John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œThey 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