Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [10]
FREDERICK LINCOLN CHEEVER, JR., was born on August 23, 1905—almost seven years before his only brother, John—and he often spoke of his happy childhood. Both parents adored him: his mother grew plump and stayed that way because Fred had weighed only three pounds at birth, and she'd had to eat and eat to feed him; his father called him Binks because he resembled a cherubic little boy in an advertisement with that name.* Father and son went sailing together in Quincy Bay for many years while John was either unborn or too small to join them. He would always be too small. Meanwhile Fred grew into a manly, likable fellow whose athletic prowess was his father's greatest pride. “Everybody loved [him],” Cheever wrote of Coverly's older brother, Moses, “including the village dogs, and he comported himself with the purest, the most impulsive humility. Everybody did not love Coverly.”
By the time John was born, his parents’ marriage had become strained at best, and his conception was the result of some rare, tipsy lovemaking after a Boston sales banquet. “As my mother often pointed out,” Cheever said, “she drank two Manhattan cocktails that evening. Otherwise I would have remained unborn on a star.” His father—whose heart was already filled by Fred and the everyday joys of commerce—did what he could to dissuade his wife from having another child, even inviting an abortionist to dinner. It was a story that haunted Cheever the rest of his life, such that he couldn't help mentioning it time and again (often with a slight chuckle), and finally wrote it into Falconer. Not surprisingly, he saw fit to blame his mother for having the bad taste to tell him of the episode—this, as he wrote in his journal, by way of “seiz[ing] the affections of her son”: “‘[Your father] comes from very bad stock [she said]. It isn't his fault that he doesn't love you. He doesn't know anything about love. He didn't want you to be born.’ … And what sense can the boy make of these lies.” Most of the time, though, Cheever found it all too plausible: “I remember my father's detestation of me as I feel the roots of some destructive vine—the vine, of course, being my bewildering love.” His lifelong need to requite this love would lead him to “invent a father” in The Wapshot Chronicle, but still his eyes smarted with tears (“oh foolishness”) when he'd observe some chance tenderness between a father and son.
With whatever reluctance on his parents’ part, John William Cheever† was born on May 27, 1912, in a two-story clapboard house at 43 Elm Avenue, near the trolley tracks. Within a few years, the family entered the period of its greatest affluence, ascending Wollaston Hill to an eleven-room Victorian house on Winthrop Avenue. Leather prices spiked during the war, and by his own recollection Frederick Cheever sold five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of elegant, handmade shoes in a single six-month period of travel—”night after night in the stifling coffin of a Pullman berth,” as his son later imagined it, “because he had traveled all over a broad country selling shoes so they could join the golf club and buy gasoline for their cars.”* John remembered a milestone day when his father (“pleased and embarrassed”) picked him up at school in a brand-new Buick sedan of robin's-egg blue, complete with a flower vase and silk curtains. Such a powerful machine went well with the man's bespoke clothing, his Masonic finery, not to mention the other posh cars parked outside the Unitarian church where Frederick attended