A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  But she didn’t understand – that was what made it impossible to cry. All she could do was walk and sit and get up and walk again, with the voice of Mr. Cameron echoing in her head; all she could do was fail and fail and fail to understand.

  A little after three o’clock, still walking, she began to know what she would do. She would go to the front window and wait for Bobby – no, better still, she would put on her raincoat and go out across the Post Road to wait for him, and when he came he would say, “How come you’re here?” and she would say, “Just waiting for you.” And they would cross the road together and go into the house. Then Bobby’s eyes would get very round and he’d say, “What’s the matter, Mommy? Is something the matter, or what?”

  And she wouldn’t tell him right away. She would carefully put both of their raincoats on hangers to dry, and she would inquire how his day had been at school. But when he asked her again if something was the matter, she would break: she would go down on her knees and take him in her arms. She would gather him in and press him close, and then – she knew that by then she’d be able to cry – then she would say, “Oh, Bobby, he’s gone. He’s gone from us, and he’s never coming back …”

  That was how she planned it, and that was the way it happened.

  Chapter Three

  If Scarsdale was, as Sterling Nelson had promised, an isolated pocket of prosperity, the town of Riverside, only a few miles away in the Hudson Valley, was an isolated pocket of grandeur. It was like no place Alice had ever seen before, and she knew at once that she wanted to live there. It would change her life.

  It wasn’t really a town at all, or even a village, but a colony of handsome dwellings built as close as possible to the high-walled borders of a great private estate called Boxwood. Both the estate and its careful environs were the work of a self-made Wall Street tycoon named Walter J. Vander Meer – a man whose eagerness to erase his own beginnings on a small Missouri farm had made him seek to establish a new dynasty here, among the ghosts of the colonial Dutch whom he believed, on slender evidence, to have been his ancestors.

  He had spared nothing in creating Riverside: he had equipped it with two tasteful churches, Episcopal and Presbyterian; he had made certain that its Riverside Country Club would have the finest golf course in Westchester County; and had taken considerable pains over the founding of Riverside Country Day School, on the high marble panel of whose main hall were engraved the words:

  MANNERS MAKETH MAN

  But the full flowering of his zeal had gone into the creation of Boxwood. Its grounds were a marvel of professional landscaping in that every vista was pleasing to the eye – wide, rolling lawns, tall trees, rich hedges, and deep gardens. In addition to a number of servants’ quarters and guest cottages, there were four substantial homes intended for the families of his four sons, and all the winding roads and pathways led eventually to the high ground on which he’d built his own mansion, which might have been named Boxwood Manor if it hadn’t always been called “The Big House.” All the tall western windows of the Big House, and the marble-flagged esplanade beneath them, commanded a majestic view of the Hudson, a view only partially blemished by another and more famous Big House less than two miles upriver in which more than a few of Walter J. Vander Meer’s early business associates had spent their final days: the squat, ugly structure of Sing Sing Penitentiary.

  Vander Meer had died of old age and bewilderment soon after the Crash, but enough of his millions remained to ensure a long and sound survival for his aristocratic widow, his progeny, his Boxwood, and his Riverside.

  “Isn’t it something?” Maude Larkin inquired, moving through the summer breeze of the esplanade with the proud and stately tread of a pathfinder, and Alice had to agree, in something close to reverence, that it certainly was.

  They paused to rest against the balustrade, and Maude Larkin said, “See? Those are the Palisades. That big one’s High Tor, the one Max Anderson wrote the play about. And look here—” She called Alice’s attention back from the mountains and away from the intermediate hulk of Sing Sing; she was pointing to the balustrade on which their forearms rested. “All this marble was imported from Italy, piece by piece. Can you imagine what that must have cost? And you see he never did quite finish it. He built this whole beautiful place all through the Twenties, and the esplanade was meant to be the crowning glory; but you see it was supposed to go all the way across the lawn, all the way to the poplars over there. And you see what happened instead?” She took Alice by the hand and led her out to where the esplanade came to an abrupt amputation, and with a theatrical flourish she pointed to five Italian marble columns lying corpselike in the grass. “Nineteen twenty-nine,” she said in a stage whisper. “Isn’t that something? I mean really, Alice; isn’t that something?”

  In the long, lonely time since Sterling Nelson’s desertion – almost three years now – Alice had found a small measure of comfort in spending two afternoons a week as a teacher of sculpture in the Arts and Crafts Guild, a community enterprise that occupied the basement of the Westchester County Center, in White Plains. The money she earned from it was scarcely worth counting most of the other teachers were volunteers – but she thought the experience would be valuable, and she hoped it might be a way of meeting people. It was: all her students were women of her own age or older, prosperously married and vaguely dissatisfied and “looking for something,” as more than a few of them put it, and they tended to make a pet of her. They would take her into their homes, in Scarsdale or in other nearby towns just like it, to meet their polite if baffled husbands; but more often than not those evenings would end with her riding home in the embarrassing silence of the husbands’ cars, her mouth dry and swollen from too much talking about “art” and “form” and “Paris” and “Greenwich Village” (and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening’s conversation?) while the husbands shifted gears and groped for pleasantries about how “interesting” it had been.

  Then toward the end of the third year Maude Larkin had enrolled in her class, and she knew from the start that Maude Larkin was going to be different. Not only did she seem more talented than the others, or at least more responsive to criticism, but everything else about her suggested the kind of person Alice really did want to know, and to have for a friend. One day Maude shyly asked her out for a drink after class and they sat for hours in a White Plains cocktail lounge. For once it wasn’t Alice who did most of the talking, and all the things Maude said revealed more and more clearly that Alice hadn’t been wrong about her: Maude Larkin was interesting. She didn’t live in Scarsdale or in any of its stifling vicinities; she lived in Riverside, of which Alice had never heard. And her husband wasn’t an insurance man or a lawyer or a business executive like the others, but a writer: he wrote scripts for three of the evening radio serials to which Alice had long been addicted.

  “You mean you really like them?” Maude asked, her eyes as bright as a happy child’s. “Oh, I can’t wait to tell Jim that; he hates them; he’ll be absolutely delighted.” Her witty, knowledgeable talk went on through round after round of relaxing Manhattans for which she insisted on paying; Alice had to excuse herself twice to telephone Bobby with promises to be home soon, and when Maude drove her back to Scarsdale at last they lingered in the parked car for an exchange of affectionate declarations:

  “Oh, it’s been so nice, Maude. Please come in and have dinner with us.”

  “Dear, I’d love to, but I’ve got to get home or Jim and the kids’ll kill me. But listen: I’m not letting you out of this car until you promise me one thing. Do promise to come see us soon. Bring your little boy and spend the weekend. Next weekend.”

  “Well, I’d love to, Maude, but really I—”

  “Promise. You’ve got to promise. I’ll come and get you, all right? I’ll call you tomorrow. And another thing, Alice – I know this may sound drunk and foolish, but there’s one other thing I must say before I let you go. I simply can’t tell you how much this
sculpture class has meant to me. Honestly. I feel – it’s what I’ve always – well, I just feel you’ve opened up a whole new world for me, and I want to thank you, that’s all.”

  And now in return, by bringing her to Riverside and guiding her through the splendors of Boxwood, it seemed that Maude was opening up a whole new world for Alice.

  “Are you sure it’s all right for us to be here, Maude?” she asked when they’d left the esplanade and started back down one of the winding paths.

  “Of course it’s all right. The old lady and I are on first-name terms. Well—” and here she laughed in the candid little self-effacing way that was one of her most winning traits – “I guess that’s not exactly true. She calls me ‘Maude’ and I call her ‘Mrs. Vander Meer.’ I don’t think anyone in the whole world uses her first name. Anyway, she seems to approve of me, and I know she’d approve of you. The only one you ever have to worry about is Walter Junior, the oldest son. He can be nice sometimes, but he’s essentially a pompous ass. Jim calls him a capitalist piglet – says he isn’t big enough to be a capitalist pig. He’s the whaddyacallit of the whole business, you see – the executor? Is that what you call it? I don’t know. Anyway, he’s the man in charge, and he takes it all very seriously. But look: here’s what I’ve been dying to show you. Come along.”

  And Alice followed her in pleased bewilderment. They were heading around toward the rear of one of the splendid houses Maude had pointed out earlier in the tour – the one built for Howard Vander Meer, the second son, which had been vacant since the Howard Vander Meers’ divorce some years before – and Maude walked boldly up to one of its rear doors and opened it. “Just wait till you see this,” she said.

  “You mean you’re going inside? Do you really think we—”

  “Not the house itself, that’s all locked up. Just the basement. Come along.”

  Even the basement looked rich: clean concrete corridors along whose walls were piled the incidental refuse of the broken family (expensive wardrobe trunks, racked pairs of skis, cardboard boxes bearing the trade names of Bergdorf Goodman, Brooks Brothers, Abercrombie and Fitch) – but Alice scarcely had time to notice these things before Maude drew her over to a door that couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. “You’ll have to duck going in,” she said, “but just wait till you see what’s inside.”

  The tiny door let them into an enormous, absolutely bare white room that was flooded with daylight. Its walls were of lacquered white wood, flecked all over with hundreds of little gray-black smudges, as if they’d been daubed with licorice, and they were windowless: all the light came from the high ceiling, which was made wholly of wired glass, “What is it?” Alice whispered.

  “It’s a squash court. Howard was crazy about squash, you see, so his daddy built this whole gigantic thing right into the house. That’s the kind of money they had. But Alice, don’t you see what I’m driving at? Look at the lighting; look at the walls. Don’t you see what it could be?” Her eyes were gleaming. “A sculpture studio. Your studio. You could hold private classes here – my God, you’d have room for three times as many students as you have now, and still have plenty of room for your own work. Wouldn’t it be priceless?”

  It would indeed. Alice was instantly able to picture herself at work here – teaching people as congenial as Maude, doing sculpture of her own that would be better than anything she’d dreamed of in the past. “Well, but how could I possibly – I mean how could I ever—”

  “Wait.” And Maude placed a rigid forefinger against her lips. “Don’t say another word. I just wanted you to see this place, and now there’s one more place I want you to see, and then we’ll go home and have a drink. I told you I was full of plans, didn’t I? Come on.

  “If you’re going to work here you’ll have to live here,” she said. “And I’ve got just the right house picked out for you. The perfect home for the artist in residence.”

  It turned out to be an elegant little house of white stucco, attractively set in the extreme northeast corner of the estate, surrounded by trees and beds of rhododendron, with a flagstone path leading up to its front door. “They call it the gatehouse,” Maude explained. “It was built for one of Mrs. Vander Meer’s relatives, but it’s never been occupied; actually it’s still unfinished, but I happen to know Walter Junior’s been planning to fix it up and rent it this year. And why shouldn’t it be yours?”

  It was locked, but they could see the whole of its interior by moving around and peering through windows: a big central room with a spectacular fireplace, a kitchen and dining area, two ample bedrooms with a connecting bathroom in the rear. “Can’t you just see it?” Maude demanded. “Wouldn’t it be the absolutely perfect home for you and Bobby?”

  By the time they had let themselves out through one of the heavy iron gates and strolled back to the Larkins’ home that afternoon, to have a drink and talk it over with Jim, Alice was completely enthralled with Maude’s plan. It had become her own plan, as firm and settled as any decision she had ever made. She and Bobby would live in the gatehouse; Bobby would attend Riverside Country Day; they would be among stimulating people like the Larkins, instead of the stuffy mediocrities of Scarsdale, and the whole charming new life would be made possible by her role as “artist in residence.” She would have a generous new income from teaching private classes in the squash court, and if that didn’t wholly solve the financial side of things she might well find other sources: she could sell some of her old garden sculpture – possibly even sell some of it to the Vander Meers – and once she was established in this brisk new environment there was no reason why she couldn’t turn out enough new work to warrant a profitable New York exhibition once a year. Anything seemed possible in Riverside.

  Jim Larkin was a little doubtful. “Well, I don’t know, Alice,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to see you get involved in more than you can handle.”

  “But she’ll be able to handle it, Jim,” said Maude. “That’s the whole point. She’s an exceptional woman. She’s an artist of the first rank, she’s an inspiring teacher, and she’s been hiding her talents under a bushel long enough. This place was made for her. She’s going to thrive here.”

  “I certainly don’t mean to question any of that,” he said, “but before you girls get carried away there’s one or two practical points you ought to consider.”

  And Alice was willing to hear him out. Jim Larkin had frightened her a little the evening before by saying he was a communist, but he wasn’t at all like the communists she’d known in New York. He was quick and funny and brusque in a nice way; he seemed embarrassed to be making so much money out of radio but he wasn’t boringly apologetic about it, and he was clearly a man of intellectual substance. Hundreds of books had overflowed the shelves of his study to be strewn in attractive disorder around the living room; he knew Maxwell Anderson well enough to call him Max, and once he had even hinted at knowing Thomas Wolfe well enough to call him Tom. Alice guessed she liked him very much, enough to be patient while he went over the one or two points they ought to consider.

  “In the first place,” he said, “how do you know old Walter Junior won’t take a dim view of having sculpture classes in the squash court?”

  “Oh, where’s your imagination, Jim?” Maude said. “We won’t deal with Walter Junior. We’ll go directly to the old lady, and I know she’ll approve it. I know she’ll love Alice, that’s a foregone conclusion. And I know she’s dying for some way to express herself besides writing out all those checks to hospitals – I’ll just bet the idea of being a Patroness of the Arts is going to knock her for a loop.”

  And Jim chuckled. “Well, you may be right about that. Knock her for a loop. All for art; art for art’s sake. Maybe she’ll be a pushover. God knows if anybody can talk her into it, you can. But still, even assuming that part’s okay, won’t it be a little hard for Alice to swing the rest of it? You can be sure they’re going to ask a nice little rent for that house, for one thing, not to mention the
tuition at Riverside Country Day. This is a pretty expensive town for a woman with a limited income.”

  “Her income won’t be limited for long,” Maude assured him. “And anyway we don’t know how much rent they’ll ask – they might make it reasonable for her. As for Country Day, you know perfectly well half the children go there on scholarships.” And she explained this point to Alice. “That’s the way most of these smaller private schools operate, you see: they’ve got heavy endowments, but in order to justify their existence they’ve got to keep their enrollments up to a certain minimum. The result is that an awful lot of the kids go free. Ours don’t, but that’s because Jim makes so much money. I should certainly think Bobby might qualify for a scholarship.”

  “Somebody ought to tell you it’s a pretty silly little school, though,” Jim said, and Maude turned on him.

  “It is not, Jim. It’s a fine school.”

  “Oh, come off it, sweetheart. What the hell’s ‘fine’ about Riverside Country Day? You mean it’s ‘fine’ because our kids get to mix it up with the landed gentry? It’s a ridiculous school.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Alice. Please don’t listen to him when he gets like this.”

  “Gets like what?” he demanded. “It is a ridiculous school. Everybody knows that.”

  “Jim, darling, will you please keep your voice down? Before the children hear you?” And she turned to Alice in urgent appeal. “Alice, all I can tell you is that our children love it.” But by this time Jim Larkin was laughing, touseling his wife’s hair, proving that it hadn’t been a quarrel at all, or even an argument, but only another surprising facet of this remarkable family, another aspect of the wonderfully free and easy way these people lived. “Sure they love it!” he was saying. “Sure they love it! That doesn’t mean they’re not smart enough to know it’s ridiculous, does it? Whoever said you can’t love ridiculous things? God knows I love you, and you’re the most ridiculous woman I ever met!”