The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (38 page)

“Personal questions? Why would I do that?”

“Oh, well, it's just that you're always so inquisitive, dear, about other people's private business.”

And Alice looked wounded, an expression even more frequent on her face lately than on her mother's, or her brother's.

The Towers family shied away from Elizabeth most of the time, and so did Nancy; it was like having a stranger in the house. Coming heavily downstairs in her spike heels, standing at the front windows to stare out at the Post Road as if in deep thought, picking at whatever food was set before her and drinking a lot after dinner as she paged impatiently through many magazines, Elizabeth didn't even seem to notice how uncomfortable she made everyone feel.

Then one night, long after the children were in bed, she cast aside
The New Republic
and said, “Lucy, I don't think this is working out. I'm sorry, because it did seem like a good idea, but I think we both ought to start looking for other places to live.”

Lucy was stunned. “Well, but we signed a two-year lease,” she said.

“Oh, come on. I've broken leases before and so have you. People break leases all the time. I don't think you and I are well suited to living like this, that's all, and the kids don't like it either, so let's call it off.”

Lucy felt as if a man were leaving her. After a brief, intense effort to keep from crying—she knew it would be ridiculous to cry over something like this—she said, hesitantly, “Will you be moving into the city, then? With Judd?”

“Oh,
Jesus,
no.” Elizabeth got up and began pacing the rug. “That loudmouth. That overbearing, posturing, drunken son of a bitch—and anyway, he broke off with me.” She gave a harsh little laugh. “You ought to've
seen
the way he broke off with me. You ought to've
heard
it. No, I'll look for something like I had before, or maybe better, where I can just be quiet and go about my—go about my business alone.”

“Well, Elizabeth, I wish you'd think it over. I know you've had a difficult time this winter, but it doesn't really seem fair of you to—oh, look: wait a few weeks or a month; then decide. Because there
are
advantages for you here, or can be, and besides, you and I are friends.”

Elizabeth let the word “friends” hang in the air for a while, as if to examine it.

“Well,” Lucy said, qualifying it, “I mean we certainly have a lot in common, and we—”

“No, we don't.” And Elizabeth's eyes took on a glint of cruelty that Lucy had never seen in them before. “We don't have anything in common at all. I'm a Communist and you'll probably vote for Alf Landon. I've worked all my life and you've scarcely lifted a finger. I've never even
believed
in alimony, and you live on it.”

There was nothing for Lucy Towers to do then but sweep out of the room in silence, climb the stairs, get into bed and wait for convulsions of weeping to overcome her. But she fell asleep before it happened, probably because she too had drunk a good deal that night.

By then it was early spring. They had been together in the house for six months, and now the end of it was in the air. It wasn't discussed much, but the days took on a quality of last times for everyone.

On one side of the house, away from the side where Harry Snyder lived, lay a vacant lot that made a good theater for war games: some of its weeds were tall enough to hide in, and there were trails and open spaces of packed dirt for the enactment of infantry combat. Russell was fooling around the lot alone one afternoon, perhaps because it might be the last time he'd be able to, but there wasn't much point in it without Harry. He was on his way home when he looked up and found Nancy watching him from the back porch.

“What were you
doing
out there?” she asked him.

“Nothing.”

“Looked like you were walking around in circles and talking to yourself.”

“Oh, I was,” he said, pulling a goofy face. “I do that all the time. Doesn't everybody?”

And to his great relief she seemed to think that was funny; she even rewarded him with an agreeable little laugh.

In no time at all they were strolling the vacant lot together while he pointed out the landmarks of recent military action. Here was the clump of weeds where Harry Snyder had concealed his machine-gun emplacement; here was the trail down which Russell had led a phantom patrol, and the first burst of fire had caught him right across the chest.

To recapture the scene he reeled back in shock and crumpled to the dirt, lying still. “There's nothing much you can do if you get it in the chest that way,” he explained as he got up to brush off his clothes. “But the worst thing is taking a grenade in the belly.” And that called for another performance of agony and dusty sprawling.

After the third time he died for her, she looked at him thoughtfully. “You really like the falling down part, don't you,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Well, I mean the best part of it for you is getting killed, right?”

“No,” he said defensively, because her tone had implied something unwholesome in such a preference. “No, I just—I don't know.”

That took the edge off the pleasure, though they remained on cordial terms as they walked back to the house; still, it couldn't be denied that for a little while they had been companions.

And it was on the strength of that, during their lunch break from school the following day, that Russell came thumping in from the back porch with something important to tell her.

She had gotten home first; she was settled back in the cushions of the living-room sofa, gazing out a window wrapping a lock of her black hair around her index finger.

“Hey,” he said, “this is pretty funny. You know that real big guy in your class? Carl Shoemaker?”

“Sure,” she said. “I know him.”

“Well, I was coming out of school just now and Carl Shoemaker was there on the playground with these two other guys and he called me over. He said, ‘Hey, Towers, you gonna try out for the race?'

“I said, ‘What race?'

“He said, ‘The human race. But I better warn you, they don't let sissies in.'

“I said, ‘So who's the sissy?'

“And he said, ‘Aren't you one? I heard you were. That's why I'm warning you.'

“So I said, ‘Look, Shoemaker. Find somebody else to warn, okay?' I said, ‘You want somebody to warn, you better keep looking.'”

It was a fairly accurate rendering of the dialogue, and Nancy seemed to have followed it with interest. But the last line of it now had an inconclusive ring, as if leaving open a chance that there might be further trouble when he went back to school. “So then after that,” he told her, “after that they just sort of smiled and walked away, Shoemaker and the two other guys. I don't think they'll mess with me anymore. But I mean the whole thing was, really kind of—kind of funny.”

He wondered now why he had told her about it at all, instead of finding other things to discuss. Watching her there on the sofa, in the noon light, he could see how she would probably look when she grew up and got pretty.

“Said he'd heard you were a sissy, uh?” she said.

‘Well, that's what he said he'd
heard,
but I think I—”

And she gave him a long, infuriatingly sly look. ‘Well,” she said. “I wonder where he ever heard that.”

The thumbs came out of Russell's belt as he backed slowly away from her across the rug, round-eyed, aghast at her betrayal. Just before he reached the doorway he saw the slyness in her face give way to fear, but it was too late: they both knew what he would do next, and there was no stopping him.

At the foot of the stairs he called, “Mom? Mom?”

‘What
is
it, dear?” Lucy Towers appeared on the landing, looking unsettled and wearing what she called her tea dress.

“Nancy told Carl Shoemaker I'm a sissy and he told a lot of other guys and now everybody's saying it and it's a lie. It's a lie.”

In a stately manner appropriate to the tea dress, Lucy came downstairs. “Oh,” she said. “Well. This is something we can discuss at lunch.”

Elizabeth never came home for lunch and Alice ate in the junior-high-school cafeteria, so there were only the three of them at the table: Russell and his mother on one side, Nancy on the other. There was nobody to deflect the force of Lucy's slow, impassioned, relentless voice.

“I'm surprised at what you did, Nancy, and I'm deeply troubled by it. People don't do things like that. People don't spread malicious gossip and lies about their friends behind their backs. It's as bad as stealing, or cheating. It's disgusting. Oh, I suppose there are people who behave that way, but they aren't the kind of people I'd want to sit at a table with, or live in a house with, or ever have as friends of my own. Do you understand me, Nancy?”

The maid came in with their plates—there would be small portions of veal, mashed potatoes and peas today—and she lingered to give Lucy a look of veiled reproach before going back to the kitchen. She had never worked in a house like this before, and didn't want to again. A nice lady, a crazy lady, and three sad-looking kids: what kind of a house was that? Well, it would most likely be over soon—she had already put the agency on the lookout for a new job—but meanwhile, somebody ought to shut that crazy lady's mouth before she scolded that little girl to death.

“Russell is your friend, Nancy,” Lucy Towers was saying, “and he's a person you share your home with. When you spread vicious lies about him at school, behind his back, you're inflicting great damage. Oh, I'm sure you know that; you've known it from the start. But I wonder if you ever stopped to think of me. Because do you want to know something, Nancy?
I
found this house.
I
asked your mother to join me in it, so we could all live together.
I
was the one who kept hoping and hoping there'd be a little peace and harmony in our lives here—yes, and I went on hoping even after I knew there wouldn't be. So you see it isn't only Russell you've hurt, Nancy; it's me. It's me. You've hurt me terribly, Nancy. . . .”

There was more, and it came to an end exactly as Russell knew it would. All through the upbraiding Nancy had sat silent, with a rigid face and downcast eyes—she had even managed to eat a little, as if to show she was above all this—but eventually her mouth began to fall apart. There were telltale twitches of the lips, increasingly difficult to control; then it came open and was locked in a shape of despair around two partly chewed green peas, and she was crying wretchedly but making no sound.

They were both late for school that afternoon, though Nancy had a head start of at least a hundred yards. Walking out between the borders of other people's lawns and through the broken fence and then along the gently curving lane, Russell could catch only an occasional glimpse of her far ahead, a tall, slim girl with a way of walking that suggested she was older than nine. She would grow up and get pretty; she would get married and have boys and girls of her own; so it was probably a dumb and even a sissy thing to be afraid she would always remember what Russell Towers had done to her today. Still, there would now be no way of knowing, ever, if she would forget it.

“Well, I don't see any point in prolonging this,” Elizabeth said the next day, setting two packed suitcases on the living-room floor. “Nancy and I'll go up to White Plains and stay in a hotel for a few days; then when we're settled somewhere I'll send back for the rest of our stuff.”

“You're putting me in a very awkward position,” Lucy said solemnly.

“Oh, come on; I don't see that at all. Here, look, I'll leave you an extra month's rent, okay?” She sat briefly at her old worktable with her checkbook, and scribbled on it. “There,” she said when it was done. “That ought to take care of the suffering.” And she and Nancy carried their bags out to the Model A.

None of the Towers family went to the front windows to wave goodbye, but it didn't matter because neither of the Bakers looked back.

“Know something?” Elizabeth said when she and Nancy were heading north on the Post Road. “I couldn't really afford to write that check. It won't bounce, but it's going to give us a tight month. Still, maybe there are times when you have to buy your way out of something whether you can afford it or not.”

After another mile or so she glanced from the road to Nancy's serious profile and said, “Well, Jesus, can't we even have a couple of laughs in this car? Why don't you sing me Gilbert and Sullivan or something?”

And Nancy gave her a brief, shy smile before turning away again. Slowly, Elizabeth removed the driving glove from her right hand. She reached across her daughter's lap, clasped the outer thigh and brought her sliding over, careful to keep her small knees clear of the shuddering gear shift. She held the child's thighs pressed fast against her own for a long time; then, in a voice so soft it could scarcely be heard over the sound of the car, she said, “Listen, it'll be all right, sweetheart. It'll be all right.”

WHEN WARREN MATHEWS
came to live in London, with his wife and their two-year-old daughter, he was afraid people might wonder at his apparent idleness. It didn't help much to say he was “on a Fulbright” because only a few other Americans knew what that meant; most of the English would look blank or smile helpfully until he explained it, and even then they didn't understand.

“Why tell them anything at all?” his wife would say. “Is it any of their business? What about all the Americans living here on
private
incomes?” And she'd go back to work at the stove, or the sink, or the ironing board, or at the rhythmic and graceful task of brushing her long brown hair.