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to his birthplace. On the one hand, it was “a red-blooded and a splendid inheritance” to grow up in such a “powerfully sensual” environment, where one was barraged by the smells of wood smoke and flowers and the sea. “I've often wondered what makes us old Quincyites so randy,” Cheever wrote a stranger who was trying to sell him insurance. “Must be the sandy clams we dug at Wollaston Beach in those wonderful days of our youth.” Cheever made much of the fact that he'd lived less than a mile from Merrymount, where Morton had erected his Maypole and “jollity and gloom [had contended] for an empire,” as Hawthorne would have it. “[T]he difference between the legend and the present has always been amusing,” Cheever wrote in 1934, shortly after leaving Quincy for good. “It is now the most despicable, contrite tract of Dutch Colonial Houses I have ever seen. I've always wanted to go down there with a jug of firewater and a couple of sluts and raise a maypole.”

TO CHEEVER'S MIND, Anna Boynton Thompson “in her cold, classical library” served as an emblem for the “Athenian twilight years” of fin-de-siècle Boston, when even provincial families of the South Shore placed a high premium on culture. This was particularly true in Cheever's house, where reading aloud (“All of Dickens, from beginning to end, read and reread”) was the chief entertainment and a successful novelist (Mrs. Deland) often paid visits. Indeed, the entire extended family cultivated a certain artistic and intellectual flair. There was the painter Aunt Liley, of course, whose pianist son Randall studied at the Eastman Conservatory, while even the snobbish Aunt Anne founded a Shakespeare Society, and Frederick Cheever “could be called on to recite ‘Casey at Bat.’” (Frederick, again, was a great fan of Shakespeare in his own right, though perhaps defensive about his lack of formal education. In any event, he disliked arty pretentiousness, and tended to play the rube when things got thick. “If you want to hear the pianer-player you'd better come in,” he said when the great Rudolph Ganz came for tea. “Mr. Ganz is about to tickle the ivories.”) As for Cheever's mother, she took a particular hand in her sensitive younger son's education. Even when pregnant—”casting around for some way of improving the destiny of an unwanted child”—she made a point of attending every concert of the Boston Symphony,* and later took John to the theater, though an especially good play would make him almost ill with excitement. After a performance of The Merchant of Venice, the eleven-year-old dismayed his parents by rushing downstairs the next morning to get started on the rest of Shakespeare; and one time, too, his mother brought him to see Hedda Gabler, thinking it a musical, and was unable to budge her son once she'd been hideously disabused.

Cheever's precocity as a storyteller became something of a local legend. His fourth-grade teacher at Wollaston Grammar, Miss Florence Varley, never forgot the first time John “rose glibly to the occasion”: “ To my utter surprise,” she recalled half a century later, “he told a fairy tale that lasted about ten minutes. His classmates listened as avidly as they did whenever I found time to read to them from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.“ She refrained from praising the boy, because she assumed he was simply repeating something “he had read, or heard sometime;” but soon John convinced her he could make up such stories on the spot. For his part, Cheever never had any clear idea what he was going to say when asked (more and more often) to tell his classmates a story—but once he opened his mouth, a beguiling fabric of “exaggeration” and “preposterous falsehoods” never failed to synthesize. Miss Varley thought it a gift from “departed spirits,” whereas the writer Wilfrid Sheed observed that, in Cheever's case, memory and imagination were “not two faculties but one mega-faculty,” such that his everyday experiences were “improved” as soon as they happened and “halfway to being publishable” within a week—or, as Cheever himself liked to say (claiming to quote Cocteau),