Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  The baby was a girl, named Kathleen after Mary’s grandmother. A conscientious number of family snapshots were taken, and in all but one the camera caught Evan and Mary wearing smiles of theatrical intensity. The single exception, soon thrown away, showed both of them looking as scared and desperate as if they’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else than having to pose for that photograph.

  By now the adults of both families could subside into their own concerns again; but they must all have known, though nobody put it into words, that adolescent marriages aren’t likely to last.

  Evan began taking long, aimless drives alone at night, so he could frown in the darkness and think. It was an excellent thing to have a pretty girl being crazy about you all the time—there was no denying that. Still, it could leave you wondering. Was this all there was ever going to be? And he would sock the steering wheel with the soft part of his fist, again and again, because he couldn’t believe his life had become so fixed and settled before he’d even turned nineteen.

  Mary wasn’t happy either. There had to be high school, of course, so you could learn about boys and love and all that; but then there was supposed to be college too, for four years, and after college there was supposed to be a time of living in New York and having a job and buying nice clothes and going to parties and meeting a few—well, meeting a few interesting people. Wasn’t that so? And didn’t everybody know it?

  Oh, if it weren’t for the burden of knowing Evan adored her, that he’d be terribly lost without her—if it weren’t for that, she knew she would now be putting her mind to finding some way out of all this.

  Sometimes, confronting her daughter’s round, lovely eyes while lifting her out of the crib, or out of the bath, Mary would find she had to will her own face into an expression of kindness because she was afraid even an infant might recognize the looks of resentment and blame.

  When the quarrels began they were long and harsh and self-renewing.

  “Are you ever going to let me be a person, Evan?”

  “How do you mean, ‘a person?’ ”

  “Oh, you know. Or if you don’t know there’s no point in my trying to explain it.”

  “Well, but I mean how do you mean ‘let’ you? Seems to me you can be any kind of a person you want, any time.”

  “Oh, God; never mind. You’d know perfectly well what I’m trying to say if you could ever picture me away from this stove, or away from this sink, or out of that bed.”

  “Oh. So is this going to be the kind of talk where we stay up half the night until our lips are all dry and cracked and we can’t even get laid? Because if that’s the deal one more time you’d better count me out. I’m tired, is all. You can’t even imagine how tired I am.”

  “You’re tired. You’re tired. Listen, mister factory apprentice, I’m so tired I could scream.”

  “Well, but what the hell else do you want, Mary? You want to get out and meet other guys? Is that it? You want to open your legs for other guys? Because I’ve got news for you, sweetheart: I’m dumb; I’m dumb; but I’m not that fucking dumb.”

  “Oh, if only you knew, Evan. If only you had an inkling of how dumb you really are.”

  “Yeah? Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  But by the time they did break up, a year and a half after the wedding, there was no quarrelling at all. In the plainness of their need to get out of that Huntington apartment and away from each other, fast, they both seemed to know that any further quarrels would be as embarrassing as losing your temper at a stranger in a public place.

  Mary enrolled as a freshman at Long Island University, after arranging for her parents to take care of the baby, and within six months she was said to be engaged to a predental student from Hempstead.

  Evan moved back into his parents’ house and went on working at the machine-tool plant. He didn’t know what else to do, and nobody near him came up with any better ideas—though his father did try to offer encouraging advice of a general kind.

  “Well, Evan, this is bound to be a difficult time for you,” he said one night as they lingered at the dinner table after Grace had gone upstairs. “But I think you’ll find that sometimes things do get better of their own accord. It may be that all you can do now, apart from trying to keep your spirits up, is wait and see what’s going to happen next.”

  A celebrated clinic of optometry was opened for business in 1941, in lower Manhattan, where people suffering from very poor vision could be equipped with spectacles said to bring about remarkable improvements in their daily lives.

  Charles Shepard made an appointment at the place as soon as he found out about it, in April of that year; then, rather than go into New York alone on the train, he asked his son to drive him there.

  “Well, but I’ll lose a day’s pay,” Evan said, as Charles had expected he would, and Charles had just the right answer ready, for delivery in just the right kind of quiet voice.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he told him, “and what’s more, you know it doesn’t matter.”

  Evan looked briefly puzzled, but then he seemed to understand—or seemed at least to see that this might be a trip worth taking if the old man had something on his mind.

  He was twenty-three now, still working in the factory and living in his parents’ house, and his father had long suspected he was following the course of least resistance: to break out of it would have required ambition, and there didn’t yet seem to be a trace of that quality in his character. Delinquency may once have threatened to possess the boy, but now a pure lassitude was gathering to engulf the man. He was getting more dramatically handsome all the time, too—girls gave him startled looks of helplessness wherever he went—and that was the funny part: it didn’t seem right for anyone so splendid-looking to have so little going on in his head.

  Charles had often wished they could have an unhurried, serious talk, as other fathers and sons were said to do, but there never seemed to be time for that at home: as soon as Evan cleared away his dinner dishes he’d be out in his car and gone, often for most of the night. Charles didn’t know where he went on those drives, or what he did, and he was sometimes vaguely envious, imagining easy romantic adventures all around Long Island and New York; but then he’d wonder, sadly, if Evan’s carousing might amount to nothing more than wasting time at the same roadside barroom night after night, in the drink-fuddled company of other factory employees as indolent as he was. And wouldn’t that be only natural? If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren’t you almost certain to become a proletarian too?

  That was why the day of the eye clinic had become extremely important for Charles. Given an hour or two alone with Evan on the drive into lower Manhattan, and an hour or two more on the drive back, there was every reason to hope their talk might be profitable, as well as serious.

  They set out at noon, in mild and pretty spring weather, and Charles was able to get his part of the talk started after a very few miles.

  “Memory’s a curious thing,” he began, and he was afraid at once that this might be a weak, dead-giveaway kind of opening line, like the first sentence of a radio commercial, but he didn’t stop. “I don’t suppose you can remember much about Fort Benning, Georgia, can you?”

  “Oh, a little, yeah,” Evan said. “I remember a few things.”

  “Well, you were still pretty small then, but that time at Benning’s been on my mind a lot lately. Your mother and I had these great—”

  He spoke carefully, listening to the words as they came and trying as hard as an actor not to let them sound rehearsed, though in fact they were: he had rehearsed the whole of this speech last night in whispers, in bed, right down to the pauses where Evan could make a comment or two. Striving in every breath for the illusion of spontaneity, he was only reciting material he knew by heart.

  “Your mother and I had these great friends in those years, Joe and Nancy Raymond. Do you remember them at all? Had a girl of about your age and a younger boy?”
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  “Yeah, I do,” Evan said. “I mean, I do now.”

  “We took to spending an awful lot of time together, in our place or theirs, or down at the club, and we never seemed to get tired of each others’ company. Then one night Joe told us he’d decided to resign his commission. Said he wanted to find out what making money would be like. He’d been looking into the sales end of the radio business—radio was still brand-new then, you see, and people were saying it was a field with an unlimited future. His idea was to get started selling for one of the manufacturers, Philco or Majestic or one of the others, then move over into the management side and go on up from there.

  “Well, naturally, your mother and I felt bad. We’d be losing our best friends—really the only friends we had, at the time—and I can remember your mother saying ‘What’re we going to do without you?’

  “And here’s what I’ve been leading up to, Evan: Joe Raymond asked me to go along with him. He said we’d probably starve for a year or two, or three, but he said once we got our bearings we’d begin to move forward and nothing in the world would ever stop us. Then your mother spoke up again and said ‘Oh, let’s do it, Charles.’

  “And I’m afraid I can never forget what happened after that. I’ll always remember how crestfallen, how disappointed she looked when I started making excuses and shying away from it, backing down, trying to laugh it off by saying I couldn’t picture myself as a salesman, and that kind of thing. I felt like a coward, and I think that’s probably because I was a coward. I simply didn’t have Joe Raymond’s spirit, or Joe Raymond’s guts.

  “Well, I can’t tell you what became of the Raymonds because we lost touch with them after a while, the way people always seem to do, even with dear friends. I don’t know whether Joe ever did get ahead in business or whether he went down and out in the Depression. But I’ll tell you this much, Evan: years later, after your mother’s illness, I would’ve given anything to take it all back. Time and again over the years I’ve wanted to go back to that night at Fort Benning and say ‘Right; good; me too. That’s what we’ll do, Joe. We’ll get out and sell radios.’ ”

  Charles’s voice had grown a little more intense than he’d meant it to, so he waited a few seconds to bring his breathing back to normal. Then he said “I think you can probably guess why I wanted to tell you about this, Evan. It’s because I really don’t like the way things are sort of idling and drifting for you these days. I don’t like the kind of job you have; I don’t like your living at home instead of off somewhere else by yourself. You’ll be twenty-four soon, and it seems to me you ought to be taking command of your life. What I’m trying to say is, I’d like you to be a little more like Joe Raymond, if that’s possible, and a little less like me. Do you understand this at all?”

  “Well, I think so, yes,” Evan said. “Yes. Sure, I understand.”

  And Charles, tired of talking, felt a tentative sense of having done his best. The only part of it he regretted now was “you ought to be taking command of your life,” because that might have a faintly sanctimonious ring for a boy who’d been told only a few years ago that things were likely to get better of their own accord. Well, never mind. The phrasing may not have been perfect, but the message was clear.

  If a long silence had developed in the car now it was only because Evan felt he needed time to prepare a full and appropriate reply. He wanted to tell of ideas he hadn’t yet quite worked out in his own mind, so there was a lot of material to be organized before he started talking; besides, he was aware that too abrupt an announcement might spoil the drama of his father’s confession.

  “As a matter of fact, Dad,” he began when he was ready, “I’ve been making a few plans that I guess I probably should’ve discussed with you.”

  And with a shyness in his voice that surprised him, because he hadn’t meant to be shy about this, he said he wanted to go to college and study mechanical engineering. Oh, it would take some doing—he’d never really graduated from high school, for one thing, and the money part would certainly be a problem too, unless he could somehow qualify for a scholarship—but once those matters were cleared up he knew he could handle the rest of it. He had already sent away for several catalogues.

  “Well, Evan,” Charles said, “that’s marvelous. I’m delighted to know you’ve been thinking along those lines. I won’t be able to help you out much on the financial side, as you know, but I’ll back you up in any way I can.”

  They had scarcely reached Queens, but the skin on the back of Evan’s neck and along his forearms had all turned to gooseflesh, just from hearing his father say “Well, Evan, that’s marvelous.” By the time they went across the Queensborough Bridge Evan had begun to feel like a young pioneer, like a courageous man, like the very kind of man his father might always have wanted him to be, and from there on the ride might as well have been something in a dream: across town and then swiftly down toward lower Manhattan, where Charles might find a pair of glasses that would bring about remarkable improvements in his daily life.

  Somewhere below Forty-second Street it started to rain, and by the time they reached Twenty-third it was almost a downpour. Then just below Fourteenth Street, while Evan was taking what appeared to be an easy way through the long crooked maze of Greenwich Village, there was a thumping disturbance in the engine—he barely managed to pull over to the curb before it rattled and died.

  “Doesn’t sound very good,” he said.

  “No.”

  On getting out of the car and lifting the hood, Evan would have thought he knew this engine as well as he knew anything; but now, as it popped and hissed under his scrutiny and his gingerly prodding fingers, it had taken on the look and feel of something he would never understand.

  “Well, it’s a very old car,” Charles said, standing in the street beside him and wearing a wrinkled raincoat that he’d found in the back seat. “These things happen. I think we’d better find a garage if we can, don’t you?”

  But neither of them knew this part of the city. There might not be a garage for miles around, and they walked two or three blocks without even finding a telephone booth. Charles guessed they would have to impose on somebody, and that was a nuisance—he had never liked going through the elaborate apologies and thanks it always entailed—but he pressed a random doorbell in the vestibule of a small, random apartment building.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said to the woman who opened the door, “but we’ve had some trouble with our car; I wonder if we could use your phone for just a minute.”

  “Well, of course,” she said. “Please come in.” She stepped back to welcome them into her sad living room, which smelled of cat droppings and cosmetics and recent cooking, and Charles had her figured at once as a nice person down on her luck. New York was honeycombed with this kind of wretched gentility.

  “You’re very kind,” he told her. “Thank you so much. This shouldn’t take long.”

  “Well, I’m glad we can help. Will you need this?”

  The classified phone book she thrust at him was useless—he hadn’t been able to bring that kind of print into focus for years—but he thumbed the pages of it anyway, standing at her telephone table, because that was easier than looking into her face. He could feel her watching him, and he could feel the weight of her wish that this chance encounter might develop into a happy little social occasion.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m afraid my eyes aren’t very—Evan? Can you give me a hand with this?”

  Evan had followed him into the room, blinking in embarrassment under the woman’s smile; now he took over the phone book and found a place called West Village Motors that looked about right, and he crouched at the phone to dial the number.

  “Won’t you both sit down?” the woman said. “If you don’t have to rush off?”

  And there was no point in their rushing off now because it might take the mechanic half an hour or more to get here; then, just before sitting down, it seemed only civil to introduce themselves, like gues
ts at the beginning of an awkward party. The woman’s name was Gloria Drake.

  “Well, of course I don’t drive,” she said when the three of them were seated, “so I’ve never understood anything about cars, but I know they’re terribly complicated—and terribly dangerous.” Here she gave a little laughing shudder that was probably meant to be girlish and disarming, but all it did was call attention to how loose and ill-defined her lips were. When she laughed and shuddered that way, holding her shoulders high for emphasis, she looked like a shuddering clown.

  “… Oh, I know Cold Spring Harbor,” she cried a minute later. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say I ‘know’ it, but the children and I did spend a few days near there years ago. And I’ll never forget how lovely that part of the north shore is: we were there in the fall, when all the leaves were just beginning to turn. Oh, and I loved the Sound. I loved Long Island Sound. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some sherry?”

  She may not have been more than fifty, but there wasn’t much left of whatever she’d had in the way of looks. Her hair was a blend of faded yellow and light gray, as if dyed by many years of drifting cigarette smoke, and although you could say she’d kept her figure, it was such a frail, slack little figure that you couldn’t picture it doing anything but sitting right here, on this coffee-stained sofa. Her very way of sitting suggested an anxious need to be heard and understood, and to be liked if possible: hunched forward with her forearms on her knees and her clasped hands writhing to the rhythms of her own talk.

  Later, Charles Shepard would have to remind himself that he’d probably done his share of the talking—he must have given enough information and asked enough questions to keep her fuelled and going—but at the time, and again in memory, it seemed that the afternoon was given over to Gloria Drake’s voice: the long runs of it, the little bursts and hesitations of it, the hoarse, cigarette-heavy laughter in it, and the incipient hysteria. She was ready to give her heart away to total strangers off the street.