Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [12]
Thanksgiving was a great event in the Cheever home—the sort of thing for which the coachman's daughter was presumably pressed into service. What Cheever particularly remembered was his mother's habit of collecting “strays” for the table. For weeks ahead of time—on beaches and buses, in train stations or “the lobby at Symphony Hall during the intermission”—his mother would approach whosoever seemed lonely, poor, infirm, preferably all three, and invite them to the stately house on Winthrop Avenue for the annual feast. The mellow Cheever who waxed reminiscent for the Times viewed his mother's motives as a poignant blend of noblesse oblige (“pride and arrogance”) and “her respect and knowledge of the cruelty of loneliness.” When the holiday arrived, the children of Wollaston played touch football or hockey on the millpond, then repaired to their homes at noon. This was a day when gluttony was forgiven even by the Cheevers, since an overloaded table was one way of expressing “sentiments that were … too profound and tender ever to be mentioned.” Finally, once the guests had departed, Frederick Cheever stood by the door and declared, “The roar of the lion has ceased! The last loiterer has left the banquet hall!”
By far the most memorable Thanksgiving was not a happy one, though it offers a useful glimpse at the ethos in which Cheever was raised. One of the strays invited for that year's feast was Miss Anna Boynton Thompson, a cousin of Cheever's father and one of the most celebrated spinsters in nearby Braintree. A classical scholar who received her doctorate from Tufts, Thompson taught at Thayer Academy for almost fifty years and had startled her neighbors during the Great War by standing on her balcony each night and appealing loudly to the heavens for peace. “She thought of all sensuality as a mode of ignorance,” Cheever observed. In 1922, Miss Thompson was fretful over the Armenian famine, and so became incensed at the sight of the Cheevers’ laden table: “How can you do this when half the populations of this world are starving?” she exclaimed. “Anna departed,” wrote Cheever (on whom she made such an impression that he'd pause guiltily over his meat during the lean years of World War II). “Six weeks later she was found in her cold, classical library in Braintree, Massachusetts, dead of starvation.”*
One might bear in mind a curious affinity between the dour Miss Thompson and her cousin John—who combined, as Updike put it, “the bubbling joie de vivre of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar to American Protestant males.” Born under the sign of Gemini, the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, Cheever considered his own nature to be “truly halved,” and his aunt Anne Armstrong was hardly alone in supporting this view: “What you have to remember,” his wife, Mary, insistently repeated, “is that John was a split personality.” Though the words “boyish” and “pixie” are constantly used to evoke the giddy, hilarious Cheever, he could also be curt, cruelly sarcastic, relentlessly harsh in judging friends and family and especially himself. Henry Adams thought a divided nature was the inevitable result of growing up in New England and Quincy in particular (“the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land”): “The chief charm of New England,” he wrote in his Education, “was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it—so that the pleasure of hating—one's self if no better victim offered—was not its rarest amusement. … Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures.”
The profound ambivalence with which Cheever beheld the world was even more pronounced in regard