The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (48 page)

I was twenty-three that year; Dan was a year or so older, and there was a gruff, rumbling gentleness in his voice that seemed to promise he would always be good company. He lived with his parents and his younger brother in Brooklyn, “just around the corner from Coney Island, if that gives you a picture,” and he was a recent graduate of the art school at Cooper Union—a school that charges no tuition but is famous for being highly selective. I'd heard that only one out of ten applicants is accepted there; when I asked him if that was true he said he didn't know.

“So where'd
you
go to school, Bill?” he asked, and that was always an awkward question.

I had come out of the Army with the wealth of the GI Bill of Rights at my disposal, but hadn't taken advantage of it—and I will never wholly understand why. It was partly fear: I'd done poorly in high school, the Army had assessed my IQ at 109, and I didn't want the risk of further failure. And it was partly arrogance: I planned to become a professional writer as soon as possible, and that made four years of college seem a wasteful delay. There was a third factor too—one that took too much explaining for comfort, but could in a greatly simplified form be easier to tell than all the fear-and-arrogance stuff—and this had become the reply I gave most often on being asked why I hadn't gone to college. “Well,” I would say, “I had my mother to take care of.”

“Oh, that's too bad,” Dan Rosenthal said, looking concerned. “I mean, it's too bad you had to miss out on college.” He seemed to be thinking it over for a while, trailing a delicate paintbrush back and forth under the clean scent of banana oil that always hung in his side of the cubicle. Then he said, “Still, if the GI Bill gives allotments for dependent wives and children, how come they wouldn't do it for a dependent mother?”

That was something I had never looked into; worse, it was something that had never occurred to me. But whatever lame and evasive reply I made didn't matter much because he had already moved on to find another marshy place in the dark field of my autobiography.

“And you're married now?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, so who's taking care of Mother? You still doing that too?”

“No, she's—well, she's pretty much back on her feet now,” I said, and that was a lie.

I knew he wouldn't press me on it, and he didn't. Office friendships don't work that way. But I knew too, as I fingered nervously through the
Systems
copy, that I had better watch my mouth around Dan Rosenthal from now on.

My mother, who had lived on alimony payments as long as I could remember, had been left with nothing after my father died in 1942. At first she'd taken a few harsh and degrading jobs—working in a lens-grinding shop, working in the cheap loft factories that make department-store mannequins—but work like that was pitifully wrong for a bewildered, rapidly aging, often hysterical woman who had always considered herself a sculptor with at least as much intensity as I brought to the notion of myself as a writer. During my time in the Army she had collected something from her status as a “Class A Dependent,” but it couldn't have been much. For a while she lived with my older sister and her family in the Long Island suburbs, but the clash of personalities in that unhappy house soon brought her back to New York—and to me. My sister wrote me a letter about it, as if it were too delicate a matter for discussion on the phone, explaining that her husband's “views” on sharing his home with in-laws were “sound in theory, though terribly difficult in practice,” and saying she was sure I would understand.

That was how it started. My mother and I lived on what little I earned at apprentice jobs, first on a trade journal and later as a rewrite man for the United Press, and we shared an apartment she had found on Hudson Street. Except for a nagging sense that this wasn't a very adventurous or attractive way for a young man to live, I was comfortable there at first. We got along surprisingly well; but then, we always had.

All through childhood I had admired the way she made light of money troubles—that, perhaps even more than the art she doggedly aspired to or the love she so frequently invoked, was what had made her uncommon and fine for me. If we were occasionally evicted from our rented homes, if we seldom had presentable clothes and sometimes went hungry for two or three days while waiting for my father's monthly check, those hardships only enhanced the sweet poignance of her reading
Great Expectations
aloud to my sister and me in her bed. She was a free spirit.
We
were free spirits, and only a world composed of creditors or of “people like your father” could fail to appreciate the romance of our lives.

Now, she often assured me that this new arrangement was only temporary—she would surely find some way to get “back on her feet” in no time at all—but as the months wore on she made no effort, or any reasonable plans, and so I began to lose patience. This wasn't making any sense. I didn't want to listen to her torrential talk anymore or join in her laughter; I thought she was drinking too much; I found her childish and irresponsible—two of my father's words—and I didn't even want to look at her: small and hunched in tasteful clothes that were never quite clean, with sparse, wild, yellow-gray hair and a soft mouth set in the shape either of petulance or of hilarity.

Her teeth had been bad for years. They were unsightly, and they'd begun to hurt. I took her to the Northern Dispensary, an antique little triangular brick landmark of the Village that was said to be the oldest free dental clinic in New York. A pleasant young dentist examined her and told us that all her teeth would have to be removed.

“Oh, no,” she cried.

The work couldn't be done here in the clinic, he explained, but if she came to his private office in Queens he would do it there, equip her with dentures, and charge us only half his normal fee because she was a clinic patient.

It was a deal. We took a train out to Jamaica and I sat with her through it all, hearing her grunt and shudder with the shock of each extraction, watching the dentist drop one ugly old tooth after another onto his little porcelain tray. It made my toes clench and my scalp prickle; it was a terrible but oddly satisfying thing to watch. There, I thought as each tooth fell bloody on the tray. There . . . there . . . there. How could she make a romance out of this? Maybe now, at last, she would come to terms with reality.

All the way home that afternoon, with the lower half of her face so fallen-in that she wouldn't let anyone see it, she rode staring out the train window and pressed a wad of Kleenex to her mouth. She seemed utterly defeated. That night, when worse pain set in, she thrashed and moaned in her bed and pleaded with me for a drink.

“Well, I don't think that's too good an idea,” I told her. “I mean alcohol warms your blood, and when you're bleeding, you see, it'll only make it worse.”

“Call him up,” she commanded. “Call what's-his-name, the dentist. Get the Queens information operator. I don't care what time it is. I'm dying. Do you understand me? I'm dying.”

And I obeyed her. “I'm sorry to bother you at home, Doctor,” I began, “but the thing is I wondered if it would be all right for my mother to have something to drink.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “Fluids are the best thing. Fruit juices, iced tea, any of the popular sodas and soft drinks; that'll be fine.”

“No, I meant—you know—whiskey. Alcohol.”

“Oh.” And he explained, tactfully, that alcohol would not be advisable at all.

In the end I gave her a couple of drinks anyway and had three or four myself, standing alone and slumped at the window in a melodramatic posture of despair. I thought I would never get out of that place alive.

After she got her new teeth, and after the first discomfort of wearing them was over, she seemed to shed twenty years. She smiled and laughed frequently and spent a lot of time at the mirror. But she was afraid everyone would know they were false teeth, and that made her shy.

“Can you hear me clacking when I talk?” she would ask me.

“No.”

“Well,
I
can hear it. And do you see this awful little
crease
under my nose, where they fit in? Is that very noticeable?”

“No, of course not. Nobody's going to notice that.”

In her days as a sculptor she had joined three art organizations that required the paying of dues: the National Sculpture Society, the National Association of Women Artists, and something called Pen and Brush, which was a local Village women's club—a relic, I think, of the old, old Village of smocks and incense and monogrammed Egyptian cigarettes and Edna St. Vincent Millay. At my urging she had reluctantly agreed to let her dues lapse at the two uptown enterprises, but she clung to Pen and Brush because it was “socially” important for her.

That was all right with me; it didn't cost much, and they sometimes held group exhibitions of painting and sculpture—awful afternoons of tea and sponge cake, of heavily creaking wooden floors and clustering ladies in funny hats—at which a small, old, finger-smudged piece of my mother's sculpture might win an Honorable Mention.

“And you see, it's only recently that they've let sculptors
in
to Pen and Brush,” she explained, far more often than necessary. “It was always just writers and painters before that, and of course they can't change the
name
of it now, to include the sculptors, but we call ourselves ‘the chiselers.'” And that always struck her as so funny that she'd laugh and laugh, either trying to hide her old teeth with her fingers or, later, happily displaying the gleam of her new ones.

I met almost nobody of my own age during that time, except by hanging around Village bars and trying to figure out what was going on; then once I was taken to a small party and met a girl named Eileen who turned out to be as lonely as I was, though she was better at concealing it. She was tall and slender with rich dark red hair and a pretty, bony face that could sometimes look warily stern, as if the world were trying to put something over on her. She too had come from what she called a “shabby-genteel” background (I had never heard that phrase before and added it at once to my vocabulary); her parents too had been long divorced; she hadn't gone to college either; and, again like me, she earned her living as a white-collar employee. She was a secretary in a business office. An important difference here was that she insisted she liked her work because it was “a good job,” but I imagined there would be plenty of time for talking her out of that.

From the beginning, and for the whole of the next year, we were hardly ever apart except during working hours. It may not have been love, but we couldn't have been persuaded of that because we kept telling each other, and telling ourselves, that it was. If we often quarreled, the movies had proved time and again that love was like that. We couldn't keep away from each other, though I think we both came to suspect, after awhile, that this might be because neither of us had anywhere else to go.

Eileen wanted to meet my mother, and I knew it would be a mistake but couldn't think of an acceptable way to say no. And my mother, predictably, didn't like her. “Well, she's a pleasant girl, dear,” she said later, “but I don't see how you can find her so at
trac
tive.”

Then once when Eileen was telling me about a boring middle-aged man who lived in her building, she said, “He's been on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an
art
bum, like your mother.”

“An art bum?”

“Well, you know. When you fool around with it all your life, trying to impress people with something that isn't really there and never really was—don't you think that's tiresome? Don't you think it's a waste of everybody's time?”

From old loyalty I tried to defend my mother against the art-bum charge, but it came out weak and lame and overstated, and there might have been yet another quarrel if we hadn't found some way to change the subject.

Some mornings when I'd come home after daylight, with barely time to put on a clean shirt for work, my mother would greet me with a tragic stare—and once or twice she said, as if I were the girl, “Well, I certainly hope you know what you're doing.” Then one evening late in the year she went into one of her uncontrollable rages and referred to Eileen as “that cheap little Irish slut of yours.” But that wasn't really so bad because it enabled me to get up in a disdainful silence and walk out of the place and shut the door, leaving her to wonder if I would ever come back.

That winter I came down with pneumonia, which seemed only in keeping with the general run of our bad luck. And during my recovery in the hospital there was a time when my mother and Eileen, who had skillfully avoided each other until then, found themselves riding in the same elevator and came into the ward together for the afternoon visiting hour. They took chairs on opposite sides of the high steel bed and made hesitant conversation across my chest, while I turned my head on the pillow from one to the other of their remarkably different faces, the old and the new, trying to muster appropriate expressions for each of them.

Then Eileen pulled open one side of my hospital gown, peered beneath it, and began massaging the flesh on my ribs with her hand. “Isn't he a nice color?” she inquired with a bright false trill in her voice.

“Well, yes, I've always thought so,” my mother said quietly.

“Do you know what the best part is, though?” Eileen said. “The best part is, he's the same color all over.”