Richard Yates Read online

  She escaped to the bathroom to comb her hair, and then she was free of the house, walking out into Washington Square, taking deep breaths of the gentle air and taking a small but honest pride in the fit and hang of her almost-new yellow dress. It was just after dark and the park lamps were glowing in the trees.

  ‘Excuse me, miss,’ said a tall soldier walking beside her. ‘Can you tell me where Nick’s is? The jazz place?’

  And she stopped in perplexity. ‘Well, I know where it is – I mean I’ve been there a few times – but it’s sort of hard to tell you how to get there from here. I guess the best thing would be to go down Waverly to Sixth Avenue, no, Seventh Avenue, and then turn left – I mean right – and go uptown about four or five – no, wait; your quickest way would be to go down Eighth Street to Greenwich Avenue; that’ll take you…’

  And the whole time she was babbling that way, waving her hands to make inaccurate directions, he stood smiling patiently down at her. He was a homely boy with kind eyes, and he looked very trim in his bright tan summer uniform.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said when she was finished. ‘But I got a better idea. How’d you like to take a ride on a Fifth Avenue bus?’

  Climbing the steep, curved staircase of an open-topped double-decker had never before seemed the beginning of a perilous adventure, nor had it ever made her aware of the pump of her heart. When they rode past her house she shrank away from the railing and averted her face in case Pookie happened to be looking out the window.

  One lucky thing was that the soldier did most of the talking. His name was either Warren Maddock or Warren Maddox – she would have to ask him to clear that up later. He was on a three-day pass from Camp Croft, South Carolina, where he had completed infantry training, and he would soon be ‘shipped out to a division,’ whatever that meant. His home was a small town in Wisconsin; he was the oldest of four brothers, and his father was in the roofing business. This was his first visit to New York.

  ‘You lived here all your life, Emily?’

  ‘No; I lived mostly in the suburbs.’

  ‘I see. Must be funny for a person to live here all their life, never get a chance to get out and run or anything. I mean it’s a great city, don’t get me wrong; I just mean I think the country’s better for growing up. You in high school?’

  ‘Not any more. I’m going to Barnard College in the fall.’ After a moment she added ‘I have a scholarship there.’

  ‘A scholarship! Hey, you must be smart. I better watch my step around a girl like you.’ And with that he let his hand slip from the wooden back of the seat to hold her shoulder; his big thumb began massaging the flesh near her collarbone as he talked.

  ‘What kind of work’s your dad do?’

  ‘He’s a newspaperman.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Is that the Empire State Building up ahead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so. Funny, I’ve seen pictures of it, but you don’t really get the idea how big it is. You’ve got nice hair, Emily. I never have much liked curly hair on a girl; straight hair’s a lot nicer…’

  Somewhere above Forty-second Street he kissed her. It wasn’t the first time she’d been kissed – not even the first time she’d been kissed on top of a Fifth Avenue bus; one of the boys in high school had been that brave – but it was the first kiss of its kind, ever.

  At Fifty-ninth he mumbled ‘Let’s take a walk,’ and helped her down the rumbling stairs; then they were in Central Park, and his arm was still around her. This part of the park was crawling with soldiers and girls: they sat necking on benches, and they walked in groups or in couples with their arms around each other. Some of the walking girls had let their fingers slip into their soldiers’ hip pockets; others held them higher, up under the ribcage. She wondered if she was expected to put her arm around Warren Maddock, or Maddox, but it seemed too early in their acquaintance for that. Still, she had kissed him: could ‘early’ or ‘late’ be said to matter any more?

  He was still talking. ‘No, but it’s funny: sometimes you meet a girl and it doesn’t seem right at all; other times it does. Like, I’ve only known you for about half an hour, and now we’re old friends…’

  He steered her down a path where there didn’t seem to be any lights at all. As they walked he dropped his hand from her shoulder and worked it up under her arm to cradle one breast. His thumb began to stroke her erect, extraordinarily sensitive nipple, which weakened her knees, and her arm went around his back as a matter of course.

  ‘… A lot of guys just want one thing from a girl, especially after they’re in the Army; I don’t understand that. I like to get to know a girl – get to know her whole personality, you know what I mean? You’re nice, Emily; I always have liked skinny girls – I mean you know, slender girls…’

  Only when she felt grass and earth underfoot did she realize they had left the path. He was leading her out across a small meadow, and when they came into near-total darkness under a rustling tree there was nothing awkward about the way they sank to the ground together: it was as smooth as a maneuver on a dance floor, and it seemed dictated by his thumb on her nipple. For a little while they lay writhing together and kissing; then his big hand was moving high up her thigh and he was saying ‘Oh, let me, Emily, let me… It’s okay, I’ve got something… Just let me, Emily…’

  She didn’t say yes, but she certainly didn’t say no. Everything he did – even when he helped her to free one foot from her underpants – seemed to happen because it was urgently necessary: she was helpless and he was helping her, and nothing else mattered in the world.

  She expected pain but there wasn’t time to brace herself before it was there – it took her by surprise – and with it there began an insistent pleasure, building to what gave every promise of ecstasy before it dwindled and died. He slipped out of her, sank one knee into the grass beside her leg and rolled away, breathing hard; then he rolled back and took her in his arms. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’ He smelled pleasantly of fresh sweat and starched cotton.

  She felt sore and moist and thought she might be bleeding, but the worst thing was being afraid they would find nothing to talk about. What did you talk about, after something like this? When they were back under a park lamp she said ‘Is my dress dirty?’ and after he had put on his overseas cap with great care he fell a step behind her to look.

  ‘Naw, it’s fine,’ he said. ‘You didn’t even get any grass stains. Want to go for a malted or something?’

  He took her in a taxi to Times Square, where they drank big chocolate malteds at a stand-up counter and didn’t talk at all. Her stomach seemed to constrict on receiving the stuff – she knew she would be sick – but she drank it anyway because it was better than standing there with nothing to say. By the time she’d finished it her nausea was so acute she didn’t know if she could make it all the way home before vomiting.

  ‘Ready?’ he said, wiping his mouth, and guided her out to the crowded sidewalk by one elbow. ‘Now you tell me where you live, and we’ll see if we can find it on the subway.’

  Everyone they passed looked grotesque, like figures in a fever dream: a leering, bespectacled sailor, a drunken Negro in a purple suit, a muttering old woman carrying four greasy shopping bags. There was a wire-mesh municipal trash container on the corner and she ran for it and made it just in time. He came up behind her and tried to hold her arms during the seizure but she shook free of him: she wanted to go through this bleak, humiliating business alone. When the spasms were over, even the dry ones, she found some Kleenex in her purse and cleaned her mouth, but the taste of vomited chocolate malted was still rich in her throat and nose.

  ‘You okay, Emily?’ he inquired. ‘Want me to get you a drink of water?’

  ‘No, that’s all right. I’m fine. I’m sorry.’

  On the downtown IRT local he sat reading the advertisements or inspecting the faces of passengers across the aisle, saying nothing. Even if she’d known how to start a conversation the train was too loud – they would ha
ve had to shout – and soon another, more dismal thought occurred to her: now that she’d vomited, he wouldn’t want to kiss her goodnight. When they got off the train the fresh air felt good, but their silence continued all the way to Washington Square and to the approximate place in the park where they’d met.

  ‘Where’s your home, Emily?’

  ‘Oh, you’d better not take me home. I’ll just say goodnight here.’

  ‘You sure? Will you be okay?’

  ‘Sure. I’m fine.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ And sure enough, all he did was squeeze her arm and give her a little kiss on the cheek. ‘Take care, now,’ he said.

  Only after turning back to watch him walk away did she realize how much was wrong: they hadn’t exchanged addresses and promises to write; she wasn’t even sure of his last name.

  ‘Emmy?’ Pookie called from her bed. ‘How was the movie?’

  A week later Pookie answered a ringing telephone at ten o’clock in the morning. ‘… Oh; yes, hello… He what? Oh my God… When?… I see… God… Oh, God…’

  And when she’d hung up the phone she said ‘Your father died this morning, dear.’

  ‘He did?’ Emily sat down in a creaking straight chair with her hands in her lap, and she would always remember that on first hearing the news she felt nothing at all.

  Pookie said ‘God’ a few more times, as if waiting for it to sink in, and then she began to weep. When her sobs had abated she said ‘It was pneumonia. He’d been sick for over a week and the doctor was trying to treat him at home, but you know Daddy.’

  ‘What do you mean, I “know” him?’

  ‘I mean you know; as long as he was in his own apartment he had his scotch and his cigarettes. Then finally he agreed to go into the hospital yesterday, but it was too late.’

  ‘Who called you? The hospital?’

  ‘Mrs. Hammond. You know. Irene Hammond, your father’s friend.’

  But Emily didn’t know – she’d never heard of Irene Hammond – and now as it occurred to her that Irene Hammond had probably been much more than a friend she began to feel something for the first time. It wasn’t grief, exactly; it was more like regret.

  ‘Oh, how I dread calling Sarah,’ Pookie said. ‘She’s always been her father’s baby.’

  When she did call her, Emily could tell just from hearing Pookie’s end of the talk that Sarah’s grief was immediate and profound. But if Sarah had always been her father’s baby, whose baby was Emily?

  At the mortuary they had laid Walter Grimes out to look much younger than his fifty-six years; they’d given him pink cheeks and lips, and Emily didn’t want to look at him. But Sarah leaned over and kissed the corpse on the forehead; then Pookie kissed it on the mouth, which made Emily shudder.

  Irene Hammond turned out to be a trim, nice-looking woman in her forties. ‘I’ve heard so much about you girls,’ she said, and when she shook Tony Wilson’s hand she said she’d heard a lot about him too. Then she turned back to Emily and said ‘I can’t tell you how pleased your father was about that scholarship.’

  The crematory was somewhere in Westchester County, and they rode out there in the limousine following the hearse – Sarah and Tony on the jump seats, Pookie and Emily in back. Behind them came another car carrying Irene Hammond and the few of Walter Grimes’s relatives who’d been able to come down from upstate, and then came other cars bringing employees of the New York Sun.

  There wasn’t much of a ceremony at the chapel. An electric organ played, a tired-looking man read a few nondenominational prayers, the casket was removed, and it was over.

  ‘Wait,’ Sarah said as they filed outside, and she hurried back to her pew and crouched alone to let a last convulsion of sobbing overcome her. It was as if all her mourning in the past few days had not been quite enough – it was required that her bowed face crumple and her shoulders shake one final time.

  And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering ‘Daddy’ to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn’t work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father’s baby, but he had always called her ‘little rabbit.’ And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn’t be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division.

  But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself – for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.

  Chapter 4

  Sarah gave birth to three sons in three years, and the way Emily could always keep track of their ages was by thinking: Tony Junior was born in my freshman year; Peter in my sophomore year; Eric when I was a junior.

  ‘Oh dear, the way they’re breeding,’ Pookie said on hearing of the third pregnancy. ‘I thought only Italian peasants did things like that.’

  The third pregnancy turned out to be the last – the boys would remain a family of three – but Pookie always managed to suggest, with a rueful little rolling of the eyes, that three was plenty.

  Even the news of the first pregnancy had seemed to upset her. ‘Well, of course I’m pleased,’ she’d told Emily. ‘It’s just that Sarah’s so young.’ Pookie had given up the place on Washington Square; she’d found modest employment in a Greenwich Village real estate office and moved into a small walk-up just off Hudson Street. Emily had come down from Barnard to spend a weekend with her, and Pookie was fixing sardine sandwiches for lunch. She pried the last oily shred of sardine from the can with two fingers. ‘Besides,’ she said, and sucked the fingers. ‘Besides, can you imagine me as a grandmother?’

  Emily wanted to say I can’t even imagine you as a mother, but controlled herself. The important thing on these weekends was to survive them; and tomorrow they were going out to St. Charles, Long Island, for Emily’s first pilgrimage to the Wilsons’ estate.

  ‘How far, did you say?’

  ‘Oh, I forget the exact number of miles,’ Pookie said, ‘but it’s only a couple of hours on the train. It’s really quite a pleasant trip, if you take along something to read.’

  Emily took along one of her freshman English texts, but she’d scarcely settled down with it before the conductor punched their tickets and said ‘Change a jamake.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘You always have to change at Jamaica for the St. Charles train,’ Pookie explained. ‘It doesn’t take long.’

  But it did: they stood for half an hour on the windy Jamaica platform before their train came clattering in, and that was only the beginning of the journey. Were all Long Island trains this loud and dirty and badly in need of repair, or only those going to St. Charles?

  When they got off at the tiny station at last Pookie said ‘There aren’t any taxis, of course, because of the war, but it’s only a short walk. Aren’t the trees beautiful? Smell this fresh air!’

  On the short main street of St. Charles they passed a liquor store and a hardware store and a grubby little store offering BLOOD AND SAND WORMS; then they were on a country road, and the heels of Emily’s spectator pumps kept turning under her as she walked. ‘Is it much farther?’ she asked.

  ‘Just beyond this next field. Then we go past a wooded area that’s part of the estate, and then we’re there. I can’t get over how beautiful everything is.’

  And Emily was willing to acknowledge that the place was nice. Overgrown, but nice. A driveway led off the road into the trees and the high, rustling hedges; where it forked Pookie said ‘The main house is over there – you can just see a corner of it, but we’ll see it later – and Sarah’s cottage is this way.’

  It was a bungalow o
f white clapboard with a little lawn, and Sarah came out to greet them on the lawn. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the House at Pooh Corner.’ She said that as if she’d rehearsed it, and the way she was dressed showed considerable preparation too: bright, fresh maternity clothes that might have been bought for the occasion. She looked lovely.

  She served a lunch that was almost as inadequate as one of Pookie’s meals; then the problem was that the conversation kept petering out. Sarah wanted to hear ‘everything’ about Barnard, but when Emily began to talk she saw her sister’s eyes glaze over in smiling boredom. Pookie said ‘Isn’t this nice? Just the three of us together again?’ But it wasn’t really very nice at all, and for most of the afternoon they sat around the sparsely furnished living room in attitudes of forced conviviality, Pookie smoking many cigarettes and dropping ashes on the rug, three women with nothing much to say to one another. Color illustrations of Magnum Navy fighter planes in action occupied one wall; on another was the framed Easter photograph of Sarah and Tony.

  Geoffrey Wilson had invited them over to the main house for a drink, and Pookie kept watching the clock: she didn’t want to be late.

  ‘You two go ahead,’ Sarah said. ‘If Tony gets home in time we’ll join you, but he probably won’t; he’s been putting in a lot of overtime lately.’

  So they went to the main house without her. It was built of white clapboard too, and it was long and ugly – three stories high in some places and two in others, with black-roofed gables jutting into the trees. The first thing that hit you when you went inside was the smell of mildew. It seeped from the brown oil paintings in the vestibule, from the creaking floor and carpets and walls and gaunt furniture of the long, dark living room.

  ‘… It’s an old house,’ Geoffrey Wilson was saying as he poured a shot of whiskey for Pookie, ‘and it’s too big to manage without servants, but we try to cope. Will you have scotch too, Emily, or will you join Edna in some sherry?’

  ‘Sherry, please.’