The first thing that hit him, when he let himself in the apartment door, was the smell of Brussels sprouts. The children were still at their supper in the kitchen: he could hear their high mumbled voices over the clink of dishes, and then his wife’s voice, tired and coaxing. When the door slammed he heard her say, “There’s Daddy now,” and the children began to call, “Daddy! Daddy!”
He put his hat carefully in the hall closet and turned around just as she appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on her apron and smiling through her tiredness. “Home on time for once,” she said. “How lovely. I was afraid you’d be working late again.”
“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t have to work late.” His voice had an oddly foreign, amplified sound in his own ears, as if he were speaking in an echo chamber.
“You do look tired, though, Walt. You look worn out.”
“Walked home, that’s all. Guess I’m not used to it. How’s everything?”
“Oh, fine.” But she looked worn out herself.
When they went together into the kitchen he felt encircled and entrapped by its humid brightness. His eyes roamed dolefully over the milk cartons, the mayonnaise jars and soup cans and cereal boxes, the peaches lined up to ripen on the windowsill, the remarkable frailty and tenderness of his two children, whose chattering faces were lightly streaked with mashed potato.
Things looked better in the bathroom, where he took longer than necessary over the job of washing up for dinner. At least he could be alone here, braced by splashings of cold water; the only intrusion was the sound of his wife’s voice rising in impatience with the older child: “All right, Andrew Henderson. No story for you tonight unless you finish up all that custard now.” A little later came the scraping of chairs and stacking of dishes that meant their supper was over, and the light scuffle of shoes and the slamming door that meant they had been turned loose in their room for an hour to play before bath time.
Walter carefully dried his hands; then he went out to the living-room sofa and settled himself there with a magazine, taking very slow, deep breaths to show how self-controlled he was. In a minute she came in to join him, her apron removed and her lipstick replenished, bringing the cocktail pitcher full of ice. “Oh,” she said with a sigh. “Thank God that’s over. Now for a little peace and quiet.”
“I’ll get the drinks, honey,” he said, bolting to his feet. He had hoped his voice might sound normal now, but it still came out with echo-chamber resonance.
“You will not,” she commanded. “You sit down. You deserve to sit still and be waited on, when you come home looking so tired. How did the day go, Walt?”
“Oh, all right,” he said, sitting down again. “Fine.” He watched her measuring out the gin and vermouth, stirring the pitcher in her neat, quick way, arranging the tray and bringing it across the room.
“There,” she said, settling herself close beside him. “Will you do the honors, darling?” And when he had filled the chilled glasses she raised hers and said, “Oh, lovely. Cheers.” This bright cocktail mood was a carefully studied effect, he knew. So was her motherly sternness over the children’s supper; so was the brisk, no-nonsense efficiency with which, earlier today, she had attacked the supermarket; and so, later tonight, would be the tenderness of her surrender in his arms. The orderly rotation of many careful moods was her life, or rather, was what her life had become. She managed it well, and it was only rarely, looking very closely at her face, that he could see how much the effort was costing her.
But the drink was a great help. The first bitter, ice-cold sip of it seemed to restore his calm, and the glass in his hand looked reassuringly deep. He took another sip or two before daring to look at her again, and when he did it was a heartening sight. Her smile was almost completely free of tension, and soon they were chatting together as comfortably as happy lovers.
“Oh, isn’t it nice just to sit down and unwind?” she said, allowing her head to sink back into the upholstery. “And isn’t it lovely to think it’s Friday night?”
“Sure is,” he said, and instantly put his mouth in his drink to hide his shock. Friday night! That meant there would be two days before he could even begin to look for a job—two days of mild imprisonment in the house, or of dealing with tricycles and popsicles in the park, without a hope of escaping the burden of his secret. “Funny,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten it was Friday.”
“Oh, how can you forget?” She squirmed luxuriously deeper into the sofa. “I look forward to it all week. Pour me just a tiny bit more, darling, and then I must get back to the chores.”
He poured a tiny bit more for her and a full glass for himself. His hand was shaking and he spilled a little of it, but she didn’t seem to notice. Nor did she seem to notice that his replies grew more and more strained as she kept the conversation going. When she got back to the chores—basting the roast, drawing the children’s baths, tidying up their room for the night—Walter sat alone and allowed his mind to slide into a heavy, gin-fuddled confusion. Only one persistent thought came through, a piece of self-advice that was as clear and cold as the drink that rose again and again to his lips: Hold on. No matter what she says, no matter what happens tonight or tomorrow or the next day, just hold on. Hold on.
But holding on grew less and less easy as the children’s splashing bath-noises floated into the room; it was more difficult still by the time they were brought in to say goodnight, carrying their teddy bears and dressed in clean pajamas, their faces shining and smelling of soap. After that, it became impossible to stay seated on the sofa. He sprang up and began stalking around the floor, lighting one cigarette after another, listening to his wife’s clear, modulated reading of the bedtime story in the next room (“You may go into the fields, or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden . . .”).
When she came out again, closing the children’s door behind her, she found him standing like a tragic statue at the window, looking down into the darkening courtyard. “What’s the matter, Walt?”
He turned on her with a false grin. “Nothing’s the matter,” he said in the echo-chamber voice, and the movie camera started rolling again. It came in for a close-up of his own tense face, then switched over to observe her movements as she hovered uncertainly at the coffee table.
“Well,” she said. “I’m going to have one more cigarette and then I must get the dinner on the table.” She sat down again—not leaning back this time, or smiling, for this was her busy, getting-the-dinner-on-the-table mood. “Have you got a match, Walt?”
“Sure.” And he came toward her, probing in his pocket as if to bring forth something he had been saving to give her all day.
“God,” she said. “Look at those matches. What happened to them?”
“These?” He stared down at the raddled, twisted matchbook as if it were a piece of incriminating evidence. “Must’ve been kind of tearing them up or something,” he said. “Nervous habit.”
“Thanks,” she said, accepting the light from his trembling fingers, and then she began to look at him with wide, dead-serious eyes. “Walt, there is something wrong, isn’t there?”
“Of course not. Why should there be anything wr—”
“Tell me the truth. Is it the job? Is it about—what you were afraid of last week? I mean, did anything happen today to make you think they might— Did Crowell say anything? Tell me.” The faint lines on her face seemed to have deepened. She looked severe and competent and suddenly much older, not even very pretty anymore—a woman used to dealing with emergencies, ready to take charge.
He began to walk slowly away toward an easy chair across the room, and the shape of his back was an eloquent statement of impending defeat. At the edge of the carpet he stopped and seemed to stiffen, a wounded man holding himself together; then he turned around and faced her with the suggestion of a melancholy smile.
“Well, darling—” he began. His right hand came up and touched the middle button of his shirt, as if to unfasten it, an
d then with a great deflating sigh he collapsed backward into the chair, one foot sliding out on the carpet and the other curled beneath him. It was the most graceful thing he had done all day. “They got me,” he said.
A Wrestler with Sharks
NOBODY HAD MUCH respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year—even they could take little pride in the thing. At least, that’s what I used to suspect from the way they’d hump grudgingly around the office, shivering the bile-green partitions with their thumps and shouts, grabbing and tearing at galley proofs, breaking pencil points, dropping wet cigar butts on the floor and slamming telephones contemptuously into their cradles. The Labor Leader was all either of them would ever have for a life’s work, and they seemed to hate it.
You couldn’t blame them: the thing was a monster. In format it was a fat biweekly tabloid, badly printed, that spilled easily out of your hands and was very hard to put together again in the right order; in policy it called itself “An Independent Newspaper Pledged to the Spirit of the Trade Union Movement,” but its real pitch was to be a kind of trade journal for union officials, who subscribed to it out of union funds and who must surely have been inclined to tolerate, rather than to want or need, whatever thin sustenance it gave to them. The Leader’s coverage of national events “from the labor angle” was certain to be stale, likely to be muddled, and often opaque with typographical errors; most of its dense columns were filled with flattering reports on the doings of the unions whose leaders were on the subscription list, often to the exclusion of much bigger news about those whose leaders weren’t. And every issue carried scores of simpleminded ads urging “Harmony” in the names of various small industrial firms that Finkel and Kramm had been able to beg or browbeat into buying space—a compromise that would almost certainly have hobbled a real labor paper but that didn’t, typically enough, seem to cramp the Leader’s style at all.
There was a fast turnover on the editorial staff. Whenever somebody quit, the Leader would advertise in the help-wanted section of the Times, offering a “moderate salary commensurate with experience.” This always brought a good crowd to the sidewalk outside the Leader’s office, a gritty storefront on the lower fringe of the garment district, and Kramm, who was the editor (Finkel was the publisher), would keep them all waiting for half an hour before he picked up a sheaf of application forms, shot his cuffs, and gravely opened the door—I think he enjoyed this occasional chance to play the man of affairs.
“All right, take your time,” he’d say, as they jostled inside and pressed against the wooden rail that shielded the inner offices. “Take your time, gentlemen.” Then he would raise a hand and say, “May I have your attention, please?” And he’d begin to explain the job. Half the applicants would go away when he got to the part about the salary structure, and most of those who remained offered little competition to anyone who was sober, clean and able to construct an English sentence.
That’s the way we’d all been hired, the six or eight of us who frowned under the Leader’s sickly fluorescent lights that winter, and most of us made no secret of our desire for better things. I went to work there a couple of weeks after losing my job on one of the metropolitan dailies, and stayed only until I was rescued the next spring by the big picture magazine that still employs me. The others had other explanations, which, like me, they spent a great deal of time discussing: it was a great place for shrill and redundant hard-luck stories.
But Leon Sobel joined the staff about a month after I did, and from the moment Kramm led him into the editorial room we all knew he was going to be different. He stood among the messy desks with the look of a man surveying new fields to conquer, and when Kramm introduced him around (forgetting half our names) he made a theatrically solemn business out of shaking hands. He was about thirty-five, older than most of us, a very small, tense man with black hair that seemed to explode from his skull and a humorless thin-lipped face that was blotched with the scars of acne. His eyebrows were always in motion when he talked, and his eyes, not so much piercing as anxious to pierce, never left the eyes of his listener.
The first thing I learned about him was that he’d never held an office job before: he had been a sheet-metal worker all his adult life. What’s more, he hadn’t come to the Leader out of need, like the rest of us, but, as he put it, out of principle. To do so, in fact, he had given up a factory job paying nearly twice the money.
“What’sa matter, don’tcha believe me?” he asked, after telling me this.
“Well, it’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that I—”
“Maybe you think I’m crazy,” he said, and screwed up his face into a canny smile.
I tried to protest, but he wouldn’t have it. “Listen, don’t worry, McCabe. I’m called crazy a lotta times already. It don’t bother me. My wife says, ‘Leon, you gotta expect it.’ She says, ‘People never understand a man who wants something more outa life than just money.’ And she’s right! She’s right!”
“No,” I said. “Wait a second. I—”
“People think you gotta be one of two things: either you’re a shark, or you gotta lay back and let the sharks eatcha alive—this is the world. Me, I’m the kinda guy’s gotta go out and wrestle with the sharks. Why? I dunno why. This is crazy? Okay.”
“Wait a second,” I said. And I tried to explain that I had nothing whatever against his striking a blow for social justice, if that was what he had in mind; it was just that I thought The Labor Leader was about the least likely place in the world for him to do it.
But his shrug told me I was quibbling. “So?” he said. “It’s a paper, isn’t it? Well, I’m a writer. And what good’s a writer if he don’t get printed? Listen.” He lifted one haunch and placed it on the edge of my desk—he was too short a man to do this gracefully, but the force of his argument helped him to bring it off. “Listen, McCabe. You’re a young kid yet. I wanna tellya something. Know how many books I wrote already?” And now his hands came into play, as they always did sooner or later. Both stubby fists were thrust under my nose and allowed to shake there for a moment before they burst into a thicket of stiff, quivering fingers—only the thumb of one hand remained folded down. “Nine,” he said, and the hands fell limp on his thigh, to rest until he needed them again. “Nine. Novels, philosophy, political theory—the entire gamut. And not one of ’em published. Believe me, I been around awhile.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“So finally I sat down and figured: What’s the answer? And I figured this: the trouble with my books is, they tell the truth. And the truth is a funny thing, McCabe. People wanna read it, but they only wanna read it when it comes from somebody they already know their name. Am I right? So all right. I figure, I wanna write these books, first I gotta build up a name for myself. This is worth any sacrifice. This is the only way. You know something, McCabe? The last one I wrote took me two years?” Two fingers sprang up to illustrate the point, and dropped again. “Two years, working four, five hours every night and all day long on the weekends. And then you oughta seen the crap I got from the publishers. Every damn publisher in town. My wife cried. She says, ‘But why, Leon? Why?’” Here his lips curled tight against his small, stained teeth, and the fist of one hand smacked the palm of the other on his thigh, but then he relaxed. “I told her, ‘Listen, honey. You know why.’” And now he was smiling at me in quiet triumph. “I says, ‘This book told the truth. That’s why.’” Then he winked, slid off my desk and walked away, erect and jaunty in his soiled sport shirt and his dark serge pants that hung loose and shiny in the seat. That was Sobel.
It took him a little while to loosen up in the job: for the first week or so, when he wasn’t talking, he went at everything with a zeal and a fear of failure that disconcerted everyone but Finney, the managing editor. Like the rest of us, Sobel had a list of twelve or fifteen union offices around
town, and the main part of his job was to keep in touch with them and write up whatever bits of news they gave out. As a rule there was nothing very exciting to write about. The average story ran two or three paragraphs with a single-column head:
PLUMBERS WIN
3¢ PAY HIKE
or something like that. But Sobel composed them all as carefully as sonnets, and after he’d turned one in he would sit chewing his lips in anxiety until Finney raised a forefinger and said, “C’mere a second, Sobel.”
Then he’d go over and stand, nodding apologetically, while Finney pointed out some niggling grammatical flaw. “Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don’t wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.’ You wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.’”
Finney enjoyed these lectures. The annoying thing, from a spectator’s point of view, was that Sobel took so long to learn what everyone else seemed to know instinctively: that Finney was scared of his own shadow and would back down on anything at all if you raised your voice. He was a frail, nervous man who dribbled on his chin when he got excited and raked trembling fingers through his thickly oiled hair, with the result that his fingers spread hair oil, like a spoor of his personality, to everything he touched: his clothes, his pencils, his telephone and his typewriter keys. I guess the main reason he was managing editor was that nobody else would submit to the bullying he took from Kramm: their editorial conferences always began with Kramm shouting “Finney! Finney!” from behind his partition, and Finney jumping like a squirrel to hurry inside. Then you’d hear the relentless drone of Kramm’s demands and the quavering sputter of Finney’s explanations, and it would end with a thump as Kramm socked his desk. “No, Finney. No, no, no! What’s the matter with you? I gotta draw you a picture? All right, all right, get outa here, I’ll do it myself.” At first you might wonder why Finney took it—nobody could need a job that badly—but the answer lay in the fact that there were only three bylined pieces in The Labor Leader: a boiler-plated sports feature that we got from a syndicate, a ponderous column called “LABOR TODAY, by Julius Kramm,” that ran facing the editorial page, and a double-column box in the back of the book with the heading:
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Page 9