The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

by Richard Yates

“Oh, I see,” Myra said. “It’s like what we used to do when I was a kid, only we did it with a regular little spool, with nails stuck in it? You wind string around the nails and pull it through the spool and it makes sort of a knitted rope, like.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Harry said. “With a spool, huh? Yeah, I think my sister used to do that too, now that I think of it. With a spool. You’re right, this is the same principle, only bigger.”

  “What’re you going to make?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I’m just fooling around with it. Thought I might make a stocking cap or something. I don’t know.” He inspected his work, turning the knitting-rake around in his hands, then leaned over and put it away in his bed stand. “It’s just something to do.”

  She offered him the pack and he took a cigarette. When he bent forward to take the match the yellow pajamas gaped open and she saw his chest, unbelievably thin, partly caved-in on one side where the ribs were gone. She could just see the end of the ugly, newly healed scar from the last operation.

  “Thanks, honey,” he said, the cigarette wagging in his lips, and he leaned back against the pillows, stretching out his socked feet on the spread.

  “How’re you feeling, Harry?” she said.

  “Feeling fine.”

  “You’re looking better,” she lied. “If you can gain a little weight now, you’ll look fine.”

  “Pay up,” said a voice over the din of the radios, and Myra looked around to see a little man coming down the center aisle in a wheelchair, walking the chair slowly with his feet, as all TB patients did to avoid the chest strain of turning the wheels with their hands. He was headed for Harry’s bed, grinning with yellow teeth. “Pay up,” he said again as the wheelchair came to a stop beside the bed. A piece of rubber tubing protruded from some kind of bandage on his chest. It coiled across his pajama top, held in place by a safety pin, and ended in a small rubber-capped bottle which rode heavily in his breast pocket. “Come on, come on,” he said. “Pay up.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Harry said, laughing. “I forgot all about it, Walter.” From the drawer of his bed stand he got out a dollar bill and handed it to the man, who folded it with thin fingers and put it in his pocket, along with the bottle.

  “Okay, Harry,” he said. “All squared away now, right?”

  “Right, Walter.”

  He backed the wheelchair up and turned it around, and Myra saw that his chest, back and shoulders were crumpled and misshapen. “Sorry to butt in,” he said, turning the sickly grin on Myra.

  She smiled. “That’s all right.” When he had gone up the aisle again, she said, “What was that all about?”

  “Oh, we had a bet on the fight Friday night. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “Oh. Have I met him before?”

  “Who, Walter? Sure, I think so, honey. You must’ve met him when I was over in surgery. Old Walter was in surgery more’n two years; they just brought him back here last week. Kid’s had a rough time of it. He’s got plenty of guts.”

  “What’s that thing on his pajamas? That bottle?”

  “He’s draining,” Harry said, settling back against the yellow pillows. “Old Walter’s a good guy; I’m glad he’s back.” Then he lowered his voice, confidentially. “Matter of fact, he’s one of the few really good guys left in this ward, with so many of the old crowd gone now, or over in surgery.”

  “Don’t you like the new boys?” Myra asked, keeping her own voice low so that Red O’Meara, who was relatively new, wouldn’t hear. “They seem perfectly nice to me.”

  “Oh, they’re all right, I guess,” Harry said. “I just mean, well, I get along better with guys like Walter, that’s all. We been through a lot together, or something. I don’t know. These new guys get on your nerves sometimes, the way they talk. For instance, there’s not one of them knows anything about TB, and they all of them think they know it all; you can’t tell them anything. I mean, a thing like that can get on your nerves.”

  Myra said she guessed she saw what he meant, and then it seemed that the best thing to do was change the subject. “Irene thought the hospital looked real pretty, with the Christmas tree and all.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Very carefully, Harry reached over and flicked his cigarette into the spotless ashtray on his bed stand. All his habits were precise and neat from living so long in bed. “How’re things going at the office, honey?”

  “Oh, all right, I guess. Remember I told you about that girl Janet that got fired for staying out too long at lunch, and we were all scared they’d start cracking down on that half-hour lunch period?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Harry said, but she could tell he didn’t remember and wasn’t really listening.

  “Well, it seems to be all blown over now, because last week Irene and three other girls stayed out almost two hours and nobody said a word. And one of them, a girl named Rose, has been kind of expecting to get fired for a couple of months now, and they didn’t even say anything to her.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Harry said. “Well, that’s good.”

  There was a pause. “Harry?” she said.

  “What, honey?”

  “Have they told you anything new?”

  “Anything new?”

  “I mean, about whether or not you’re going to need the operation on the other side.”

  “Oh, no, honey. I told you, we can’t expect to hear anything on that for quite some time yet—I thought I explained all that.” His mouth was smiling and his eyes frowning to show it had been a foolish question. It was the same look he always used to give her at first, long ago, when she would say, “But when do you think they’ll let you come home?” Now he said, “Thing is, I’ve still got to get over this last one. You got to do one thing at a time in this business; you need a long postoperative period before you’re really in the clear, especially with a record of breakdowns like I’ve had in the last—what is it, now—four years? No, what they’ll do is wait awhile, I don’t know, maybe six months, maybe longer, and see how this side’s coming along. Then they’ll decide about the other side. Might give me more surgery and they might not. You can’t count on anything in this business, honey, you know that.”

  “No, of course, Harry, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask stupid questions. I just meant, well, how’re you feeling and everything. You still have any pain?”

  “None at all, any more,” Harry said. “I mean, as long as I don’t go raising my arm too high or anything. When I do that it hurts, and sometimes I start to roll over on that side in my sleep, and that hurts too, but as long as I stay—you know—more or less in a normal position, why, there’s no pain whatsoever.”

  “That’s good,” she said, “I’m awfully glad to hear that anyway.”

  Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time, and in the noise of radios and the noise of laughing and coughing from other beds, their silence seemed strange. Harry began to riffle Popular Science absently with his thumb. Myra’s eyes strayed to the framed picture on his bed stand, an enlarged snapshot of the two of them just before their marriage, taken in her mother’s backyard in Michigan. She looked very young in the picture, leggy in her 1945 skirt, not knowing how to dress or even how to stand, knowing nothing and ready for anything with a child’s smile. And Harry—but the surprising thing was that Harry looked older in the picture, somehow, than he did now. Probably it was the thicker face and build, and of course the clothes helped—the dark, decorated Eisenhower jacket and the gleaming boots. Oh, he’d been good-looking, all right, with his set jaw and hard gray eyes—much better looking, for instance, than a too stocky, too solid man like Jack. But now with the loss of weight there had been a softening about the lips and eyes that gave him the look of a thin little boy. His face had changed to suit the pajamas.

  “Sure am glad you brought me this,” Harry said of his Popular Science. “They got an article in here I want to read.”

  “Good,” she said, and she wanted to say: Can’t it wait until I’ve gone?

  Harry flipped
the magazine on its face, fighting the urge to read, and said, “How’s everything else, honey? Outside of the office, I mean.”

  “All right,” she said. “I had a letter from Mother the other day, kind of a Christmas letter. She sent you her best regards.”

  “Good,” Harry said, but the magazine was winning. He flipped it over again, opened it to his article and read a few lines very casually—as if only to make sure it was the right article—and then lost himself in it.

  Myra lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of her last one, picked up the Life and began to turn the pages. From time to time she looked up to watch him; he lay biting a knuckle as he read, scratching the sole of one socked foot with the curled toe of the other.

  They spent the rest of the visiting hour that way. Shortly before eight o’clock a group of people came down the aisle, smiling and trundling a studio piano on rubber-tired casters—the Sunday night Red Cross entertainers. Mrs. Balacheck led the procession; a kindly, heavyset woman in uniform, who played. Then came the piano, pushed by a pale young tenor whose lips were always wet, and then the female singers: a swollen soprano in a taffeta dress that looked tight under the arms and a stern-faced, lean contralto with a briefcase. They wheeled the piano close to Harry’s bed, in the approximate middle of the ward, and began to unpack their sheet music.

  Harry looked up from his reading. “Evening, Mrs. Balacheck.”

  Her glasses gleamed at him. “How’re you tonight, Harry? Like to hear a few Christmas carols tonight?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  One by one the radios were turned off and the chattering died. But just before Mrs. Balacheck hit the keys a stocky nurse intervened, thumping rubber-heeled down the aisle with a hand outstretched to ward off the music until she could make an announcement. Mrs. Balacheck sat back, and the nurse, craning her neck, called, “Visiting hour’s over!” to one end of the ward and, “Visiting hour’s over!” to the other. Then she nodded to Mrs. Balacheck, smiling behind her sterilized linen mask, and thumped away again. After a moment’s whispered counsel, Mrs. Balacheck began to play an introductory “Jingle Bells,” her cheeks wobbling, to cover the disturbance of departing visitors, while the singers retired to cough quietly among themselves; they would wait until their audience settled down.

  “Gee,” Harry said, “I didn’t realize it was that late. Here, I’ll walk you out to the door.” He sat up slowly and swung his feet to the floor.

  “No, don’t bother, Harry,” Myra said. “You lie still.”

  “No, that’s all right,” he said, wriggling into his slippers. “Will you hand me the robe, honey?” He stood up, and she helped him on with a corduroy VA bathrobe that was too short for him.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Chance,” Myra said, and Mr. Chance grinned and nodded. Then she said goodnight to Red O’Meara and the elderly man, and as they passed his wheelchair in the aisle, she said goodnight to Walter. She took Harry’s arm, startled at its thinness, and matched his slow steps very carefully. They stood facing each other in the small awkward crowd of visitors that lingered in the waiting room.

  “Well,” Harry said, “take care of yourself now, honey. See you next week.”

  “Oo-oo,” somebody’s mother said, plodding hump-shouldered out the door, “it is cold tonight.” She turned back to wave to her son, then grasped her husband’s arm and went down the steps to the snow-blown path. Someone else caught the door and held it open for other visitors to pass through, filling the room with a cold draft, and then it closed again, and Myra and Harry were alone.

  “All right, Harry,” Myra said, “you go back to bed and listen to the music, now.” He looked very frail standing there with his robe hanging open. She reached up and closed it neatly over his chest, took the dangling belt and knotted it firmly, while he smiled down at her. “Now you go on back in there before you catch cold.”

  “Okay. Goodnight, honey.”

  “Goodnight,” she said, and standing on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek. “Goodnight, Harry.”

  At the door she turned to watch him walk back to the ward in the tight, high-waisted robe. Then she went outside and down the steps, turning up her coat collar in the sudden cold. Marty’s car was not there; the road was bare except for the dwindling backs of the other visitors, passing under a streetlamp now as they made their way down to the bus stop near the Administration Building. She drew the coat more closely around her and stood close to the building for shelter from the wind.

  “Jingle Bells” ended inside, to muffled applause, and after a moment the program began in earnest. A few solemn chords sounded on the piano, and then the voices came through:

  “Hark, the herald angels sing,

  Glory to the newborn King . . .”

  All at once Myra’s throat closed up and the streetlights swam in her eyes. Then half her fist was in her mouth and she was sobbing wretchedly, making little puffs of mist that floated away in the dark. It took her a long time to stop, and each sniffling intake of breath made a high sharp noise that sounded as if it could be heard for miles. Finally it was over, or nearly over; she managed to control her shoulders, to blow her nose and put her handkerchief away, closing her bag with a reassuring, businesslike snap.

  Then the lights of the car came probing up the road. She ran down the path and stood waiting in the wind.

  Inside the car a warm smell of whiskey hung among the cherry-red points of cigarettes, and Irene’s voice squealed, “Oo-oo! Hurry up and shut the door!”

  Jack’s arms gathered her close as the door slammed, and in a thick whisper he said, “Hello, baby.”

  They were all a little drunk; even Marty was in high spirits. “Hold tight, everybody!” he called, as they swung around the Administration Building, past the Christmas tree, and leveled off for the straightaway to the gate, gaining speed. “Everybody hold tight!”

  Irene’s face floated chattering over the back of the front seat. “Myra, honey, listen, we found the most adorable little place down the road, kind of a roadhouse, like, only real inexpensive and everything? So listen, we wanna take you back there for a little drink, okay?”

  “Sure,” Myra said, “fine.”

  “’Cause I mean, we’re way ahead of you now anyway, and anyway I want you to see this place . . . Marty, will you take it easy!” She laughed. “Honestly, anybody else driving this car with what he’s had to drink in him, I’d be scared to death, you know it? But you never got to worry about old Marty. He’s the best old driver in the world, drunk, sober, I don’t care what he is.”

  But they weren’t listening. Deep in a kiss, Jack slipped his hand inside her coat, expertly around and inside all the other layers until it held the flesh of her breast. “All over being mad at me, baby?” he mumbled against her lips. “Wanna go have a little drink?”

  Her hands gripped the bulk of his back and clung there. Then she let herself be turned so that his other hand could creep secretly up her thigh. “All right,” she whispered, “but let’s only have one and then afterwards—”

  “Okay, baby, okay.”

  “—and then afterwards, darling, let’s go right home.”

  A Glutton for Punishment

  FOR A LITTLE while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it—the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around—and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds—a kind of hoarse-whispered “Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!”—with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poise
d for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he reveled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them; Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it.

  But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired. He had become a sober, keen-looking young man now, with clothes that showed the influence of an Eastern university and neat brown hair that was just beginning to thin out on top. Years of good health had made him less slight, and though he still had trouble with his coordination it showed up mainly in minor things nowadays, like an inability to coordinate his hat, his wallet, his theater tickets and his change without making his wife stop and wait for him, or a tendency to push heavily against doors marked “Pull.” He looked, at any rate, the picture of sanity and competence as he sat there in the office. No one could have told that the cool sweat of anxiety was sliding under his shirt, or that the fingers of his left hand, concealed in his pocket, were slowly grinding and tearing a book of matches into a moist cardboard pulp. He had seen it coming for weeks, and this morning, from the minute he got off the elevator, he had sensed that this was the day it would happen. When several of his superiors said, “Morning, Walt,” he had seen the faintest suggestion of concern behind their smiles; then once this afternoon, glancing out over the gate of the cubicle where he worked, he’d happened to catch the eye of George Crowell, the department manager, who was hesitating in the door of his private office with some papers in his hand. Crowell turned away quickly, but Walter knew he had been watching him, troubled but determined. In a matter of minutes, he felt sure, Crowell would call him in and break the news—with difficulty, of course, since Crowell was the kind of boss who took pride in being a regular guy. There was nothing to do now but let the thing happen and try to take it as gracefully as possible.