Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [110]
THOUGH CHEEVER CLAIMED he encountered no “deep spiritual impediment” to finishing his novel, the fact remained that he was trying to write an unflattering account of a family very like his own—featuring a domineering, gift-shop-owning mother—while his actual mother was still alive, if not altogether well. At age eighty she was very fat and ill with diabetes, and her face had a mournful way of collapsing when she removed her upper plate at night. She managed to keep busy, though. In recent years she'd closed the gift shop and begun selling hand-painted lampshades out of her house; sometimes when Cheever arrived for a visit he'd find the living room crowded with ladies and have to retreat to the kitchen or backyard, remembering the old days when he used to cool his heels in the back of her shop while she chatted with customers after hours (“I still feel the struggle—faintly—in my balls”). Though he tried hard to be nice to the old woman, her “depraved tastes” mortified him as much as ever—more—now that he had a family and lived in the posh banlieue of Scarborough (where, he noted, her “tastes and manners would not succeed”). When she insisted on talking business, Cheever would listen with a faint, flinching grin and imagine that she was deliberately tormenting him, and in front of his family no less. Her reactionary provincialism (as he saw it) pervaded all of New England. When he took Susan on a tour of Concord and other historical sites, a lady custodian at Emerson's house pointed to a portrait of the great transcendentalist and said, “He was a man of principle. Today [Senator] McCarthy is our only man of principle.” Writing to Eleanor Clark, Cheever claimed to have given this woman a piece of his mind while “Susie blushed and sweated.” A few days later, however, writing to Maxwell, he transferred the woman's McCarthyism to his mother: “ ‘Isn't MaCarthy [sic] wonderful?’ old Mrs. Wapshot asked me before her welcoming kiss had dried. … It galls her that I am now her sole support and she announced—reflectively—that if I were only dead she would be handsomely provided for by the state. It would be like poor Coverly to notice that every stick of furniture in her house has claw feet.”*
For what it's worth, Susan Cheever did not find her grandmother (“Bammy”) the least domineering, nor did she consider the gift shop the “depraved” brainchild of a castrating vulgarian; rather she thought it the natural enterprise of a “craft-y” woman with a taste for pretty things. Indeed, she remembers Bammy as nothing but thoughtful and kind: the woman was always sending lovely little presents she herself had made—an embroidered dress, bits of jewelry—and liked to teach her granddaughter how to do practical feminine things like bake cookies and make a martini (“Just pass the [vermouth] bottle over the gin”). Fred Cheever's oldest daughter, Jane, also has nothing but fond memories of Bammy: “She would take me out to lunch and have my hair done, and then she'd buy me outlandish clothes that my mother would never want me to wear. She hadn't had daughters so I was the first girl she had a chance to play with.” Lest the picture seem too idyllic, though, it's worth noting that Jane's younger sister Sarah thought her grandmother “a bit of a bitch,” and never forgot the time Bammy asked her to help wrap a package by placing her finger on the bow: “She tied it so tight my finger almost came off.” By then relations had soured between Bammy and Iris—Fred's wife—who chafed at her mother-in-law's bossiness and resented her husband's