A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  “Do you like it?”

  “Well, you know me on the subject of art, Alice,” he said. “I mean I’m certainly no judge or anything. It looks fine to me. It’s very – fanciful.”

  “Oh, good. That’s just what I was hoping you’d say. And I’ve got a wonderful idea for the next one: the next one’s going to be Pan. Let me show you.” And she turned a page to reveal a drawing of a little boy kneeling in shrubbery, playing the pipes of Pan.

  “Well,” Harvey Spangler said. “That looks fine, Alice.” A bumblebee was trapped inside the skylight, buzzing loud and frantically against the brilliant pane, and Harvey stared up at it as if in the hope that it might excuse him from looking at any more sculpture or making any more comments. Then he said: “Well, I guess I’d better be getting started, Alice; it’s a long drive.”

  Back in the kitchen he gathered her up in a cozy, awkward embrace, kissing her hair and the tip of her nose, and she rested her head against his chest for a moment; then he stood apart from her and straightened his clothes. “Take care of yourself, now,” he said.

  “I will, Harvey. You too.”

  She walked out to the car with him and stood watching while he got it started and backed it out into the street. A little group of neighborhood children stood watching too, with wide-eyed, expressionless faces, and one of the smaller ones was Bobby.

  When he was gone, heading back for New Rochelle, there was nothing for Alice to do but sit in the studio and hold her head in both hands with her eyes closed tight. Harvey Spangler! A dull, humorless, middle-aged New Rochelle doctor; a man with a wife and four children! And as if her behavior last night wasn’t bad enough, there was the shame of her performance this morning: running around the kitchen like a bride on a honeymoon, smiling at him while he blew his horrible cigar smoke in Bobby’s face. And taking him to the studio! Showing him her work, asking for his opinions, being pleased – yes, pleased – when he said he liked something. Harvey Spangler! But soon she got up and began walking around smoking a cigarette, trying to pull herself together. It was almost time to go in and fix lunch.

  “Where’s Dr. Spankler?” Bobby inquired while she worked at the stove.

  “Dr. Spangler,” she corrected. “He went home, dear. He was only here for breakfast.”

  “Oh. Where does he live?”

  “In New Rochelle, dear. Where we used to live.”

  “Did I live there?”

  “Of course you did. That’s where you were born.”

  “Did Daddy live there?”

  “Of course. Hurry and wash your hands, now. The soup is almost ready.”

  When lunch was over she went back to the studio and tried to work, but it went badly for nearly an hour before she realized what was wrong: the children were playing just outside the barn door, and the noise of their voices made it impossible to concentrate. She took several deep breaths so that her voice wouldn’t sound shrill; then she went to the door and opened it. “Would you children mind playing somewhere else?” she said.

  There were four or five of them. Bobby and one of the little Mancini boys were the smallest, and the older Mancini girl was the biggest, a gangling nine-year-old with a sly, insolent face.

  “We weren’t making any noise, Mrs. Prentice,” she said.

  “Well, I can’t work as long as you’re playing here. Please, children; I’ve got some important work to do. Just find some other place to play.”

  “Can we watch you, Mrs. Prentice?”

  “Some other time you can. Not just now.”

  “Even if we don’t make any noise?”

  “No. Please, now, children. Just do as I say.”

  And finally, laggardly, they moved away to another part of the yard. Watching them go, she felt a tremor of dislike for the Mancini girl. The child was too much like her mother, whom Alice suspected of being a malicious gossip, and it was a pity because the father was so nice – a rough, jovial Italian who worked in one of the Danbury hat factories and who’d gone out of his way to be neighborly when Alice first moved in.

  There were no more interruptions for nearly two hours and she got some good work done. Or so it seemed, at least, until she stopped to look at it from across the room. Then, with a terrible suddenness, it seemed that there was something very much the matter with the Faun’s left arm, the one that held the grapes. She had labored too hard over it; it was stiff and lifeless with overwork, and so was the left hip. But it wasn’t hopeless: she could still save it if the daylight lasted long enough and if she allowed herself to concentrate on nothing else. She went quickly out across the yard to where the children were.

  “Bobby,” she called. “Can I see you a minute, please?” And he detached himself from the group and walked toward her. He looked reluctant, which prompted her to be especially nice when she got him alone. “Dear, would you mind posing for me again this afternoon? Just for an hour or so?”

  He was willing.

  “It’ll be just like the other times,” she said when they were back in the studio and she was helping him get undressed, “except that this time we won’t use the apple and the grapes. But if you pose very well, and don’t move, you can have all the apples and grapes you want afterwards. How would that be?”

  She took him to the right spot under the skylight and positioned his feet, one a little forward and one back. Then she arranged his arms, one crooked as if holding the grapes and the other raised with his hand to his mouth. “There,” she said. “That’s fine. Oh, this will be such a help to me, if you’ll just hold that pose. You really are a wonderful model.”

  The light was perfect, and in a little while she felt she was getting the arm right. “That’s wonderful, dear,” she would say abstractedly from time to time, shifting her gaze back and forth from his sunlit flesh to the clay, and “You’re doing fine,” and “Hold still, now – don’t move.”

  What a pleasure it was to work when the work went well! It was a pleasure that took care of everything else, that made everything else fall away in unimportance, and it always took her back to Cincinnati and to her second year at the Academy – the year she’d abandoned painting and discovered sculpture.

  “See how you like it.” Willard Slade! Sometimes she could go through whole weeks without thinking of him, but he was always there to remember at times like this. And that was what he’d always said – “See how you like it,” in a casual, offhand way – when he introduced her to something that would enrich her life forever.

  The funny part was that she hadn’t even liked him at first: a sarcastic, unkempt, and almost loutish young man, with his hands usually dirty from working on his dreadful motorcycle – not at all the kind of boy her parents would have liked. She couldn’t understand why all the other boys either despised or admired him, and why the boys she liked best were the ones who admired him most. He never seemed to pay attention in class and he made fun of most of the instructors. She thought him rude and spoiled, and she didn’t like to be around him for fear he might say something awful; but that was before she’d begun to learn what everyone else seemed to know instinctively: that Willard Slade was a genius.

  It wasn’t that he was always brilliant. Sometimes he would work and work over a piece and it would turn out to be as dull and forced as everyone else’s, and he’d throw it away. But there were other times, and they’d begun to happen more and more frequently – times when, as he would have said, he was feeling right – when what he did was apparently effortless and was much, much better than good, and the teachers would look at him in open envy.

  He was wonderful. “See how you like this,” he’d said to her once and handed her a copy of Keats’s poems, and she’d taken it home and studied it for days, memorizing several of the more obscure poems so as to be able to surprise him; and in the end, when she went carefully through her recitation of one of them as they sat in Lytle Park, he said, “Yeah, that’s nice, but it’s one of the sissy ones. I like the later stuff better. Try this one.” And he handed t
he book back to her, open at the page of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which she’d skipped because she’d thought it was too famous to bother with. “Read it out loud,” he said, and so she read it, really read it, for the first time:

  “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

  Thou foster-child of silence and slow time …”

  And when she got to the end, to the overwhelming final two lines, she started to cry.

  Oh, there had been nothing at all she wouldn’t do for Willard Slade. He asked her to marry him, and her life took on an unbelievable richness until October 8, 1914, when Willard Slade ran his motorcycle into a trolley car and was instantly killed.

  It was years before she got over it – years spent first back in Plainville, then breaking into the advertising business in Cleveland, and then in New York, where Willard Slade had always wanted to go – and sometimes, like this afternoon, it seemed that she hadn’t gotten over it yet and never would.

  “Mommy?”

  “What, dear?”

  “My nose itches.”

  “Then you’d better scratch it, silly boy. I’ll wait while you do.”

  He scratched it and then resumed his careful pose.

  “Move your hand just a little higher, dear – no, the other one; there. That’s fine. You’re really helping your mommy a lot. Would you like to talk while you’re posing?”

  “All right.”

  “Fine. Why don’t you tell me about what you did in Atlantic City.”

  “I told you.”

  “You didn’t tell me hardly anything at all. You told me about the big waves and the saltwater taffy, and that’s all you told me about.”

  “And I told you about the chairs on wheels.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you did.”

  “And I told you about me and Daddy and Uncle Bill getting up on each other’s shoulders.”

  “That’s right.” A small, querulous part of her mind was annoyed that George had taken his brother along on the trip: Bill Prentice was loud and coarse and drank too much, and she hated him.

  “And Uncle Bill was so funny, we kept laughing and laughing. And Irene said Uncle Bill was the funniest man she’d ever met in her whole life. And then me and Daddy and Brenda and Irene covered him all up with sand, so just his head was sticking out.”

  “That must have been fun. And who were Brenda and Irene? Were they some children you met on the beach?”

  “No, Mommy, they’re ladies. They’re the ladies we stayed with.”

  “Oh. I see.” She was at a difficult place now, a juncture of arm and shoulder on which there was a subtle play of light, and she allowed herself to think about nothing but that.

  “And we kept covering Uncle Bill up with sand and he kept saying ‘Hey! Let me outa here!’ and we kept covering him and covering him.”

  “Hold still now, dear. Maybe we’d better not talk any more for a little while. This is a hard part.”

  The ladies they stayed with! She was doing her very best not to think about it, to think only of the tip of her modeling tool and the clay, but it was impossible.

  “And were they nice ladies?” she inquired.

  “Is the hard part over?”

  “What? Oh, yes, the hard part’s over. Were they nice ladies?”

  “Yes. I liked Irene best because she smelled so pretty and she played with me a lot. Brenda was nice too but she kept wanting to hug and kiss me all the time.”

  “I see.”

  She put down the tool and got out her cigarettes, and she was just about to say, “Let’s rest a minute, Bobby,” when she heard a startling sound from somewhere in the wall behind her – an erupting, burbling sound that she was a little late in identifying as a lewd giggle of children. In the split second of her confusion she whirled to look at the wall, and she saw them: three or four pairs of eyes peering in through an inch-wide crack in the wallboards – eyes that vanished, leaving only sunlight in the crack, as soon as she. discovered them. The sound of their laughter rose up louder as they ran away, and when she turned back to Bobby he was round-eyed with humiliation, hunched over with both hands hiding his genitals.

  She wanted to get hold of the Mancini girl and beat her – hit her across the face – but by the time she got to the door the children had disappeared. She stood looking out across the bright grass for some time before realizing that there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t call up Mrs. Mancini without telling her what it was the children had done, and that would mean having to explain what she and Bobby had been doing.

  “They’re gone, dear,” she said, turning back to him. “Let’s not worry about those silly children.”

  She persuaded him to pose again, but he was clearly uneasy about it; in a little while she let him get dressed and went on working alone until the light began to fade. It was nearly five o’clock, and when she went back to the house she found she was exhausted.

  She went to the living room first and turned on the radio for the five o’clock news. It was something unintelligible about President Hoover and the Treasury deficit, but she listened to it anyway because she always enjoyed Lowell Thomas – his voice was reassuringly steady and baritone, and there was something nice about the way he always said: “So long until tomorrow.” She turned the volume up in order to hear it in the kitchen while she got the dinner started; she had begun to scrape a carrot when Lowell Thomas went off and Kate Smith came on:

  “When the moon comes over the mountain …”

  And the ridiculous thing was that it made her cry. “Every beam brings a dream, dear, of you …” She had to put the carrot and the knife down and stand with her forehead pressed against the kitchen window until her sobs abated, and afterwards, though she felt refreshed and much better, she was ashamed of herself. Keats could make her cry but so could Kate Smith.

  Neither she nor Bobby were very hungry, so dinner didn’t take very long. She got the dishes washed and Bobby put to bed a little earlier than usual, and then there was nothing to do.

  She listened to the radio and then tried to read, but thoughts of Harvey Spangler kept obtruding on the page. After a while she got up and began walking around the room, smoking one cigarette after another. If only there were some way to escape the evening hours!

  When the telephone rang it was such an unexpected, exciting event that she let it ring three or four times before answering it, knowing it would probably be Eva but savoring the fact that it might be anyone at all. It was George.

  “Did I get you up?” he inquired.

  “No. I wasn’t in bed.”

  “Listen, Alice,” he began in a tone that warned her of unpleasantness. “I’m calling because there’s something very important that we’ve got to discuss.”

  “All right.”

  “They’re putting through another cutback in salaries and commissions next month. That means I’ll be making an awful lot less money, and in fact I’m lucky to have a job at all.”

  “I see.”

  “So what it amounts to is that we’re simply going to have to economize, Alice. I’m afraid you’ll have to give up that place in the country.”

  “But it’s cheaper here than in the city.”

  “Alice, I know what that place is costing you in rent alone. Do you know what other people are paying for rent? Do you know what I’m paying for rent?”

  “And how much—” she started to tremble and had to hold the phone in both hands. “How much did it cost you to take your lady friends to Atlantic City?”

  “I – look, Alice. That has nothing to do with – Please try to be reasonable.”

  And she did her best. She listened while he explained about good, inexpensive apartments in Queens, and while he offered to find her such a place himself; and she knew that by her silence she was concurring in his wishes, or at least expressing willingness to abandon the house in Bethel.

  But then it was her turn, and she gripped the phone in both hands again. At first she was scarcely aware of what she
was saying; she knew only that she wanted to hurt him as badly as possible, and she knew that the force and rhythm of her words were building to an inevitable climax.

  “… and I don’t care how many lawyers you get; I’ll never ever let my child be exposed to you and your – your little whores again, do you understand me? Never!”

  She hung up the phone, and when it rang again a moment later she didn’t answer it; she let it ring ten times, and then it stopped.

  She thought she heard Bobby crying and went quickly upstairs to see, but he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. She tucked the covers more securely around him and moved his Teddy bear closer to his head, just in case.

  Downstairs again, she walked around the living room twisting her hands together, going over and over the things she wished she had thought of saying to George; then, as her breathing and her blood slowed down, she sat quietly in a chair.

  After a while she started thinking about the Faun again and wondering how it looked. Sometimes, if you looked at a piece of sculpture under artificial light, after working on it all day, you could see new things in it.

  There was a full moon, which made it easy to walk to the barn, and once she was inside there was enough blue-gray glow from the skylight to show her the outlines of the Faun. It didn’t look bad at all. Then she switched on the lights, and after the first shock of brightness she had to stand biting her lip for a full minute before she could admit how disappointed she was: all the work she’d done today looked crude.

  But then, moving back a few steps and squinting, she was able to see the beginnings of something promising, and she began to breathe normally again. She knew better than to touch it now, but if she had a good day tomorrow she might still be able to bring it off.

  She looked at several other pieces, seeing things she could improve in all of them, but she had to leave the studio soon because she kept thinking of Harvey Spangler standing there with his gaberdine suit and his awful cigar, saying: “Well, you know me on the subject of art, Alice.”

  Instead of going back to the house she went up into the field behind the barn – she wanted to be as far as possible from thoughts of Harvey Spangler, and of the Mancini girl, and of George, and even of Bobby.