John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson Read Free Book Online

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 objects 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