Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  “Yes. Well, that’d be another story, wouldn’t it.” And Charles could feel his spirits beginning to lift again. It would be another story, but it might be almost as good: draftees could qualify for officers’ training too.

  It wasn’t until he was on his way out that afternoon, shrugging into his overcoat as they walked him through room after peach-colored room to the front door, that Charles thought to ask what proved to be an awkward question.

  “How much are you kids paying for this place?”

  Evan hung his head in a dumb, cowardly way that Charles hadn’t seen in years, but Rachel came through with the precise amount of the rent as brightly as though she didn’t know it was going to make trouble.

  “Oh,” Charles said, taking in the dull shock of the information. “Well, that’s a little—that’s a little on the preposterous side, don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s about three or four times as much as it ought to be, if you still have any plans for engineering school at all? This is foolishness, Evan.”

  Exasperation wasn’t a very good note to strike at the end of a visit like this—Charles knew that—but he was determined to stand here waiting until his son looked him in the eyes like a man.

  “Well, I think I can handle it, Dad,” Evan said, and at least his head was up and facing in the right direction now. “And the thing is we like it here, you see. We both like it here a lot.”

  In March Evan’s draft board summoned him for a physical examination.

  Rachel tried to be brave about it because that was how young wives were shown to be in the movies, but she was perilously close to tears as she went about the poignant business of fixing his breakfast. She felt almost as if this were the day of his going into the army itself, or even the day he’d be sent overseas.

  All he had to do today, though, was stand and walk buck naked in an echoing civilian gymnasium among hundreds of other bare-assed men, each with a set of numerals drawn in lipstick across his chest, each with his “personal effects” slung in a little cotton bag around his neck. It didn’t take very long because the doctors all worked quickly, but there was time enough for Evan to find a surprising pleasure in the visions of soldiering that began to crowd his mind.

  He felt sure he could withstand the rigors and embarrassments of basic training, which was often said to be the worst part; he knew he could learn to love the clean, oiled, weighted and balanced potency of his M-1 rifle, and now he could imagine wanting all the rest of it: helmet, field pack and cartridge belt, with the canteen hung against one buttock; canvas leggings strapped under the insteps of high-cut service shoes.

  He could almost hear the boisterous talk and laughter of the barracks and the sharp, ringing count of cadence as his platoon moved out for the rifle range before sunrise—and he knew he would crave every chance he could get at rollicking nights in the bars and hotels of lost country towns with sweet, brassy little country girls.

  There would be an ocean voyage in some comically overcrowded troopship; then there’d be a long ride and a long wait and a long hungry march on broken foreign roads to the front line; and so, soon enough, he would find out forever what “combat” meant; and he wanted that too.

  “Shepard, Evan C.?”

  He was singled out of his column of men, taken back, and made to submit to a second, more meticulous probing of his inner ears. When that was done the doctor sat down at a table, picked up half a salami sandwich in one hand and a fountain pen in the other, wrote “4-F” on a printed form, and took a greedy bite of the sandwich. He was evidently the kind of man who could write and talk at the same time, because while writing a sentence or two on the paper he explained everything, spilling crumbs of bread from his lips, before Evan could ask a question.

  “Perforated eardrums,” he said around his chewing. “And I wouldn’t bother trying the navy or the Marine Corps; be better to save those people the trouble. Nobody’s going to take you in with ears like this.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Rachel said prayerfully when he came home with the news. “Oh, God, I’m so glad, and so relieved; aren’t you?”

  And he didn’t know how to answer her (Well, maybe; maybe not; yes and no); so he didn’t say anything. He opened a cold beer and sat down with it, knowing he’d need a little time and quiet to sort things out. It occurred to him, glancing around, that this ample apartment seemed to have shrunk. It had come to look and feel uncannily like the place in Huntington with Mary Donovan, years ago, except that it was costing him more than three times the rent.

  “Aren’t you going to call your father, darling?” Rachel asked. She’d been addressing him as “darling” since a week or two before they were married and he’d found it charming at first; lately, though, he’d begun to wonder if she wasn’t overdoing it.

  “Well, not right now,” he said. “I’ll call him in a while.”

  “All right. Oh, but I can’t wait to tell my mother, and I want to call Daddy too.” And she started swiftly for the telephone across the room.

  “No, don’t,” he said, sharply enough to make her stop and turn back.

  “Well, but they’ll be so pleased, Evan.”

  “Look: just sit now, okay?” he told her. “Sit. Sit.” And it sounded like a command given to a nervous, well-trained dog, but she obeyed him.

  If he’d ever spoken that way to Mary Donovan she might have put her hands on her hips and told him to go fuck himself; but then, that was the difference between youth and maturity. As a boy he’d had to contend with a proud and resentful girl; now, fully grown, he had earned the right to have a wife as placid as the wives of other men.

  Well, but still, other men were saying goodbye to their wives all over the world. Other men were caught up in a profoundly hazardous adventure now, unable to guess how long it might last and not even caring. None of them were ready to die but they all knew their death was entirely possible; that was what would invigorate every waking moment of their lives.

  And when they came back, these other men—or when most of them did—they would all have a decided advantage over Evan Shepard. They might look at him as if he were scarcely worth bothering with, the way the cops had looked at him the night he was booked for disorderly conduct. If they talked to him at all it would be in tones of condescension, rarely waiting to hear his replies. And whatever elaborate peaceful structures they might manage to build in the world, after the war, would always seem to be there for no other purpose than to shut him out.

  One thing, therefore, was clear: they had better not find him like this. Evan Shepard was damned if they’d find him punching a factory time clock, fondling his thermos bottle of coffee and his little brown paper bag of lunch, doing mindless, underling things all day and then driving home in an absurdly cheap old car to this absurdly expensive place.

  Something would have to be done, and soon; but first he would have to call his father.

  Charles answered the phone in the kitchen while he was getting dinner started.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s—that’s really too bad, Evan. I can imagine how disappointed you are, and I’m sorry … Perforated eardrums; oh, yes. Well, that’s always been a tough one. The medical assumption there, you see, is that you might be susceptible to many different minor infections, and it isn’t worth the army’s while to take responsibility for that kind of thing.”

  And for what other kinds of thing, dear God, had it ever been worth the army’s while to take responsibility? What about a boy who couldn’t believe the First World War was over? What about a girl who couldn’t sleep in Fort Devens or Fort Dix, Fort Benning or Fort Meade?

  Oh, Jesus, the army was a bitch and a slut and a whore. The army didn’t care whether you loved it or not.

  Charles was obliged to put the phone down for a minute—he had to turn over two sizzling pork chops on the grill and then to lower the heat under a frothing pan of peeled, boiling potatoes—and by the time he picked it up again he found he’d thought of a few encouraging things to say.
>
  “Well, but look, Evan,” he began. “There’s a brighter side to all this. All the colleges are going to be a lot more accessible to you now, and for as long as the war goes on. They’ll have to worry about keeping their enrollments up, you see, and I imagine they’ll be very liberal with their scholarship programs and so on. If I were you I’d set my sights on engineering school right now, and I wouldn’t let anything else interfere.”

  He’d gotten that far before remembering that Rachel was pregnant—maybe the news of pregnancy would always have to break over a man in wave after wave until it finally sank in—and so he had to wonder if all this college talk might now be pointless. A student with a crisp little working wife was one thing; what about a student with a wife and child?

  But he took up the broken thread of his argument anyway, because he wasn’t yet ready to let it go. “It seems to me the first thing you and Rachel ought to do is find a cheaper place to live; get out from under all that rent; then open a savings account and put away as much as you can every month, on a regular basis. I think you’ll find it isn’t really very hard to carry out a plan like this, Evan, if you’re careful and if you never lose sight of your goal …”

  Long before he’d finished talking, though, Charles had lost confidence in his own voice. He didn’t like the bogus athletic-coach quality of it; he wasn’t sure if a line like “Never lose sight of your goal” should be allowed to stand except as a ludicrous admonition in some comedy for children; he resented Rachel’s pregnancy; and he was bitterly disappointed, in ways that got worse and worse the more he thought about it, by the perforated eardrums. Sometimes the world was just too fucking much.

  He had washed the kitchen windows only yesterday, long and hard, and tonight one of their big black panes gave back a merciless reflection of himself: surprisingly old, surprisingly gaunt, looking forever as bewildered as he’d been in boyhood. He might have lingered at the window in a little ceremony of self-regard and self-loathing, but there were other things to be done. He had to mash the potatoes, drain the string beans, serve up the pork chops, and go tell Grace that dinner was ready.

  He was almost as far as the sun porch when it occurred to him that Grace would probably say “Oh, God, how wonderful” or “Oh, that’s marvelous” on hearing of Evan’s draft classification, and he was right about that. She said both of those things.

  Rachel’s favorite radio program was a weekly series of half-hour Western dramas called Death Valley Days.

  “Because I mean it really isn’t just a bunch of cowboy stuff,” she would explain. “They’re very good, well-written little radio plays, and the acting’s always very good too. I don’t know how they can sustain such a high level of quality every week.”

  But Death Valley Days came on at seven o’clock, dinnertime for the young Shepards of Amityville, and that meant there could be no talk at all at their table as the two of them soberly fed themselves and listened to the little plastic Philco her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

  It sounded like just a bunch of cowboy stuff to Evan, every time; still, it hadn’t taken him very many weeks to decide he didn’t mind. Anybody’s marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk. Besides, Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals—that was one of the things he’d come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness.

  One evening in April, after a laconic, final exchange of cowboy dialogue and a significant whinnying of horses, Rachel turned off the radio without waiting for the theme music to come up at the end and said “Well, that wasn’t exactly one of their better ones, was it.”

  She cleared away the dinner dishes, going about the job like an efficient young waitress, showing off a little to suggest how deft and graceful she could be. Then she brought her husband’s coffee over to the sofa, in a softer lamplight, and sat beside him there with a cup for herself and a lighted cigarette that looked a little funny in her fingers because she hadn’t yet quite learned to handle it. This was one of the hours Evan most looked forward to all day, every day, in the relentless drone and glare of the machine-tool factory.

  “Darling, there’s something I have to talk over with you, because I promised I would,” Rachel said. “But let’s put it this way: if you don’t care for the idea, we don’t have to discuss it any further. We’ll just forget it, okay?”

  “Well, okay, but wait.” He was looking at her with one of the long, fond, teasing smiles that were beginning to make her nervous. “You know what you do?” he asked her. “You say a lot of little things over and over, and always just the same.”

  “I do?” She looked troubled. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you say ‘let’s put it this way,’ and you say ‘don’t care for the idea’—those are two examples, and I could probably come up with a whole lot of others.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I suppose that must be very—boring for you, then, isn’t it.”

  “Oh, come on, sweetheart, I never said ‘boring.’ Whoever said ‘boring’?” And he was afraid she might be taking this much too seriously, so he reached out to stroke or tousle her hair, but that didn’t work because she’d just been to the hairdresser and didn’t want to get it messed up.

  “No, but still,” she said after ducking and taking his hand away, “isn’t that something everybody does? Develop certain habits of speech? You do it too.”

  “Nah, now wait a minute; that’s silly. You’re just—”

  “Well, but it’s true, Evan. You do. You always say ‘a decided advantage’—never a ‘distinct’ or a ‘definite’ or a ‘clear’ advantage—oh, yes you do, and you say ‘nah’ instead of ‘no’ a lot of the time, and you always, always say—”

  But by then it no longer mattered what either of them said, or was said to say, because any further talk was out of the question. With their cups and saucers safe on the coffee table and their cigarettes hastily stubbed out, the young Shepards of Amityville were in each other’s arms.

  At first the sofa seemed an adequate bed; then, with one foot, Evan shoved the coffee table far enough away to let him help his writhing, gasping wife carefully down onto the rug.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Evan, don’t stop.”

  “Oh, I won’t, dear,” he promised her, “you know that. I’ll never stop.”

  And it was clear to them both, in what little thought they gave it, that the privacy of this big peach-colored place would always be worth whatever it cost as long as it allowed them an occasional chance to get laid on the floor.

  It was an hour or more later, as they sat up in their bed with two bottles of beer, before Rachel opened the topic she’d said they would have to discuss. She told him there was a house available in Cold Spring Harbor where they’d have plenty of living space and even a separate room for the baby, and where the rent would be less than a third of what they were paying here; but there was a drawback.

  “You’re amazing, Rachel, you know that? How’d you find out about this?”

  “Wait—I’m getting to that. The drawback is, it wouldn’t exactly be private. It’s a sharing arrangement, you see. We’d be sharing the house with two other—two other people.”

  “Oh?” Evan frowned and began thoughtfully peeling the paper label off his beer bottle. “Well, but still, that might not necessarily be so bad. You know who the other people are?”

  “I’m getting to that. Just let me finish, okay?” And she took a deep breath. “The point is, this whole thing is my mother’s idea. We’d be sharing the house with her, you see, and with my brother, too, when he’s home on vacations.”

  And Evan conveyed all his disappointment in one sad syllable: “Oh.”

  “Well, I said I didn’t think you’d like it, Evan, didn’t I? Haven’t I made that clear from the start? We can simply drop the whole subject now, if that’s what you want to do.” But a minute later, as if the subject were still too whole and too fra
gile to be dropped, she said “I only wish—”

  “Only wish what?”

  “Oh, well, I was just going to say I wish I didn’t have to call her tomorrow and tell her, that’s all. She takes these things so hard. She’ll be ‘hurt.’ She’s dying to live in Cold Spring Harbor and she knows she could never afford to take this house alone, so she’ll be ‘hurt’ for that reason; then the other thing is she’s come to think of it all as some big generous way of doing us a favor, you see, so now she’ll be ‘hurt’ for that reason too. She’s impossible. I mean she’s my mother and I love her and everything, but she’s really a very, very—”

  “Oh, I know, dear,” Evan said quietly.

  “God, and here I am talking about it when I said I wouldn’t. Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind if you talk.”

  “She’s really sort of—crazy, Evan. I mean that. She’s always been crazy. Oh, I don’t suppose anybody’d want to commit her to an insane asylum or anything, but she’s crazy. All my life she’s kept coming up with some scheme for a new place to live every year, and I think she always really has believed it’d make everything happier for us, each time. Isn’t that crazy? Oh, and she used to say my father’s a ‘coward’ because he hasn’t gotten ahead in business; that’s crazy too.”

  Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother. Maybe it happened with sons and their fathers, too, or with all grown children and the ever-diminishing presence of parents in their lives; in any case, the knowledge didn’t prevent her from pressing on, as if to see how far she would dare to go.

  “… And she doesn’t smell very good, either.”

  “Doesn’t what?”

  “Smell very good. I guess that’s a horrible thing to say about my own mother, but it’s true. It may be that she doesn’t take baths often enough, or that when she does take a bath she forgets to use the soap, but I’ve dreaded getting up close to her as long as I can remember. And do you know a funny thing, Evan? I’ve never told anybody about that until this very minute.”