Broken Vessels (10 page)

We are warm. Outside ice covers the bare branches of trees, and earlier they shone in the light from our one neighbor's house; so did the ice-covered snow under the trees, and between our houses. I stepped outside and looked for a while at that shining white beauty in the peaceful quiet here on the hill in the country. Then I stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen and now, hours later, I remember R. V. Cassill saying:
Nature isn't lethal; it's indifferent
. And I sit with a pen and a notebook and Sutherland and Pavarotti while across the land cold air and frozen snow are lethal: for my indifferent country has made them so: made them silent air raids on our people.

We were not poor at Iowa City, my brave young wife Pat, and me, and our children: Suzanne, born in 1958; Andre in 1959, Jeb in 1960, Nicole in 1963. We had all the time we wanted to spend with each other and with our new and good friends. We had time to read, to talk, even to think. We had time, my wife and I, to make love and a place where we could read about and talk about our Church's opinions and pronouncements about artificial birth control; and to decide that we could resort to contraception and still receive the Catholic sacraments. We had time to love each other, to understand better the complexity of marital love, and to try to achieve what we understood. So we had time to fail; and our later failure, nearly four years after leaving Iowa City, probably began there. But we suffered no more than our friends whose marriages ended. We will never know what our children suffered, and can only hope they are healed now; or will be: if there is complete healing, so long as memory exists.

Our children did not know we had very little money, and they did not know their parents would fail. Nor did we. One day there was an ice storm and when it was over the six of us looked out the living room window at the sparkling trees. We were all very young then, and had lived only on Marine and Navy bases and in small towns, and none of us knew that such beauty was, in the wrong nation, a killer of human beings. I see us now at that window: the red-haired little girl, the two blond boys, the blond girl and the blond mother and me, and I know that the only poverty afflicting my wife and me in Iowa City was youth: educated, Caucasian, never affluent but always safe youth. We knew about blacks, and because we had lived and had two sons at Camp Pendleton, California, we knew about migrant Mexican workers. But at the window we believed in the promise of these moments with our children, and believed that all white Americans could feel as we did, our six bodies pressed together as we exclaimed and pointed and murmured, and looked through cold glass at that afternoon's lovely gift from the sky.

1986

I
NTO THE
S
ILENCE

F
ROM TIME TO
time I've read or heard a strange notion: many writers come from the South, because southerners have a tradition of telling stories. I did not grow up in the true South. I grew up in southern Louisiana, in a place of Cajuns and Creoles and Catholics. In the neighborhood where I spent most of my boyhood, only a few girls and boys were Protestants. Most of us came home on Ash Wednesday with dark grey crosses on our foreheads. From the third through the twelfth grades I learned from Christian Brothers at Cathedral School in Lafayette. The first class of the day was religion, and the Brothers told stories: from the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints, and they also told stories to show and dramatize morality. And through the rest of the day, in other classes, they told us stories, in their worthy attempt to teach us about the earth and its people, the living and the dead. They were not southerners. Two were from France; and Pancho Villa had sent one out of Mexico, in a freight train carrying nuns and Christian Brothers and priests. He told us that story too.

When I left Louisiana in 1958 to become a Marine lieutenant, I met real southerners, drawling Protestants who had never eaten a crawfish. They told stories. So did everyone else I knew. We were all very young and there were a lot of babies and, often, after parties, some people of both genders spoke with amusement and sometimes derision about the young mothers gathered at one part of a room, talking about babies. Even now, because I have many young friends, and also two very young daughters, I hear this amusement or derision after parties. I confess to taking part in the amusement, now and years ago, in Quantico, Virginia, and Camp Pendleton, California. I was wrong.

The mothers were not talking abstractly about infancy and early childhood. They were telling stories about their children, so that a listener could see and hear and perhaps even smell and touch the child who was not in the room, not even in the house, but at the mother's home, usually in the care of a teenage girl. The mothers were also talking about their motherhood, and to convey those deep emotions and physical and spiritual changes in their lives, they chose what we have always chosen with our friends: they told stories with concrete language, with words that appeal to our senses. We talk abstractly with people whose love or affection or respect we don't want, so we keep them at bay, we do not tell them any of the stories that are part of the collection of stories that is our earthly lives.

In one life, there are so many of these stories and they are so different from each other, that I have come to mistrust a particular sort of novel: the sort that attempts to tell the whole story of a human life or human lives. Unless the novel ends in death, and even then I remain unconvinced: for, with a few magnificent exceptions, those novels by the very nature of their form — they must, finally, end — have left out enough stories to make at least another book.

Years ago, when I believed or at least hoped it would work, I spent some time in marriage counseling. The counseling did not work because it was one last try at keeping two people lovingly in the same home and, unlike baseball and other pursuits, like writing fiction, a last act of will to stay married usually comes too late. What we did in the counselor's office was tell stories. A good counselor won't let you get by with the lack of honesty and commitment we bring to abstractions. And when we told these stories we discovered the truths that were their essence, that were the very reasons we needed to tell the stories; and, like honest fiction writers, we did not know the truth of the stories until we told them. Or, more accurately, until the stories told themselves, took their form and direction from the tactile language of our memory, our pain, and our hope.

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.

1986

A S
ALUTE TO
M
ISTER
Y
ATES

R
ICHARD YATES IS
one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world. I have been his friend for thirty-three years, and he has most often needed money, and has never complained to me about that, or about anything else either. For several years in the seventies and eighties, Dick lived in an apartment on Beacon Street in Boston. It is a street with trees and good old brick buildings. He lived on the second floor, in two rooms. The front room was where he wrote and slept. A door at the far end of it, behind his desk, opened to the kitchen; and adjacent to that was the room I never saw him enter. I suppose his youngest daughter, Gina, slept there when she came to visit. Gina's paintings and drawings hung in the first room, above the bed against one wall, and his desk facing another.

His desk was two tables he placed in the shape of an L; he sat inside of it, the leg of the L on his right, and a window on his left. Below the window was an alley and parking spaces. On the floor near the kitchen was a small radio, plugged into an outlet; he listened to classical music. The back of a couch was against the long table of the L, and the couch faced the apartment's door, the bathroom, his shelf of books, the closet, and the bed. When I went to visit him I sat on the couch, and he sat on the bed, and we drank Michelob and talked about writing, and writers.

Fluffs of dust were on the floor, and to some eyes that one room where he lived may have looked dirty and cluttered. It was never cluttered. He wrote with a pencil on legal pads; but usually, when I went to see him, he was working on a typed draft, his manual typewriter on the shorter table, before his straight wooden chair; and the typed manuscript stacked on the long table, along with galley proofs and other writers' manuscripts he was reading. His room reminded me of my own bachelor apartments, where I too lived in one room, and rarely entered the other, and my childrens' paintings and drawings hung on the walls: the bed always made, the refrigerator stocked with breakfast food and beer, and every manuscript and book and bit of clothing in place, readily at hand. It was, I believed — and still do — a place that should have been left intact when Dick moved, a place young writers should be able to go to, and sit in, and ask themselves whether or not their commitment to writing had enough heart to live, thirty years later, as Dick did: with time his only luxury, and absolute honesty one of his few rewards.

He woke each morning at seven and ate breakfast, then worked till noon, when he walked perhaps a hundred yards to Massachusetts Avenue, where it intersects with Beacon Street, and across it to a restaurant called The Crossroads. After lunch he napped, then wrote till evening and returned to The Crossroads for dinner and, even if I ate with him, even if we had dates, he went home around ten o'clock. He did not go to movies, and he never plugged in the television set Penelope Mortimer gave him after she taught at Boston University, then went back to England. It was on the living room floor, facing the couch, its cord lying behind it like a tail.

On Beacon Street now there is only resident parking, but in those days I left my car near Dick's and walked to the Red Sox games. One warm and dry and sunny afternoon, a Saturday in spring, I was walking past The Crossroads, toward Fenway Park, when Dick walked out of the restaurant. He had just eaten lunch and, as always, wore a suit and tie. I have rarely seen him without a tie. I had time before the game for a beer, so we went into The Crossroads and sat in a booth, and I congratulated him on receiving a second Guggenheim grant.

“How much did you get?” I said.

“Well,” he said, smiling. “How much did
you
get?”

He was talking about several years earlier, in 1975.

“I asked for twenty,” I said. “But I was making eleven-five teaching, so they gave me twelve.”

He nodded, his eyes merry.

“The first time,” he said, “I got sixty-five hundred. But that was nearly twenty years ago, Andre. This time I got sixteen thousand.”

“Sixteen? That's my salary, and I'm having a hard time in Haverhill. Can you make it on sixteen in Boston?”

“Well, Andre,” he said, like a man holding a full house in five card stud, “I think I can make it on sixteen thousand dollars.”

“You're wonderful,” I said. “You're the only writer I know, your age, who isn't always worrying about money,
talking
about money: mortgages and cars and second cars and boats —”

“I don't really think those guys want all that stuff.”

“If they gave you a
hun
dred thousand you wouldn't buy a damned thing, would you? You'd live in the same place and write every day and you wouldn't change a
thing
, would you.”

“I don't want money,” he said. “I just want readers.”

1988

S
ELLING
S
TORIES

W
E SHORT STORY
writers are spared some of the major temptations: we don't make money for ourselves or anybody else, so the people who make money from writers leave us alone. No one gives us large advances on stories we haven't written. I have never envied a writer who makes a lot of money, because the causal combination of money and writing frightens me. The act of writing alone is all I can muster the courage to face in the morning; if my livelihood and the expectations of publishers depended on it, I doubt that I could do it at all. So, like the poets, short story writers live in a safer world. There is no one to sell out to, there is no one to hurry a manuscript for; our only debt is to ourselves, and to those stories that speak to us from wherever they live until we write them. And every writer has stories that only he can give birth to and, until he does, they float like bodiless spirits crying to be born. I have been teaching fiction writing to very young students for ten years, and I am still saddened when one of them leaves a story unborn, before I can hear it all; and, like a nuance of death, I can feel that story and its people drifting away forever.

But that's a different matter, and has to do with confronting oneself at the writing desk, where there are always temptations. When all that is done and the story is in the mail, we don't have to worry about much until someone decides to publish it. Then, with some magazines, we have to do a bit of thinking. I'm forty-one, so I've done a lot of thinking, but I still don't have many answers. Except one: I prefer to publish in quarterlies. That is not the whole truth. I would like to publish in
Harper's
and
Atlantic Monthly
, but I never have, simply because I haven't written anything they liked enough to publish.

For reasons I've forgotten, I used to want to publish in
Esquire
, and there was a time when I mailed stories by special delivery to their fiction editor. Because he had read a story of mine in
Northwest Review
and written to me and said from now on, send everything directly to me. His assistant, a woman I never met but whom I liked anyway, wrote, saying that if the story in
Northwest Review
was one she had rejected, she would apologetically and happily walk through Central Park alone at midnight. This stirred in me memories of one of the sweetest and saddest images of my boyhood: a World War II movie — was it
So Proudly We Hail
? — about nurses or WACs or whatever on an island in the Pacific. Near the end of the movie, one of the girls puts a hand grenade between her breasts, walks into the jungle, and when the Japanese soldiers come out of the brush and surround her, she pulls the pin. That might have been Lana Turner. I wrote the kind woman at
Esquire
, told her she had indeed rejected the story that her boss liked, but
Northwest Review
had taken it and paid for it with a check for ten dollars from the state of Oregon, and she should not walk through that park even at high noon.