Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [6]
For the next fifty years, Frederick Cheever worked in the shoe business, always bearing in mind the fate of his poor father, whose life was “made unbearable by lack of coin”: “The desire for money most lasting and universal passion,” he wrote for his own edification and perhaps that of his sons. “Desire ends only with life itself. Fame, love, all long forgotten.” While still in his teens, he worked at a factory in Lynn for six dollars a week (five of which went to room and board) in order to learn the business; a photograph from around this time shows a dapper youth with a trim little mustache, his features composed with a look of high purpose, though its subject had glossed, “Look like a poet. Attic hungry—Etc.” John Cheever would one day find among his father's effects a copy of The Magician's Own Handbook—a poignant artifact that brought to mind “a lonely young man reading Plutarch in a cold room and perfecting his magic tricks to make himself socially desirable and perhaps lovable.” In the meantime, once he turned twenty-one, Frederick began to spend almost half the year on the road selling shoes (“gosh writer has sat in 1001 RR stations … ‘get the business’ or ‘get out’”), often bunking with strangers and hiding his valuables in his stockings, which he then wore to bed.
Apart from the pursuit of “big coin,” Frederick's early manhood was something of a lark. A great lover of the theater (“Powerful never forget it,” he wrote of Henry Montague's performance in Romeo and Juliet), he took extra or “supe” roles at Boston's Hollis Street Theatre for fifty cents a performance, wearing tights and carrying spears into battle for big Shakespearean productions, and playing zany pranks on his fellow supes to pass time offstage: “Swiped the other chap's pants—left a bum pair—h——to pay—did not show up again second fellow, out a pair of trousers—but ‘actor's’ life, you know.” He not only saw James O'Neill's famous performance in The Count of Monte Cristo, but swore that O'Neill had been a boon companion whom he, Frederick Cheever, had drunk under the table at the old Adams House (“a memory I'm inclined to believe,” his son remarked, “since I can drink Yevtushenko to the floor”). But his favorite recreation by far was the beach, for he always fancied himself a man of the sea: “On beaches the joy and gall of perpetual youth,” Leander rhapsodizes. “Hear Neptune's horn. Always raring to go.” For most of his life, Frederick kept a wide-waisted catboat and liked nothing better than sailing around Boston Harbor—preferably with a female companion—as a way of unwinding after grueling but increasingly lucrative sales trips. So things stood for Frederick Cheever until the end of a happy, protracted bachelorhood in 1901.
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OF HIS MOTHER'S FAMILY CONNECTIONS Cheever also made a romance—much of which he evidently believed, since he wrote it down in his journal as fact: “The only photograph I have of my grandmother shows her in a long apron. Her father was knighted by Victoria and Grandmother was (I think) friends of some ladies in waiting; but I think they had settled for a degree of plainness.” Cheever claimed his great-grandfather was Sir Percy Devereaux, lord mayor of Windsor, who agreed to pay a remittance to his “bounder” son-in-law, William Liley, as long as the man left England and never returned.* Liley, perhaps broken in spirit, died on a horsecar shortly after arriving in America, and so left his three young daughters fatherless and poor. But Cheever's mother, Mary Devereaux Liley, never forgot her family's genteel beginnings in Old Windsor (though she herself was born in the industrial city of Sheffield, well to the north), and kept a picture of Windsor Castle in her home. As for John Cheever, his wife and children sometimes mockingly referred to him as the Lost Earl of Devereaux: “He'd ask me if I wanted some cauliflower,” his daughter, Susan, recalled, “and I'd say, ‘Wow! What a lucky girl I am, to be served cauliflower by the Lost Earl of Devereaux !’ “
Cheever's maternal grandmother, Sarah,