Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [17]
Arched with birches in Gothic style,
Traced in crystalline rain,
Like a tall and slender window
In Notre Dame on the Seine.
“John never has a grudge against anyone,” reads his character summary, “and is always a good sport”—a consensus view, it would seem. His teacher Grace Osgood remembered him as pleasant and “eager to learn” (“a very different young person,” she noted, from the one who later made a notorious exit from Thayer), and other classmates described him as “a tease” and “full of fun.” “Make it Posture Week, not Weak Posture!” Cheever quipped in The Evergreen (though he does not appear on the “Posture Honor Roll”), where he was repeatedly mocked for being a poor speller (“WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF … JOHN CHEEVER learned how to spell?”). Clearly he and Fax were both regarded as class wags, and everyone found it “great fun” to watch them perform in an eighth-grade production of A Christmas Carol, with Fax appearing as Scrooge and John as his jolly nephew Fred in a swallow-tailed coat.
“I think of substratas of aloneness,” Cheever wrote in 1972, remembering a sad day when “Fax walked off the playing field with his arm around someone else.” After his sophomore year at Thayer, Fax transferred to Culver Military Academy in Indiana; he and Cheever would meet only once again, almost forty years later, after which the dejected Fax would occasionally call while in his cups: “Weren't we happy, Johnny? Weren't we really happy?”* Back at Thayerlands in 1926, the boys were given prints of snow-laden evergreens in lieu of diplomas (“thought to be inhibiting”); Cheever's bore the inscription “John, be true to yourself.”
* John would have no such charming nickname. He was either called Joey, a name he loathed, or the more generic Brother—because he was, after all (in his parents’ eyes foremost), Fred's brother.
†He was named William after his (despised) uncle Hamlet, and kept the name under wraps as much as possible.
* In the midst of his post-Falconer celebrity, Cheever would claim his father had actually been a partner in the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever,” which had a factory in Lynn where Frederick took his son John once a year to blow the whistle. However, Ben Cheever pointed out that his father, in the 1964 Time cover story, had described Frederick as a mere salesman (“a commercial traveler with a flower in his buttonhole”): “I assume the factory had not yet been invented,” said Ben, with due skepticism. As with many matters relating to Cheever's past, the truth remains nebulous. Among Frederick's notes is a vague reference to one “MH Whittredge” (“Saratoga every season—clothes”), presumably the same “Myron H. Whittredge” who appears in an old family album. Perhaps this was the man who brought Frederick into the business as a salesman, but whether the two were actually partners remains unknown—there's no record of “Whittredge and Cheever” in the various city directories, and Frederick gives his occupation in every federal census as “Salesman.” But wait: he appears in the 1932 Quincy directory as a “shoe mfr,” and writes in his notes: “I have produced in essential material for 50 years. Given employment to many. Invested in equipment, material.” Here one throws up the hands—except to add that Fred Jr.'s children never heard about any “shoe factory.”
* Lillian Wentworth, the Thayer historian, wrote me helpfully as follows: “Anna Boynton Thompson died January 28, 1923, at age 76. … The police found Anna dead, sitting at breakfast in the kitchen. Medical examiners determined death was caused by cerebral hemorrhage and hardening of the arteries.”
* Which may have had the desired effect, as Cheever's musical tastes were narrow but passionate. As his wife remarked, “He was a nut about certain music. He played nothing but the Beethoven quartets for years. Also he loved Tosca—listened to it over and over.” Cheever also enjoyed playing some of the easier Chopin preludes on the piano, and could sing the entire score to Guys and Dolls. When