The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (13 page)

It took him a little while to loosen up in the job: for the first week or so, when he wasn't talking, he went at everything with a zeal and a fear of failure that disconcerted everyone but Finney, the managing editor. Like the rest of us, Sobel had a list of twelve or fifteen union offices around town, and the main part of his job was to keep in touch with them and write up whatever bits of news they gave out. As a rule there was nothing very exciting to write about. The average story ran two or three paragraphs with a single-column head:

or something like that. But Sobel composed them all as carefully as sonnets, and after he'd turned one in he would sit chewing his lips in anxiety until Finney raised a forefinger and said, “C'mere a second, Sobel.”

Then he'd go over and stand, nodding apologetically, while Finney pointed out some niggling grammatical flaw. “Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don't wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.' You wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.'”

Finney enjoyed these lectures. The annoying thing, from a spectator's point of view, was that Sobel took so long to learn what everyone else seemed to know instinctively: that Finney was scared of his own shadow and would back down on anything at all if you raised your voice. He was a frail, nervous man who dribbled on his chin when he got excited and raked trembling fingers through his thickly oiled hair, with the result that his fingers spread hair oil, like a spoor of his personality, to everything he touched: his clothes, his pencils, his telephone and his typewriter keys. I guess the main reason he was managing editor was that nobody else would submit to the bullying he took from Kramm: their editorial conferences always began with Kramm shouting “Finney! Finney!” from behind his partition, and Finney jumping like a squirrel to hurry inside. Then you'd hear the relentless drone of Kramm's demands and the quavering sputter of Finney's explanations, and it would end with a thump as Kramm socked his desk. “
No,
Finney. No, no,
no
! What's the matter with you? I gotta draw you a picture? All right, all right, get outa here, I'll do it myself.” At first you might wonder why Finney took it—nobody could need a job that badly—but the answer lay in the fact that there were only three bylined pieces in
The Labor Leader
: a boiler-plated sports feature that we got from a syndicate, a ponderous column called “LABOR TODAY, by Julius Kramm,” that ran facing the editorial page, and a double-column box in the back of the book with the heading:

There was even a thumbnail picture of him in the upper left-hand corner, hair slicked down and teeth bared in a confident smile. The text managed to work in a labor angle here and there—a paragraph on Actors' Equity, say, or the stagehands' union—but mostly he played it straight, in the manner of two or three real Broadway-and-nightclub columnists. “Heard about the new thrush at the Copa?” he would ask the labor leaders; then he'd give them her name, with a sly note about her bust and hip measurements and a folksy note about the state from which she “hailed,” and he'd wind it up like this: “She's got the whole town talking, and turning up in droves. Their verdict, in which this department wholly concurs: the lady has class.” No reader could have guessed that Wes Finney's shoes needed repair, that he got no complimentary tickets to anything and never went out except to take in a movie or to crouch over a liverwurst sandwich at the Automat. He wrote the column on his own time and got extra money for it—the figure I heard was fifty dollars a month. So it was a mutually satisfactory deal: for that small sum Kramm held his whipping boy in absolute bondage; for that small torture Finney could paste clippings in a scrapbook, with all the contamination of
The Labor Leader
sheared away into the wastebasket of his furnished room, and whisper himself to sleep with dreams of ultimate freedom.

Anyway, this was the man who could make Sobel apologize for the grammar of his news stories, and it was a sad thing to watch. Of course, it couldn't go on forever, and one day it stopped.

Finney had called Sobel over to explain about split infinitives, and Sobel was wrinkling his brow in an effort to understand. Neither of them noticed that Kramm was standing in the doorway of his office a few feet away, listening, and looking at the wet end of his cigar as if it tasted terrible.

“Finney,” he said. “You wanna be an English teacher, get a job in the high school.”

Startled, Finney stuck a pencil behind his ear without noticing that another pencil was already there, and both pencils clattered to the floor. “Well, I—” he said. “Just thought I'd—”

“Finney, this does not interest me. Pick up your pencils and listen to me, please. For your information, Mr. Sobel is not supposed to be a literary Englishman. He is supposed to be a literate American, and this I believe he is. Do I make myself clear?”

And the look on Sobel's face as he walked back to his own desk was that of a man released from prison.

From that moment on he began to relax; or almost from that moment—what seemed to clinch the transformation was O'Leary's hat.

O'Leary was a recent City College graduate and one of the best men on the staff (he has since done very well; you'll often see his byline in one of the evening papers), and the hat he wore that winter was of the waterproof cloth kind that is sold in raincoat shops. There was nothing very dashing about it—in fact its floppiness made O'Leary's face look too thin—but Sobel must secretly have admired it as a symbol of journalism, or of nonconformity, for one morning he showed up in an identical one, brand new. It looked even worse on him than on O'Leary, particularly when worn with his lumpy brown overcoat, but he seemed to cherish it. He developed a whole new set of mannerisms to go with the hat: cocking it back, with a flip of the index finger as he settled down to make his morning phone calls (“This is Leon Sobel, of
The Labor Leader
 . . .”), tugging it smartly forward as he left the office on a reporting assignment, twirling it onto a peg when he came back to write his story. At the end of the day, when he'd dropped the last of his copy into Finney's wire basket, he would shape the hat into a careless slant over one eyebrow, swing the overcoat around his shoulders and stride out with a loose salute of farewell, and I used to picture him studying his reflection in the black subway windows all the way home to the Bronx.

He seemed determined to love his work. He even brought in a snapshot of his family—a tired, abjectly smiling woman and two small sons—and fastened it to his desktop with cellophane tape. Nobody else ever left anything more personal than a book of matches in the office overnight.

One afternoon toward the end of February, Finney summoned me to his oily desk. “McCabe,” he said. “Wanna do a column for us?”

“What kind of a column?”

“Labor gossip,” he said. “Straight union items with a gossip or a chatter angle—little humor, personalities, stuff like that. Mr. Kramm thinks we need it, and I told him you'd be the best man for the job.”

I can't deny that I was flattered (we are all conditioned by our surroundings, after all), but I was also suspicious. “Do I get a byline?”

He began to blink nervously. “Oh, no, no byline,” he said. “Mr. Kramm wants this to be anonymous. See, the guys'll give you any items they turn up, and you'll just collect 'em and put 'em in shape. It's just something you can do on office time, part of your regular job. See what I mean?”

I saw what he meant. “Part of my regular salary too,” I said. “Right?”

“That's right.”

“No thanks,” I told him, and then, feeling generous, I suggested that he try O'Leary.

“Nah, I already asked him,” Finney said. “He don't wanna do it either. Nobody does.”

I should have guessed, of course, that he'd been working down the list of everyone in the office. And to judge from the lateness of the day, I must have been close to the tail end.

Sobel fell in step with me as we left the building after work that night. He was wearing his overcoat cloak-style, the sleeves dangling, and holding his cloth hat in place as he hopped nimbly to avoid the furrows of dirty slush on the sidewalk. “Letcha in on a little secret, McCabe,” he said. “I'm doin' a column for the paper. It's all arranged.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Any money in it?”

“Money?” He winked. “I'll tell y' about that part. Let's get a cuppa coffee.” He led me into the tiled and steaming brilliance of the Automat, and when we were settled at a damp corner table he explained everything. “Finney says no money, see? So I said okay. He says no byline either. I said okay.” He winked again. “Playin' it smart.”

“How do you mean?”

“How do I mean?” He always repeated your question like that, savoring it, holding his black eyebrows high while he made you wait for the answer. “Listen, I got this Finney figured out.
He
don't decide these things. You think he decides anything around that place? You better wise up, McCabe. Mr.
Kramm
makes the decisions. And Mr. Kramm is an intelligent man, don't kid yourself.” Nodding, he raised his coffee cup, but his lips recoiled from the heat of it, puckered, and blew into the steam before they began to sip with gingerly impatience.

“Well,” I said, “okay, but I'd check with Kramm before you start counting on anything.”

“Check?” He put his cup down with a clatter. “What's to check? Listen, Mr. Kramm wants a column, right? You think he cares if I get a byline or not? Or the money, either—you think if I write a good column he's gonna quibble over payin' me for it? Ya crazy.
Finney
's the one, don'tcha see?
He
don't wanna gimme a break because he's worried about losing his
own
column. Get it? So all right. I check with nobody until I got that column written.” He prodded his chest with a stiff thumb. “On my own time. Then I take it to Mr. Kramm and we talk business. You leave it to me.” He settled down comfortably, elbows on the table, both hands cradling the cup just short of drinking position while he blew into the steam.

“Well,” I said. “I hope you're right. Be nice if it does work out that way.”

“Ah, it may not,” he conceded, pulling his mouth into a grimace of speculation and tilting his head to one side. “You know. It's a gamble.” But he was only saying that out of politeness, to minimize my envy. He could afford to express doubt because he felt none, and I could tell he was already planning the way he'd tell his wife about it.

The next morning Finney came around to each of our desks with instructions that we were to give Sobel any gossip or chatter items we might turn up; the column was scheduled to begin in the next issue. Later I saw him in conference with Sobel, briefing him on how the column was to be written, and I noticed that Finney did all the talking: Sobel just sat there making thin, contemptuous jets of cigarette smoke.

We had just put an issue to press, so the deadline for the column was two weeks away. Not many items turned up at first—it was hard enough getting news out of the unions we covered, let alone “chatter.” Whenever someone did hand him a note, Sobel would frown over it, add a scribble of his own and drop it in a desk drawer; once or twice I saw him drop one in the wastebasket. I only remember one of the several pieces I gave him: the business agent of a steamfitters' local I covered had yelled at me through a closed door that he couldn't be bothered that day because his wife had just had twins. But Sobel didn't want it. “So, the guy's got twins,” he said. “So what?”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “You getting much other stuff?”

He shrugged. “Some. I'm not worried. I'll tellya one thing, though—I'm not using a lotta this crap. This chatter. Who the hell's gonna read it? You can't have a whole column fulla crap like that. Gotta be something to hold it together. Am I right?”

Another time (the column was all he talked about now) he chuckled affectionately and said, “My wife says I'm just as bad now as when I was working on my books. Write, write, write. She don't care, though,” he added. “She's really getting excited about this thing. She's telling everybody—the neighbors, everybody. Her brother come over Sunday, starts asking me how the job's going—you know, in a wise-guy kinda way? I just kept quiet, but my wife pipes up: ‘Leon's doing a column for the paper now'—and she tells him all about it. Boy, you oughta seen his face.”

Every morning he brought in the work he had done the night before, a wad of handwritten papers, and used his lunch hour to type it out and revise it while he chewed a sandwich at his desk. And he was the last one to go home every night; we'd leave him there hammering his typewriter in a trance of concentration. Finney kept bothering him—“How you coming on that feature, Sobel?”—but he always parried the question with squinted eyes and a truculent lift of the chin. “Whaddya worried about? You'll get it.” And he would wink at me.

On the morning of the deadline he came to work with a little patch of toilet paper on his cheek; he had cut himself shaving in his nervousness, but otherwise he looked as confident as ever. There were no calls to make that morning—on deadline days we all stayed in to work on copy and proofs—so the first thing he did was to spread out the finished manuscript for a final reading. His absorption was so complete that he didn't look up until Finney was standing at his elbow. “You wanna gimme that feature, Sobel?”