Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [19]
The vulgarity of it all was an “abysmal humiliation” to Cheever, whose innate sense of alienation was burden enough. Nor did he ever quite recover from “the trauma, the earthquake,” of his family's awful decline. Anything smacking of gift-shop knickknackery would always repulse him to the point of illness—and there were other triggers, too, some of them rather odd. Rollin Bailey's father was the director of a local bank, and John was never invited to play on their tennis court, two blocks above the Cheevers’ house on Wollaston Hill. “Suddenly I remember with painful clarity a fight I had with Rollin Bailey, forty years ago, on the gravel walk of his mother's garden,” Cheever wrote in 1965. “In a way I had been victorious, but I had only a painful sense of having disgraced myself and my family.” Cheever would forever associate that disgrace (and also, perhaps, his irksome memories of Uncle Hamlet) with the posh thwock of tennis balls, and couldn't bear to be anywhere near the game; whenever his friends the Boyers would start a friendly tournament on Whiskey Island, Cheever would remove himself to the opposite shore. As for Rollin Bailey, he last saw his old friend on a troop train returning north during World War II; by then Cheever was on his way to becoming a well-known New Yorker writer, and he treated Bailey with a kind of cordial disdain that made the man feel “like less of a person.”
At the best of times, Cheever would joke about his family's downfall, announcing that he was one of the “poor” or “wrong” Cheevers. As with other compartments of his personal legend, he had a ready-made story about how the schism had come to pass. The “right” Cheevers had been distinguished doctors in the Revolutionary War, and John's father had impudently written to one of their worthier descendants—Dr. David Cheever of Cambridge—and offered his body for dissection at the medical school.* The proper Cheevers were appalled at the prospect of a relation (however distant) flouting the Christian burial service, and thereafter banished Frederick and his whole raffish branch to the South Shore. John Cheever, for his part, affected to accept his exile in a spirit of roguish insouciance: “They could have their humorless Boston respectability with its piss-pot social rules and regulations and its dumpy Richardsonian architecture,” as Susan Cheever put it. At the same time, he was quite pleased to be a Cheever (and a Devereaux to boot), because he believed somewhat in the idea of “breeding”—rather as his brother Fred expressed it in a late-life letter to his daughter Sarah: “My underlying conviction is that any Cheever has a great destiny, great ability, great force, grace and love of the world. This is inbred and not many people have it. It is a matter of breeding, and I have the great conceit to know that this will be a heritage to your child.” John Cheever rarely went that far, though he did think his “sound digestion” and “able dick” were the result of a lucky inheritance “that no amount of venereal or alcoholic abuse could impair.”
The part that shamed Cheever—the part he sometimes took pains to conceal—was a dreadful suspicion that his family had become poor and outcast not as a result of some stylish revolt against “piss-pot” respectability, but because they were, at bottom, strange and vulgar people. In his journal he worried that he would “have to pay” when his origins caught up with him: “I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more