The Stories of John Cheever

Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead. My father’s cousin, Anna Boynton, who had taught Greek at Radcliffe, starved herself to death during the Armenian famine. She and her sister Nanny had the copper skin, high cheekbones, and black hair of the Natick Indians. My father liked to recall the night he drank all the champagne on the New York-Boston train. He started drinking splits with some friend before dinner, and when they finished the splits they emptied the quarts and the magnums and were working on a jeroboam when the train reached Boston. He felt that this guzzling was heroic. My Uncle Hamlet—a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team—called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter—droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him. This all took place in the environs of Athenian Boston, but the family seemed much closer to the hyperbole and rhetoric that stem from Wales, Dublin, and the various principalities of alcohol than to the sermons of Phillips Brooks.