Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  “See ya then, Amy,” he called after her, and he let her get twelve or fifteen feet away before he brought the hose around and gave it a little snake-like flip that sent a dollop of water splashing at her ankles.

  “Oh, Ralph,” she cried, breaking into a run for the kitchen door—and when this particular girl ran, in that cream-colored skirt, her rhythmically churning buttocks were marvelous to watch. Phil Drake had made a firm, sensible decision not to think too much about girls this summer—it would be better to wait until his glands could catch up with his mind, or until his mind could catch up with his glands—but at moments like this he knew what a futile decision it was. If he didn’t start finding out a few things about girls, soon, he was going to go crazy.

  “Well, Amy’s kind of a good kid,” Ralph confided as he put the hose back to work on the sudsy, dripping limousine. “Or at least she coulda been a good kid; it may be too late now for any man to straighten her out. Know what her trouble is?” And he turned his smile on both the boys, who were dumbly waiting for the answer. “She finger-fucks herself too much. Simple as that.”

  Mrs. Ferris and Mr. Cox were gone from the sitting room—back to New York where they’d come from, or upstairs getting ready to go back as quickly as possible—and Phil found ample evidence that his mother had talked her heart and lungs and brains away all afternoon: there was a sad, telltale display of cigarette ashes on the oriental rug beside her chair, and she looked very tired.

  “Well, you must come again, Mrs. Drake,” Mrs. Talmage was saying. “It’s been so nice.”

  “I’ll give you a call tomorrow, then, Phil,” Flash Ferris said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  And all the way home, or at least until the serious walking began, Phil knew he would have to agree with his mother that they’d both had a lovely time.

  “… No, but it’s really too bad you don’t have a bike,” Flash pointed out, straddling his own bike at the curbside. “When do you think you might get one?”

  “I’ve told you,” Phil said as he slouched against a lamppost, hoping to look like the picture of a normal, healthy local youth at ease. “If I get a job this summer I guess I could save up for one; meanwhile I can’t afford it, that’s all.”

  They were hanging around the skimpy village with nothing much to say and nothing to do. This was the second or third day of the easy companionship Flash had planned, and it wasn’t developing very well.

  There was a new picture at the movie house, so they settled for that as a way of killing a couple of hours; but they both seemed to know it would only leave them feeling jaded and edgy afterwards, when they came out into the sun again, and it did.

  “… Well, okay, so I’ll see you,” Flash called over his shoulder, just before rising on his pedals to pump his way out to Route Nine; and watching him go, Phil wondered ironically if it might be only in keeping with the rest of this lousy summer to find himself dumped by Flash Ferris.

  But the next time they got together Flash was tense and brimming with a fine idea. Ed’s Cycle Repair, in Huntington, had a nice, thoroughly rebuilt bike for sale at twenty-five dollars. How did that sound?

  “Too much money,” Phil said, and Flash looked at him as if he must be kidding. There weren’t supposed to be situations like this in prep-school circles.

  “You can’t raise twenty-five dollars?”

  “No; that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t.”

  “Well, but couldn’t your mother help you out until you—”

  “No, she couldn’t. She can’t.”

  The incredulity was lessening in Flash’s face—he seemed to allow that there might indeed be a few charity boys at a place like Irving, though he wouldn’t have expected any of them to live in a place like Cold Spring Harbor—and he said “Well, okay. I know what we can do. I’ll ask my grandmother to buy it.”

  “No, that’s out,” Phil said emphatically. “That’s out. I don’t want you doing anything like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be right, that’s why. I wouldn’t feel right about something like that.” And Phil could dimly hear, in his own voice, a tone of righteous, stubborn pride that he guessed he must have learned from movies about the Depression.

  “Ah, come on, Drake, don’t be dumb about this,” Flash said, and that won the argument.

  A day or two later Phil took a sluggish local bus into Huntington, where he met Flash at Ed’s Cycle Repair, and there it stood—substantial and shining, bought and paid for. It wasn’t quite the first bike he had ever ridden, though it might have looked as if it were from the way he wobbled out into the Huntington streets, but it was the first one he had ever owned.

  “How you doing?” Flash called back to him, sailing easily ahead.

  “Good. Fine.” But as he hunched over the handlebars Phil had to acknowledge that this was still another example of how young he was for his age: straining to keep up with a fourteen-year-old, beginning to like the feel of a bicycle when everybody knew that boys and even girls of sixteen were expected to be driving cars.

  Flash Ferris did seem to know all the roads and all the towns. During the next week or two they traveled west to Oyster Bay and east beyond Huntington to Greenlawn and Kings Park, and they rode away from the shore to a few inland towns as well. Phil had to admit he was having a pretty good time, if only because he hardly ever had to be at home, and he liked to discover how bright and inviting all these other parts of Long Island could seem.

  “Well, I’ve made a decision about next year,” Flash said one afternoon when they’d stopped to rest at a grassy little strip of beach along the shore road. He was sitting in the sand with his legs drawn up at ungainly angles, looking even gawkier than usual. “In January, once I’ve turned fifteen, I’m gonna lie about my age and see if the Marines’ll take me.”

  There hadn’t been many chances lately to give Flash Ferris the kind of disdainful response he’d always drawn at Irving, but this was a good one and Phil made the most of it. He was reclining on his elbows, squinting out across the water, and he let a few moments of silence gather before he turned to Flash’s vulnerable face.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “That’s about the silliest God damn thing I ever heard.”

  “Whaddya mean?” And Flash was instantly on the defensive. “I’m tall; I’m pretty strong; I might even pass for seventeen right now, except that waiting till January’ll give me a chance to fill out a little more. Besides, the Marine Corps is loaded with kids who’ve lied about their age. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “You didn’t get this out of the papers, dummy; you got it outa the fucking movies. And you’d never pass for seventeen. You wouldn’t even pass for fifteen.”

  “Wanna bet? Wanna bet I don’t look as old as you, or older?”

  That brought the discussion around in an unwelcome way, and Phil didn’t have a very good answer ready. “Ah, you’re dreaming, Ferris,” he said. “You’re dreaming, that’s all.”

  “Well, so what if I am?” Flash inquired, logically enough. “It’s still worth a try, isn’t it? So I’m gonna try for it, is all, and I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah; okay.”

  It wasn’t hard to erase that small unpleasantness before the day’s bicycle riding was over: there were times when all you had to do was smile at Flash Ferris to make him blush and smile gratefully back. Then, a few days later, Phil had an important announcement of his own to make.

  “Got a job this morning,” he said as they sat together at a Huntington lunch counter, drinking fountain Cokes. “Start work tonight.”

  “Yeah? What kind of a job?”

  “Parking-lot attendant at Costello’s, out on Route Nine.”

  “You know how to drive?”

  “No; but you don’t have to move any cars on this job—you’re not even supposed to, from what the manager told me. What you do is, when the cars come in you use a flashlight to guide them into
the right parking space; then when people are ready to leave you guide them back to their car. Takes a little planning, because you have to keep the whole pattern of the lot organized so nobody’s car ever gets blocked in or anything, but I think I can handle it. The house only gives me a token payment of five bucks a week, but the guy said I can expect to make thirty a week in tips; maybe more.”

  Flash was clearly troubled as he stirred his crushed ice with a paper straw. “So can you still come out for rides?”

  “Well, maybe once in a while, late in the afternoon, but the point is I won’t be getting off work until four in the morning, you see; then I’ll have to get my sleep. And it’ll be seven nights a week.”

  “Yeah,” Flash said. “Well, but what’d you do this for, anyway? Take this job?”

  “For the money; what else? And I need money for a whole lot of reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Jesus, Ferris, don’t give me ‘such as.’ If you weren’t rich you’d never say ‘such as.’ ”

  “I’m not rich.”

  “Oh, Christ, don’t make me laugh.” And Phil tried for a look of patient scorn as he got up and stepped away from the counter. “Come on, then,” he said. “If you’re finished with that, let’s get going.”

  There could probably have been no cleaner a way to arrange the necessary break with Flash Ferris, and the best part of it came at a little after five o’clock that afternoon, when they were riding home along Route Nine and approaching an intersection that made a shortcut to Phil’s house.

  “Guess I’d better peel off here and go on home, Flash,” he called into the wind. “Gotta eat and go to work. So listen: take it easy, okay?”

  A high, handsome electric sign—“Costello’s”—brought people into an ample old bar and restaurant built out on pilings over the softly lapping water of the Sound. It was a nice-enough place, a little vulgar for some tastes but pulsing with romantic possibilities of its own kind. Nobody ever seemed to get bored there.

  Hardly any of the regular employees paid attention to Phil Drake—they all knew he was only the summer kid who looked after the cars—but two or three of the waitresses would say hello to him when they showed up for work, and there was a hefty, slope-shouldered young busboy named Aaron who sometimes stopped to exchange a few words in the gathering dusk.

  “So how’s it going, Phil?”

  “Oh, not bad, thanks, Aaron; how about you?”

  “Can’t complain. Staying out of trouble, anyway.”

  “Good.”

  And if ways could be found of making a grave and courteous little ceremony out of opening and closing car doors, Phil did his best to find them every night. In the long hours after dark he used his flashlight with conspicuous skill, but the tips were disappointing at first: many people didn’t tip him at all, and he’d ride home in the morning with a loose pocketful of quarters and dimes that were hardly worth counting. Then one day he rode into Huntington and turned over a great deal of merchandise in a drab little army and navy store until he found what he was looking for: a chauffeur’s cap of dark gray twill with a patent-leather visor, similar to the more expensive-looking cap of Ralph’s uniform. That made a difference. He wore it low and square on his forehead, to show he meant business, and his tips picked up. At the end of the second week he folded a five and two ten-dollar bills into a gracefully worded little letter of thanks, addressed the envelope to Mrs. Talmage and dropped it into the mail with a nice, grown-up sense of knowing how to do things right.

  It might not be much of a job, this parking lot, but it was the first job he’d ever had and he took it as seriously as the circumstances allowed. And it seemed to impress his sister, in what little he saw of her these days.

  “I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing so well for yourself, Philly,” she told him once. “We all do.”

  He did the “planning” part of it well enough so that nobody’s car ever got blocked in and there were no other troubles, even with drunks, but there were unsettling moments.

  For all the excellence and wisdom of his decision not to think too much about girls, it was shaken a few times every night. Most of the arriving customers were scarcely worth his attention; but he could never tell, at any hour from dusk until well after midnight, when he might be surprised by a pretty girl. A car would ease into its appointed spot, the dim glow of its ceiling light would come on inside and there she would be, combing her hair or freshening her lipstick. Then she’d squirm around and shift her weight, careful to keep her knees together as she slipped out of the passenger’s side while he held the flashlight steady to help her find her footing. The man coming around from the driver’s side to claim her would often be a soldier wearing the summer uniform of starched tan cotton, but with surprising frequency he’d be a civilian—sometimes even a civilian who didn’t look very much older than Phil himself.

  As they moved away toward the bright steps of Costello’s the girls would hold their escorts by the waist or the arm or not at all—Phil decided there was no real significance in those three styles—and they didn’t seem to walk across the lot so much as drift across it, their pale dresses floating and swaying in and out of shadows as if time were the last thing on their minds. Keeping a careful distance, he would sometimes follow a couple and try to overhear what the girl was saying: whole personalities of girls might be deduced from that kind of eavesdropping, but for the most part he heard only tantalizing fragments.

  “… Well, but we’ll only have one drink here, okay? And then let’s go right on home.”

  “… Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that I might be a little tired of hearing about what Linda likes and doesn’t like? And how Linda feels? And what Linda has to say about this and that and everything else …?”

  Late one night he led a soldier and a lovely girl from the bar into the darkness, and the girl’s voice was as sweet as a song. She was trying to reassure the soldier about something, though the words were indistinct at first until she said “But you’re not insensitive, Marvin. You’re wonderfully sensitive.”

  And Phil knew he wouldn’t hear anything prettier than that all summer. It stayed with him for hours as he needlessly patrolled the parking lot or stood looking through a chain link fence at the slick pilings and the black, gentle water.

  “You’re wonderfully sensitive.” It was exactly the kind of thing a girl might say to Phil Drake when he was old enough to deserve it—and it could even happen in two more years, when he’d be in the army and when all other elements of his life would be under control.

  He often wished he could follow people into Costello’s and find out what it was like at the peak of business hours—all he was ever allowed to see was the way it looked in the late afternoons, when guys in shirtsleeves were still taking upside-down chairs off the tops of tables, and the way it looked at the end of the night when they’d be putting the chairs back up again. He knew, though, that there were deep leatherette booths along three walls of the room, and he guessed that those were where most of the girls would probably choose to settle. Toying with their gin rickeys or their rum-and-Cokes in the throb and moan of the jukebox, they might let their free hands fall delicately onto the thighs of their men. And he knew he wouldn’t forget certain popular songs of that summer of 1942 as they were wafted dimly out to him among the parked cars.

  This was one:

  Missed the Saturday dance

  Heard they crowded the floor

  Couldn’t bear it without you

  Don’t get around much any more.…

  And this was another:

  Altho’ some people say he’s just a crazy guy,

  To me he means a million other things

  For he’s the one who taught this happy heart of mine to fly;

  He wears a pair of silver wings.…

  I’m so full of pride when we go walking

  Ev’ry time he’s home on leave

  He with those wings on his tunic

  Me with my heart
on my sleeve.…

  When closing time came around he would stuff the flashlight in his pocket and walk through the service entrance into the kitchen—this was his only privilege on the job—and ask for a cup of black coffee.

  “How come you always want black coffee?” a haggard dishwasher asked him after the first few nights.

  “I like it black, is all,” Phil explained, but the explanation didn’t ring true: he knew he drank coffee black because that was how his mother drank it (“It’s wonderful, Philly; it’s very stimulating; it really perks up your spirits; this is the way the French drink it all the time”).

  “Want any ice cream?” the dishwasher asked him. “We got five flavors.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Piece a pie?”

  “No, that’s okay. Thanks anyway.”

  “Know something, kid? You’re gonna rot your guts out, taking in all that caffeine without any nourishment.” And the man shook his head in mild exasperation. “You’re a sad case.”

  Sipping and wincing at his hot cup, Phil knew the old guy was probably right but didn’t know what to say or do about it, and that made him feel even skinnier than usual.

  Then Aaron the busboy burst through the swinging doors from the restaurant, whipping off his apron and dropping it into a laundry hamper. He made straight for a tub of maple walnut, mashed three scoops of it into an ice-cream dish and wolfed it down in what looked like no more than six or seven motions of his spoon. Then he lobbed the spoon and the empty dish into a sinkful of hot water and suds and turned away to take off for home.

  “Goodnight, Aaron,” one of the girls called, and then others took it up: “Goodnight, Aaron” … “Goodnight, Aaron” …

  “So long, girls,” he called back. “See you tomorrow.”

  And Phil Drake felt like a very sad case indeed as he pedaled slowly home along Route Nine.

  But in the shrunken daylight hours, with money in his pocket and his firm tires whirring over asphalt and concrete, it never took him long to feel much better. He could go shopping now, even for things he didn’t need. In the well-fanned depths of an old-fashioned hardware store one day he bought a jackknife for no better reason than that he liked the weighted feel of it in his hand; then later, closer to home, he made another stop and picked up a cellophane package of six Milky Way bars because Rachel had often said it was her favorite kind of candy.