Richard Yates Read online

  And then it happened. Young Tony Wilson came hurrying downstairs one morning, his fine English shoes barely touching the tread of each warped step, just as Sarah walked out into the vestibule, and they almost collided.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  ‘Excuse me. Are you Miss Grimes?’

  ‘Yes. And you’re—’

  ‘Tony Wilson; I live upstairs.’

  Their talk couldn’t have lasted more than three or four minutes before he excused himself again and left the house, but it was enough to bring Sarah sleepwalking back into the apartment, allowing herself to be late for work. The debutantes and the Chinese multitudes could wait. ‘Oh, Emmy,’ she said, ‘have you seen him?’

  ‘I’ve passed him in the hall occasionally.’

  ‘Well, isn’t he something? Isn’t he just about the most – the most beautiful person you’ve ever—’

  Pookie came into the living room, her eyes wide and her uncertain lips glistening with breakfast bacon grease. ‘Who?’ she said. ‘You mean Tony? Oh, I’m so glad; I knew you’d like him, dear.’

  And Sarah had to sit down in one of their moth-eaten easy chairs to catch her breath. ‘Oh, Pookie,’ she said. ‘He looks – he looks just like Laurence Olivier.’

  That was true, though Emily hadn’t thought of it before. Tony Wilson was of medium height, broad-shouldered and well-built; his wavy brown hair was carelessly arranged across the forehead and around the ears; his mouth was full and humorous and his eyes seemed always to be laughing at some subtle private joke that he might tell you when you got to know him better. He was twenty-three years old.

  A very few days later he knocked on the door to ask if he might have the pleasure of Sarah’s company for dinner some evening soon, and that was the end of Donald Clellon.

  Tony didn’t have much money – ‘I’m a laborer,’ he said, which meant that he worked at a big naval aircraft plant on Long Island and very likely did something of Top Secret importance – but he owned a 1929 Oldsmobile convertible and drove it with flair. He would take Sarah on drives into the far reaches of Long Island or Connecticut or New Jersey, where they’d have dinner at what she always described as ‘wonderful’ restaurants, and they’d always be back in time for a drink at a ‘wonderful’ bar called Anatole’s, which Tony had discovered on the upper East Side.

  ‘Now, this fellow’s a different story entirely,’ Walter Grimes said on the telephone. ‘I like him; you can’t help liking him…’

  ‘Our young people seem to be getting on rather well, Mrs. Grimes,’ Geoffrey Wilson said one afternoon, with his wife smiling beside him. ‘Perhaps it’s time for us to get better acquainted.’

  Emily had often seen her mother flirt with men before, but never quite so openly as the way she flirted with Geoffrey Wilson. ‘Oh, that’s marvelous!’she would cry at his every minor witticism, and then she’d dissolve into peals of deep-throated laughter, pressing her middle finger coquettishly against her upper lip to conceal the fact that her gums were shrinking and her teeth going bad.

  And Emily thought the man was funny – it wasn’t so much what he said, she decided, as the way he said it – but she was embarrassed by Pookie’s enthusiasm. Besides, a little too much of Geoffrey Wilson’s humor depended on his strange delivery, in which the heavy English accent seemed compounded by a speech impediment: he talked as though he held a billiard ball in his mouth. His wife Edna was pleasant and plump and drank a good deal of sherry.

  Emily was always included in her mother’s afternoons and evenings with the Wilsons – she would sit quietly and nibble salted crackers through their talk and laughter – but she would much rather have been out with Sarah and Tony, riding in that splendid old car with her hair blowing attractively in the wind, strolling with them along some deserted beach and then coming back to Manhattan at midnight and sitting in their special booth at Anatole’s while the pianist played their song.

  ‘Do you and Tony have a song?’ she asked Sarah.

  ‘A song?’ Sarah was painting her fingernails, and she was in a hurry because Tony would call for her in fifteen minutes. ‘Well, Tony likes “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” but I sort of like “All the Things You Are.”’

  ‘Oh,’ Emily said, and now she had music to accompany her fantasies. ‘Well, they’re both good songs.’

  ‘And you know what we do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, when we’re having our first drink we kind of hook our arms around each other’s like this – here, I’ll show you. Careful of my nails.’ And she slipped her wrist through the crook of Emily’s elbow and brought an imaginary glass to her own lips. ‘Like that. Isn’t that nice?’

  It certainly was. Everything about Sarah’s romance with Tony was almost too nice to be borne.

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Would you go all the way with him if he asked you to?’

  ‘You mean before we’re married? Oh, Emily, don’t be ridiculous.’

  So it wasn’t quite as profound a romance as some she’d read about, but even so it was very, very nice. That night Emily lay steaming in her bath for a long time, and when she’d gotten out and dried herself, with the bathwater slowly draining away, she stood posing naked at the mirror. Because her breasts were so meager she concentrated on the beauty of her shoulders and her neck. She pouted and parted her lips very slightly, the way girls did in the movies when they were just about to be kissed.

  ‘Oh, you’re lovely,’ said a phantom young man with an English accent, just out of camera range. ‘I’ve wanted to say this for days, for weeks, and now I must: it’s you I love, Emily.’

  ‘I love you too, Tony,’ she whispered, and her nipples began to harden and rise of their own accord. Somewhere in the background a small orchestra played ‘All the Things You Are.’

  ‘I want to hold you. Oh, let me hold you and I’ll never let you go.’

  ‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Tony.’

  ‘I need you, Emily. Will you – will you go all the way with me?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes, Tony, I will. I will…’

  ‘Emmy?’ her mother called from outside the locked door. ‘You’ve been in that bathroom over an hour. What’re you doing in there?’

  At Easter time Sarah’s employers lent her an expensive dress of heavy silk, said to be a model of the kind of clothes worn by aristocratic Chinese ladies before the war, and a broad-brimmed hat of closely woven straw. Her assignment was to mingle with the fashionable crowds on upper Fifth Avenue and to get her picture taken by a photographer from the public relations office.

  ‘Oh, you look stunning, dear,’ Pookie said on Easter morning. ‘I’ve never seen you look so lovely.’

  But Sarah only frowned, which made her all the lovelier. ‘I don’t care about the silly Easter parade,’ she said. ‘Tony and I were planning to drive out to Amagansett today.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Pookie said. ‘It’ll only be for an hour or two; Tony won’t mind.’

  Then Tony came in and said ‘Oh, I say. Smashing.’ And after looking at Sarah for a long time he said ‘Look; I’ve an idea. Can you wait five minutes?’

  They heard him charge upstairs, seeming to shake the old house, and when he came back he was wearing an English cutaway, complete with flowing ascot, dove-gray waistcoat and striped trousers.

  ‘Oh, Tony,’ Sarah said.

  ‘It wants a pressing,’ he said, turning around for their admiration and shooting his cuffs, ‘and one really ought to have a gray topper, but I think it’ll do. Ready?’

  Emily and Pookie watched from the windows as the open car rolled past on its way uptown – Tony turning briefly from the wheel to smile at them, Sarah holding her hat in place with one hand and waving with the other – and then they were gone.

  The public relations photographer did his job well, and so did the editors of the rotogravure section of The New York Times. The picture came out the following Sunday in a pageful of other, less striking ph
otographs. The camera had caught Sarah and Tony smiling at each other like the very soul of romance in the April sunshine, with massed trees and a high corner of the Plaza hotel just visible behind them.

  ‘I can get eight-by-ten glossies from the office,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ Pookie said. ‘Get as many as you can. And let’s get more newspapers, too. Emmy? Get some money out of my purse. Run down to the newsstand and get four more papers. Get six.’

  ‘I can’t carry that many.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  And whether she was annoyed or not as she left the house, Emily knew how important it was to have as many copies as possible. It was a picture that could be mounted and framed and treasured forever.

  Chapter 3

  They were married in the fall of 1941, in a small Episcopal church of Pookie’s choosing. Emily thought the wedding was nice enough, except that the dress she had to wear as bridesmaid seemed contrived to call attention to her small breasts, and also that her mother wept throughout the ceremony. Pookie had spent a lot of money on her own dress and rich little hat, both in a new shade called Shocking Pink, and she’d spent many days regaling anyone who would listen with the same weak joke. ‘How would that look in the newspapers?’ she asked time and again, pressing her middle finger to her upper lip. “The bride’s mother wore Shocking Pink!”’ She drank too much at the reception, too, and when the time came for her to dance with Geoffrey Wilson she batted her eyelids and sank as dreamily into his arms as if it were he and not his son who looked like Laurence Olivier. He was visibly embarrassed and tried to loosen his hold on her back, but she clung to him like a slug.

  Walter Grimes kept mostly to himself at the party; he stood nursing his scotch, ready to smile at Sarah whenever she smiled at him.

  Sarah and Tony went to Cape Cod for a week, while Emily lay worrying about them. (What if Sarah was too nervous to do it right the first time? And if it wasn’t right the first time, what could you possibly talk about while you waited to try again? And if it became a matter of trying, wouldn’t that spoil everything?) Then they settled into what Pookie described as a ‘wretched little apartment’ near the Magnum Aircraft plant.

  ‘But that’s only temporary,’ she would tell her friends on the telephone. ‘In a few months they’ll be moving into the Wilsons’ estate. Have I told you about the Wilsons’ estate?’

  Geoffrey Wilson had inherited, from his father, eight acres of land in the hamlet of St. Charles, on the North Shore of Long Island. The place had a fourteen-room main house (Pookie always described it as ‘a wonderful old house,’ though she hadn’t yet seen it); that was where Geoffrey and Edna would live as soon as the present tenants’ lease expired next year. And there was a separate cottage on the property that would be perfect for Sarah and Tony; didn’t that sound like the ideal arrangement?

  Pookie talked so much about the Wilsons’ estate all winter that she seemed scarcely to realize the war had started, but Emily realized almost nothing else. Tony was an American citizen, after all; he would probably be drafted and trained and sent somewhere to have his handsome head blown off.

  ‘Tony says it’s nothing to worry about,’ Sarah assured her, one day when Emily and Pookie went out to visit the ‘wretched’ apartment. ‘Even if he is drafted he’s pretty sure the higher-ups at Magnum will arrange to get him assigned back to the plant as enlisted naval personnel. Because Tony doesn’t just work at Magnum; he’s practically an engineer. He had almost three years’ apprenticeship with an engineering firm in England – that’s the way they do it over there, you see, they have apprenticeships instead of engineering school – and the people at Magnum realize that. He’s a valuable man.’

  He didn’t look very valuable when he came home from the plant that afternoon, wearing green work clothes with an employee identification badge clipped over his heart, carrying his tin lunch box under his arm, but despite that costume he managed to radiate the old elegant vigor and charm. Maybe Sarah was right.

  ‘I say,’ he said. ‘Won’t you join us for a drink?’

  He and Sarah sat close together on the sofa and carefully went through the ritual from Anatole’s, entwining their arms to take the first sip.

  ‘Do you always do that?’ Emily inquired.

  ‘Always,’ Sarah said.

  That spring Emily was awarded a full scholarship to Barnard College.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Pookie said. ‘Oh, darling, I’m so proud of you. Just think: you’ll be the first member of our family with a college education.’

  ‘Except for Daddy, you mean.’

  ‘Oh. Well, yes, I suppose that’s right; but I meant our family. Anyway, it’s just wonderful. Tell you what let’s do. Let’s call Sarah right away and tell her, and then you and I’ll get all dolled up and go out and celebrate.’

  They did call Sarah – she said she was very pleased – and then Emily said ‘I’m going to call Daddy now, okay?’

  ‘Oh. Well, all right, certainly, if you want to.’

  ‘… A full scholarship?’ he said. ‘Wow. You must have really impressed those people…’

  She arranged to meet him for lunch the following day, in one of the dark basement restaurants he liked near City Hall.

  She got there first and waited near the coatroom, and she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn’t quite clean.

  ‘Hello, honey,’ he said. ‘My God, you’re getting tall. We’d like a booth for two, George.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr. Grimes.’

  And maybe he was only a copy-desk man, but the head-waiter knew his name. The waiter knew him too – knew just which kind of whiskey to bring and set before him.

  ‘That’s really great about Barnard,’ he said. ‘It’s the best news I’ve had in I don’t know how long.’ Then he coughed and said ‘Excuse me.’

  The drink brightened him – his eyes shone and his mouth tightened pleasantly – and he had a second one before the food arrived.

  ‘Did you go through Syracuse on a scholarship, Daddy?’ she asked. ‘Or did you pay your way?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘“Go through Syracuse?” Honey, I didn’t “go through.” I only went to Syracuse for a year, then I started working on the town paper up there.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You mean you thought I was a college graduate? Where’d you get that idea? Your mother?’

  ‘I guess so, yes.’

  ‘Well, your mother has her own way of dealing with information.’

  He didn’t eat all of his lunch, and when the coffee came he peered down at it as if it didn’t appeal to him either. ‘I wish Sarah could have gone to college,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s fine that she’s happily married, and all that, but still. Education is a wonderful thing.’ Then the cough hit him again. He had to turn away from the table and press a handkerchief to his mouth and nose, and a small vein stood out in his temple as he coughed and coughed. When it was over, or nearly over, he reached for his water glass and took a sip. That seemed to help – he was able to take several deep breaths – but then his breath caught and he was coughing again.

  ‘You do have a bad cold,’ she said when he’d recovered.

  ‘Oh, it’s only partly the cold; it’s mainly the damn cigarettes. You know something? Twenty years from now cigarettes’ll be against the law. People’ll have to get them from bootleggers, the way we did with liquor during Prohibition. Have you thought about what you’ll major in?’

  ‘English, I think.’

  ‘Good. You’ll read a lot of good books. Oh, you’ll read some that aren’t so good, too, but you’ll learn to distinguish between them. You’ll live in the world of ideas for four whole years before you have to concern yourself with anything as trivial as the demands of workaday reality – that’s what’s nice about college. Would you like some dessert, little rabbit?’

  When she got home that day she thought of facing down her mother with the truth about Syracus
e, but decided against it. There was no hope of changing Pookie.

  Nor was there any hope, it seemed, of changing the way they had come to spend their evenings together since Sarah’s marriage. Occasionally the Wilsons would invite them upstairs, or come down; more often the two of them sat reading magazines in the living room, while cars and Fifth Avenue buses droned past the windows. One or the other of them might make a plate of fudge, more to kill time than to satisfy any real craving, and on Sundays there were good programs on the radio, but for the most part they were as idle as if they had nothing to do but wait for the telephone to ring. And what could be less likely than that? Who would want to call up an aging divorcée with rotten teeth, or a plain, skinny girl who moped around feeling sorry for herself all the time?

  One night Emily spent half an hour watching her mother turn the pages of a magazine. Pookie would slowly, absently wipe her thumb against her moist lower lip and then wipe the thumb against the lower right-hand corner of each page, for easier turning; it left the corners of all the pages wrinkled and faintly smeared with lipstick. And tonight she had eaten fudge, which meant there would be traces of fudge as well as lipstick on the pages. Emily found she couldn’t watch the process without grinding her teeth. It made her scalp prickle too, and made her squirm in her chair. She got up.

  ‘I think I’ll go to a movie,’ she said. ‘There’s supposed to be a fairly good one at the Eighth Street Playhouse.’

  ‘Oh. Well, all right, dear, if you want to.’