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

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.