her energies are the energies of anxiety; but she is admirable; she did not once ask for sympathy on her moving; and she is a very old woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

When my father was alive, I thought I understood the unhappiness my parents caused each other. I too had loved someone to distraction, only to find years later that I could hardly stand him. Looking back, I see how little I knew. I thought they should divorce, and they often spoke of it and asked me to find them good lawyers. My father would joke about it. Do you want me to be an old man alone walking a dog on a rope? he would ask. At that point he flagrantly declared his love for another woman as often as he could manage it: Hope Lange, the beautiful actress he had met when her husband Alan Pakula wanted to make a movie of The Wapshot Chronicle.<\/em> Nancy Miner, an adoring student from when he was teaching at Iowa.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople named John and Mary never divorce,\u201d he wrote in the journal. \u201cFor better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep and commit mayhem but they are not free to divorce. Tom Dick and Harry go to Reno on a whim but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without the protection of my mother and his marriage, without the camouflage of the role he loved to play at the head of the table in Ossining, without the Famous Writer cloak that he treasured when it became available, the cloak that made his true sexuality invisible to me and to reporters, he might have been exposed as the complicated gay man he was. \u201cSo the boundless continents of anxiety appear. I will be described as an impostor, a bum sponging off the government and the corp of Yaddo, a cheap social climber, an imitation gentleman,\u201d he mused in the journal one day in 1964, after \u201cThe Swimmer\u201d had sold to the movies. \u201cThe sale of my books will stop, the Hollywood producer will cancel the sale because I am an obscene character, I will be tempted if not forced to destroy myself. But all of this is nonsense. I have nothing to be ashamed of. How could I possibly be destroyed?\u201d<\/p>\n

Secrets of this magnitude have a life of their own. The father I knew was not really there as he sat day after day typing on his Olivetti portable\u2014he liked to keep everything portable. The real John Cheever was somehow distilled into his pages, pages that hid the man in a way that created an incandescent landscape, a landscape everyone could connect with and no one could quite understand. Did living a lie help him create the lie that is the truth of fiction? The best lies, as he well knew, are the ones that sail closest to the truth. The best fiction is fiction that seems to be real.<\/p>\n

My father\u2019s sexuality was one of the central facts of my parents\u2019 marriage, a fact made more powerful because it was hidden. Now, forty years after his death, I am beginning to grasp how much of our lives were colored by this lie and this coruscating fear. My father lived often in darkness, although his prose is filled with light. His story makes me sad. If he had been born in another time\u2014if he had been born now\u2014his life could have completely different. As it was, he was afraid of everyone\u2014anyone, friend or stranger, could casually announce his secret and blow his life apart.<\/p>\n

My mother lived in the half light of knowing my father\u2019s secret and choosing not to know. Others guessed, however. Looking back on my father\u2019s career at The New Yorker<\/em>, I have often wondered how they got away with treating him as shabbily as they did. Their connection started out as a love affair in 1935 when the magazine bought the stories \u201cBrooklyn Rooming House\u201d and \u201cBuffalo\u201d in quick succession\u2014both stories about ordinary people fumbling through desperate lives. My father adored his editor Gus Lobrano, and with William Maxwell, who succeeded Lobrano, he got even better. \u201cWe have great hopes for Cheever,\u201d Maxwell wrote to Geraldine Mavor, my father\u2019s agent in 1939. \u201cEven in this story there is that special quality which he gives to his things and which is exactly right for The New Yorker<\/em>.\u201d Coming from the man who had turned down Auden\u2019s great war poem \u201cSeptember 1, 1939,\u201d this was high praise. It continued. When Harold Ross, the magazine\u2019s founder and editor, came back from vacation, he wrote of \u201cThe Enormous Radio,\u201d \u201cThat piece is worth coming back to work for. It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish. Very wonderful indeed.\u201d Although he was thrilled to be published by The New Yorker, <\/em>my father was always trying to better the magazine by taking chances, pushing against the bounds of naturalism, dreaming beyond the you-and-me couples who so often watched their lives turn sour. By the fifties, when my father was writing masterpieces, his connection to The New Yorker <\/em>and to Maxwell was fraying. He began reaching for wilder and wilder endings, more vivid metaphors, similes like this one in \u201cThe Season of Divorce\u201d that Ben Yagoda calls \u201cone of the most spectacular similes in the history of fiction\u201d: \u201cThere was a loud rapping on the radiator, a signal from the people upstairs for decorum and silence\u2014urgent and expressive, like the communications that prisoners send to one another through the plumbing in a penitentiary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, sixty years later, when I have more facts, I wonder why he was so loyal to Maxwell, a man with his own complicated sexuality. I don\u2019t want to use a word like blackmail<\/em>\u2014the New Yorker<\/em> run by William Shawn was, above all things, genteel\u2014but my father\u2019s fears of exposure made him easy to manipulate. He was not a weak man, but perhaps his secret made him weak. When the break finally came, and The New Yorker<\/em> wanted to placate him, he joked about it. He said that instead of a raise, they had offered him \u201cthe key to the men\u2019s room and all the bread and cheese he could eat.\u201d The key to the men\u2019s room!<\/p>\n

I found out that my father was gay a few months after he died. He had kept copious journals, typed in small notebooks since the forties. He knew what they contained, and perhaps that was why he had some loony fear about the IRS finding them and overvaluing them after his death. He talked about this a lot. He let my brother Ben read some of them. Ben looked up from reading them once and saw that our father was weeping. He hid the journals in cabinets and boxes and in a silver drawer in the dining room and even under the bed in my old bedroom. He instructed me to secretly get rid of them after he died.<\/p>\n

When he died in 1982, his good friend the art dealer Eugene Thaw and I drove the boxes into New York City and put them safely into Morgan Manhattan, on Third Avenue and Eighty-First Street. In those days Morgan Manhattan was a grand old institution where wealthy people\u2019s discarded lawn furniture\u2014Granny Abernathy\u2019s teak bench\u2014shared space with real treasures like the Pollocks and Degas in Gene\u2019s storage room.<\/p>\n

When my father died, my own story about our lives as a family was still intact. I had written it in my mind as nonfiction\u2014don\u2019t we all write our stories as nonfiction?\u2014but it was fiction. I was married with a two-month-old daughter. When my brother had once mentioned that he thought my father was gay, I was outraged and surprised! My husband, who knew my father well, agreed. One of the things we shared was an understanding of my father, his work, and The New Yorker<\/em>, where my husband had also published for decades. He got paid better than my father ever had, much better. My father\u2019s death was tragic, but we knew how to go on. Our family stories were safe. My identity as a novelist and the only daughter of a handsome and distinguished man was fixed. That\u2019s what I thought.<\/p>\n

Then, as he was dying in the upstairs bedroom of the house in Ossining, I started casually writing about him. I had written three novels by then and had a contract for another one. Instead of working on my novel, I found myself just typing out the many stories he had told over the years\u2014I was afraid they would be lost. I couldn\u2019t help myself. I did not know that I was tinkering with my own future. I forgot about the power of stories. After he died, I kept writing. At some point a few months into my writing\u2014I didn\u2019t yet admit I was writing a book\u2014I thought it would be fun to look at those journals that had been so dear to his heart. Gene drove me back to Morgan Manhattan, and we opened the door to his storage room. The hinges creaked; a ray of light lit up the dusty air.<\/p>\n

I knelt down on the cement floor and opened the top box of my father\u2019s journals, thinking I would grab a few and go. One of the notebooks fell open. Cocks, hands, sucking, desire, mouths. I flipped through the pages. More cocks, more longing, more sucking. I opened another notebook. What I found out in those dusty minutes kneeling on the floor of a storage room changed many things in my life. The journals told the story: my father had been hungrily, passionately, furiously gay. He had fucked students and friends and anyone who would have him, and I mean fucked. My patrician literary father, with his elegant manners and Brooks Brothers shirts\u2014a man adored for his glorious writing\u2014was not the man I thought he was. Not at all.<\/p>\n

It turned out that other people already knew this secret. My brother Ben had guessed. My brother Fred said he\u2019d suspected and wasn\u2019t surprised. I wasn\u2019t sure how to tell my mother, but of course she\u2014somehow\u2014already knew. Did she realize that the nice young men who appeared at the house as my father\u2019s literary prot\u00e9g\u00e9s were actually his lovers? Did she think as she cooked for all of us about what was actually happening?<\/p>\n

It was 1982, I was writing about my father, but I still did not think I was writing a book. Then a man named Scott Donaldson announced in a letter to my mother that he was going to write a biography of my father. Donaldson was a professor at William and Mary. He took me out to lunch. He said he knew my father was gay, and he let me know that his book was going to reveal that. I had been a writer for years, but Donaldson was not talking to me as a fellow writer\u2014he was talking to me as a daughter, as a little girl, although I was almost forty years old. Once again I had that feeling of being usurped. Donaldson made it sound as if he were the child my father would have preferred. I decided right then and there that I would be the one to reveal my father\u2019s sexuality and that I would find a loving way to do it. This man was not about to traffic in my family secrets. I would beat him to it, and I did.<\/p>\n

Even so, even in 1984, revealing my father\u2019s sexuality, which I did in a few pages more than halfway through the book, turned out to be a problem that overwhelmed the response to it. People still hated and feared homosexuals in the early eighties. That a man with children whom they\u2019d admired might be gay was unthinkable. I got a lot of hate mail. How could I say these terrible things about my father? The New York Times<\/em> ran a long article about the \u201ccontroversy\u201d: Was John Cheever gay? Sales of the book stopped; I became famous as the woman who had outed her father. One letter I got just had SHAME<\/small> written across the page in red letters.<\/p>\n

Reading my father\u2019s journals now, I\u2019m amazed at my own gullibility. That day in 1982, I took the notebooks out of Gene\u2019s room and rented my own cubicle, and over the next month I read them all. It was a bittersweet experience. In the millions of words he wrote, I was mentioned less than a dozen times. My brothers did not fare better. There was a lot of longing for sex with men. Men I had thought were pleasant literary hangers-on were actually objects of desire, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Many of the journals\u2019 pages were devoted to complaints about my mother\u2019s coldness and my mother\u2019s self-pity and my mother\u2019s obsession with politics or teaching or anything outside their marriage. A close second in the journals were his longings for sex with men and wrestling with the dreadful shame and fear that these longings engendered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI black out with a sleeping pill,\u201d he wrote in 1965\u2014after twenty-five years of marriage. \u201cMy prayers for the alleviation of bitterness go unanswered. Did you see Virginia Woolf, people ask. Why should I, I reply. I get that kind of a performance nightly for nothing. She is a nut, I think. She is a nut.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time my father wrote \u201cO Youth and Beauty!\u201d their marriage had progressed to a new, suburban stage. Another story that is deeply indebted to Hemingway in general and \u201cThe Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber\u201d in particular, this story takes place in the familiar Cheever suburbia, a place of lawns and cocktail parties, men commuting from the station and children weeping and country club bills going unpaid. \u201cBy the standards of Shady Hill, the Bentleys were a happily married couple,\u201d the narrator tells us. Louise Bentley has a life like my mother\u2019s, getting her two children here and there, doing the laundry, shopping and cooking. Every now and then the Bentleys have an ugly fight fueled by Cash Bentley\u2019s business failures, and Louise Bentley\u2019s self-pitying view of her wifely and maternal duties.<\/p>\n

Cash Bentley has one lovely eccentricity. He was a track star back in college and sometimes, as parties wind down, he rearranges the furniture in the room, asks another man to fire a starter pistol, and gracefully bounds through a domestic steeplechase, hurdling over sofas and coffee tables leaping as he once did as a young athlete. He sticks the landing, there is some polite applause, and the party is over.<\/p>\n

One of my father\u2019s great themes was the passage of time. Nothing ever stands still in a Cheever story. Cash, of course, is getting older. His hair is thinning. He watches his weight, but tempus fugit. Another aging athlete, my father\u2019s brother, Fred, lived across the street. Dudley Schoales, formerly a great football player, lived down the road.<\/p>\n

Soon enough one of Cash Bentley\u2019s improvised hurdle races ends with a broken leg. Unlike Hemingway\u2019s Francis Macomber, Cash Bentley doesn\u2019t have a moment of triumphant masculinity. Instead, he has increasing desperation. His final race begins with him snapping at his wife, Louise, about how to hold the starter pistol. She clumsily figures it out as he takes the first leap. \u201cThe pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1963, my parents\u2019 marriage had disintegrated further, and the marriages in my father\u2019s short stories were definitely on the rocks. In \u201cAn Educated American Woman,\u201d my father\u2019s portrait of a heartless mother finally, finally caused some trouble with his real-life model\u2014my mother. By this time, my actual mother had found an exciting and rich community of friends, as well as jobs and interests outside her marriage. She was a beloved teacher and began to get involved in local politics, joining the League of Women Voters and becoming part of an effort to stop construction of a highway at the edge of the Hudson River.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn Educated American Woman\u201d doesn\u2019t actually make much sense except in terms of the writer\u2019s furious reaction to feminine abandonment. The fictional portrait of my mother, a woman who worries alternately about the size of her breasts and the state of the world, begins with a dead-on excerpt from her college alumni magazine. Sometimes my father, as a writer, seemed to understand my mother better than she understood herself. Sometimes she baffled him.<\/p>\n

He thought about writing a \u201cpiece about the man who discovers that his wife has a personality completely independent of his. That in loving and marrying her he seemed to absorb her character and her body in some effusion or discharge that made her his member, his limb or rib. But in the middle of life she disengaged herself and emerged with a fully developed personality of her own \u2026 He seemed to share his house with an utter stranger but a stranger who was untroubled by the situation. The sense of how meteoric is our progress through life. How keen is our dependence upon the ambience, the cloud of well-tempered gasses upon which we subsist, how indifferent we are to the atmosphere beyond our galaxial formations and that what we take for supreme sympathy is only a corresponding taste in gasses.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the short story in question, published in October 1963, an adorable little boy named Bibber\u2014a little boy very much like my beloved seven-year-old brother Fred\u2014is left alone by his mother while she goes out on some political tear. In the story, she is testifying before the highway commission. Bibber\u2019s father, George, finds the boy in bed, alone, and very, very sick. \u201cGeorgie moistened the boy\u2019s lips with some water, and Bibber regained consciousness long enough to throw his arms around his father.\u201d The doctor\u2019s line is busy busy busy, and by the time the ambulance comes for Bibber it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

The story of her son dying because of her negligence was too much even for my mother\u2014a woman who by 1963 was certainly accustomed to recognizing herself in my father\u2019s short stories. My father didn\u2019t ask her permission, of course\u2014it was ART and it had nothing to do with real life! This time she protested to my father\u2019s New Yorker<\/em> editor William Maxwell. He too told her that the story was literature and that any comparisons between the story and her life were unimportant. She was reducing literature to gossip. Even some of my parents\u2019 friends, including Tanya Litvinov, a Russian intellectual and brilliant translator, whom my father revered, thought he had gone too far.<\/p>\n

This time, in response to Tanya, my father came up with a different excuse. \u201cNo one likes Bibber\u2019s demise,\u201d he wrote to Tanya. But, he explained, that little boy in the story was not my brother Fred nor even my brother Ben. It was him! The little boy was my father! \u201cWhen I was eleven I was attacked by a virulent strain of tuberculosis. A few days after the crisis my mother covered me with a blanket, gave me a pile of clean rags in which I might bleed and went off to chair some committee for the General Welfare. As a healthy man I expect I should be grateful to be alive and to have had so conscientious a parent, but what I would like to forget is the empty house and the fear of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most egregious example of my father arguing with my mother in his fiction is his 1970 story \u201cThe Fourth Alarm,\u201d published seven years after Bibber\u2019s fictional death and five years before my father got sober and stopped, incidentally, sacrificing his family\u2019s private lives to his art. By this time, his drinking was at the forefront of his mind and in the mind of anyone who cared about him. His journals are filled with countdowns to the first drink, calculations about secret drinking and sharp regrets about things said and done while drinking. There were many trips to the hospital; the doctor became a family friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cI get my drinking schedule balled up,\u201d he wrote on a typical morning. \u201cAt half-past ten I take the flask and silver cup out of the car and bring it up here. I\u2019ve never done this. I drink a jigger and then a second. It is a little like perversion. I am doing that which I should not do and I am enjoying it. My reminiscences take on deeper and richer colors. It is easy to kill the time \u2026 At half-past eleven I drink two martinis and eat a sandwich. I take the dogs for a walk around Kuttners, drink another martini and eat my soup. By this time I am both drowsy and groggy and when M comes home at quarter to two I snap at her. The difficulties of a man being around a house at noon.\u201d<\/p>\n

My mother was a great teacher, literate, imaginative, and passionately grateful to the students who treated her with respect. My father\u2019s opposition made teaching hard for her. He did not approve. The nadir of her career, or of their marriage, or both, was at the Rockland Country Day School, where, as a popular teacher, she had been asked to take part in the students\u2019 annual play. She had the small part of an onstage bride. She had no lines; all she had to do was appear onstage in a white dress.<\/p>\n

At the last minute, my father chose to attend the performance. When, in the play, the student playing the minister asked whether anyone had reason why the couple should not be married, my father did not forever hold his peace. He stood unsteadily in the audience, a famous writer reeking of gin, and protested. Yes, he did have an objection, he shouted out to the students at the footlights. The woman onstage was his wife!<\/p>\n

The moment effectively ended my mother\u2019s teaching career and also shattered again the line between life and art that my father had been so eager to protect. To no one\u2019s surprise, the incident ended up in a short story, in which the protagonist husband is not an obstreperous drunk but a baffled hero. In \u201cThe Fourth Alarm,\u201d the narrator\u2019s wife is also a teacher asked to participate in a student play. Only in the story, unlike in real life, she is naked, simulates copulation, and takes part in a naked \u201clove pile\u201d with the audience. We all knew it was dangerous to argue with my father; your argument might end up in the pages of The New Yorker<\/em>, with my father transformed into an innocent and your argument eviscerated.<\/p>\n

For years the war between my parents raged, and my father\u2019s stories reflected it in a crowd of dreadful women married to sweet, great-hearted men who sometimes had a\u00a0 little drinking problem. Then my father got sober. Everything changed. Around this time, my mother was offered an editing job at a new magazine in Westchester County. She quickly came to feel that she had been hired for her connections rather than her skills. She complained about it to all of us; we sympathized. We had all had the experience of being flattered for what we thought was our talent, only to find we were being flattered for my father\u2019s talent.<\/p>\n

My father\u2014now, in sobriety, my mother\u2019s advocate\u2014took action. He wrote a story especially for this Westchester magazine called \u201cThe Night Mummy Got the Wrong Mink Coat.\u201d It\u2019s a satirical romp that takes place after dinner at a country club. The couple is happy; the ending is happy. My father signed the story with a pseudonym, Louisa Spingarn. My mother turned it in to her editors.<\/p>\n

The editors, who had been hoping for a John Cheever story\u2014who in fact unbeknown to them had indeed received a John Cheever story\u2014hemmed and hawed. They had some questions about the story. Who was this Louisa Spingarn? My mother told them, at my father\u2019s suggestion, that Louisa Spingarn was a kind of latter-day Emily Dickinson. The editors didn\u2019t get it. They said the story was too short\u2014could Ms. Spingarn make it longer? My mother said no. The whole adventure played out at our family dinner table with high hilarity. Finally, deciding that it was too much of a \u201cwoman\u2019s piece,\u201d the editors rejected it. By the time The New Yorker<\/em> published it under the name of its real author, my mother had left another job behind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This essay is excerpted from<\/em> When All The Men Wore Hats<\/a>,<\/em> which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Susan Cheever<\/span> is the author of numerous novels and many books on American history, including<\/em>\u00a0Drinking in America: Our Secret History. She is also the author of<\/em> My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson\u2015His Life and the\u00a0Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, and<\/em>\u00a0Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever<\/span>. She teaches at Bennington College and the New School in their M.F.A. programs.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen my father was alive, I thought I understood the unhappiness my parents caused each other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2624,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-171877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMy Parents\u2019 Marriage by Susan Cheever<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 7, 2025 \u2013 \u201cWhen my father was alive, I thought I understood the unhappiness my parents caused each other.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/10\/07\/my-parents-marriage\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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