John Cheever Read Free

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