Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  Then later, when he’d calmed her down with a gin and lime at an inexpensive restaurant they knew on Route Nine, she began to speak slowly and unemphatically enough for anyone’s understanding.

  “… Because she really is crazy, Evan; that’s what I’ve come to recognize. And I don’t mean ‘crazy’ in any harmless or funny way, I mean out of her mind. Divorced from reality. Off in some other world of her own. Oh, I’ll probably go on ‘loving’ her, whatever she is, but I can’t live with her any more—that’s the thing. So look.” And Rachel leaned across the table to take his hand. “Whether it’s fair to her or not, I think we’ve got to get out of that rotten old house as soon as we possibly can. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  With his bright eyes narrowed in a smile of love, Evan raised his drink as if to propose a toast. He said he was very, very glad to hear her say all that. He said it was the best news he’d had in years; and now he had some pretty interesting news of his own.

  Did she remember his mentioning Frank Brogan, at the plant? The guy who’d lent them the apartment in Jackson Heights that weekend, before they were married? Well, Frank would be getting drafted any time now—he didn’t know how soon, because all the draft board could tell him was “any time”—and he’d offered to turn the place over to Evan as soon as he’d cleared out. Wouldn’t that be a break?

  “Because I mean a lot of guys going into the service are subletting their places for terrific profits, but Frank doesn’t want to mess with any of that: we’d have the same rent he’s been paying there for years. Oh, and I know you didn’t much like the looks of it, dear, but we could change all that to suit ourselves—fix it up any way you want.”

  She agreed that getting Frank Brogan’s apartment would be fine, though her memories of it didn’t kindle much enthusiasm: a stark, threadbare, masculine place where she’d spent the whole weekend on the verge of hysteria, afraid of losing Evan forever if she couldn’t overcome her fear of sex. Still, it was only an “any time” kind of thing; something better might easily turn up first.

  When their dinner arrived—plates of lukewarm filet of sole with boiled potatoes—she settled down to tell him more about this galvanizing afternoon. “… Oh, and your mother’s pickled, Evan. I mean I’ve seen her drunk before, but this is different: she’s embalmed. It’s like having to look at a corpse in an armchair. And your father can’t even begin to get her home, you see, until this terrible old millionaire lady leaves—and the millionaire lady keeps staying and staying, talking and lapping up the booze. She must be seventy-five, but I think she’s got as much of a yen for your father as my mother’s ever had. Oh, and you can see my mother sensing the competition, too, rising to the—wait. Excuse me a sec.”

  Rachel went off to the ladies’ room, holding the seat of her dress bunched oddly in one hand. She was gone a long time, and when she came back to her chair she looked very pale.

  “Darling?” she said. “Listen: don’t get scared, but I think I’m starting to have the baby right here in the restaurant. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  A son was born to them at Huntington General Hospital, early the next morning. He was healthy and perfectly formed, and Rachel had what her doctor called an easy time of it, considering the birth was at least two weeks premature.

  On Rachel’s instructions (“I don’t care if my mother ever finds out”) Evan made the first phone call of the day to Curtis Drake, who said he hoped to be at the hospital by nine o’clock.

  Then he called his own father, and he could tell at once that things weren’t going smoothly at home.

  “Well, that’s—splendid news, Evan. I’ll give Gloria a call, then, and I’ll stop by her place and bring her on over there. That probably won’t be until sometime sort of later in the morning, though, because there are still quite a few things to be done here. Your mother had a difficult night, you see, and she isn’t feeling at all well.”

  Gloria wasn’t feeling well either, though she was fairly sure she’d managed to convey the appropriate sentiments of joy on the telephone.

  Years ago, and especially during Prohibition, having a hangover could be almost as much of an adventure as drinking itself: you could waste a whole day in absent-minded idleness, laughing easily and often with whoever you’d gotten drunk with the night before, mistrustfully sampling various kitchen “remedies” until the time came to agree, with all your heart, that a little hair of the dog might be the best thing after all.

  Age and loneliness had spoiled all that. The only advantage now was that you knew what the best thing was from the start and didn’t hesitate to make use of it. On any other bad morning she would have poured a decent amount of whiskey into a bedside glass, cut it with water from the bathroom tap, and swallowed it all before even trying to get dressed; but this would have to be a day of decorum. Clothes and cosmetics came first; then she went downstairs and made coffee, surprised at her own skill and patience, and she was able to force down nearly a cup of it before taking her medicine like a lady, with ice.

  Now she could breathe again. She could gather her wits and wait for Charles’s taxicab to sound its horn in the driveway. And she was ready for whatever little jokes might arise (“Well, but the trouble is I simply don’t feel like a grandmother, Charles; can you help me with that? I don’t even know how a grandmother is supposed to feel.”)

  “Evan said she had an easy time of it,” Charles was saying, “though I don’t suppose it can ever be called ‘easy,’ can it. Giving birth is one kind of suffering no man can ever claim to understand.”

  They were riding together into Huntington now on the slick, buoyant seat of the cab, in bright sunshine, and the funny part was that Gloria could have sworn she was still alone at the kitchen table with her medicine. Decorum or not, this was evidently going to be one of those addled days without regard for logical sequence, when small events and transitional periods of time were instantly lost to memory. It would be best not even to ask Charles if he could help her feel like a grandmother now because there was no way of knowing whether she’d made the same request at least once before, in the same words, back in the driveway or somewhere on the road. She would have to pay close attention to every moment from now on, or the whole day might get away from her.

  One thing she noticed very clearly, and promised herself to remember, was that a tasteful-looking place called Crossroads Restaurant and Lounge lay less than a block from the hospital entrance. When their duties in the maternity ward were completed this morning, Gloria and Charles could drift as if by chance into the Crossroads Restaurant and Lounge for a few ice-cold martinis and a nice, light lunch.

  “Why don’t you sit down here, Gloria,” Charles said in the swarming bewilderment of the hospital lobby. “I’ll go find out where the maternity ward is, but it may take a minute in a place like this.”

  They were pressed into an elevator full of Negroes and cripples and fools, all holding hot paper cups of coffee and saying “Good morning” to each other as if it might be the last morning of the world. Then there were several corridors that led in wrong directions, and when they found their way at last into the nook where Rachel lay in a high stiff bed, there stood Curtis Drake.

  He took Gloria wholly by surprise, in his dark little gabardine suit. She wanted him to vanish at once but he was here to stay, smiling, pleased with having brought the dozen roses whose nodding heads seemed to enhance the pallor of his daughter’s exhausted face.

  “Well, Gloria,” he said. “Isn’t this something? Isn’t this great? And Mr. Shepard; how’re you, sir?”

  Rachel was still groggy but extremely talkative, and the first thing she wanted them to know was that Evan had stayed with her all night—he’d been a “lamb”; he’d left the hospital only a little while ago, to get to work. “And have you seen Evan Charles Shepard Junior yet? Oh, he’s a beautiful boy. Go and look at him, okay? Ask one of the girls outside.”

  When a sterile-masked nurse held him up for their inspection through the p
late glass he looked like any other infant—no better, no worse—with his head wobbling and his lips and gums stretched open in a cry of silence.

  Neither Gloria nor Charles came up with anything trenchant to say about him, so they mumbled a few pleasantries and went back to Rachel’s bedside.

  “… And we’re never going to neglect him in any way, Daddy,” Rachel was saying, “but we won’t sort of impose ourselves on him either—we’ll never let our problems be his problems, if you see what I mean. Well, I know it’s silly to be talking this way when he isn’t even half a day old, but I—”

  “I don’t think it’s silly at all, dear,” Curtis assured her. “I think it’s grand.”

  Gloria took a look behind the hanging yellow cloth that was meant to insure semiprivacy, and there lay another girl or woman with her legs apart and her knees up so that anyone could see the sanitary napkin at her crotch.

  “Oh, and another thing,” Rachel said. “If he’s very, very bright we’ll always encourage him to make the most of his intelligence, and if he’s sort of slow we’ll never push him into more than he can—”

  Something in her daughter’s prattle had been irritating Gloria’s nerves all this time, and now she could tell what it was: Rachel was talking with her molars clenched, either because she was still in pain or because she thought it might help keep her voice down in deference to her roommate behind the hanging cloth, and it made all her sibilants come out funny. Phrases like “most of his intelligence” and “if he’s sort of slow” had a clicking, spitty sound that only Curtis Drake, in all the world, would ever consider grand.

  “And we may have to move him around a lot,” Rachel was saying, “because of Evan’s education and career, but we’ll never let him feel he doesn’t have a home. We’ll take our home along with us wherever we go because that’s the kind of home it’ll always be; do you see?”

  “Well, sure, honey,” Curtis said, “but don’t you think you ought to get some rest now? We’ll have plenty of time for talking later on.”

  “Oh, yes, plenty of time later on,” Gloria said. “You’ll have plenty of time for talking when her teeth aren’t clenched against her mother, and that’ll be grand indeed. ‘Grand’—oh, what a simpering word that is, and my God, what a simpering little man you are, Curtis. Listen, Rachel—”

  “Oh, no. Please,” Rachel said. “Please. Daddy? Charles? Can you just sort of get her out of here? Can you get her out of here now before I—”

  “Listen,” Gloria said again. “Do you want to know why you and your brother’ve never had a home?”

  “Oh, she is crazy, Daddy; she is crazy. If you can’t get her out of here I’ll get somebody to call the whaddyacallit, the psycho ward, and they’ll put her in a straitjacket and lock her up. I mean that.”

  “You’ve never had a home,” Gloria said, “because your father is a coward and a coward and a coward.”

  Curtis had taken one of her upper arms and Charles took the other. They walked her quickly out into the corridor and held her there, not knowing what else to do. She was both weak and powerful as she struggled in their grip, and her voice wouldn’t stop: “… soft little cowardly swine. Oh, swine. Swine …”

  “Can I help you?” a very young man inquired. He looked too young to be a doctor but he wore a stethoscope slung around his neck, as very young doctors often do.

  “Yes, perhaps you can,” Charles began. “We’re looking for the psych—” and he would have said “the psychiatric facility here” if Curtis hadn’t cut him off.

  “No, this’ll be all right. We need an elevator now, is all.”

  And from then on Curtis was plainly in charge. It was Curtis who got her into a mercifully uncrowded elevator—“coward; swine”—and he who steered her alone through the rushing employees and the standing wheelchairs and flowers of the lobby. In the dazzling light outside the main entrance he whistled up a cab for her and carefully loaded her into the back seat of it, saying “There, now; there now.” Charles was needed only once, to recite her exact address in Cold Spring Harbor; then it was Curtis who pressed a five-dollar bill into the driver’s hand and said “Just be careful with her, son. This lady’s emotionally disturbed.”

  “She’s what, sir?”

  “Mentally ill. Got it?”

  They went briefly upstairs again to comfort Rachel—“Well, it was sweet of you both to come back,” she said, “but I’m fine. Really, I’ll be fine now”—and afterwards the two of them strolled like friends into the shaded, air-conditioned barroom of the Crossroads Restaurant and Lounge.

  “I thought you handled all that admirably, Curtis,” Charles said. “If it had been left to me I might only have made things worse.”

  “Well, these—displays of hers can be very upsetting, but I’ve seen her through worse than this. She’ll be very ashamed for a while and then she’ll be well again—or at least as well as she’s ever going to be. Besides—” And Curtis looked thoughtfully into his glass. “Besides, I think our friends in the psychiatric line still have a great deal to learn.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Charles said. “Matter of fact, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had to take the same position with my own—with a member of my own family.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll be able to trust the morbid little bastards—and I suppose the war is bound to teach them a few things—but not yet. Not yet. They’re fooling around in the dark, is all.”

  “Exactly.”

  It wasn’t until they were well into their second drinks, having happily agreed to stay here for lunch, that Charles Shepard said “You know a funny thing, Curtis? I don’t even know what kind of work it is you do. I mean I know you’re a business executive, of course, but I’ve never really—”

  “No, ‘executive’ isn’t quite right. I’m more on the level of a staff sergeant, you might say, than a commissioned officer. I work for Philco Radio, is all. Sold in the field for a good many years; then I came over into a job on the sales-management side. I’m one of four assistant sales managers for the area of greater New York.”

  “Well, that sounds very—that’s really interesting. A good friend of mine in the army went into the radio business, back in about ’twenty-eight or ’twenty-nine, and I think it was Philco he started out with. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard the name—Joe Raymond?”

  “No, I don’t believe I have,” Curtis said. “Still, there’s been quite a heavy—you know—quite a heavy turnover in sales personnel since ’twenty-nine.”

  And Charles said he could easily imagine that must be true.

  “… So how was she when she got home?” Rachel asked her brother that afternoon. “She still out of her mind?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I mean I really don’t know, Rachel, because I didn’t see her. She knocked on my door and told me the baby was born, is all; then I got the bike and came right over here. She was in her room when I left, I think.”

  “Oh. Well, she might stay in her room for days and days now, trying to make us all feel bad because she feels bad. Daddy said she needs the shame of these things as much as she needs the explosions, only he called them ‘displays.’ He said it’s a cycle he’s known about since even before they were married. Oh, but look: let’s not talk about this stuff any more, okay? I’m sorry I even told you what happened. So listen: why don’t you go and have a look at your nephew. Just ask any of the girls out there. See if you don’t think he’s the image of his father.”

  “Well, good,” Phil said. “I’ll have a look.”

  Gloria kept entirely to herself for the next two weeks. From small remnants found in the kitchen every morning—a stain of milk or egg or meat on the linoleum counter—it was clear that she came downstairs to feed herself at night, but her bedroom had become her fortress and tabernacle, and except for an occasional creaking of floorboards it never emitted a sound.

  “Oh, I know I could probably go in there and talk to her,” Rachel explained to her husband after the first week, “but I don’t
really feel like doing that. I don’t want to.”

  And Evan’s mumbled view, as he opened his newspaper, was that sometimes it was best to leave well enough alone.

  “And then I keep wanting to call Daddy for advice on this, but that’s pointless because I know he’ll just say there’s nothing anyone can do.”

  “Right,” Evan said, rattling the paper firmly into reading position. “And besides, if you want to go around calling her crazy, you might as well let her be crazy.”

  Privately, Evan felt he couldn’t be expected to pay much attention to any gloomy domestic crisis here when the real interests of his heart were miles away.

  “Daddy?” Kathleen said during one of their Saturday rides together. “Mom says she and you are good friends again.”

  “Well, what’s the matter with that, sweetheart? Whoever said divorced people can’t be good friends?” And it was profoundly pleasing, as he reached from the steering wheel and tousled her hair, to know that only a few hours from now he would have her mother in his arms.

  Phil Drake’s fields of interest were divided now too. Ever since the night of Aaron’s party he’d found himself on easy, jolly terms with the kitchen staff and the waitresses at Costello’s. He didn’t even have to eat at home any more because succulent suppers were prepared for him at work, with the manager’s tacit approval (“Gotta put a little weight on this boy, right? Case we ever need him to defend our country?”).

  Shortly before dark one evening, as he walked glowing with food and camaraderie from the service door, he saw Mrs. Talmage’s limousine pull into the far end of his lot. Ralph drove as slowly past the few parked cars as if he were conducting a sight-seeing tour, and his two smiling passengers were Flash Ferris and a much smaller, younger boy.

  “Just checking up on you, Drake,” Ferris called as the limousine came to a stop. “Wanted to make sure you’re hard at work here.”