Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [14]
Writing was a suitable occupation for a pudgy, unathletic boy who preferred to stay home playing with his puppet theater. If other children visited, they often found themselves on the opposite side of the proscenium while John manipulated the puppets from above and provided their voices, or, if he had a more elaborate show in mind (for which he'd invite the whole neighborhood and charge a penny per), he'd put his visitors to work making sets or dyeing materials for the costumes. His friend Rollin “Tifty” Bailey got the impression that John was wholly absorbed in his own world, that he hardly noticed others, and was therefore startled when he read “Goodbye, My Brother” some twenty-five years later in The New Yorker. Cheever, it seemed, had paid better attention than Bailey thought—appropriating not only his nickname “Tifty” for the “rather undesirable” Lawrence Pommeroy, but also the relevant backstory. As Bailey explained, “When I was small, the sound of my little shoes on the runner carpet in the upper hall sounded to my father like Tifty-Tifty-Tifty …“ And finally, for what it's worth, Bailey had to admit he rather identified with his fictional namesake: “I did tend to see the bad side,” he said. “If you know what's bad, you can face it.”
Cheever's public manners were pleasant enough, for his mother's strict sense of propriety was “rigidly observed” by the family. At the end of any social event, he always made a point of bowing to the hostess and thanking her for a good time—though occasionally (if he had an audience) he might add a puckish “My mother told me to tell you so.” Such little rebellions were subtle, and no wonder. It was ill-advised to trifle with his “impetuous” mother, who abruptly defenestrated the puppet theater when it caught fire one day (“It was the intelligent thing to do,” Cheever mused in retrospect, “but I was shocked”). “You sweep like an old woman!” she berated him, yanking a broom out of his hands, whereupon he carved his name on the cover of her sewing machine—a rare and probably unrepeated act of (overt) retaliation, since afterward “she trashed [him] with a belt until [he] bled.” The woman's vigor was nowhere in evidence, however, when it came to showing affection. “My mother was not demonstrative in any way,” said Cheever, who came to emulate such restraint toward his own children, though he was, arguably, free enough with his feelings otherwise. He often signed letters with “Love” even to casual friends—usually “Best” or “Yours, John” to his children—and Updike's first wife, Mary Weatherall, remembered how Cheever went around gleefully hugging people in Russia.
His mother's lack of tenderness was partly a matter of New England decorum, of course, but was also influenced by Mary Baker Eddy's teaching that “God is both father and mother” and hence the proper source of such loving-kindness. Cheever had been christened in the Episcopal Church, though a few years later his mother “veered wildly into Christian Science” and thereafter adhered to its principles with the sort of fanatical devotion she brought to all larger pursuits. Every Wednesday she attended testimonial meetings, where (as family legend has it) she arrested a tumor by confessing to her fellows that she was “enchained by the flesh” and needed their prayers. Later, too, at the age of seventy, she broke her leg in the bathtub and set the bone herself—then, after five weeks in bed (“a severe trial for her,” wrote Frederick, “with her natural speed and energy”), she refused any sort of elastic bandage and would only grudgingly use a cane. Moreover, she expected the same stalwart self-reliance from her children, as John discovered when he developed pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twelve: “I think