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By Root 3797 0

bristled at her poverty in the New World, proclaiming she was “a very well-educated English woman” who could hem a handkerchief and speak French, which she insisted her family practice each night at the dinner table. For the most part, though, she was glad to have left England, where there was little in the way of women's rights and she was unable to pursue her dream of becoming a fireman. Whether she achieved that dream, to whatever degree, is unknown; with her friend and fellow feminist Margaret Deland—author of John Ward, Preacher, and other novels—she ultimately devoted herself to the rehabilitation of unwed mothers who had (or might have otherwise) turned to prostitution. Ultimately, the two women took as many as sixty outcast mothers into their homes and taught them basic housekeeping skills, helping them find work via advertisements in the Boston Herald. In the meantime, too, as Cheever liked to point out, his grandmother and Mrs. Deland “provided themselves with good maids,” and privately he was more rueful: “My mother's and my grandmother's houses,” he wrote, “were always full of strays—orphans, bastards, prostitutes.”

Two of Sarah Liley's daughters did not inherit her zest for good works, though both seem to have contributed something to their nephew John's personality. From his aunt Anne he might have derived some of the chilly hauteur he affected when threatened in certain ways, to say nothing of his wish for a “traditional past.” Anne comported herself like the displaced gentry she believed herself to be, dubbing her oldest son “Devereaux” and cultivating a clipped British accent. When, later in life, she returned to Windsor in hope of glimpsing the family demesne, her husband Jim Armstrong—an affable Scot who took pains to deflate his wife's pomposity—furtively bribed a cabbie to drive them to the grandest estate he could find. “Just as I remember it!” Anne sighed. “There was nothing slummy about Aunt Anne,” Cheever noted in 1968, by which time he hadn't spoken to the woman in over a decade—ever since she'd recognized herself in the quirky, imperious Honora Wapshot—though Cheever claimed she'd forgiven him once she remembered he was “a split personality.”

If so, she might have been thinking of the side of her nephew's psyche that reflected the influence of her sister Florence, whom she sometimes cut dead in public because of the latter's incorrigible eccentricity. Florence was a painter who asked to be addressed as “Liley,” wore Spanish shawls, and smoked cigars. She became a rather notable illustrator of children's books as “Florence Liley Young,” though she regarded herself as a serious artist and was generous in sharing her enthusiasm. Cheever never forgot sitting on a riverbank watching his aunt Liley teach landscape painting to the cook—“Cherchez le motif 7”—and among his favorite mementos was her portrait of himself as a slouching, apple-cheeked young artist, which, years later, as a man of means, he framed in gilt and hung in his library at Ossining.* “[Liley] interests me most,” he wrote, “because of the importance art played in her life as it does in mine. Shortly before her death she said—‘One thing I really must do is go to the museum and see the Sargent water-colors of the Milton quarrys. They are so beautiful.’ This was exactly what she felt.”

Cheever liked to think he had somewhat less in common with his mother, who was altruistic like Sarah Liley and also had “settled for a degree of plainness.” In 1901, she graduated from the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing, and she had already become a head nurse when she married Frederick Cheever. Where or how they met is not a matter of record, though it seems an unlikely alliance. For many years, Frederick had devoted himself to his mother while pursuing what his sons agreed was a robust love life. In his journal, Cheever wrote that his father had proposed out of pity (“a profound weakness”) because his mother was “expected to die of tuberculosis”—though Cheever's wife always insisted it was her mother-in-law who had married against her