The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (29 page)

She wasn't a very good sculptor. She had been working at it for only three years, since breaking up her marriage to my father, and there was still something stiff and amateurish about her pieces. Before the Roosevelt project her specialty had been “garden figures”—a life-size little boy whose legs turned into the legs of a goat at the knees and another who knelt among ferns to play the pipes of Pan; little girls who trailed chains of daisies from their upraised arms or walked beside a spread-winged goose. These fanciful children, in plaster painted green to simulate weathered bronze, were arranged on homemade wooden pedestals to loom around her studio and to leave a cleared space in the middle for the modeling stand that held whatever she was working on in clay.

Her idea was that any number of rich people, all of them gracious and aristocratic, would soon discover her: they would want her sculpture to decorate their landscaped gardens, and they would want to make her their friend for life. In the meantime, a little nationwide publicity as the first woman sculptor to “do” the President-elect certainly wouldn't hurt her career.

And, if nothing else, she had a good studio. It was, in fact, the best of all the studios she would have in the rest of her life. There were six or eight old houses facing our side of the courtyard, with their backs to Bedford Street, and ours was probably the showplace of the row because the front room on its ground floor was two stories high. You went down a broad set of brick steps to the tall front windows and the front door; then you were in the high, wide, light-flooded studio. It was big enough to serve as a living room too, and so along with the green garden children it contained all the living-room furniture from the house we'd lived in with my father in the suburban town of Hastings-on-Hudson, where I was born. A second-floor balcony ran along the far end of the studio, with two small bedrooms and a tiny bathroom tucked away upstairs; beneath that, where the ground floor continued through to the Bedford Street side, lay the only part of the apartment that might let you know we didn't have much money. The ceiling was very low and it was always dark in there; the small windows looked out underneath an iron sidewalk grating, and the bottom of that street cavity was thick with strewn garbage. Our roach-infested kitchen was barely big enough for a stove and sink that were never clean, and for a brown wooden icebox with its dark, ever-melting block of ice; the rest of that area was our dining room, and not even the amplitude of the old Hastings dining-room table could brighten it. But our Majestic radio was in there too, and that made it a cozy place for my sister Edith and me: we liked the children's programs that came on in the late afternoons.

We had just turned off the radio one day when we went out into the studio and found our mother discussing the Roosevelt project with Howard Whitman. It was the first we'd heard of it, and we must have interrupted her with too many questions because she said, “Edith? Billy? That's enough, now. I'll tell you all about this later. Run out in the garden and play.”

She always called the courtyard “the garden,” though nothing grew there except a few stunted city trees and a patch of grass that never had a chance to spread. Mostly it was bald earth, interrupted here and there by brick paving, lightly powdered with soot and scattered with the droppings of dogs and cats. It may have been six or eight houses long, but it was only two houses wide, which gave it a hemmed-in, cheerless look; its only point of interest was a dilapidated marble fountain, not much bigger than a birdbath, which stood near our house. The original idea of the fountain was that water would drip evenly from around the rim of its upper tier and tinkle into its lower basin, but age had unsettled it; the water spilled in a single ropy stream from the only inch of the upper tier's rim that stayed clean. The lower basin was deep enough to soak your feet in on a hot day, but there wasn't much pleasure in that because the underwater part of the marble was coated with brown scum.

My sister and I found things to do in the courtyard every day, for all of the two years we lived there, but that was only because Edith was an imaginative child. She was eleven at the time of the Roosevelt project, and I was seven.

“Daddy?” she asked in our father's office uptown one afternoon. “Have you heard Mommy's doing a head of President Roosevelt?”

“Oh?” He was rummaging in his desk, looking for something he'd said we might like.

“She's going to take his measurements and stuff here in New York,” Edith said, “and then after the Inauguration, when the sculpture's done, she's going to take it to Washington and present it to him in the White House.” Edith often told one of our parents about the other's more virtuous activities; it was part of her long, hopeless effort to bring them back together. Many years later she told me she thought she had never recovered, and never would, from the shock of their breakup: she said Hastings-on-Hudson remained the happiest time of her life, and that made me envious because I could scarcely remember it at all.

“Well,” my father said. “That's really something, isn't it.” Then he found what he'd been looking for in the desk and said, “Here we go; what do you think of these?” They were two fragile perforated sheets of what looked like postage stamps, each stamp bearing the insignia of an electric lightbulb in vivid white against a yellow background, and the words “More light.”

My father's office was one of many small cubicles on the twenty-third floor of the General Electric building. He was an assistant regional sales manager in what was then called the Mazda Lamp Division—a modest job, but good enough to have allowed him to rent into a town like Hastings-on-Hudson in better times—and these “More light” stamps were souvenirs of a recent sales convention. We told him the stamps were neat—and they were—but expressed some doubt as to what we might do with them.

“Oh, they're just for decoration,” he said. “I thought you could paste them into your schoolbooks, or—you know—whatever you want. Ready to go?” And he carefully folded the sheets of stamps and put them in his inside pocket for safekeeping on the way home.

Between the subway exit and the courtyard, somewhere in the West Village, we always walked past a vacant lot where men stood huddled around weak fires built of broken fruit crates and trash, some of them warming tin cans of food held by coat-hanger wire over the flames. “Don't stare,” my father had said the first time. “All those men are out of work, and they're hungry.”

“Daddy?” Edith inquired. “Do you think Roosevelt's good?”

“Sure I do.”

“Do you think all the Democrats are good?”

“Well, most of 'em, sure.”

Much later I would learn that my father had participated in local Democratic Party politics for years. He had served some of his political friends—men my mother described as dreadful little Irish people from Tammany Hall—by helping them to establish Mazda Lamp distributorships in various parts of the city. And he loved their social gatherings, at which he was always asked to sing.

“Well, of course, you're too young to remember Daddy's singing,” Edith said to me once after his death in 1942.

“No, I'm not; I remember.”

“But I mean really remember,” she said. “He had the most beautiful tenor voice I've ever heard. Remember ‘Danny Boy'?”

“Sure.”

“Ah, God, that was something,” she said, closing her eyes. “That was really—that was really something.”

When we got back to the courtyard that afternoon, and back into the studio, Edith and I watched our parents say hello to each other. We always watched that closely, hoping they might drift into conversation and sit down together and find things to laugh about, but they never did. And it was even less likely than usual that day because my mother had a guest—a woman named Sloane Cabot who was her best friend in the courtyard, and who greeted my father with a little rush of false, flirtatious enthusiasm.

“How've you been, Sloane?” he said. Then he turned back to his former wife and said, “Helen? I hear you're planning to make a bust of Roosevelt.”

“Well, not a bust,” she said. “A head. I think it'll be more effective if I cut it off at the neck.”

“Well, good. That's fine. Good luck with it. Okay, then.” He gave his whole attention to Edith and me. “Okay. See you soon. How about a hug?”

And those hugs of his, the climax of his visitation rights, were unforgettable. One at a time we would be swept up and pressed hard into the smells of linen and whiskey and tobacco; the warm rasp of his jaw would graze one cheek and there would be a quick moist kiss near the ear; then he'd let us go.

He was almost all the way out of the courtyard, almost out in the street, when Edith and I went racing after him.

“Daddy! Daddy! You forgot the stamps!”

He stopped and turned around, and that was when we saw he was crying. He tried to hide it—he put his face nearly into his armpit as if that might help him search his inside pocket—but there is no way to disguise the awful bloat and pucker of a face in tears.

“Here,” he said. “Here you go.” And he gave us the least convincing smile I had ever seen. It would be good to report that we stayed and talked to him—that we hugged him again—but we were too embarrassed for that. We took the stamps and ran home without looking back.

“Oh, aren't you excited, Helen?” Sloane Cabot was saying. “To be meeting him, and talking to him and everything, in front of all those reporters?”

“Well, of course,” my mother said, “but the important thing is to get the measurements right. I hope there won't be a lot of photographers and silly interruptions.”

Sloane Cabot was some years younger than my mother, and strikingly pretty in a style often portrayed in what I think are called Art Deco illustrations of that period: straight dark bangs, big eyes, and a big mouth. She too was a divorced mother, though her former husband had vanished long ago and was referred to only as “that bastard” or “that cowardly son of a bitch.” Her only child was a boy of Edith's age named John, whom Edith and I liked enormously.

The two women had met within days of our moving into the courtyard, and their friendship was sealed when my mother solved the problem of John's schooling. She knew a Hastings-on-Hudson family who would appreciate the money earned from taking in a boarder, so John went up there to live and go to school, and came home only on weekends. The arrangement cost more than Sloane could comfortably afford, but she managed to make ends meet and was forever grateful.

Sloane worked in the Wall Street district as a private secretary. She talked a lot about how she hated her job and her boss, but the good part was that her boss was often out of town for extended periods: that gave her time to use the office typewriter in pursuit of her life's ambition, which was to write scripts for the radio.

She once confided to my mother that she'd made up both of her names: “Sloane” because it sounded masculine, the kind of name a woman alone might need for making her way in the world, and “Cabot” because—well, because it had a touch of class. Was there anything wrong with that?

“Oh, Helen,” she said. “This is going to be wonderful for you. If you get the publicity—if the papers pick it up, and the newsreels—you'll be one of the most interesting personalities in America.”

Five or six people were gathered in the studio on the day my mother came home from her first visit with the President-elect.

“Will somebody get me a drink?” she asked, looking around in mock helplessness. “Then I'll tell you all about it.”

And with the drink in her hand, with her eyes as wide as a child's, she told us how a door had opened and two big men had brought him in.

“Big men,” she insisted. “Young, strong men, holding him up under the arms, and you could see how they were straining. Then you saw this
foot
come out, with these awful metal braces on the shoe, and then the
other
foot. And he was sweating, and he was panting for breath, and his face was—I don't know—all bright and tense and horrible.” She shuddered.

“Well,” Howard Whitman said, looking uneasy, “he can't help being crippled, Helen.”

“Howard,” she said impatiently, “I'm only trying to tell you how
ugly
it was.” And that seemed to carry a certain weight. If she was an authority on beauty—on how a little boy might kneel among ferns to play the pipes of Pan, for example—then surely she had earned her credentials as an authority on ugliness.

“
Any
way,” she went on, “they got him into a chair, and he wiped most of the sweat off his face with a handkerchief—he was still out of breath—and after a while he started talking to some of the other men there; I couldn't follow that part of it. Then finally he turned to me with this smile of his. Honestly, I don't know if I can describe that smile. It isn't something you can see in the newsreels; you have to be there. His eyes don't change at all, but the corners of his mouth go up as if they're being pulled by puppet strings. It's a frightening smile. It makes you think: this could be a dangerous man. This could be an evil man. Well anyway, we started talking, and I spoke right up to him. I said, ‘I didn't vote for you, Mr. President.' I said, ‘I'm a good Republican and I voted for President Hoover.' He said, ‘Why are you here, then?' or something like that, and I said, ‘Because you have a very interesting head.' So he gave me the smile again and he said, ‘What's interesting about it?' And I said, ‘I like the bumps on it.'”

By then she must have assumed that every reporter in the room was writing in his notebook, while the photographers got their flashbulbs ready; tomorrow's papers might easily read: