The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (22 page)

Across the aisle, McIntyre sat brooding over his unfinished letter. “I don't know, Vernon,” he said to Sloan. “I felt sorry for you last week, having to stay in this dump over Christmas, but you know something? You were lucky. I wish they wouldn't of let me go home either.”

“That so?” Sloan said. “How do you mean?”

“Ah, I don't know,” McIntyre said, wiping his fountain pen with a piece of Kleenex. “I don't know. Just that it's a bitch, having to come back afterwards, I guess.” But that was only part of it; the other part, like the letter he'd been trying to write all week, was his own business.

McIntyre's wife had grown fat and bewildered in the last year or two. On the alternate Sunday afternoons when she came out to visit him she never seemed to have much on her mind but the movies she had seen, or the television shows, and she gave him very little news of their two children, who almost never came out. “Anyway, you'll be seein' them Christmas,” she would say. “We'll have a lot of fun. Only listen, Dad, are you sure that bus trip isn't gonna tire you out?”

“'Course not,” he had said, a number of times. “I didn't have no trouble last year, did I?”

Nevertheless he was breathing hard when he eased himself off the bus at last, carrying the packages he had bought in the hospital canteen, and he had to walk very slowly up the snow-crusted Brooklyn street to his home.

His daughter, Jean, who was eighteen now, was not there when he came in.

“Oh, sure,” his wife explained, “I thought I told you she'd prob'ly be out tonight.”

“No,” he said. “You didn't tell me. Where'd she go?”

“Oh, out to the movies is all, with her girlfriend Brenda. I didn't think you'd mind, Dad. Fact, I told her to go. She needs a little night off once in a while.
You
know, she's kind of run-down. She gets nervous and everything.”

“What's she get nervous about?”

“Well,
you
know. One thing, this job she's got now's very tiring. I mean she likes the work and everything, but she's not used to the full eight hours a day, you know what I mean? She'll settle down to it. Come on, have a cuppa coffee, and then we'll put the tree up. We'll have a lot of fun.”

On his way to wash up he passed her empty room, with its clean cosmetic smell, its ragged teddy bear and framed photographs of singers, and he said, “It sure seems funny to be home.”

His boy, Joseph, had still been a kid fooling around with model airplanes the Christmas before; now he wore his hair about four inches too long and spent a great deal of time working on it with his comb, shaping it into a gleaming pompadour with upswept sides. He was a heavy smoker too, pinching the cigarette between his yellow-stained thumb and forefinger and cupping the live end in his palm. He hardly moved his lips when he spoke, and his only way of laughing was to make a brief snuffling sound in his nose. He gave one of these little snorts during the trimming of the Christmas tree, when McIntyre said something about a rumor that the Veterans Administration might soon increase disability pensions. It might have meant nothing, but to McIntyre it was the same as if he had said, “Who you tryna kid, Pop? We know where the money's coming from.” It seemed an unmistakable, wise-guy reference to the fact that McIntyre's brother-in-law, and not his pension, was providing the bulk of the family income. He resolved to speak to his wife about it at bedtime that night, but when the time came all he said was, “Don't he ever get his hair cut anymore?”

“All the kids are wearing it that way now,” she said. “Why do you have to criticize him all the time?”

Jean was there in the morning, slow and rumpled in a loose blue wrapper. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, and gave him a kiss that smelled of sleep and stale perfume. She opened her presents quietly and then lay for a long time with one leg thrown over the arm of a deep upholstered chair, her foot swinging, her fingers picking at a pimple on her chin.

McIntyre couldn't take his eyes off her. It wasn't just that she was a woman—the kind of withdrawn, obliquely smiling woman that had filled him with intolerable shyness and desire in his own youth—it was something more disturbing even than that.

“Whaddya looking at, Dad?” she said, smiling and frowning at once. “You keep
lookin'
at me all the time.”

He felt himself blushing. “I always like to look at pretty girls. Is that so terrible?”

“'Course not.” She began intently plucking at the broken edge of one of her fingernails, frowning down at her hands in a way that made her long eyelashes fall in delicate curves against her cheeks. “It's just—you know. When a person keeps looking at you all the time it makes you nervous, that's all.”

“Honey, listen.” McIntyre leaned forward with both elbows on his skinny knees. “Can I ask you something? What's all this business about being nervous? Ever since I come home, that's all I heard. ‘Jean's very nervous. Jean's very nervous.' So listen, will you please tell me something? What's there to be so nervous about?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I don't know, Dad. Nothing, I guess.”

“Well, because the reason I ask—” he was trying to make his voice deep and gentle, the way he was almost sure it had sounded long ago, but it came out scratchy and querulous, short of breath—“the reason I ask is, if there's something bothering you or anything, don't you think you ought to tell your dad about it?”

Her fingernail tore deep into the quick, which caused her to shake it violently and pop it into her mouth with a little whimper of pain, and suddenly she was on her feet, red-faced and crying. “Dad, willya lea' me alone? Willya just please lea' me
alone
?” She ran out of the room and upstairs and slammed her door.

McIntyre had started after her, but instead he stood swaying and glared at his wife and son, who were examining the carpet at opposite ends of the room.

“What's the matter with her, anyway?” he demanded. “Huh? What the hell's going on around here?” But they were as silent as two guilty children. “C'mon,” he said. His head made a slight involuntary movement with each suck of air into his frail chest. “C'mon, goddamn it,
tell
me.”

With a little wet moan his wife sank down and spread herself among the sofa cushions, weeping, letting her face melt. “All right,” she said. “All right, you asked for it. We all done our best to give you a nice Christmas, but if you're gonna come home and snoop around and drive everybody crazy with your questions, all right—it's your funeral. She's four months pregnant—there, now are you satisfied? Now willya please quit bothering everybody?”

McIntyre sat down in an easy chair that was full of rattling Christmas paper, his head still moving with each breath.

“Who was it?” he said at last. “Who's the boy?”

“
Ask
her,” his wife said. “Go on, ask her and see. She won't tell you. She won't tell anybody—that's the whole trouble. She wouldn't even of let on about the
baby
if I hadn't found out, and now she won't even tell her own mother the boy's name. She'd rather break her mother's heart—yes, she would, and her brother's too.”

Then he heard it again, a little snuffle across the room. Joseph was standing there smirking as he stubbed out a cigarette. His lower lip moved slightly and he said, “Maybe she don't
know
the guy's name.”

McIntyre rose very slowly out of the rattling paper, walked over to his son and hit him hard across the face with the flat of his hand, making the long hair jump from his skull and fall around his ears, making his face wince into the face of a hurt, scared little boy. Then blood began to run from the little boy's nose and dribble on the nylon shirt he had gotten for Christmas, and McIntyre hit him again, and that was when his wife screamed.

A few hours later he was back in Building Seven with nothing to do. All week he ate poorly, talked very little, except to Vernon Sloan, and spent a great deal of time working on a letter to his daughter that was still unfinished on the afternoon of New Year's Eve.

After many false starts, which had ended up among the used Kleenex tissues in the paper bag that hung beside his bed, this was what he had written:

That was as far as the letter went.

Now that Tiny's laughter was stilled, the ward seemed unnaturally quiet. The old year faded in a thin yellow sunset behind the west windows; then darkness fell, the lights came on and shuddering rubber-wheeled wagons of dinner trays were rolled in by masked and gowned attendants. One of them, a gaunt, bright-eyed man named Carl, went through his daily routine.

“Hey, you guys heard about the man that ran over himself?” he asked, stopping in the middle of the aisle with a steaming pitcher of coffee in his hand.

“Just pour the coffee, Carl,” somebody said.

Carl filled a few cups and started across the aisle to fill a few more, but midway he stopped again and bugged his eyes over the rim of his sterile mask. “No, but listen—you guys heard about the man that ran over himself? This is a new one.” He looked at Tiny, who usually was more than willing to play straight man for him, but Tiny was moodily buttering a slice of bread, his cheeks wobbling with each stroke of the knife. “Well, anyways,” Carl said at last, “this man says to this kid, ‘Hey kid, run acrost the street and get me a packa cigarettes, willya?' Kid says, ‘No,' see? So the man ran over him
self
!” He doubled up and pounded his thigh. Jones groaned appreciatively; everyone else ate in silence.

When the meal was over and the trays cleared away, McIntyre tore up the old beginning of page 3 and dropped it in the waste bag. He resettled his pillows, brushed some food crumbs off the bed, and wrote this:

But he threw that page away too, and sat for a long time writing nothing, smoking a cigarette with his usual careful effort to avoid inhaling. At last he took up his pen again and cleaned its point very carefully with a leaf of Kleenex. Then he began new page:

The starched rustle and rubber-heeled thump of a nurse made him look up; she was standing beside his bed with a bottle of rubbing alcohol. “How about you, McIntyre?” she said. “Back rub?”

“No thanks,” he said. “Not tonight.”

“My goodness.” She peered just a little at the letter, which he shielded just a little with his hand. “You still writing letters? Every time I come past here you're writing letters. You must have a lot of people to write to. I wish I had the time to catch up on my letters.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, that's the thing, see. I got plenty of time.”

“Well, but how can you think of so many things to write about?” she said. “That's my trouble. I sit down and I get all ready to write a letter and then I can't think of a single thing to write about. It's terrible.”

He watched the shape of her buttocks as she moved away down the aisle. Then he read over the new page, crumpled it, and dropped it in the bag. Closing his eyes and massaging the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, he tried to remember the exact words of the first version. At last he wrote it out again as well as he could:

But from there on, the pen lay dead in his cramped fingers. It was as if all the letters of the alphabet, all the combinations of letters into words, all the infinite possibilities of handwritten language had ceased to exist.

He looked out the window for help, but the window was a black mirror now and gave back only the lights, the bright bedsheets and pajamas of the ward. Pulling on his robe and slippers, he went over to stand with his forehead and cupped hands against the cold pane. Now he could make out the string of highway lights in the distance and, beyond that, the horizon of black trees between the snow and the sky. Just above the horizon, on the right, the sky was suffused with a faint pink blur from the lights of Brooklyn and New York, but this was partly hidden from view by a big dark shape in the foreground that was a blind corner of the paraplegic building, a world away.