The first is for the husband and father, Frederick, and contains a line from William Shakespeare's
The Tempest: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." The second marker commemorates the passing of the wife and mother, Mary Liley Cheever, with the familiar prayer "Rest in Peace." The third grave bears no inscription other than the name John William Cheever and the dates of his life, 1912-1982. A brass star identifying the deceased as a military veteran stands in front of the headstone.
John Cheever 's life as a child growing up in nearby Quincy probably appeared to be "normal"--if anyone's life can be so described. A second look at the headstones reveals that his father was forty-nine years old when John was born, but otherwise there was nothing in the circumstances of his family that would hint at anything but the most predictable standards of middle-class American life. Frederick Cheever had been successful in the shoe business (as a factory owner, according to John, but more probably as a salesman, according to biographer Scott Donaldson)--successful enough to move the family to the fashionable section of Quincy when John was eight. John shared the Cheevers' prosperity, but not his father's affection, with his older brother, Fred, ten years his senior.
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