Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [16]
“THE CLIMATE WAS ANXIOUS,” Cheever wrote of his early adolescence; Fred was away at Dartmouth winning glory on the varsity hockey team while, at home, his parents kept a weather eye on their weakling second-born. They suspected the worst (“You sweep like an old woman!”) and let him know, obliquely and otherwise, that sexual inversion was a terrible fate. Naturally, Cheever despised himself for having such impulses, splitting wood to cleanse his thoughts of an “obsessive” erotic need—not only a need for Janet Weil and Sally Bradford, but also “Arnold and Gordon and Faxon and Tubby.” And the more he was browbeaten, the more he was apt to pursue his “merry games of grabarse” as a means of “parting from Mother”—the sexual equivalent of carving his name on the lid of her sewing machine. Both had painful consequences. With or without a lash, the woman possessed “the authority of an executioner” as the embodiment of social custom—”a world of white gloves and dancing pumps” that Cheever associated with a fraught childhood memory:
It was autumn. We went over to the R.'s barn and had a penis-measuring contest, followed by an orgy, but when it was over I felt so guilty and ashamed of myself, so sorrowful and uneasy. … I went home and ate a sandwich and was put by my mother into a bath so hot that it made my skin pucker and made the touch of everything unpleasant. … I couldn't find my dancing pumps. I connected this with my lewd behavior in the morning. … I went into the closet, got to my knees, and said the Lord's Prayer three times, noticing … that my dancing pumps, in a serge bag, hung from a hook above me. At least this much of my prayer was answered, but I was filled with terrible longings. … I would have run away, except that my mother was a matron that afternoon [at dancing school], and anyhow where would I, in my blue serge, find a haven?
For a while, he found a haven of sorts in his friendship with Fax Ogden, which he later described as “the most gratifying and unself-conscious relationship I had known.” Even their sex play struck the adult Cheever as larky and harmless (though in general he was “frightened and ashamed” of such memories), and he didn't hesitate to suggest as much to his wife and children. According to his journal, it was Fax who first learned the joys of masturbation from a man sitting beside him at a vaudeville show: “F[ax] went home and gave it a try and told me about it at school. Lying in bed that night I jacked off while listening to a philosophical radio commentator. The orgasm was racking; my remorse was crushing. I felt I had betrayed the fatherly voice on the radio.” Happily, the remorse passed, and soon the two were masturbating each other as often as possible—in movie theaters, in the golf-club shower, and especially at Boy Scout camp on Gallows Pond, in South Plymouth. The camp was “one of John's happiest memories,” according to his wife: He and Fax earned their junior lifesaving certificates, and one year John won the treasure hunt and was awarded a watermelon. Rainy days were best of all, as the two boys could stay in bed and practice, indefatigably, their favorite pastime (“When one bed got gummed up we used to move to another”).
They also attended the same progressive elementary school, Thayerlands, for which Anna Boynton Thompson had bequeathed her home near the Thayer Academy (high school) campus. Cheever entered as a seventh-grader in 1924, the school's inaugural year, and was well suited to its determinedly creative atmosphere. He served as poetry editor of the yearbook, The Evergreen, to which he contributed some of his own verse, including