John Cheever Read Free Page B

Well educated in England and capable of taking tea in French and hemming a pocket handkerchief, his grandmother nonetheless thought of herself as a free spirit. She read widely in current literature, and was a friend of Margaret Ware Deland, the Boston novelist and short-story writer. One day while walking with the Delands in the slums of Boston, she saw women rapping their rings against the windows. “Why are they doing that?” she asked. “Because they are whores ,” Mr. Deland explained.
    Left virtually destitute by the death of her husband, John’s maternal grandmother nonetheless managed to send her daughter Florence to art school. John’s aunt Florence, called Percy in the 1968 story he wrote about her, did eventually become a painter, though she was forced to abandon her dream of rivaling “the Masters of the Italian Renaissance” in favor of commercially salable magazine covers. She also smoked cigars (though remaining intensely feminine), and married a philandering doctor whom she continued to love despite his frequent amours. She transferred her artistic hopes to their son, Randall, who had a short career as a concert pianist. After Sunday dinner, Cheever irreverently recalled, Randall “would play two Beethoven sonatas … and everyone would sit around and belch.”
    In a 1968 journal entry about “Percy,” Cheever chastises himself for any hint of affectation, any trace of a swagger, in the story. The real reason his Aunt Florence interested him was not that she smoked cigars—it was that art ruled her life as it came to rule his own. One of her last requests was to be taken from her sickbed to see the Sargent watercolors at the Boston Museum one final time.
    The artistic inheritance of the Lileys bypassed John’s mother, but not the drive and enthusiasm behind it. Both for economic reasons and because it suited her personality, she rejected the Victorian role of passive housewife. Mary Liley Cheever was a woman who did things for others. After high school she attended the school of nursing at Massachusetts General Hospital; she became a head nurse there within a year following her graduation. She and Frederick Cheever must have met and fallen in love sometime during the late 1890s in Boston, where he had for many years been living with and supporting his mother. At the time Mary Liley was thought to be “quite beautiful.” In one photograph of her as a young woman that John recalled, she had fair hair, wore a long tennis dress, and carried a racket. “Her features had a pleasant, sensuous thickness.” She looked something like John himself at the same age. Another photograph he remembered characterized her better, however. This picture appeared on the cover of a luncheon program, celebrating Founders Day at the Quincy Woman’s City Club. She was one of the founders, or as John put it with some hyperbole, “she was founder.” In this picture of Mary Liley Cheever, now in her late thirties, the features were finer and the hair darker. These photographs have not survived. John’s mother did not like to have her picture taken. She had been able to achieve a look of composure in the Founders Day photo, she explained to her son, only by holding him in her lap. “I was cropped,” he added.
    That rather bitter remark typified Cheever’s feelings about his mother. In his view she was too occupied in raising money for the new parish house, financing the library, installing flower boxes, starting progressive schools, and promoting cultural events to devote much time to him. She “always seemed to be out raising money … rather than being at home when I needed her.” Similarly she invited the downtrodden to take Thanksgiving dinner with the family, but had little time or inclination for mundane domestic tasks. She used to sing a lament about having to wash and iron a shirt, John recalled. Another song was