Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [18]
† “Come, John, you know I made that up,” Cheever remarked to John Hersey, when the latter asked to be reminded of the source of that fascinating quote.
* In 1979, Cheever told an interviewer that his “closest [childhood] friend, a man named Faxon Ogden,” was probably dead: “Someone called from Thayer last winter and I asked them to check back on Fax, and it was ‘address unknown.’ “ On October 28, 1980, David Oliver of Thayer wrote a letter to the Culver alumni office asking for Ogden's address on behalf of “a classmate who remembers him warmly”—almost certainly Cheever, who perhaps saw fit to check on his friend one last time. The letter was returned with a Wilmington (Delaware) address typed at the bottom—though, as it happened, Fax had died almost ten years before.
CHAPTER THREE
{1926-1930}
THE DEPRESSION CAME EARLY to New England, and by the mid-twenties the shoe industry was all but dead. This, of course, was not openly discussed in the Cheever household, though John could tell his father was becoming dispirited. He overheard the man say to a neighbor, while raking the driveway, that he was prepared to die. As Cheever would later tell it, Frederick had sold out of the shoe business (whether that meant the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever” or some lesser concern is, again, a mystery) and gone into an investment partnership with another fellow, alternately named “Mr. Forsyth” and “Harry Dobson” in Cheever's journal. One day, while playing his four holes of morning golf, Frederick espied what appeared to be a coat hanging from a tree near the fairway; naturally, this proved to be none other than Forsyth or Dobson, hanged. After that, Frederick gave up golf and began crying at the breakfast table: “He'd say good morning to me and then look out the window and say something about the weather and then his face would break … and he'd start making noises like a winded runner.”
Fortunately, he was married to a resourceful woman, who saved the family from certain ruin by opening a gift shop in downtown Quincy.* In fact, it was becoming more and more common at the time for middle-class women to go into business for themselves—what with canned foods and labor-saving devices that lessened the drudgery of housekeeping—and certainly this came all the more easily to an old feminist like Mary Liley Cheever. Indeed, one might even venture to say that as a gift-shop proprietress she'd found her niche: genial and motherly, she was able to strike an instant rapport with most customers, who came to regard the Mary Cheever Gift Shoppe as the place to go for something a little better than the usual dime-store bric-a-brac. It was true that Mrs. Cheever could be a bit pushy at times. As she herself confided, a little ruefully, the harder she tried to “match the purchase to the person,” the more determined the person became to buy what she or he had picked out in the first place.
John was aghast that his mother had gone into trade: “[A]fter this I was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely, ‘Is there something I can do for you?’ “ Nor was it simply the doorstops and china dogs and doilies that she foisted on a public consisting mostly of her former peers, but the very furniture out from under her family's backs. “You can't sell this,” John would remonstrate, “it doesn't belong to you.” To which the woman would sensibly reply, “Well, do you have $100?” She even sold his own bed (and decades later, at a Sutton Place party, Cheever bumped into an old Quincy acquaintance who informed him that she herself had bought one of the family beds).