Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [8]
Deprived of a nursing career, Mary Liley Cheever flung her astounding energy into all sorts of social-service endeavors. She was a “Madame President” type (as Cheever put it), who organized cultural events and raised money for libraries, progressive schools, and beautification projects; she cofounded the Woman's Club and the Current Events Club, and as her star rose she was called upon to give public lectures on such topics as feminism and the Armenian famine—so often, in fact, “that the word mother evoked for [Cheever] a lectern and a large hat.” She rose to every challenge with an almost brazen level of commitment. When war was declared against Germany, she scooped up her husband's beer steins and smashed them with a hammer; she plowed up her lawn to plant potatoes; she organized parties for rolling bandages and potting vegetables. In sum, she was the sort of “do-gooder” who “distributed skinny chickens to the poor”—a woman who, like Sarah Wapshot, “had exhausted herself in good works … As a result of all these activities the house on River Street was always filled with dust, its cut flowers long dead, the clocks stopped.” Nor was this the only drawback, domestically speaking. As her husband would shortly learn, “a woman who has just attended a stirring lecture on hospital conditions … [comes home] in a frame of mind that makes it difficult for her to be embraced.”
Looking back, Cheever wondered if there was maybe something a little mad about his mother's zeal. As a boy he'd been mortified again and again by her “unseemly departures”: “She had marched out of church in the middle of a sermon on the vanity of good works,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “She marched up the aisle and out of the concert hall at the first notes of Sacre du printemps. She marched out of committee meetings, theaters, restaurants and movie houses at the first hint of anything unsavory, daring or improper. The single memory [I] preserved of [my] mother was of a woman dressed in black, hastening up an aisle.” And though it was true that her sense of propriety was easily affronted, Cheever came to suspect her indignation was more a pretext for one of her various phobias. His mother would gasp for air if caught in a crowd or confined in any way, hence her pathological need to escape. Also, she had a “primitive horror of being photographed,” such that her own son had little idea what she'd looked like as a younger woman until, one day, he discovered her portrait in an old Woman's Club program; when asked about it, she explained that her look of composure had been managed by holding her infant son—John himself—on her lap (“I was cropped”).* At the time it might have seemed like so much winsome eccentricity, but it was less amusing later, when Cheever himself became a virtual prisoner of anxiety. “I blame her, I do,” he wrote a week after her death in 1956, “for having conveyed some of her morbid fears to me.” But then, as he wrote of his fictional alter ego, “Poor Coverly blamed everything on Mrs. Wapshot. Had he seen a falling star he would have blamed his Mother.”
* The parallel passage in Frederick's notes reads as follows: “On the way [from Newburyport to Amesbury via horsecar] you saw sturgeons leap out of river—they were 3-4 feet long—all covered with knobs.” One might add that, as Cheever suggests, his father was quite diligent about noting the weather—always, for instance, in the top right corner of the letters he wrote his son. Thus, from October 10, 1943: