John Cheever (2 page)

Under the circumstances, rumors flourished. It was understood that his grandfather had left his wife, Sarah, and their two children, Hamlet (Aaron admired Shakespeare) and Frederick, to fend for themselves. His grandmother subsequently ran a Boston boarding-house, John suspected, though he wasn't told. He did get the distinct impression between the lines of what went unsaid that his grandfather had been a seafaring man in his youth, that he drank, and that he had committed suicide.

In an early story, “Homage to Shakespeare” (1937), Cheever attempted to summon up his grandfather's ghost. According to the story, he had in effect been undone by Shakespeare. At sixteen he shipped out to Calcutta and took with him the buckram-bound copy of Shakespeare's plays that, along with a tintype of himself looking fiercely angry, were the only mementos to survive when he died. The book was heavily annotated, with sonorous speeches underlined where Lear and Coriolanus and Macbeth “damned men for their treachery” and their lack of faith. Admittedly his grandfather was a failure in the eyes of Newburyport, where he retired to reflect, with the encouragement of the Bard, on his own unappreciated greatness. He considered that he had the spirit of a king, and did not deign to work. With Shakespeare, he took dark views. “Gleaming through the vanity of every incident he read the phallus and the skull.” Eventually, nagged by his wife, he took up with the bottle and the local barmaids, and she left him for a better life. At the end, the narrator imagines him—“my grandfather,” given no other name—still prideful but now beaten, too drunk to find a woman, bumping into lampposts, locked out of his lodgings, “muttering as he stumbled some line from
Timon of Athens
about how men bolt their doors against the setting sun.”

So it may have been, or some of it. The available facts are that Aaron Waters Cheever was born in Newburyport on September 18, 1815, the son of Benjamin Hale and Rebekah Thompson Cheever. At thirty-one, on December 5, 1847, he married Sarah A. Nash in Medford. Both bride and groom then lived in Woburn, and he was employed as a cordwainer—a worker in cordovan leather, a shoemaker. Later he became a patternmaker, someone who sketches the design of shoes. In time the family lived both in Newburyport and in Lynn, where Aaron probably participated in the great shoemakers' strike that began on Washington's birthday, 1860. Frederick Lincoln Cheever, John's father, was born in Lynn on January 16, 1863. Frederick's only sibling, Hamlet, was almost ten years his senior. Soon after Frederick's birth the Cheevers moved to Boston. Evidently Aaron left his wife and children early in the 1870s. He died in Boston on August 2, 1882. The death certificate lists his final residence as III Chambers Street in the old West End, a ragged quarter inhabited largely by Eastern European immigrants. (Chambers Street no longer exists, having given way to urban renewal.) The immediate cause of death was “alcohol & opium—del. [irium] tremens.” That too was not something John was told.

Left fatherless, Frederick Cheever grew up poor, but the stories he told did not dwell on his poverty. Instead he talked of sleeping in an attic full of ivory tusks and of riding the first horsecar from Newburyport to Amesbury, a trip he celebrated in the laconic style of his journal.

Sturgeon in river then. About three feet long. All covered with knobs. Leap straight up in air and fall back in water.… Hold the reins and see the sturgeon leap. Boyish happiness.

He came to Boston with his parents on the
Harold Currier
, the last sailing vessel to leave the Newburyport yards. It cost the family very little, since the ship was being towed in for outfitting; otherwise, they probably couldn't have afforded the trip.

Frederick went to work in a shoe factory full-time the day after he graduated from the Phillips School with honors. In the evenings, wearing mittens against the cold, he studied
The Magician's Own Handbook
, in order, his son concluded, “to make himself socially desirable.” One of the tricks was “How to Cook an Omelet in Your Hat.” The secret was to make the omelet in advance, hide it in the top of the hat, then propose to perform one's magic when, say, the gentlemen rejoined the ladies after brandy and cigars. “I can cook an omelet in my hat,” one was to say brightly, and when challenged produce four eggs, three of them blown through tiny needle holes, drop the one whole egg on a table as if by accident, then take the three blown eggs and “cook” them over a candle in one's hat, eventually—Alakazam—displaying the precooked omelet for the wonderment of one's companions.

In appearance John Cheever's father “was one of those Massachusetts Yankees who look forever like a boy although toward the end he looked like a boy who had seen the Gorgon.” He spoke in a North Shore accent and kept his
a
s variable. “The ship had a mahst made of had wood,” he would say. He followed a series of rituals, convinced like the fictional Leander Wapshot “that the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and continuousness of things.” Every morning “he took a cold bath, howling like a walrus.” In the evenings he invariably wore a white shirt and a dark coat. “His concern for sartorial preciseness was exhaustive,” as his son put it. He went skating on Christmas Day. He went swimming as many days as he could; at seventy his false teeth were swept away by the Atlantic. He fancied himself a seafarer, and handled his catboat—though “it sailed like real estate,” he'd complain—as gracefully as a dancer. But actually he made his living, and then stopped making his living, in the same shoe business that had given his own father employment.

Frederick Lincoln Cheever either did or did not own a shoe factory. In his late years, John Cheever certainly said he had, and said so with the verisimilitude of the storyteller. As a boy, John reported, he was permitted once a year to toot the noon whistle at the factory in Lynn. “Everybody then took their sandwiches out of their paper bags. And that,” he observed, “was my participation in the shoe industry.” Yet city directories in Lynn show no record of Whitteridge and Cheever or Woodbridge and Cheever, as his firm was presumably called. Moreover, Frederick Lincoln Cheever is listed in Quincy city directories as a salesman from 1908 until 1922, then as a shoe manufacturer for several years thereafter. And the records of Thayer Academy, attended by both John and his brother, Fred, during the 1920s, give their father's occupation as “shoe salesman.”

It hardly matters, except that it mattered to John Cheever. As he grew older, he became insistent on his father's status as factory owner. But there is no mention of this part of his career in the apparently accurate story/article “The Autobiography of a Drummer,” which appeared in
The New Republic
of October 23, 1935. Its first-person account traces the roller-coaster career of a “commercial traveler” in the shoe business from 1891 to 1931. The unnamed salesman (or drummer) of the piece was modeled after his own father, Cheever acknowledged, and the pattern of success followed by failure was manifestly that of Frederick Lincoln Cheever's life. Significantly, in the story the drummer fails through no fault of his own but because of changing economic conditions. In his glory days on the road—and this brief Cheever story anticipates Miller's
Death of a Salesman
—the drummer succeeded through force of personality and the intimate knowledge of the business he'd acquired by going to work at twelve as office boy in a shoe factory. He “often sold two carloads of shoes over a glass of whiskey.” He “had ten suits of clothing and twenty pairs of shoes and two sailboats.” He gambled at the track and at the table. For three decades, from 1895 to 1925, he traveled all over the United States, living in hotels and clubs and selling “expensive and beautiful” shoes to individual buyers working “for individual firms.” But then the structure of the business began to change. Cheap shoes manufactured in mass quantities replaced well-crafted handmade shoes. Chain stores and stores owned by manufacturers replaced individually owned stores. Only a few independent dealers remained, and they did not buy enough to cover the expenses of selling shoes. By 1925 the drummer's income began to drop; by 1930 he was out of work and as forgotten as “those big yellow houses with cornices and cupolas that they used to build.” Shaving in the morning, the salesman considers his life “a total loss.” He looks at his defeated face in the mirror, and then, he says in conclusion, “I get sick as if I had eaten something that didn't agree with me and I have to put down the razor and support myself against the wall.”

This piece, signed like several other early writings by “Jon” Cheever, may have been shaped in part by the anticapitalist requirements of
The New Republic
in 1935. Politics aside, though, it accurately reflected what happened to Cheever's father. By the mid-1920s his career had gone sour, while earlier there had been high old times on the road. Frederick Lincoln Cheever told stories about those days—about oyster sweepstakes in Chesapeake Bay, storms on Lake Erie, breakfasts in New Orleans, horse races and boxing matches and the night he and two companions drank all the champagne on the Boston–New York train. It was an extravagant life, but he brought back the orders.

Things were going well in 1900 when with thousands of others he shot off Roman candles in Boston Common to welcome the new century and decided, at thirty-seven, to get married. Projecting his own experience backward, John later reckoned that his father, “an intensely sensuous and perhaps lascivious man,” must have had affairs with lovers of both sexes during his bachelor years. In fact, his dapper father was regarded as something of a ladies' man, though at least in the beginning he obviously adored the woman he married. This too would change; the marriage deteriorated along with the family fortunes.

A decade younger than her husband, Mary Devereaux Liley Cheever was born in England in 1873 and came to this country as a young girl with her parents, William and Sarah A. D. Liley. A tiny woman scarcely five feet tall, she was a dynamo of energy. John Cheever came to resent her, as many American male writers resent their strong mothers, but it was evidently from her side of the family that he inherited his artistic talent. Grandfather Liley died soon after the voyage across the Atlantic; Grandmother Liley survived to become a favorite figure of his boyhood. The daughter (according to her grandson) of Sir Percy Devereaux, a tradesman knighted by Victoria when he became Lord Mayor of Windsor, Sarah Liley began reading him Dickens in his preschool years; he reciprocated by reading to her after she suffered a stroke. She observed rigorous standards and demanded proper English of John. “Did you have a good time?” she would ask him. “An awful good time,” he would answer. And then she would say, “A
very
good time,” and he would say, “No, it was really an awful good time.” John's father rather liked deflating her cultural pretensions. One afternoon she invited a pianist to tea. “Madame Langlois,” Frederick Cheever announced, “is about to tickle the ivories.”

Grandmother Liley knew how to let the air out of people too. She especially endeared herself to young John by describing his mother as “a little stupid and foolish.” That he always remembered, along with the Dickens. Well educated in England and capable of taking tea in French and hemming a pocket handkerchief, his grandmother nonetheless thought of herself as a free spirit. She read widely in current literature, and was a friend of Margaret Ware Deland, the Boston novelist and short-story writer. One day while walking with the Delands in the slums of Boston, she saw women rapping their rings against the windows. “Why are they doing that?” she asked. “Because they are
whores
,” Mr. Deland explained.

Left virtually destitute by the death of her husband, John's maternal grandmother nonetheless managed to send her daughter Florence to art school. John's aunt Florence, called Percy in the 1968 story he wrote about her, did eventually become a painter, though she was forced to abandon her dream of rivaling “the Masters of the Italian Renaissance” in favor of commercially salable magazine covers. She also smoked cigars (though remaining intensely feminine), and married a philandering doctor whom she continued to love despite his frequent amours. She transferred her artistic hopes to their son, Randall, who had a short career as a concert pianist. After Sunday dinner, Cheever irreverently recalled, Randall “would play two Beethoven sonatas … and everyone would sit around and belch.”

In a 1968 journal entry about “Percy,” Cheever chastises himself for any hint of affectation, any trace of a swagger, in the story. The real reason his Aunt Florence interested him was not that she smoked cigars—it was that art ruled her life as it came to rule his own. One of her last requests was to be taken from her sickbed to see the Sargent watercolors at the Boston Museum one final time.

The artistic inheritance of the Lileys bypassed John's mother, but not the drive and enthusiasm behind it. Both for economic reasons and because it suited her personality, she rejected the Victorian role of passive housewife. Mary Liley Cheever was a woman who did things for others. After high school she attended the school of nursing at Massachusetts General Hospital; she became a head nurse there within a year following her graduation. She and Frederick Cheever must have met and fallen in love sometime during the late 1890s in Boston, where he had for many years been living with and supporting his mother. At the time Mary Liley was thought to be “quite beautiful.” In one photograph of her as a young woman that John recalled, she had fair hair, wore a long tennis dress, and carried a racket. “Her features had a pleasant, sensuous thickness.” She looked something like John himself at the same age. Another photograph he remembered characterized her better, however. This picture appeared on the cover of a luncheon program, celebrating Founders Day at the Quincy Woman's City Club. She was one of the founders, or as John put it with some hyperbole, “she was founder.” In this picture of Mary Liley Cheever, now in her late thirties, the features were finer and the hair darker. These photographs have not survived. John's mother did not like to have her picture taken. She had been able to achieve a look of composure in the Founders Day photo, she explained to her son, only by holding him in her lap. “I was cropped,” he added.