Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  “Well, good,” he said. “I like it when we tell each other things.”

  “She smells sort of like—rotten tomatoes,” Rachel said in a hesitant, tentative way, distorting her face with the need to find a precise comparison, “or maybe more like old, rancid mayonnaise.”

  The pleasure of disparaging her mother was fading fast—maybe it would always be something you couldn’t sustain very long—and besides, she wanted to go back and think about the completely unexpected remark her husband had just made: “I like it when we tell each other things.”

  Wasn’t it supposed to be the girl, rather than the man, who said unashamedly vulnerable things like that? But the lingering expression of it was still there in Evan’s eyes, and it was enough to make her tingle. She might even have tried to praise him for it, or to thank him in some way, if he hadn’t spoken up first.

  “How do you suppose your mother ever found this place?”

  “Oh, probably from an ad in the paper: she always reads the real-estate section. She’s spent her whole life reading the real-estate section.”

  “Seems funny, though, doesn’t it, that a house of that size would be so reasonable? And furnished too?”

  “Well, she did say the furniture isn’t much, but she said it’s ‘tasteful’ enough. Oh, and this is funny, Evan: she told me the house is ‘very nicely located,’ and I think all she means by that is that it’s not far from where your parents live. Isn’t it sort of—embarrassing, really, what a crush she has on your father?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “So anyway I’ve got the address written down, and the name of the rental agent, but I didn’t really think you’d—”

  “Well, it’d be worth looking into, wouldn’t it?” Evan said. “And I mean Jesus—” He gave a brief, self-deprecating laugh. “Jesus, my father’d sure as hell like it, wouldn’t he?”

  The word “ramshackle” occurred to Rachel as they left the car and walked up to the house her mother’s heart was set on: long, two stories high, white clapboard with a black tarpaper-shingled roof. It was similar to other cheaply built houses around the village, but its angularity was softened by a wealth of shrubs and trees; you couldn’t quite see all of it at once.

  “Plenty of space in there,” the rental agent said, pocketing his bunch of keys, and he hung back to let the young people go first.

  The interior walls had a makeshift look—big panels of light-gray insulation board that were framed and held in place by strips of wooden lath with all the hammered-in nail heads showing—but they were the same kind of walls that Evan’s parents had in their house, so Rachel decided not to call attention to them.

  And there was certainly plenty of space. The downstairs part of it alone looked roomy enough to accommodate four people, neither two of whom would necessarily have much to do with the other; and upstairs, that sense of strict mutual privacy became convincing.

  Their bedroom, with the little adjacent room that would be the baby’s, was practically an apartment in itself. There were generous windows along two sides of it, and there was a small fireplace that brought quick erotic visions into Rachel’s mind. They could get laid here on the hearth rug by firelight, any time they happened to feel like it, with flames and shadows dramatizing every subtle movement of their flesh.

  “I like the fireplace,” she said to Evan, “don’t you?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a nice advantage.”

  “You mean a ‘decided’ advantage,” she told him, prompting him to come up close and wink and give her a hug, while the rental agent looked discreetly away.

  And Rachel would always remember it was that bedroom fireplace, with its ample little hearth rug, that won both of them over to her mother’s plan.

  By the end of Philip Drake’s first year at the Irving School there was a hole the size of an apple in one elbow of his tweed jacket. He couldn’t get it repaired because it was the only jacket he owned, and that small predicament seemed entirely in keeping with a greater hopelessness.

  “Ah, Drake, you’re hopeless,” he’d been told, unnecessarily and many times, often just before being put through some crowd-pleasing humiliation that would turn out to be worse than the last. From the day of his talkative, overconfident arrival at Irving he had failed and failed at learning how not to behave like a jerk; and everybody knew what kind of life a jerk could expect in prep school. All through the fall and winter his hopelessness had been almost complete, and the worst of it was knowing he’d brought it on himself: he had “asked for it,” as other boys were always quick to point out.

  With the coming of spring there’d been surprising improvements: he began to attract less public ridicule and even managed to make two or three respectable friends. There was some basis for assuming things would be better next year (and “next year” would always hold a shining promise of renewal for every schoolboy), but first he would have to spend the whole of a summer at home—and “home,” for Phil Drake, had now become as sketchy and treacherous an assignment as the dormitory he’d gone blundering into, talking and smiling, last September.

  He wouldn’t have minded going back to his mother’s most recent apartment, the one on Hudson Street with the flaking walls and the doors that wouldn’t quite shut, and with the good mirror where you could look for signs of maturity long overdue; it might not have been much, that place, but it was something he knew. All he could predict about Cold Spring Harbor was that his sister would be lost to him there—a married, pregnant woman—and that he would have to find some way of making peace with the taciturn, intimidating stranger she was married to.

  After the sleek and quiet railroads of New England he found the rocking, clangoring Long Island train an insult to the nerves. He could hardly wait for the ride to be over, and so he was ready—standing in the aisle with his hauled-down suitcase in his hand, even before the conductor called “Cold Sp’ng Harb’ ”—or at least he was as ready as anyone could reasonably expect.

  “Philly!” his mother cried, coming quickly across the living room of a long, oddly made house. “Oh, you look wonderful. Oh, let me feast my eyes on you.”

  She didn’t usually want to feast her eyes on him until she’d had a few drinks, and it must still be too early in the afternoon for that; or maybe, here in the country, she had taken to drinking all day.

  “What’s the matter with your coat, dear?”

  “The matter with my what?”

  “Your nice tweed jacket. It looks sort of all—slick.”

  “Well, it’s very dirty, is the thing. When you’ve only got one of these you can never send it to the cleaners, you see, because you have to wear it every day.”

  “Turn around,” she told him, and when she saw the hole in the sleeve she said “Oh, what a shame. Well, but listen: tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have it dry-cleaned right away, and we’ll have some nice leather patches sewn onto the elbows. How would that be?”

  And he could barely detect the weariness in his own voice when he said it would be fine.

  “Rachel’s dying to see you. She’s upstairs in bed. Oh, it’s nothing serious; just some little complication of pregnancy kind of thing, and the doctor wanted her to rest for a few days. So. Bring your bag, and I’ll take you up to your room—oh, and I’m so hoping you’ll like it, dear, because from the moment I saw that room I thought ‘This is the place for Philly.’ ”

  The staircase was walled in with the same insulation-board paneling that formed all the other walls; he guessed it must be part of some thrifty Long Island method of building.

  “Well, this is fine,” he said of his room. “I mean, really; it’s very nice.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” she said. “So glad you like it. See how big the closet is? Now come across the hall and see my room.”

  And once again, walking in and looking around, he assured her that everything was fine. Then she led him down to the other end of the hall, where they came to a closed door of paned glass that was tightly covered
on the outside with a dotted-swiss curtain.

  “Wait, though, dear,” his mother said. “She may be sleeping. I’ll check.” She parted the curtain with one forefinger, peeked inside, and said “Oh, good; she’s awake.” Then she knocked on one of the panes and called “Rachel? Your wonderful brother is home. Can he come in?”

  “Well, of course he can.”

  And so he found his sister propped against pillows, putting aside what looked like a detective novel. She pulled up the bedclothes as if to hide her pregnancy but he got a glimpse of it anyway, unexpectedly big and heavy-looking under the flimsy stuff of her nightgown, when she raised her arms to give him a hug.

  “Bring over that chair and come sit with me, Phil,” she said. “Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”

  She wanted to know “all about” his year at school, and he gave her a brief, carefully edited summary of it, trying to imply that he’d had a pretty good time and concluding with an anecdote funny enough to make her laugh. Their mother lingered smiling in the open doorway for a little while, as though hoping to be included in their talk; then she went back downstairs.

  “… Oh, this is nothing,” Rachel said of her illness. “It’s just a dumb little bladder infection, but I think my doctor wants to keep me in bed until he collects a whole shelf of urine samples. First he gave me red pills, so the samples came out red; then he gave me blue pills, so the samples came out blue; and so on, and so on. I don’t think he’ll stop until he gets every color of the rainbow. No, but really, I’m fine. Never felt better in my life.”

  And that was easy to believe, from the look of her bright face. He noticed too that she’d changed this year: she looked older and prettier, in subtle ways, and he wondered if all girls were transformed like this when they started getting laid.

  “Well, you’ve got a nice big room here,” he said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  He got up and took his chair back to the wall where it belonged. Then he said “My room’s nice too. And I guess the house itself is kind of a bargain, isn’t it. How d’you suppose she ever found it?”

  “Oh, well.” And Rachel gave him a quick, significant glance. “I think it probably helps if you’ve spent your whole life reading the real-estate section, don’t you?”

  Only rarely did the Drake children allow themselves a smile or a wink at their mother’s expense—anything beyond that would have seemed a sacrilege—but they both suspected it would be a good thing if they could ever let themselves go. They might even be able, then, to talk about such matters as the way she smelled.

  “No, but the main problem here is the dampness,” Rachel was saying. “Have you noticed that? The whole house is damp. It wasn’t something any of us noticed until after we’d moved in, but now there’s no getting away from it. And Evan hates a damp house.”

  Back in his own room, unpacking his jumbled suitcase, Phil thought he could begin to notice the dampness—a faint tang of mildew in the air—but he didn’t believe it was really the main problem here at all, and didn’t believe his sister thought so either. The main problem, the thing about this house there was no getting away from, the part of the bargain that Evan Shepard must hate and hate, was having to live with Gloria Drake.

  Because there was nothing else to do he went downstairs and sat around the living room for half an hour, first in one deep chair and then, to no purpose, in another. He supposed his mother was in the kitchen and hoped she’d stay there, even if it meant she would have more and more to drink. It wasn’t easy to remember, now, that there’d been homesick times at Irving when he’d missed her as badly as if he were seven or eight years old.

  The old cat came treading slowly in from the hall, and Phil said “Well, hey, there, Perkins; come on over here.” He gathered up the cat and held it hanging in both hands as he eased himself far enough down into the chair to set his heels on the edge of the seat, as children sometimes do; then, bringing the cat’s face in close, he kissed it on the nose.

  That was when he looked up and found Evan Shepard standing in the room, watching him.

  He spilled the cat instantly to the floor, got out of the chair as fast as he could, with a flailing of legs, and said “Oh, hi, Evan; just saying hello to my cat here, is all. How’ve you been?”

  And even their handshake was a failure: Evan’s hand closed so abruptly around Phil’s that it clasped only the fingers instead of the palm; it must have felt as if he were shaking hands with a girl.

  “Good to see you, Phil. How was your—how was your year?”

  “Oh, it was okay, thanks.”

  And they stood looking each other over. It was the first time Phil had ever seen Evan in his factory clothes, shirt and pants of dark cotton twill, with an identification badge clipped to the left breast pocket, and that outfit made him want to apologize for attending a private school.

  “Well, then,” Evan said, with a nod to excuse himself, “see you later.” And he went charging upstairs.

  From the beginning, in this artificial household, dinner was the most oppressive event of the day. Rachel would place a small electric fan on the table before they sat down, because the weather was uncommonly hot and still for June, but the caged, buzzing, slowly turning face of it could only send faint new waves of warmth among the dishes.

  “Oh, isn’t this nice,” Gloria often said at the brink of a dinner, and if Phil happened to glance at her then he could always see how afraid she was that tonight, once again, there might be no voices around the table except her own. Twice during the first week or so she made everyone’s discomfort all the worse by saying, plaintively, “Well; I’ve always thought the dinner hour was for conversation.” And not even her son could bring himself to look at her when she said that.

  Evan Shepard hardly ever looked up from his plate, even in response to murmured questions from his wife, and his stolid concentration seemed to suggest that eating, no less than the day’s work or than fathering children, was just another part of a man’s job in the world. When he didn’t need both hands for forking and cutting his meat, the muscular forearm of his free hand would always come to rest in the same way—canted up against the edge of the table, with the hand curled in a loose fist or holding a folded slice of bread, and Phil found that mannerism intriguing: it was the way working-class heroes ate in the movies. He tried to copy it a few times but it didn’t come naturally and only made him self-conscious. One of the lesser things he had learned at Irving, without knowing he’d learned it, was that the prep-school style of eating involved one conspicuous elbow on the table and a tucking of your free hand down out of sight, hanging limp over your lap. That was the pose he kept reverting to now, involuntarily; it wasn’t any wonder that many people seemed to think of prep school as a tucked-in, prissy way of life.

  “Darling?” Rachel inquired—and it always startled Phil to hear her say that word as if it were her husband’s name—“Do you still like the salad, or should I try another kind of dressing?”

  “No, it’s good,” Evan said with his mouth full, and with olive oil shining on his lips. “This is good.” But he didn’t look at her.

  One evening their dinner hour was brief and free of its usual tension, if only because it held tensions of another kind: the elder Shepards had agreed at last, after several courteous postponements, to come over tonight for an after-dinner drink. Scarcely had the table been cleared and the dishes stacked before the doorbell rang; but when Gloria rushed to answer it she found Charles smiling there alone.

  “I’m afraid my wife is a little tired,” he said, “but she made me promise to bring her along another time; possibly some afternoon, if that’s at all convenient.”

  “Well, of course,” she told him, “as long as you’ll—you know—as long as you’ll keep your promise.”

  Out in the kitchen again, where she dropped two ice cubes on the floor in her nervousness, Gloria decided she didn’t really mind Grace Shepard’s staying away: having Charles here by himself would sim
ply make it a different kind of evening, and one that called for a different plan. It was always important to have a plan in situations where you weren’t entirely sure of yourself; otherwise your every chance at happiness could drift away and dissolve and be lost.

  He was making small talk with the young people when she brought the liquor tray into the living room and set it with a little display of ceremony on the coffee table—or rather, he was allowing the young people to make small talk with him as he strolled the carpet and inspected things he probably couldn’t see.

  “Well, this is nice, Gloria,” he said. “You’ve found a very comfortable house.”

  “Oh, well, it’s damp,” she said, letting him have the worst of the information at once to prove she wouldn’t dream of withholding it. “That’s the main problem. Still, we’re hoping all this dry, warm weather’ll make a difference. I think it will. What would everyone like?”

  There was gin and whiskey; there was even a bottle of beer for Phil to nurse; and it wasn’t long before their gathering seemed to glow with a sense of incipient pleasure.

  “Charles?” Gloria said. “I’d almost begun to think we’d never see you again. Have you been avoiding us?” She knew that might sound like a tactless thing to say, or even a reckless thing, but it was a deliberate part of her plan. If you could go straight to the root of a social awkwardness and bring it out into the open, it nearly always worked to your advantage. The other person might feel momentarily embarrassed, but he’d appreciate your candor soon enough. The air would be cleared.

  Charles assured her he’d been meaning to stop by for weeks—as, of course, had Grace; he said he couldn’t imagine where the time had gone; he said he certainly hoped she hadn’t thought he’d been rude.