The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (51 page)

“Yeah, I will; I will.” Then he turned his chair away from his drawing board—he didn't often do that—and sat looking grave and thoughtful, examining the wet end of his cigar. “Well, hell, I'd like to get married too,” he said. “I mean I'm not really
immune
to it or anything, but there are a few obstacles. Number one, I haven't met the right girl. Number two, I've got too many other responsibilities. Number three—or wait, come to think of it, who the hell needs number three?”

Soon after the year turned into 1950, and a few weeks before the baby was due, the National Association of Women Artists agreed at last to hire my mother at a starting salary of eighty a week. “Oh, Jesus, what a relief,” Eileen said, and I couldn't have agreed more. Except for the smiling boredom entailed in having her over for dinner once, “to celebrate,” it seemed now that we could stop thinking about her almost indefinitely.

Then our daughter was born. Dan Rosenthal paid a surprise visit to Eileen in the hospital afterwards, bringing flowers, and that made her blush. I walked him out into the corridor for a window-view of the baby, whom he solemnly pronounced a beauty; then we went back and sat at Eileen's bedside for half an hour or so.

“Oh, Dan,'” she said when he got up to leave, “it was
so
nice of you to come.”

“My pleasure,” he told her. “Entirely my pleasure. I'm very big on maternity wards.”

The famous Long Island housing development called Levittown had recently been opened for business, and some of the younger married men around the eleventh floor began discussing at length—each of them explaining to the others, as if to convince himself—the many things that made it a good deal.

Then Dan told me he too had decided to buy into Levittown, and I might have said, But you're not even
married
, if I hadn't checked myself in time. He and his mother and brother had gone out there last weekend.

What had won him over to Levittown was that the basement of the house they inspected was remarkably big and bright. “It might as well've been
designed
as a studio,” he said. “I walked around that basement and all I could think was Wow. I'm gonna paint my ass off down here. And I can even make prints, set up a lithograph stone, whatever the hell I want. You know all this stuff about the perils of suburbia? How your life's supposed to fall apart when you move out of the city? I don't believe any of that. If your life's ready to fall apart, it'll fall apart anywhere.”

Another time he said, “You know anything about Harvard?”

“Harvard? No.”

“Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know?—the outside view. And that's sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it's this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there's nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewelry wholesalers. There isn't any
reason
for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you're out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that's a disappointment because you've seen it all in photographs so many times. Or take Radio City Music Hall, if you're a kid of about thirteen—same thing. I took Phil there once when I was home from the service, and we both knew it was a mistake. Oh, it's pretty nice to see seventy-eight good-looking girls come out and start kicking their legs up in unison—even if they're half a mile away, even if you happen to know they're all married to airline pilots and living in Rego Park—but I mean all you ever personally
find
in Radio City Music Hall is a lot of wrinkled old chewing gum stuck up underneath the arms of your fucking chair. Right? So I don't know; I think Phil and I'd better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around.”

And they did. Mrs. Rosenthal went along too. Dan came back to the office overflowing with enthusiasm for everything about Harvard, including the very sound of its name. “You can't imagine it, Bill,” he told me. “You have to be there; you have to walk around and look, and listen, and take it all in. It's amazing: right there in the middle of a commercial city, this whole little world of ideas. It's like about twenty-seven Cooper Unions put together.”

So it was arranged that Phil would be enrolled as a Harvard freshman the following fall, and Dan remarked more than a few times that the kid would certainly be missed at home.

One evening when we left the building together he held our walk down to a stroll in order to get something off his chest that seemed to have been bothering him all day.

“You know all this ‘need help' talk you hear around?” he inquired. “‘He needs help'; ‘She needs help'; ‘I need help'? Seems like almost everybody I know is taking up psychotherapy as if it were the new national craze, like Monopoly back in the thirties. And I've got this friend of mine from school—bright guy, good artist, married, holding down a pretty good job. Saw him last night and he told me he wants to be psychoanalyzed but can't afford it. Said he applied to this free clinic up at Columbia, had to take a lot of tests and write some half-assed essay about himself, and they turned him down. He said, ‘I guess they didn't think I was interesting enough.' I said, ‘Whaddya mean?' And he said, ‘Well, I got the impression they're up to their ass in overmothered Jewish boys.' Can you understand something like that?”

“No.” We were strolling in the dusk past brilliant storefronts—a travel agency, a shoe store, a lunch counter—and I remember studying each one as if it might help me keep my brains together.

“Because I mean what's the deal on being ‘interesting' in the first place?” Dan demanded. “Are we all supposed to lie on a couch and spill our guts to prove how ‘interesting' we are? That's a degree of sophistication I don't care to attain. Well.” We were at the corner now, and just before he moved away he waved his cigar at me. “Well. Regards at home.”

I had felt terrible all that spring, and it was getting worse. I coughed all the time and had no strength; I knew I was losing weight because my pants seemed ready to fall off; my sleep was drenched in sweat; all I wanted during the day was to find a place to lie down, and there was no place like that in the whole of Remington Rand. Then one lunch hour I went to a free X-ray service near the office and learned I had advanced tuberculosis. A bed was found for me in a veterans' hospital on Staten Island, and so I retired from the business world, if not from the world itself.

I have since read that TB is high on the fist of “psychosomatic” illnesses: people are said to come down with it while proving how hard they have tried under impossibly difficult circumstances. And there may be a lot of truth in that, but all I knew then was how good it felt to be encouraged—even to be ordered, by a grim ex-Army nurse wearing a sterile mask—to lie down and stay there.

It took eight months. In February of 1951 I was released as an outpatient and told I could get continuing treatment at VA-approved clinics “anywhere in the world.” That phrase had a nice ring to it, and this was the best part: I was told my illness had qualified as a “service-connected disability,” allowing me to collect two hundred dollars a month until my lungs were clean, and that there was a retroactive clause in the deal providing two thousand dollars in cash.

Eileen and I had never known such a glow of success. Late one night I was trying to make plans, wondering aloud whether to go back to Remington Rand or look for a better job, when Eileen said, “Oh, listen: let's do it.”

“Do what?”

“You know. Go to Paris. Because I mean if we don't do it now, while we're young enough and brave enough, when are we ever going to do it at all?”

I could scarcely believe she'd said that. She looked, then, very much the way she'd looked acknowledging the applause after her scene from
Dream Girl
—and there was a touch of the old secretarial “toughness” in her face too, suggesting that she might well turn out to be a sturdy traveler.

Because everything happened so fast after that, the next thing I remember clearly is the cramped farewell party in our cabin, or tourist-class “stateroom,” aboard the SS
United States.
Eileen was trying to change the baby's diaper on an upper berth, but it wasn't easy because so many people were crowded into the small room. My mother was there, seated on the edge of a lower berth and talking steadily, telling everyone about the National Association of Women Artists. Several employees of Botany Mills were there, and several other random acquaintances, and Dan Rosenthal was there too. He had brought a bottle of champagne and an expensive-looking hand puppet, in the form of a tiger, which the baby wouldn't appreciate for another two years.

This tense gathering was what I'd heard Eileen describe on the phone a few times as “our little shipboard
soignée
”—I didn't think that word was right but didn't know enough French to correct her. There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother's throat. She wore a nice spring suit, with a rich little feathered hat that had probably been bought for the occasion.

“. . . Well, but you see we're the only national organization in the country; our membership is up in the thousands now, and of course each member has to submit proof of professional standing as an artist before we'll even consider their application, so we're really a very . . .” And the deeper she settled into her monologue the farther she allowed her knees to move apart, with a forearm on each one, until the shadowy pouch of her underpants was visible to all guests seated across from her. That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing.

Dan Rosenthal was the first to leave, even before the first warning horn had sounded. He said it had been very nice to meet my mother, shaking hands with her; then he gravely turned to Eileen with both arms held out.

She had finished with the diapering—finished too, it seemed, with all concern for any of the other visitors. “Oh,
Dan
,” she cried, looking sad and lovely, and she melted fast against him. I saw his heavy fingers clap the small of her back three or four times.

“Take care of my friend the promising writer,” he said.

“Well, sure, but
you
take care, Dan, okay? And promise to write?”

“Of course,” he told her. “Of course. That goes without saying.”

Then he let her go, and I sprang to his service as an escort upstairs to the main deck and the gangplank. We were both quickly winded in climbing, so we took our time on the sharply curving, paint-smelling staircase, but he talked a lot anyway.

“So you're gonna send back a whole bunch of stories, right?” he asked me.

“Right.” And only dimly aware of paraphrasing his Levittown plans, I said, “I'm gonna write my ass off over there.”

“Well, good,” he said. “So it turns out you didn't need that shitty little art school after all. You'll never have to sneak around pretending to be an artist and playing hooky all day, and conspiring with a bunch of very ‘casual' Frenchmen to rob the United States. That's good. That's fine. You'll be doing this whole thing on your own, with money you've earned from your fucked-up lungs, and I'm proud of you. I mean it.”

We were up on the open deck now, facing each other in the cluster of people near the gangplank.

“So okay,” he said as we shook hands. “Keep in touch. Only, listen: do me a favor.” He stepped back to pull on his topcoat, which flapped in the light wind, and to shrug and settle it around his neck; then he came up close and looked at me in stern admonishment. “Do me a favor,” he said again. “Don't piss it all away.”

I didn't know what he meant, even after he'd winked to show he was mostly kidding, until it occurred to me that I had everything he must ever have wanted—everything he'd resigned himself, since his father's death, never to wish for again. I had luck, time, opportunity, a young girl for a wife, and a child of my own.

A great, deep ship's horn blew then, frightening dozens of seagulls into the sky. It was the sound of departure and of voyage, a sound that can make the walls of your throat fill up with blood whether you have anything to cry about or not. From the railing I saw his thick back descending slowly toward the pier. He wasn't yet far away: I could still call some final pleasantry that would oblige him to turn and smile and wave, and I thought of calling, Hey, Dan? Regards at home! But for once I managed to keep my mouth shut, and I've always been glad of that. All I did was watch him walk away between fenced-off crowds and into the heavy shadows of the pier until he was gone.

Then I hurried back down those newly painted, seaworthy stairs to get my mother off the boat—there wouldn't be many more warning horns—and to take up the business of my life.

JACK FIELDS'S FIRST
novel took him five years to write, and it left him feeling reasonably proud but exhausted almost to the point of illness. He was thirty-four then, and still living in a dark, wretchedly cheap Greenwich Village cellar that had seemed good enough for holing-up to get his work done after his marriage fell apart. He assumed he'd be able to find a better place and perhaps even a better life when his book came out, but he was mistaken: though it won general praise, the novel sold so poorly that only a scant, brief trickle of money came in during the whole of its first year in print. By that time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much—not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet his alimony payments—and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.