John Cheever (3 page)

That rather bitter remark typified Cheever's feelings about his mother. In his view she was too occupied in raising money for the new parish house, financing the library, installing flower boxes, starting progressive schools, and promoting cultural events to devote much time to him. She “always seemed to be out raising money … rather than being at home when I needed her.” Similarly she invited the downtrodden to take Thanksgiving dinner with the family, but had little time or inclination for mundane domestic tasks. She used to sing a lament about having to wash and iron a shirt, John recalled. Another song was “Hands Off.” When as in “Independence Day at St. Botolphs,” a draft for the opening of
The Wapshot Chronicle
, Sarah Wapshot (Mary Liley Cheever) came home “from a stirring lecture on hospital conditions,” she was in no mood to be embraced. Her husband blew down the back of her neck to no avail. Her “lack of interest in sexuality” sorted badly with his passionate nature. Nor was she demonstrative with her two sons. “There were very seldom warm embraces. Her rules of decorum were rigidly observed.”

In such an environment John Cheever grew up, in a series of three houses all located in Quincy, Massachusetts, the South Shore city—suburb to Boston—where his parents moved shortly after the birth of their first son, Frederick Jr., in 1905. As old as Boston itself, Quincy was best known for its most famous citizens. Specifically, Quincy was the home—at least in summer—of the Adams family: the two presidents John and John Quincy, then Charles Francis Adams and Brooks and Henry Adams. The name of a still earlier resident, Thomas Morton of Merry Mount, figures less prominently in histories of the community, for he brought infamy with him.

Morton arrived with Captain Wollaston to establish the original settlement in 1625, and upon Wollaston's departure took over command. He set up an Indian trading post at Merry Mount, or Mount Wollaston (both place-names survive in modern Quincy), and conducted himself so recklessly as to call down the wrath of the other English settlements in the New World. A veritable lord of misrule, Morton got the Indians drunk before striking bargains with them, and then sold them guns. In addition, he and his men disported themselves with the Indian women, “the lasses in beaver coats,” around the community Maypole. The combination of “neglected Indian husbands, liquor, and gunpowder” threatened to lead to serious trouble, and eventually Miles Standish was dispatched from Plymouth to arrest Morton in the king's name. Morton was deported to England, but soon returned to resume his former practices. The Massachusetts Bay Colony in the form of Governor Endicott then descended on Merry Mount to cut down the Maypole and ship the still-unchastened Morton back to England again, this time permanently. The rebellion of Thomas Morton, involving strong drink and promiscuity, was directed against the accepted mores of his time. The Adams family objected more discreetly and to political rather than social constraints, but they too rebelled against authority. “Resistance to something,” as Henry Adams wrote in his
Education
, “was the law of New England nature,” and this was true of John Cheever in the 1920s as it had been for Morton in the 1630s and Adams in the 1850s.

Henry Adams's Quincy represented summertime relief from the rigors of winter in Boston. “Town was constraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed by boys without knowing it.” For Cheever, seventy years later, these dual impulses toward freedom and confinement, license and law, nature and civilization fought their way out on the stony ground of Quincy itself. In its most concrete manifestation, he felt a “critical division” between his outdoor world of play and his mother's indoor world of propriety.

The Quincy of his youth was larger and far more of a self-sufficient city than the rural retreat Henry Adams had enjoyed. It had grown by virtue of its twenty-seven miles of shoreline—young Henry could gaze from the hill near John and Abigail Adams's Old House east across Quincy Bay, north to Boston and beyond—and on the strength of the granite industry. Quincy granite sales flourished from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Scotch-Irish, Scandinavian, and Italian immigrants came to quarry and cut the granite. The large Fore River shipyard started operating in 1900, attracting still more laborers and managers. The old summer houses were converted to year-round use, as the railroad made commuting to Boston easy. Not all of the growth pleased longtime residents. More people meant more schools, more police, and higher taxes. The Adams family moved out as the Cheevers moved in.

CHILDHOOD

1912–1926

The Cheevers lived first in the flat part of Quincy, near the trolley tracks. It was there, in a small house at 43 Elm Avenue, that John William Cheever spent the first seven years of his life. He was born on May 27, 1912, almost seven years after Fred. There were no other children. John's parents had not planned on his birth, as he was often to hear in the years ahead. His mother was thirty-nine, his father forty-nine when he was born.

Looking back on his youth in a 1978 interview, John Cheever said that it could be divided into an extremely sunny childhood and an extremely troubled adolescence. The childhood was probably not as happy as all that, however. His mother kept busy, and was not given to shows of affection. His father was often away from home on sales trips, and when in residence devoted substantially more time to John's older brother, Fred, than to him. Fred was so much older that he and John could hardly have played together. Cheever remembered little of those first years. What he did remember suggests that things were less sunny than he stated publicly.

In his earliest recollections of his mother, she almost always appears as dominating if not tyrannical, cruel if not heartless. Much of the time, she was too busily occupied with charity projects and home-front war work to pay much attention to her younger son. Yet it was she who tore him from the arms of a maid he had grown fond of, as she fired her for petty thieving. And it was she who snatched the broom from him, with the exasperated comment that he “swept like an old woman.”

By 1920 the Cheevers had moved up the hill to Wollaston, Quincy's solid Ward 5, the Republican stronghold, the best neighborhood in town. For two years they stayed in a two-family house at 396 Highland Avenue. By 1922, however, they were living in their own eleven-room home a few blocks away, at 123 Winthrop Avenue. The house was Victorian, and so was the heavy, comfortable furniture that Mary Liley Cheever installed. Weekdays John walked to Wollaston Grammar School, near the corner of Highland and Beale Street. On Sundays he attended Episcopal Sunday school. The family fortunes were at their peak. Father went off to work in Boston or Lynn, but rarely took long trips on the road. Mother became a clubwoman, a “Madame President.” Gentility reigned.

Wollaston in the early 1920s was “very much turn of the century.” Draft horses still clopped through the streets, bringing merchants and their wares. The milkman delivered before 5:00
A.M.
You set a large square card in the window for the iceman, turned to indicate how much ice you wanted, twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, or one hundred pounds. Children tagged along behind the ice wagon to cadge a free sample. Mr. Holman the vegetable man, famous for his high-stepping horse, stopped in at kitchens to sell housewives his products. He might have a special on “native grass” (asparagus) or on oyster shells to be spread on sidewalks. Hawkers toured the streets in open delivery trucks with roll-down side curtains in case it rained. “Strawbeeeries! Strawbe-e-e-ries! Forty cents a box,” they hollered, and the box held a quart. Junkmen came by with horse and wagon and a spring-operated hand scale to buy scrap metal and bundles of old newspapers. Kids from down the hill sometimes tossed stones or ripe fruit on the Baileys' tennis court, but there was no serious crime. There were no minorities either, except for Jimmy Tab, who ran the bicycle shop and whose son was the only black child at Wollaston Grammar. Otherwise everyone was white and Christian and well-to-do. If anyone deviated from the norm in some way, it was noticed but discussed, if at all, quietly, quietly.

On the surface John Cheever seemed much like the other children on Wollaston hill. He played kick-the-can, hide-and-go-seek, hoist-the-green-sail, and nine-ten-red-light. He climbed the backyard pear tree he named the Duchess. He lost three teeth riding his brother's bike without permission. He went fishing in the summer and skated in the winter. He swam naked in the woods beyond Furnace Brook Parkway. He loved swimming in the brook, in Black's Creek, and in Quincy Bay off Wollaston Beach. Black's Creek joins the sea at the south end of the beach, and there, his friend Rollin Bailey distinctly remembers hearing, Cheever once threw a ring into the creek and “thus married the creek near where it married the ocean.” That was so curious a tale that Bailey stopped telling people about it. They didn't believe it or couldn't imagine such a gesture or didn't know John Cheever anyway.

The theatricality of the gesture fitted Cheever's boyhood personality even as it suggested a lack of emotional bonding within the family. Young Cheever spent much of his time in fantasy worlds. He loved playacting. On one Washington's birthday, he saw to it that all the neighbor youngsters were outfitted in Revolutionary War regalia. As organizer he reserved the role of General Washington for himself. When others took over charge of neighborhood play, he was assigned less glamorous roles. In the Robin Hood band that Rollin Bailey organized, for instance, he was cast as Friar Tuck, and logically so. Like the good friar, he was roly-poly and affable.

When he was still in grade school, Cheever suffered an attack of pulmonary tuberculosis. His mother had the disease herself and may have communicated it to her son. Yet she neglected him in his distress, the boy thought, and he never forgave her. For a time thereafter, he became an indoor child and brought his fantasy world inside with him in the form of puppet shows. At their simplest these were performed in the attic for one or two other children. Sometimes there were more public presentations. The tiny theater with its colorful backdrop was his own creation. “He built his own puppet theater, designed the scenery, and dyed the materials for the costumes,” next-door neighbor Helen Howarth remembers. She was enlisted to sew the costumes, advertise the shows, and take in pennies and safety pins. Then John would take over. “He did the talking (in appropriate voices for the characters), manipulating them and narrating the story themes before the acts.”

Fiction was his passion and also, he was to maintain, his salvation. “Perhaps the first thing in the world that I can remember,” he told an interviewer in 1980, “is being read a story.” In those “twilight Athenian years,” reading provided the family entertainment. His grandmother read him Dickens, and he was also read
Treasure Island
and
The Call of the Wild
and some of the Tom Swift stories. As soon as he could, he tackled the books on his own. Even before that, though, he had begun to tell stories in school, without puppets or props. “If we did our class work satisfactorily then a period would be set aside during which I would tell a story.” Sometimes these were serials. Usually they were “characterized by exaggeration, moving into preposterous falsehoods.” When he walked to the front of the class, he often had no clear idea of what the story would be about. He simply started talking, and the story came.

At eleven he decided he wanted to be a writer, and told his parents. That was fine, they said, so long as he didn't expect to win fame or fortune. No, he said, he didn't care about such things. From the first, he found that telling stories had a therapeutic effect as relief from “a volcanic and early adolescence.” Yet art was not merely an escape from his troubles, it was also a source of joy and understanding. Both the romantic and the realistic offered epiphanies, though of different nature. He was taken to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky's Fifth and thought, “That's tremendous—that's the way I feel about life.” He was taken to see Ibsen in repertory and became almost sick with excitement at the shock of recognition. His own fiction—sometimes fantastical, sometimes virtually photographic—helped him, as he often said, “to make sense of his life.”

The capacity to be moved by art—not entertained or laved by sentiment but genuinely moved—is rare enough, and when aligned with Cheever's still more remarkable ability to invent his own stories, it set him apart from other children. So Robert Daugherty, who was his classmate for the first eight years of school, thought of the public yarn-spinner and puppeteer as an introvert. What he meant, specifically, was that the chubby youth with the engaging manner and the stories in his head was not athletically inclined and rarely participated in such team sports as baseball and football. Baseball, especially, he avoided like a pestilence, and revealed why in “The National Pastime” (1953), another of those uncollected autobiographical stories in which he explored his origins.

The difficulty started with his father. Frederick Lincoln Cheever, who reached fifty before his younger son's first birthday, generally made it clear that he could be expected to do very little for the boy. He had formed a bond with his older son and namesake, Fred—often taking him sailing in Quincy Bay, for example—but John was born too late. One son was enough for his father, and perhaps for his mother as well. “If I hadn't drunk two manhattans one afternoon,” she told him, “you never would have been conceived.” But it was his father, she also told him, who wanted him aborted and who went so far as to invite the abortionist to dinner. The unwanted-child motif crops up repeatedly in Cheever's fiction. The abortionist appears at the dinner table both in
The Wapshot Chronicle
and in
Falconer
. “Farragut's father, Farragut's own father,” the latter novel reflects, “had wanted to have him extinguished as he dwelt in his mother's womb, and how could he live happily with this knowledge …?”