Trying Out for the Race
ELIZABETH HOGAN BAKER, who liked to have it known that both her parents were illiterate Irish immigrants, wrote feature stories for a chain of Westchester County newspapers through all the years of the Depression. Her home office was in New Rochelle but she was on the road every day in a rusty, quivering Model A Ford that she drove fast and carelessly, often squinting in the smoke of a cigarette held in one corner of her lips. She was a handsome woman, blond, sturdy, and still young, with a full-throated laugh for anything she found absurd, and this wasn’t the life she had planned for herself at all.
“Can you figure it out?” she would ask, usually at night and after a few drinks. “Bring myself up from peasant stock, put myself through college, take a lousy little job on a suburban paper because it seemed a good-enough way to mark time for a year or two, and now look. Look. Can you figure it out?”
Nobody could. Her friends—and she always had admiring friends—could only agree that she’d had rotten luck. Elizabeth was much too good for the kind of work she did and for the inhibiting, stifling environment it had forced on her.
Back in the twenties, as a girl and a daydreaming reporter on the New Rochelle Standard-Star, she had looked up from her desk one day to see a tall, black-haired, shy-looking young man being shown around the office, a new staff member named Hugh Baker. “And the minute he walked in,” she would say later, many times, “I thought, There’s the man I’m going to marry.” It didn’t take long. They were married within a year and had a daughter two years later; then, soon, everything fell apart in ways Elizabeth never cared to discuss. Hugh Baker moved alone to New York, where he eventually became a feature writer for one of the evening dailies and was often praised for what the editors called his light touch. And even Elizabeth never disparaged that: over the years, embittered or not, she always said Hugh Baker was the only man she had ever known who could really make her laugh. But now she was thirty-six, with nothing to do at the end of most days but go home to an upstairs apartment in New Rochelle and pretend to take pleasure in her child.
A stout middle-aged woman named Edna, whose slip seemed always to hang at least an inch below the hem of her dress all the way around, was working at the kitchen stove when Elizabeth let herself in.
“Everything seems to be under control, Mrs. Baker,” Edna said. “Nancy’s eaten her supper, and I was just putting this on the low heat so you can have it whenever you’re ready. I made a nice casserole; it turned out very nice.”
“Good, Edna, that’s fine.” And Elizabeth pulled off her worn leather driving gloves. She always did this with an unconscious little flourish, like that of a cavalry officer just dismounted and removing his gauntlets after a long, hard ride.
Nancy appeared to be ready for bed when they looked in on her: she was in her pajamas and fooling around on the floor of her room in some aimless game that involved the careful alignment of a few old toys. She was nine, and she would be tall and dark like her father. Edna had recently cut out the soles of the feet in her Dr. Denton pajamas to give her more freedom—she was growing out of everything—but Elizabeth thought the pouches of excess cloth at her ankles looked funny; besides, she was fairly sure that children of nine weren’t supposed to wear that kind of pajamas anymore. “How was your day?” she inquired from the doorway.
“Oh, okay.” And Nancy looked up only briefly at her mother. “Daddy called.”
“Oh?”
“And he said he’s coming out to see me Saturday after next and he’s got tickets for The Pirates of Penzance at the County Center.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Elizabeth said, “isn’t it.”
Then Edna stepped crouching into the room with her arms held wide. Nancy scrambled up eagerly, and they stood hugging for a long time. “See you tomorrow, then, funny-face,” Edna said against the child’s hair.
It often seemed to Elizabeth that the best part of the day was when she was alone at last, curled up on the sofa with a drink, with her spike-heeled shoes cast off and tumbled on the carpet. Perhaps a sense of well-earned peace like this was the best part of life itself, the part that made all the rest endurable. But she had always tried to know enough not to kid herself—self-deception was an illness—and so after a couple of drinks she was willing to acknowledge the real nature of these evenings alone: she was waiting for the telephone to ring.
Some months ago she had met an abrupt, intense, sporadically dazzling man named Judd Leonard. He ran his own small public-relations firm in New York and would snarl at anyone who didn’t know the difference between public relations and publicity. He was forty-nine and twice divorced; he was often weak with ambition and anger and alcohol, and Elizabeth had come to love him. She had spent three or four weekends in his chaotic apartment in the city; once he had shown up here in New Rochelle, laughing and shouting, and they’d talked for hours and he’d taken her on this very sofa, and he’d been nicely obedient about getting out of the place before Nancy woke up in the morning.
But Judd Leonard hardly ever called her now—or rather, hardly ever called her when he was able to speak coherently—and so Elizabeth had begun to wait here, one night after another.
When the phone rang at last she was dozing off on the sofa, having just decided to let the casserole dry out in the oven and to sleep right here, in her clothes—the hell with it—but it wasn’t Judd.
It was Lucy Towers, one of her most admiring friends, and this meant she would be on the damned phone for at least an hour.
“. . . Well, sure, Lucy,” she said. “Just give me a second to sort of pull myself together, okay? I was taking a nap.”
“Oh. Well, of course; I’m sorry. I’ll wait.” Lucy was a few years older than Elizabeth, and if self-deception was an illness she was well into its advanced stages. She described herself as being “in real estate,” which meant she had worked in various real-estate offices around the county, but she seemed unable or unwilling to hold those jobs and was often idle for long periods; she lived mostly on what her former husband sent her every month. She had a daughter of thirteen or so and a son of Nancy’s age. And she had groundless social aspirations—social pretensions—that Elizabeth found silly. Still, Lucy was sweet and comforting, and they had been friends for years.
When she’d made a new drink and settled into a weary sitting position, Elizabeth picked up the phone again. “Okay,” she said. “I’m fine now, Lucy.”
“I’m sorry if I called at the wrong time,” Lucy Towers said, “but the thing is I simply couldn’t wait to tell you this marvelous idea I have. First of all, do you know those houses along the Post Road in Scarsdale? Oh, I mean it’s Scarsdale, I know, but none of those houses have much market value because they’re on the Post Road, you see, so most of them are rental properties and one or two of them are really very nice. . . .”
This was the idea: if Elizabeth and Lucy were to pool their resources, they could share one of those houses—and Lucy thought she had just the right place picked out already, though of course Elizabeth would have to inspect it first. There’d be plenty of room to combine both households—the children would love every minute of it—and with the money they’d save they could even hire a maid.
“Oh, and besides,” Lucy concluded, coming to the real point at last, “besides, I’m awfully tired of living alone, Elizabeth. Aren’t you?”
The house, on a highway that bore steady traffic even in 1935, was bulky and glistening in the autumn sun. It was a jumble of architectural styles and materials: much of it was mock-Tudor but there were other expanses of fieldstone and still others of pink stucco, as if several things had gone wrong with the building plans and the men had been obliged to finish the job as best they could. It might not be much to look at, the rental agent conceded, but it was sound and clean, it was “tight,” and at a rent like this it was certainly a bargain.
Lucy Towers and her children were the first to arrive on the appointed day of occupancy. The girl, Alice, who would be starting junior high
school next week, wanted everything to look as nice as possible, and so she was a great help to her mother in moving their old furniture around into new and “interesting” arrangements to suit the unfamiliar rooms.
“Russell, will you get out of my way, please?” she said to her brother, who had found an old rubber ball in one of the packing boxes and was bouncing it moodily on the floor. “He keeps getting in my way and getting in my way,” Alice explained, “just when I’m trying to—ugh!”
“All right.” And Lucy Towers swept back her hair in an exasperated gesture that revealed a coating of house dust on the inside of her forearm, runneled with several clean, dry streaks from when she had last washed her hands. “Dear, if you’re not going to work with us you’d better go outside,” she told her son. “Please.”
So Russell Towers stuffed the ball in his pocket and went down the short slope of weedy, uncropped grass to the edge of the highway with nothing to do but stand there, watching the cars. The Bakers would soon be coming along in their old Ford, either before or after their moving van, and he decided it might be nice to have them find him here, like a courteous sentinel posted at the driveway.
Russell’s family had changed houses and towns many times, and he’d never liked moving, but this new venture was the least promising yet. He had occasionally been pressed into acquaintance with Nancy Baker since they’d both been six, but he’d always shied away from her, or she from him, because they both understood it was their mothers who were friends. Now, and perhaps for years to come, Nancy’s bedroom and his own would be along the same short corridor, with a single bathroom; they would eat their meals together and might easily be stuck with nobody else for company the rest of the time. They had been assigned to separate sections of the third grade—a plan the principal had said was “wise”—but even so, there were bound to be other difficulties. If he ever brought somebody home from school (assuming he would make any friends at all, which was something he couldn’t bring himself to think about yet), Nancy’s presence in the house would be all but impossible to explain.
When the Model A did pull up and make its shuddering turn into the driveway, Mrs. Baker got out first and asked Russell to wait here until the van came, because she wasn’t sure if the driver would know which house it was. Then Nancy got out of the car and came around to wait with him, carrying a suitcase and a small, grubby-looking teddy bear. She smiled uncertainly, Russell looked quickly down, and they both watched with apparent interest as Mrs. Baker ground out a cigarette with her shoe and made her way up to the kitchen door.
“Know why they call it the Post Road?” he asked, squinting off into the distance of it. “Because it goes all the way up to Boston. You’re really supposed to call it the Boston Post Road, and I think the ‘post’ part is because they carry the mail on it.”
“Oh,” Nancy said. “Well, no, I didn’t know that.” Then she held up her teddy bear and said, “His name’s George. He’s slept with me every night of my life since I was four years old.”
“Oh yeah?”
Russell didn’t see the van coming until it had slowed down to negotiate the turn. He waved vigorously anyway, but the driver didn’t notice, or need to.
Within a very few weeks Nancy Baker turned out to be impossible. She was stubborn and sulky and a terrible crybaby; the empty feet of her mutilated Dr. Dentons were ludicrous, and one of her prominent front teeth crookedly overlapped another in a way appropriate only to homely, tiresome little girls. She was shameless in her pursuit of Alice Towers, even after Alice had tactfully discouraged her time and again (“Not now, Nancy, I told you, I’m busy with something”). And although Lucy Towers made occasional formal efforts to be kind, she too seemed always dismayed by her. “Nancy isn’t a very—attractive child, is she?” she remarked once, thoughtfully, to her son. Russell needed no further evidence to know how awful Nancy was, but there was ample further evidence anyway: her own mother seemed to find her impossible too.
There were mornings when the Towers family had to sit embarrassed at breakfast and hear the noise of mother and daughter locked in quarreling upstairs. “Nancy!” Elizabeth would cry, with the same stagey lilt in her voice that she sometimes used for reciting Irish poetry. “Nancy! I’m not putting up with this another moment. . . .” And through it all came the sound of Nancy’s voice in tears. There would be a thump or two and a slamming of doors, and then the sharp, heavy tread of Elizabeth alone, coming downstairs in her spike-heeled pumps.
“Sometimes,” she intoned through clenched teeth as she came into the dining room one morning, “sometimes I wish that child were at the bottom of the sea.” She pulled out her chair and sat down with enough authority to suggest she was glad she’d said that, and would say it again. “Do you know what it was this time? It was shoelaces.”
“Will you want something, Mrs. Baker?” asked the Negro maid, whose presence here was still a source of surprise to everyone.
“No, thanks, Myra, there isn’t time. I’ll just have coffee. If I don’t have coffee I won’t be responsible for my actions. Well. First it was shoelaces,” Elizabeth went on. “She has only one flat shoelace and one round one, you see, and she’s ashamed to go to school that way. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that? When half the children in the United States aren’t getting enough to eat? Oh, and that was only the beginning. She then said she misses Edna. She wants Edna. So can someone please tell me what I’m expected to do? Am I expected to go over to New Rochelle and get the wretched woman and bring her here? And take her home again? Besides, I think she’s working in the radio-tube factory now—a point I was wholly unable to get across.”
Elizabeth took her coffee as if it were medicine and trudged out to the car. By then it was time for Alice and Russell to leave for school, and Lucy Towers found something to do in her bedroom. Nobody was there when Nancy came down at last to eat nothing, to put on her coat and hurry out between the borders of other people’s lawns, through a broken fence and then along a gently curving suburban lane to the school building, where a frowning teacher would mark her “tardy” one more time.
But there was worse trouble by now in that Russell Towers had found himself ill-equipped to serve, even if only symbolically, as man of the house. There wasn’t anything quiet or self-assured or dignified about him. He too, like Nancy, could throw dreadful fits of temper and crying that made him feel humiliated even while they were going on. When his mother came to his room one evening to announce that she was “going out to dinner in White Plains” with a man he had met only once before, a big, bald, red-faced man who had called him Champ and who was probably listening at the foot of the stairs right now, ready to learn in head-shaking wonderment what a snot-nosed little mother’s boy he was, Russell went all the way. He faked a collapse on the floor as if tantrums were a form of epileptic seizure, then he faked a collapse on the bed, and he was appalled at the shrillness of his own voice: “You can’t go! You can’t go!”
“. . . Oh, please,” Lucy was saying. “Please, Russell. Listen. Listen. I’ll bring you something nice, I promise, and you’ll find it when you wake up, and that’ll let you know I’m home.”
“. . . Ah! Oh! Oh! . . .”
“Please, now, Russell. Please . . .”
On waking ashamed the next morning he found a small, well-made stuffed toy in the form of a lamb beside his pillow—a gift for a baby, or a girl. He took it to the wooden chest against the wall that contained all the other toys he had outgrown, put it inside, and closed the lid. He was a mother’s boy, all right, and at times like this it seemed useless ever to deny it.
“You sure made a racket last night,” Nancy said to him later that day.
“Yeah, well, I’ve heard you make a lot of racket too. Plenty of times.”
He might have added that he’d even heard Harry Snyder make a racket, and Harry was a year older, but she hadn’t been present at Harry’s tantrum and so would probably not have believed it, or even have cared.
School had a
s yet produced no real friends for Russell, and he worried about that, but Harry Snyder was the boy next door, and so a casual, loafing kind of friendship had been easy to achieve with him. One day they were intently hunkered down over many tin soldiers in the basement of Harry’s house when Mrs. Snyder came to the stairs and called down, “Russell, you’ll have to go home now. Harry has to come up and get ready because we’re all going for a drive to Mount Vernon.”
“Aw, Mom, now? You mean now?”
“Certainly I mean ‘now.’ Your father wanted to get started an hour ago.”
And that was when Harry went into action. In three swift, merciless kicks he sent soldiers flying in all directions, ruining formations that had been all afternoon in the making, and he howled and flailed and cried like someone half his age, while Russell looked away in a wincing smile of embarrassment.
“Harry!” Mrs. Snyder called. “Harry, I want you to stop this right now. Do you hear me?”
But he didn’t stop until long after she’d come down and led him tragically upstairs; when Russell crept out for home he could still hear the terrible sound of it ringing across the yellow grass.
Even so, there was an important difference. Harry had cried because he wanted his mother to leave him alone; Russell had cried because he didn’t—and therein lay the very definition of a mother’s boy.
On some winter evenings Elizabeth would set up her typewriter in the living room and be lost in concentration for hours, hammering out her newspaper features or trying for something more substantial that she might submit to a magazine. She sat as straight as a stenographer at her work, her spine never touching the back of the chair, and she wore horn-rimmed glasses. Sometimes a lock of her pretty blond hair would dislodge itself and fall over one eye, and she’d put it back with impatient fingers—often the same fingers that held a short, burning cigarette. There was always a full ashtray on one side of her machine; on the other, near the paper supply, a big block of milk chocolate lay carefully broken apart in its torn-open wrapper—the kind of Hershey bar that cost almost fifty cents. Everyone understood, though, that this chocolate wasn’t for passing around: it was the fuel Elizabeth needed when she wasn’t drinking.
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Page 27