The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (35 page)

When she arrived there were huggings and kissings in the front hall—Dr. Andrews's lips brushed the cool lobe of an ear—and there were happy exclamations at how much Candace had grown, how different she looked, since the last time her grandparents had seen her.

Alone in the kitchen, preparing drinks and coming to an abrupt, nervous decision that he'd better have a quick one now, here, before taking the tray into the living room, Dr. Andrews wondered once again what it was that could make him tremble in the presence of this dearest child, this particular girl. She was always so calm and so competent, for one thing. She had probably never done an incompetent or irresponsible thing in her life, except for wasting her Turnbull College tuition that time—and that, now that he thought of it, was nothing at all compared to the way millions of other children had behaved in those years, with their flowers and their love beads, their fuzzy-headed Eastern religions and their mindless pursuit of drug-induced derangement. Maybe David Clark could be thanked, after all, for having steered her away from all that; but no, that wasn't right. The credit couldn't go to Clark because it belonged to Susan herself. She was too intelligent ever to have been a vagabond, just as she was too honest to go on living with a man she no longer loved.

“So what are your plans, Susan?” he asked as he brought the bright tinkling tray of drinks into the room. “California's kind of a big place. Kind of a scary place too.”

“Scary? How do you mean?”

“Oh, well, I don't know,” he said, and he was ready to back down on anything now if it meant avoiding an argument. “All I meant was—you know—judging from some of the stuff you read in magazines, and so forth. I don't really have any firsthand information at all.”

Susan explained, then, that she had a few friends in Marin County—“that's up north of San Francisco”—so she wouldn't be starting out among strangers. She would find a place to live, and then she'd look for some kind of work.

“What kind?” he asked. “I mean, is there anything in particular you'd like to do?”

“I don't really know yet,” she said. “I'm pretty good with children; I might work in a nursery school or a day-care center; otherwise I'll look for something else.” She crossed her narrow, pretty knees under the hem of an attractive tweed skirt, and he wondered if she had changed into fresh clothes in some motel room on the road in order to look nice for this homecoming.

“Well, dear,” he said. “I hope you know I'll be happy to help out in any way I can if you're—”

“No, no, Daddy, that's okay. We can get along easily on what David sends us. We'll be all right.”

And it was such a fine thing to hear her say “Daddy” that he allowed himself to sit back, silent and almost relaxed. He didn't even ask the one question foremost in his mind: How
is
David, Susan? How's he taking all this?

He had met and talked with David Clark only a few times—first at the wedding, and on four or five occasions since then—and he'd been surprised each time to discover that he liked the man. Once, tentatively, they had begun to discuss politics, until David said, “Well, Doctor, I guess I've always been a bleeding-heart liberal,” and Edward Andrews found that appealing—the humor and the self-deprecation of it, if not the way it might apply to current issues. He had even decided not to mind David's being twenty years older than Susan, or his having another, earlier family far away, because all that seemed to suggest he wasn't likely to make any more mistakes; he would devote the prime of his middle age to his second marriage. And the best part, the thing that seemed to make nothing else matter, was that this shy, courteous, sometimes bewildered-looking stranger could never take his eyes away from Susan in any gathering. Couldn't everybody see he was in love with her? And wasn't that the first thing to look for in a son-in-law? Well, sure it was. Of course it was. And so, therefore, what now? What was the poor son of a bitch going to do with the rest of his life?

Susan and her mother were talking of family matters. All three of the younger girls were living away from home now, two of them married, and there were other bits of news to be exchanged about the older girls. Then after awhile—inevitably, it seemed—they took up the subject of childbearing.

Agnes Andrews would be sixty before very long, and for many years she had been obliged to wear spectacles with lenses so thick that it wasn't easy to see the expression in her eyes: you had to rely on the smile or the frown or the patient, neutral look of her mouth. And her husband had to acknowledge that the rest of her was rapidly aging too. There wasn't much left of her once-lustrous hair except what the hairdresser could salvage and primp; her body sagged in some places and was bloated in others. She looked like what she was: a woman who'd been called Mother in shrill, hungering voices for most of her life.

Long ago, almost beyond memory, she had been a neat, crisp, surprisingly passionate young nurse whose flesh he had been wholly unable to resist. The only minor deterrent, easily ignored from their first night right on up through the night he'd proposed to her (“I love you, Agnes; oh, I love you, and I need you. I need you . . .”), the only qualifying aspect of his love had been his knowledge that some people—his mother, for one—might think it strange of him to marry a girl of the working class.

“. . . Well, Judy was my easiest,” she was saying. “I never knew a thing. I went into the hospital and they put me under, and when I woke up it was all over. She was born, I was full of painkillers so I felt all right, and somebody gave me a bowl of Rice Krispies. No, but some of the others were a lot harder—you, for instance. Yours was a difficult birth. Still, I think my worst times were with the younger girls, probably because I was getting older. . . .”

Agnes rarely talked at such length—whole days could pass without her saying a word—but this had come to be her favorite topic. She sat leaning forward, her forearms on her knees and her clasped hands rolling this way and that to emphasize the points she was making.

“. . . And you see Dr. Palmer thought I was unconscious—they all did—but the anesthetic wasn't working. I could feel everything, and I could hear every word they said. I heard Dr. Palmer say, ‘Watch out for that uterus: it's thin as paper.'”

“God,” Susan said. “Weren't you frightened?”

And Agnes gave a tired little laugh that made her glasses gleam in the fading afternoon light. “Well,” she said, “when you've been through it as many times as I have, I guess you don't really think much about being frightened anymore.”

Candace, who had been given a glass of ginger ale with a cherry in it, went over to stand and stare out of the big windows that faced west, almost as if she were trying to gauge the distance to California. “Mommy?” she called, turning back. “Are we staying here tonight, or what?”

“Oh no, honey,” Susan told her. “We can only stay a little while. We've got a long drive ahead.”

Out in the kitchen again, Edward Andrews broke open a tray of ice cubes with more force and noise than necessary, hoping it might stifle his mounting rage, but it didn't. He had to turn away and press his forehead hard against the heel of one trembling hand, like a goddamned actor in a tragedy.

Girls. Would they always drive you crazy? Would their smiles of rejection always drop you into despair and their smiles of welcome lead only into new, worse, more terrible ways of breaking your heart? Were you expected to listen forever to one of them bragging about how paper-thin her womb was, or to another saying, ‘We can only stay a little while”? Oh, dear Christ, how in the whole of a lifetime can anybody understand girls?

After a minute or two he achieved a semblance of composure. He carried the fresh drinks back into the living room with an almost stately bearing, determined that for this next, last little while he would keep everything down and quiet inside him so that neither of these girls, these women, would sense his anguish.

Half an hour later, in the early dusk, they were all out in the driveway. Candace was seated and belted in on the passenger side of the car, and Susan, with the car keys out and ready in her hand, was embracing her mother. Then she stepped over to give her father a hug, but it wasn't really much of a hug at all; it was more like an agreeable gesture of dismissal.

“Drive carefully, dear,” he said into the softness of her dark, fragrant hair. “And listen—”

She drew away from him with a pleasant, attentive look, but he had swallowed whatever it was or might have been that he wanted her to know, and all he said instead was “Listen: keep in touch, okay?”

ELIZABETH HOGAN BAKER
, who liked to have it known that both her parents were illiterate Irish immigrants, wrote feature stories for a chain of Westchester County newspapers through all the years of the Depression. Her home office was in New Rochelle but she was on the road every day in a rusty, quivering Model A Ford that she drove fast and carelessly, often squinting in the smoke of a cigarette held in one corner of her lips. She was a handsome woman, blond, sturdy, and still young, with a full-throated laugh for anything she found absurd, and this wasn't the life she had planned for herself at all.

“Can you figure it out?” she would ask, usually at night and after a few drinks. “Bring myself up from peasant stock, put myself through college, take a lousy little job on a suburban paper because it seemed a good-enough way to mark time for a year or two, and now look. Look. Can you figure it out?”

Nobody could. Her friends—and she always had admiring friends—could only agree that she'd had rotten luck. Elizabeth was much too good for the kind of work she did and for the inhibiting, stifling environment it had forced on her.

Back in the twenties, as a girl and a daydreaming reporter on the New Rochelle
Standard-Star,
she had looked up from her desk one day to see a tall, black-haired, shy-looking young man being shown around the office, a new staff member named Hugh Baker. “And the minute he walked in,” she would say later, many times, “I thought, There's the man I'm going to marry.” It didn't take long. They were married within a year and had a daughter two years later; then, soon, everything fell apart in ways Elizabeth never cared to discuss. Hugh Baker moved alone to New York, where he eventually became a feature writer for one of the evening dailies and was often praised for what the editors called his light touch. And even Elizabeth never disparaged that: over the years, embittered or not, she always said Hugh Baker was the only man she had ever known who could really make her laugh. But now she was thirty-six, with nothing to do at the end of most days but go home to an upstairs apartment in New Rochelle and pretend to take pleasure in her child.

A stout middle-aged woman named Edna, whose slip seemed always to hang at least an inch below the hem of her dress all the way around, was working at the kitchen stove when Elizabeth let herself in.

“Everything seems to be under control, Mrs. Baker,” Edna said. “Nancy's eaten her supper, and I was just putting this on the low heat so you can have it whenever you're ready. I made a nice casserole; it turned out very nice.”

“Good, Edna, that's fine.” And Elizabeth pulled off her worn leather driving gloves. She always did this with an unconscious little flourish, like that of a cavalry officer just dismounted and removing his gauntlets after a long, hard ride.

Nancy appeared to be ready for bed when they looked in on her: she was in her pajamas and fooling around on the floor of her room in some aimless game that involved the careful alignment of a few old toys. She was nine, and she would be tall and dark like her father. Edna had recently cut out the soles of the feet in her Dr. Denton pajamas to give her more freedom—she was growing out of everything—but Elizabeth thought the pouches of excess cloth at her ankles looked funny; besides, she was fairly sure that children of nine weren't supposed to wear that kind of pajamas anymore. “How was your day?” she inquired from the doorway.

“Oh, okay.” And Nancy looked up only briefly at her mother. “Daddy called.”

“Oh?”

“And he said he's coming out to see me Saturday after next and he's got tickets for
The Pirates of Penzance
at the County Center.”

“Well, that's nice,” Elizabeth said, “isn't it.”

Then Edna stepped crouching into the room with her arms held wide. Nancy scrambled up eagerly, and they stood hugging for a long time. “See you tomorrow, then, funny-face,” Edna said against the child's hair.

It often seemed to Elizabeth that the best part of the day was when she was alone at last, curled up on the sofa with a drink, with her spike-heeled shoes cast off and tumbled on the carpet. Perhaps a sense of well-earned peace like this was the best part of life itself, the part that made all the rest endurable. But she had always tried to know enough not to kid herself—self-deception was an illness—and so after a couple of drinks she was willing to acknowledge the real nature of these evenings alone: she was waiting for the telephone to ring.

Some months ago she had met an abrupt, intense, sporadically dazzling man named Judd Leonard. He ran his own small public-relations firm in New York and would snarl at anyone who didn't know the difference between public relations and publicity. He was forty-nine and twice divorced; he was often weak with ambition and anger and alcohol, and Elizabeth had come to love him. She had spent three or four weekends in his chaotic apartment in the city; once he had shown up here in New Rochelle, laughing and shouting, and they'd talked for hours and he'd taken her on this very sofa, and he'd been nicely obedient about getting out of the place before Nancy woke up in the morning.