by Blake Bailey
“Domestic corporate bonds moved irregularly higher in moderately active trading today.…” That was the kind of prose I wrote all day long for the UP wire, and “Rising oil shares paced a lively curb market,” and “Directors of Timken Roller Bearing today declared”—hundreds on hundreds of words that I never really understood (What in the name of God are puts and calls, and what is a sinking fund debenture? I’m still damned if I know).…
And when he wasn’t writing about puts and calls and debentures, or heading uptown to attend his evening classes, or rutting about with Russ and the girls, he was home with his mother, who was always glad to see him. What had started as a temporary arrangement was showing every sign of becoming permanent. Dookie made no effort to get a job—though she often said she’d be “back on [her] feet” in no time—and indeed seemed more than content to live on her son’s modest income, as long as she could afford to pay dues at Pen and Brush on Tenth Street, where as “resident sculptor” she conducted what was left of her social life. At first Yates hadn’t really minded the setup, as he and his mother were still rather compatible in those days, and after all it was only a matter of time. But he continued to toy with the idea of college, or just a reasonable degree of independence, and after a while his mother’s almost mad complacency began to seem ominous. “This wasn’t making any sense,” he wrote in “Regards at Home”:
I didn’t want to listen to her torrential talk anymore or join in her laughter; I thought she was drinking too much; I found her childish and irresponsible—two of my father’s words—and I didn’t even want to look at her: small and hunched in tasteful clothes that were never quite clean, with sparse, wild, yellow-gray hair and a soft mouth set in the shape either of petulance or hilarity.
One thing that might have inhibited his mother from taking positive action were her rotten teeth, which made her self-conscious and were painful besides. Yates took her to a free dental clinic in the Village, the Northern Dispensary, where a nice young dentist offered to fit her for dentures at his private office in Queens for half his normal fee. Yates sat with his mother as the rest of her teeth were extracted one by one, and found her agony “oddly satisfying”: “There, I thought as each tooth fell bloody on the tray. There … there … there. How could she make a romance out of this? Maybe now, at last, she would come to terms with reality.”
And for a few days, perhaps, she did—seeming “utterly defeated” by her caved-in face; but as soon as she got her new dentures “she seemed to shed twenty years.” And this was a mixed blessing for her son, since now she was all the more willing to laugh and smile and talk—and talk—though she worried that her false teeth made a telltale clacking noise, and she still seemed disinclined to find a means of supporting herself.
CHAPTER FOUR
Liars in Love: 1947-1951
That first year back from the war was a lonely time for Yates. Whether by choice or circumstance, he was drifting away from his old Avon friends. Hugh Pratt, about to be married in Rochester, came home from medical school one day to find that Yates had showed up out of nowhere, left a wedding gift with Pratt’s mother, and departed. Pratt never heard from him again. As for Yates’s other friends, they were mostly busy with college or career, or had become tiresome like Bick Wright. Russell Benedict, too, was beginning to pall; whatever Yates wanted out of bachelorhood wasn’t to be found in Benedict’s company. Yates longed to make new friends who were “young, poor, bright, humorous, very much alive and headed in the right direction”—a direction off the beaten track, to be sure, the sort of path taken by abstract beings whom he really did call “golden people.” The long hours he spent in Village bars (“trying to figure out what was going on”) had proved a fruitless guide, and pretty much always would.
At some point he renewed his acquaintance with one Jeff Macaulay, an Avon classmate known for having coined the word plerb (“a synonym for anything you need a synonym for”); Macaulay is also noteworthy for having introduced Yates to Sheila Bryant, who at the time was having a small party at her mother’s apartment on East Sixty-first. Sheila was not quite nineteen at the time—a tall, severely pretty redhead who’d recently graduated from Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School and now had what she rather defensively called “a good job” at the Cavendish Trading Corporation, where she worked as a stenographer in the accounting department. Before that she’d done a bit of acting at Bronxville High School and was deemed to have talent, though she was far too sensible to pursue it as a career. After a while she and Yates left the party to continue their talk in private—a talk that convinced both they had a great deal in common, which in a way they did.
For one thing Sheila’s childhood was, perhaps, even more luridly awful than Yates’s. Her father was the British actor Charles Bryant, whose one claim to fame, or infamy, was his involvement with the great theater and silent-movie actress Alla Nazimova. For more than ten years, beginning in 1912, the two lived together and claimed to be married, though in fact the union was never legally or physically consummated. Nazimova was a lesbian insofar as she bothered, and hence the burly six-foot-three Bryant served as a credible beard and pleasant, undemanding companion who agreed to be her business manager as well. Nazimova’s friend Patsy Ruth described Bryant as “very pompous, ultra-British, extremely good-looking, or so people thought at the time. He had a self-important managerial air, but did nothing for Madame except spend her money.” When at last Nazimova decided to “divorce” the no-talent Chumps (as she fondly called him), he persuaded his Allikins (as he called her) to sign a phony document, dated 1918, in which she agreed to pay both her and Bryant’s future income tax, lest the IRS discover the true nature of their arrangement and demand back taxes. In return he gave his word as a gentleman never to reveal their secret, but was forced to renege when he married Sheila’s mother, Marjorie Gilhooley, in 1925; as far as the public knew, Bryant and Nazimova had never been divorced, and hence it behooved the wily Chumps to point out that indeed they’d never been married in the first place. The ensuing scandal all but destroyed Nazimova’s career, while Bryant settled into what he hoped would be a pleasantly domestic state of semiretirement.
His wife Marjorie had a bit of money and even a fine pedigree, despite a surname that suggested Irish peasantry. In fact her father was Justice Gilhooley of the New Jersey Supreme Court, but it was her mother, a New York Kendrick no less, who conferred a degree of gentility on the family. Marjorie attended Vassar and had an interest in French literature, in light of which it seems odd that she should end up marrying a washed-up, not overbright, middle-aged actor such as Charles Bryant, whatever his looks and dashing British manner. Perhaps what attracted each to each, apart from similarly polished facades, was their essential vulgarity: Bryant had been a bank clerk from a lower-middle-class family before he turned to acting and blackmail, while Marjorie would go on to become a member of the John Birch Society—a zealous reactionary racist who was known to return letters if they had FDR’s likeness on the stamps. But what this unsavory couple may have had most in common was that both were miserable parents.
Sheila and her older brother Charlie were raised by her mother’s sister—at first because their parents claimed to have no time for them (Marjorie sold real-estate and Charles still took the occasional stage role), and then because they weren’t getting along, and finally because they were divorced (in 1936) and had little interest in caring for children anyway. Also, Charles Bryant had run through their money with the same skill he’d shown as Nazimova’s business manager, and most of whatever was left was lost in the Depression. The caretaking aunt was also somewhat reduced, but still owned property and was solvent enough to move to Miami Beach for her arthritis, or wherever else her fancy took her. In fact they moved so often that Sheila would eventually attend some twelve different schools, though her formal education didn’t actually begin until third grade. At that time they were still living in New York, where she and Charlie were enrolled at the elite Dalton School. Sheila, however,
was a poor student (having never been taught so much as the alphabet), and Charlie’s disturbing behavior soon got him expelled.* After that, whenever possible, the aunt would send them away to second-rate boarding schools, where they were invariably the shabbiest and most neglected among their wealthier classmates. Indeed, “shabby-genteel” would later become a favorite epithet of Sheila’s, one that struck a deep chord in Yates as well.
Such an upbringing took a grievous toll on Sheila’s brother, a bright but increasingly bizarre young man, while Sheila herself seemed to emerge relatively unscathed. All her adult life she’d briskly admit that she disliked her parents as well as the aunt who’d grudgingly cared for her, but that didn’t mean she wanted anybody to feel sorry for her—least of all Yates, some of whose early stories (as well as parts of Revolutionary Road) were attempts to make sense of Sheila’s inner life as a child. “It was nothing like what he imagined,” she insists. “He made it seem like I was torn apart by my father’s absence, but that’s what he felt as a child, not me.” Which seems plausible up to a point, though evidence suggests that Sheila’s wounds were deep and abiding, however adept she became at hiding them.
She never did catch up in school. At Hunter High she flunked almost everything but English, and ended up at Bronxville her senior year. Her peripatetic childhood had left her socially awkward—like Yates she constantly found herself the only kid in school who didn’t know anybody—and she was desperate for acceptance. At Bronxville there was a clique of girls who called themselves “the Web,” and Sheila’s only ambition was to become a member. “She did all the wrong things,” said her friend Ann Barker. “She tried to suck up and was very gauche about it. And of course she had to smoke, because that was the thing to do.” More than fifty years later, Barker asked Sheila if it still bothered her that she hadn’t been accepted by the Bronxville clique. “Oh, you mean the Web!” Sheila replied, and said she didn’t know why she hadn’t gotten in, since her aunt had written her a recommendation, and so on. “She still felt the hurt,” said Barker, who’d long forgotten the name of the clique until Sheila reminded her.
But at the time she affected not to care, and took to cultivating a jadedly sophisticated manner. Barker had a brother at West Point, and Sheila urged her to get them invited to a dance so they could meet cadets and mingle with college girls; also she insisted they had to have fur coats—a muskrat imitation of mink in Sheila’s case and a “rat paw or rabbit wrapper of sorts” in Barker’s. But at the dance they were not mistaken for college girls. As Barker recalled, “Sheila lit and smoked her cigarettes with great aplomb, and I just shrank, not even knowing how to feign worldliness.” By then Sheila had decided to become a thespian like her father (whom she professed to admire greatly, though she later called him “a silly man”), and certainly her protean personality would seem conducive. When she got the lead in the Bronxville senior play she persuaded both parents to attend, and afterward her father observed that she was “very good at acting the actress.” Whereupon Sheila dropped acting and decided to attend secretarial school, rather abruptly changing her accent from a genteel Westchester drawl to that of a savvy New York working girl. As Yates noted in “Regards at Home”:
… some of her speech mannerisms made me wince. Instead of “yeah” she said “yaw,” often while squinting against the smoke of a cigarette; she said “as per usual” too—an accounting department witticism, I think—and instead of saying “everything” she often said “the works.” That was the way smart, no-nonsense New York secretaries talked, and a smart, no-nonsense New York secretary was all she had ever allowed herself to be.
Not quite “ever,” nor did Sheila entirely relinquish her old persona. She always dressed smartly, with elegant understatement, never wearing patterned clothes because, as she put it, she herself was too “printed” (that is, with a redhead’s freckles) to wear a pattern. Also she refused to refer to her future husband as “Dick,” which was too coarse; for most of their married life he became “Rich,” and for a while that caught on with family and friends as well.
* * *
They were together constantly for the first year of their courtship, and the more they fought, the more they worked to convince each other that they were in love, since “the movies had proved time and again that love was like that.” An early impediment to intimacy was solved when Sheila moved out of her mother’s place (a step she would have taken in any case) and found an apartment on the Upper West Side with two sisters, Mary and Doris Bialek, both of whom were “wowed” by their roommate’s new boyfriend.* Not only was he tall and “terribly good-looking,” as Doris recalled, but also charming in a quiet sort of way; he was somewhat less quiet when he drank (“a bit too much” even then), but still charming and a lot more funny, since he rarely joked when sober.
The couple were torn between the bourgeois white-collar world of their working lives and that of hip nonconformity to be found, they supposed, in certain recesses of the Village and elsewhere. But both were wary of unconventional behavior for its own sake, and felt rather alienated from the whole bohemian milieu—the “half-phoney art talk that [made] the rafters ring at the San Remo,” as Yates put it a few years later. At the time, though, they both seemed to concede the romantic appeal of such a scene, at least in comparison with whatever passed for fun among the Bialek sisters and certain friends from the office. At night, then, they shed their quotidian shells and worked at becoming personages. Before long they were both so comfortable in their newfound freedom that they even managed to shock a few friends, one of whom found the two in bed together and not even embarrassed about it—Sheila picked a pair of panties off the floor, then curtsied and withdrew to the bathroom without so much as a blush. Meanwhile the couple spoke of moving to Europe someday, where perhaps they’d find not only themselves, but others who weren’t mortified by matters such as premarital sex.
Things were going about as well as could be expected until it came time to meet the parents. On one side this wasn’t a problem—Yates’s introduction to the divided Bryants went more or less without a hitch: Marjorie would always regard him as a nice-enough young man (never suspecting how intensely he disliked her), while the impressively bulky and semifamous father rather awed his prospective son-in-law, such was the contrast between Charles Bryant and the diminutive, meekly deceased Vincent Yates. It’s possible Bryant might have become a father of sorts to Yates (if not Sheila), but as it happened he died of liver cancer a few months after that first meeting.
Dookie was another matter. In her loneliness she bitterly resented the demands this girl was making on Richard’s time, and her paradoxical sense of delicacy was affronted by the manner in which that time was spent. She hardly saw her son anymore, except when he breezed through in the morning to change clothes for work, and when she finally did meet Sheila—if one accepts the account given in “Regards at Home”*—the dislike was immediate and mutual. “Well, she’s a pleasant girl, dear” (says the mother in the story), “but I don’t see how you can find her so attractive.” As for Sheila, she thought Dookie ridiculous at best, dismissing her as an “art bum.” Dookie apparently tipped her hand (during “one of her uncontrollable rages”) when she referred to Sheila as “that cheap little Irish slut”; and finally, when Yates was hospitalized with pneumonia toward the end of 1947, the two women’s bedside visits seem to have coincided with unfortunate results. Who knows whether Sheila actually made a ribald reference to Yates’s healthy color (“The best part is, he’s the same color all over”), but Dookie’s reaction to some such remark was apt to be that of her fictional alter ego: “[She chose] to take it in silence, slightly lowering her eyelids and lifting her chin, like a dowager obliged to confront an impudent scullery maid.”
Dookie, in short, was like a whiff of ammonia to Sheila, abruptly rousing her from a dream of romantic questing with this handsome but frail young man who wanted to be a writer. There was no future in it, she decided, reverting at once to the level-headed ou
tlook of a no-nonsense New York secretary. Yates’s salary at the UP was hardly enough for him and his mother, much less a wife, and as for his fiction—what was likely to come of that? In a later letter to Sheila, Yates characterized her attitude as follows: “[Y]ou had [my writing] figured as a pleasant but hopelessly unworldly knack which anyone in their right mind would gladly swap for a degree in Accountancy out of NYU.” True enough, though it was only part of the whole dismal picture: Sheila was all of twenty; she wanted to meet other, more practical men; and finally Yates had an obligation to his mother, an aging “art bum” with no other hope of subsistence. Sheila wanted to make a clean break.
After Yates’s latest bout with pneumonia, the doctor advised him that he was highly susceptible to tuberculosis (yet another reason for Sheila to beg off), and for a while he imagined himself heading for an early grave like Keats, minus the literary immortality. Despondent, he tried calling Sheila on the phone, though usually one of the Bialek sisters would answer and say (as instructed) that she wasn’t home; but sometimes Sheila was obliged to pick up and listen, and it eventually began to wear her down. She wasn’t made of stone, after all, nor was she meeting other viable men, and such persistence was flattering in a baffling sort of way. “Dick had a terrible thing with loneliness,” she later observed. “If he formed an attachment, he’d be half-destroyed if it ended. Really I think that’s what did him in. He could never bear the thought of losing close people.”
Meanwhile his evenings were free again, and that meant coming home and keeping his mother company. According to “Regards,” she greeted him one night with a peculiar buoyancy, and Yates thought “for a moment of unreasoning hope” that she might have found a job. But no. As “resident sculptor” at Pen and Brush she’d been asked to contribute a bit of light entertainment to an upcoming party, and she was eager to give her son a preview (“with bright eyes and a brisk little hopping around on the floor of our wretched home”). It was a parody of the old Chiquita Banana jingle: