John Cheever Read Free Page A

sailboats.” He gambled at the track and at the table. For three decades, from 1895 to 1925, he traveled all over the United States, living in hotels and clubs and selling “expensive and beautiful” shoes to individual buyers working “for individual firms.” But then the structure of the business began to change. Cheap shoes manufactured in mass quantities replaced well-crafted handmade shoes. Chain stores and stores owned by manufacturers replaced individually owned stores. Only a few independent dealers remained, and they did not buy enough to cover the expenses of selling shoes. By 1925 the drummer’s income began to drop; by 1930 he was out of work and as forgotten as “those big yellow houses with cornices and cupolas that they used to build.” Shaving in the morning, the salesman considers his life “a total loss.” He looks at his defeated face in the mirror, and then, he says in conclusion, “I get sick as if I had eaten something that didn’t agree with me and I have to put down the razor and support myself against the wall.”
    This piece, signed like several other early writings by “Jon” Cheever, may have been shaped in part by the anticapitalist requirements of The New Republic in 1935. Politics aside, though, it accurately reflected what happened to Cheever’s father. By the mid-1920s his career had gone sour, while earlier there had been high old times on the road. Frederick Lincoln Cheever told stories about those days—about oyster sweepstakes in Chesapeake Bay, storms on Lake Erie, breakfasts in New Orleans, horse races and boxing matches and the night he and two companions drank all the champagne on the Boston–New York train. It was an extravagant life, but he brought back the orders.
    Things were going well in 1900 when with thousands of others he shot off Roman candles in Boston Common to welcome the new century and decided, at thirty-seven, to get married. Projecting his own experience backward, John later reckoned that his father, “an intensely sensuous and perhaps lascivious man,” must have had affairs with lovers of both sexes during his bachelor years. In fact, his dapper father was regarded as something of a ladies’ man, though at least in the beginning he obviously adored the woman he married. This too would change; the marriage deteriorated along with the family fortunes.
    A decade younger than her husband, Mary Devereaux Liley Cheever was born in England in 1873 and came to this country as a young girl with her parents, William and Sarah A. D. Liley. A tiny woman scarcely five feet tall, she was a dynamo of energy. John Cheever came to resent her, as many American male writers resent their strong mothers, but it was evidently from her side of the family that he inherited his artistic talent. Grandfather Liley died soon after the voyage across the Atlantic; Grandmother Liley survived to become a favorite figure of his boyhood. The daughter (according to her grandson) of Sir Percy Devereaux, a tradesman knighted by Victoria when he became Lord Mayor of Windsor, Sarah Liley began reading him Dickens in his preschool years; he reciprocated by reading to her after she suffered a stroke. She observed rigorous standards and demanded proper English of John. “Did you have a good time?” she would ask him. “An awful good time,” he would answer. And then she would say, “A very good time,” and he would say, “No, it was really an awful good time.” John’s father rather liked deflating her cultural pretensions. One afternoon she invited a pianist to tea. “Madame Langlois,” Frederick Cheever announced, “is about to tickle the ivories.”
    Grandmother Liley knew how to let the air out of people too. She especially endeared herself to young John by describing his mother as “a little stupid and foolish.” That he always remembered, along with the Dickens.