At graduation time, the school issued no diplomas. Instead Cheever received a print of fir trees in the snow with the inscription “John, be true to yourself.” He did his best, as the world came crashing down around him.
ADOLESCENCE
1926–1930
The ties that held John Cheever’s universe together began to unravel when his father lost his position in the shoe business in the mid-1920s. What happened to Frederick Lincoln Cheever was not unusual, for the Depression struck New England shoe and leather manufacturing well in advance of the 1929 crash. In “Shoetown,” a poem about Haverhill, Winfield Townley Scott recorded the effects of the collapse on his hometown.
Mr. Forrester shot himself
at the bank; Benny Goldstein
Lost his apartment houses; the stores
took back the Armenians’
Rugs and furniture; the Italians moved on with the shops; the
Irish got on relief, and the Yankees voted for Hoover.
But Quincy, unlike Haverhill, was not dependent on the shoe business for its livelihood, and so, though John’s father certainly voted for Hoover, his idleness and want of useful occupation were the more conspicuous and the more costly in psychological as well as financial terms.
Frederick Cheever’s income had already peaked by 1922, when he assumed the mortgage on the handsome house at 123 Winthrop. A few years later, in his early sixties, he found himself unemployable. He applied for dozens of jobs, but nothing worked out. Perhaps he aimed too high. He must have felt it was too late to start over. In frustration he wrote a series of angry letters to the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, the bureaucracy that dealt a final blow to his pride by reassigning his low-digit license plate to an Italian-American politician. 3088 was his number, and the state had no right to take that away too.
In 1923, Mr. Cheever had piled the neighborhood children in his touring car with the top down and raced a train at the terrific speed of thirty-five miles per hour. By 1926 those same children saw that everything had changed, though in accordance with Yankee reticence such matters were not openly talked about. Sixty years later, the friends of Cheever’s youth follow the same standard. “We all knew about John’s father’s difficulties but they were not discussed in front of us,” one writes. “Vaguely in our minds we knew that John’s father was not like other dads,” another recalls. How was he different? What were his difficulties? The most perceptive children noticed that “he always seemed to be sitting down” and that he was subdued, “like a rubber band” that has lost some of its elasticity. But the two facts about Frederick Lincoln Cheever that made him unlike the other fathers, that caused his troubles, that sapped his vitality, still went largely unarticulated. He was out of work. He drank.
Liquor was almost always involved in John’s memories of his father, but most of the anecdotes celebrated his drinking rather than deploring it. His father was debonair, he was hilarious, he had drunk Robert Ingersoll and James O’Neill under the table at the old Adams House, and no blame was attached. There was the time—undoubtedly apocryphal—when he’d finished the sherry in the parlor and pissed the decanter full to avoid detection. Soon thereafter the pastor stopped by and Mrs. Cheever served him moldy pilot crackers and piss. There was the tale—more plausible—that one drunken Christmas Eve he smoked a cigarette in church. There was the morning, real enough, when John woke his father from a sodden sleep; the old man, still comely, was wearing a necklace of seventeen champagne corks. When awakened, his father slung the champagne corks across the room. “Will you forgive me?” he asked. John said he did, and would have if he could.
Finally there was the evening, retold in both Falconer and “The Folding Chair Set,” when he drove frantically to Nagasakit to rescue his father from suicide by drowning. Noticing there were only two plates at dinner, John indiscreetly asked, “Where’s Dad?” At this his mother only sighed and continued serving the red-flannel hash and poached eggs. When he asked again, she revealed that there had been a quarrel. His father had drawn up a twenty-two-item indictment enumerating her failures “as a woman, a wife and a mother.” She’d thrown it in the fire, and the old man, enraged, announced that he was going to Nagasakit to drown himself. Though he had no driver’s license, John jumped in the car and drove to the beach as fast as he could. When he got there, he saw no sign of his father until—drawn by the music from the amusement park—he finally discovered him riding the roller coaster, “pretending to drink from an empty bottle and pretending to contemplate suicide at every rise” while a crowd watched in fascination. He then persuaded the attendant to stop the ride, so when his father got off, he saw his “younger son and killjoy.” “Oh, Daddy,” John said to him in his fictional account of this incident, “you shouldn’t do this to me in my formative years.” That remark, worded humorously to disarm all condemnation, came from the heart, as did his bland rendering of his mother’s callousness. Making it light became Cheever’s way of confronting—of evading—his problems.
The children of Wollaston who did not know what to think of John’s father were unanimous in liking his mother. They thought Mrs. Cheever charming and pleasant—“a very sweet, wonderful person—so much a lady.” Above all they admired her for her resourcefulness in supporting the family after her husband had lost his livelihood. Her son John refused to be impressed.
It could not have been easy for Mary Liley Cheever, grown stout in her fifties, to give up her position as community clubwoman and make a go of a gift shop downtown, but that is what she did. She first opened the Mary Cheever Gift Shoppe in 1926, and it was this shop, located first at 9 Granite Street and then at 1247 Hancock just north of Quincy Square, that supported the family and paid John’s way through school. (Frederick L. Cheever wrote the ninety-dollar check for the semiannual tuition payment to Thayer Academy in the fall of 1926, and Mary L. Cheever paid thereafter.) At the least, it could be said of her that she made the best of a bad situation.
In his writing and conversation, however, John Cheever consistently denigrated his mother’s accomplishment. “I suppose that the gift shop was our principal if not our only source of income,” he acknowledged, but he did not think much of the place. Mrs. Cheever ran a high-class store, it was true. “You’d go to Woolworth’s for souvenirs, but to Mary Cheever’s for nice things,” Doris Oberg recalls. It was her good fortune, she used to say, to be surrounded by lovely things, but to her son’s eyes they were anything but lovely. He spent many an adolescent afternoon amid the clutter and debris in the back of her shop, waiting for his mother to close up. At Christmastime especially, she devoted her energies to the gift shop and not the home. John knew that it had to be that way, and resented it.
Mrs. Cheever’s manner as a saleswoman seems to have been unusually aggressive. After greeting customers with a smile, she had a disconcerting way of making up their minds for them about what they should buy. If someone chose a gift that she thought did not match his or her personality, she would do her best to discourage the purchase by suggesting alternatives. Often enough this did not work. She would then sell people what they wanted in the first place, reluctantly, or even with a hint of disapproval.
Still the shop survived, and as time wore on Mrs. Cheever branched out into other ventures. In 1929 she opened a dress shop, the Little Shop Around the Corner, also in downtown Quincy. The shop featured copies of smart French frocks, hats, and costume jewelry. It was launched, according to the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, to satisfy the demand of Mary Cheever’s patrons for a dress and accessory shop that would reflect the “exclusiveness and beauty … already evident in her gift shop.” Her entrepreneurial drive also led her to launch two restaurants, one in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and the other in Hanover, Massachusetts. Both soon went under. Later Mrs. Cheever began a number of cottage industries. She manufactured and tried to merchandise large cloth bags, for instance. When these didn’t sell unadorned, she painted roses on them, and that led her into painting roses on other household obje
cts and offering them for sale. There were not many takers, but she kept going. In her old age, she ran a small lampshade shop out of her home.
Whatever the outcome of these endeavors—and to John it seemed as if “the odor of failure” clung to them all—it is clear that Mary Cheever was a woman of tremendous energy who cherished the independence that her gift shop had earned for her, and protected it as need be. Once she drove off an armed robber with a candlestick. Late in life, John Cheever began to understand what that independence must have meant to his mother, but he could not entirely forgive her for it. The very word “antique” would set his teeth on edge. He deeply hated the fact of his mother’s gift shop.
For one thing, his mother’s highly visible employment as shopkeeper called attention to the family’s financial predicament, and hence its difference from others. Though around the country women were beginning to break away from the drudgery of housekeeping and take jobs of their own, it is safe to say that the Cheevers were the only householders in Wollaston and John the only boy at Thayer with an unemployed father and a mother in trade. He felt the social humiliation, patent if unexpressed, and could take no pride in his mother’s accomplishment. Worse, he became convinced that her very vitality and strength functioned to demean and unman his father. There was no question as to which parent had the controlling personality.
His mother, John invariably said, was a strong person: dominant, eccentric, opinionated. In middle age she abandoned the Episcopal Church for Christian Science, and suffered her way stoically through any physical ills that befell her. Her weakness was claustrophobia. She could not enjoy a concert or the theater or the movies; the minute the doors closed, she was on the verge of hysteria. Otherwise she was afraid of nothing. As Coverly Wapshot told the psychiatrist in The Wapshot Chronicle, where he came from the women were “very powerful. They [were] kind and they [meant] very well, but sometimes they [got] very oppressive. Sometimes you feel as if it wasn’t right to be a man.”
Cheever regarded his parents’ marriage as a struggle for dominance, and his mother as the victor. Caught in the middle, he consistently took his father’s part, especially after the loss of his job and his wife’s ascendancy as breadwinner robbed him of his power. “My sympathies all lay with him. And I worried terribly about what would happen to him,” John said. His father was a self-made man who suddenly “found himself helpless, unable to support his family.” John was afraid he would commit suicide.
In story after story, he reenacted the quarrels that raged between his parents. In “Publick House” (1941), old Mr. Briggs rails at having to wait for his dinner until all the customers in his wife’s tearoom/gift shop have been fed. “I’m sick and tired of being pushed around,” he says, loud enough for the customers to hear. “You’ve sold all my things. You’ve sold my mother’s china. You sold the rugs. You sold the portraits.… What kind of business is that—selling the past?” In “The Jewels of the Cabots” (1972), a family of three sits down to a Sunday dinner and the son’s father starts to carve the roast. As he makes the first cut, his mother sighs so profoundly that it seems her life is in danger. “Will you never learn,” she asks, “that lamb must be carved against the grain?” Then the battle ensues. After half a dozen wounding remarks, his father waves the carving knife in the air and shouts, “Will you kindly mind your own business, will you kindly shut up?” She sighs once again, surely “her last breath.” But no: to close the argument she gazes at the air above the table and says, “Feel that refreshing breeze.” There is no breeze.
Another bitter dinner-table dispute in “The Edge of the World” (1941) sends the teenage son out of the house and on the road. Back home the argument ends when his mother cuts herself, his father binds her wound, and in a paroxysm of passion they make love. But to the boy theirs was a love contaminated by hate, and in his eyes the hate prevailed and made him feel insignificant. “They spend all their lives hating one another,” he tells a companion.
“They torture one another. They fight and then she tells me not to feel sorry for him. She tells me that he never wanted to have any children. Then he tells me she never wanted to have any children. Then she tells me that he spent all her money. Then he tells me that she spends all his money. Sometimes I don’t think they know who I am; I don’t think they know my first name.”
They were so wrapped up in hating each other, he thinks, that they had forgotten all about him.
Cheever felt much the same way as the boy in this story. In a journal entry, he writes of coming home from school to find “the furnace dead, some unwashed dishes on the table in the dining room and at the center of the table a pot of tulips that the cold had killed and blackened.” Anger had driven his parents out of the house. Their “detestation of one another had blinded them to their commitments to the house and to him.…” It was as if he’d been exiled.
Cheever did not run away from home. He found other ways of protesting against lack of love from his parents, against his father’s downfall, and against his mother’s shopkeeping. Years later he would look back on Quincy occasionally in his journal, a repository for innermost thoughts, or in his fiction. But he went back in person only on visits while his parents were alive, and not at all after they died. It was a painful place for him. He had been unhappy there. His family had been poor there. He did not want to face that time openly, without the scrim of invention.
Besides, his adolescent home was inhabited by the ghost of the father who had never had enough time for him and who in his decline sacrificed his self-respect. “The greatest and most bitter mystery in my life was my father,” Cheever wrote in 1977. He was convinced that his father had never loved him, and he revisited the sorrow and the pain of that conviction in almost everything he wrote.
Half a century earlier, in the Massachusetts suburbs south of Boston, the fifteen-year-old knew that his father failed him time and again, but he did not know whose fault it was. His tendency was to assign the blame to economic causes, or to his mother’s domineering ways, or to any convenient explanation that would leave his father free of culpability. In the New England society of the day, you didn’t tell your father off, and you didn’t allow yourself to think he should be told off. In effect, he denied his father’s failure and romanticized his shortcomings, repressed his own anger and acted out his own frustrations in the series of disasters that, he said, constituted his own adolescence.
Even in relative poverty, the Cheevers kept up certain appearances. Mrs. Cheever continued to invite to Thanksgiving dinner all of the strays she had been able to collect on “trains and buses and beaches and in the lobby of Symphony Hall during the intermission.” When the last guest left, Mr. Cheever would stand by the door and exclaim, “The roar of the lion has ceased! The last loiterer has left the banquet hall!” The ritual was important. Like having a maid who was the daughter of an Adams coachman, it seemed to bespeak the family’s secure status in a society of early settlers. As an adolescent, Cheever was keenly sensitive to social slights, both real and imagined. On Thanksgiving morning, he pointed out, he played touch football with the Winslows and Bradfords, who were willing to overlook the fact that his ancestors had not, like theirs, arrived on the Mayflower. He claimed that he’d never learned to play tennis, though, because the Baileys, who lived slightly above the Cheevers on Highland and who had a tennis court, never asked him up to play.
His mother did what she could to make sure he was invited wherever he should have been and knew how to act when he got there. There were some advantages to knowing the forks early in life. Even as a kindergartner he had mastered social skills unusual in children of any age. Upon leaving a party one day, Bertha L. Wight recalls, young John was the only child who spoke to the hostess. “Thank you for inviting me,” he said. “I enjoyed it very much and I mean it!”
As he grew up, he was sent as a matter of course to dancing classes and to the junior and senior assemblies that succeeded them—experiences he memorialized in a 1937 memoir for The New
Yorker entitled “In the Beginning.” The central figure in the memoir is Miss Barlow, a venerable dancing instructor who wore jet-black dresses that hiked up a little in the rear and who spoke as if addressing hundreds. Every Saturday afternoon during his middle school years, John had trouble finding the serge bag that held his patent-leather dancing shoes. He would kneel and pray to God that he’d find the shoes in time to be driven down to the Masonic Temple for the two-o’clock class. There ensued the same drill followed by upper-middle-class youngsters in every American city of the time. The boys gathered in the locker room, the girls in the ladies’ room. They then marched upstairs, entered the ballroom in pairs, and bowed to the observing matrons. After an hour of instruction, the children practiced what they had learned by dancing in couples.
When Cheever was fifteen, he graduated to the junior assemblies held at the country club. These “began at eight and ended at eleven, and you could clap as hard as you wanted to but the band wouldn’t play any encores.” Miss Barlow insisted on at least one cotillion and one elimination dance, the latter usually won by a good-looking boy who danced on the balls of his feet. Next came the senior assemblies, which were formal and lasted from nine to one. By this time the stock market had crashed, and along with it “most of the institutions our fathers had lived by.” But Miss Barlow did not change. She still wore the same black dresses and the same ankle-high beaded shoes; she still carried a corsage in her left hand and a whistle in her right. She was seventy at least, and had her dignity. One evening in her last season, she had the ballroom decorated with balloons. Seeing their opportunity, the teenagers began to break the balloons with matches and penknives. Miss Barlow sounded her whistle and commanded their attention with her sarcastic voice. “This is extraordinary,” she said. “I can’t understand you young people.” Never before, she told them, had her guests taken so much pleasure in destroying her decorations. “Your amusement is really a revelation. Next week we’ll have rattles. Alphabetical blocks the week after that.”