Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  “Well, good,” Phil said, fitting his cap carefully into place. “Glad you came by.”

  “This is Rod Walcott. He’ll be starting in at Deerfield too.”

  “Hiya, Rod.”

  “Hi.”

  The boy was about twelve, barely of boarding-school age but squaring his shoulders and visibly trying to look older in Flash’s company.

  “Deerfield sent out this letter to all the new boys,” Flash explained, “so we could get together if we wanted, and Rod’s the only other one from this part of the Island. And I mean he’s little, but you oughta see him on his bike: this kid can really travel.”

  “Good.”

  “Not much business here tonight,” Flash observed.

  “Well, it generally doesn’t pick up until after dark; that’s when I have to start hustling, if I want to make a buck.”

  “I see. Well; hope you make a whole lot of bucks.”

  Phil gave his flashlight a little end-over-end flip in the air and caught it neatly in his palm, as tennis players sometimes do with their racquets.

  “So how about the Marine Corps, Flash?” he asked. “You still planning to try for it next winter?”

  Flash blinked and ducked his head bashfully, seeming to shrink a little under Rod Walcott’s incredulous stare; then he said he hadn’t decided yet. He might do that, and he might not. He was thinking it over.

  And just before the limousine drew away Ralph turned in the driver’s seat to give Phil a slow, sardonic nod and a wink, making clear that he hadn’t missed a nuance of the conversation. No weakness in the world, apparently, would ever be lost on Ralph.

  Rachel had just fed the baby and put him down for a late-morning nap when she decided her mother’s isolation had gone on long enough. Tiptoeing from the baby’s room and closing his door, she knew at once how simple and natural a thing it would be to go and do something about the other closed door down the hall.

  She checked the mirror first to make sure she looked all right—hair in place, face set in a pleasing expression of concern for another person’s welfare—then she walked the distance to Gloria’s door and gave it a sharp little rap.

  “Mother?” she called. “I know you haven’t been feeling well, but won’t you come out and join us soon? We’ve all missed you.”

  This was substantially what she’d planned to say, except that the words “We’ve all missed you” seemed to have been spoken of their own accord, and as she waited for some response she braced herself for a heavy scent of rotten tomatoes or of old, rancid mayonnaise.

  But the air in the room was surprisingly fresh—the open windows had provided cross-ventilation day and night—and Gloria’s appearance was surprising too: she wore a clean, stylish summer dress, and except for a slightly truculent lift of the chin to suggest she had nothing to apologize for, her face could have been called serene. Clearly, though, she wasn’t going to talk until Rachel did a little more talking first.

  “I’ve just put the baby down,” Rachel said, “but you’ll see him this afternoon. See if you don’t think he’s changed a whole lot, just in this little bit of time. If he goes on changing at this rate we won’t know what he’s going to look like.”

  “Well, they all do that when they’re new,” Gloria said. “You changed a lot too, and so did Phil.” Her voice was as hoarse as could be expected after two weeks of silence and many hundreds of cigarettes, but it held a tone of redemption: it seemed incapable now of the rancor and malice in her cry of “coward,” or of any other kind of troublemaking.

  “Can I fix you some lunch, Mother?” Rachel inquired. “Or something like that?”

  When Phil got up and came downstairs that day he found the two of them seated together in the living room, murmuring and chuckling over the baby, and he didn’t need any signal from his sister to know it would be best to act as if nothing had happened.

  They were all waiting for Evan now. They needed his homecoming to settle their newfound peace of mind; and they felt lucky, when he came in from the car, that he appeared to be at his jaunty best.

  “Gloria,” he said. “Good to see you.”

  It seemed to Phil, though, that Evan’s smile on finding her back in commission betrayed the look of a frugal young working man who hadn’t forgotten which side his bread was buttered on.

  “Well, I suppose we’ve had our ups and downs this summer,” Gloria said when the drinks were served, “but I think we can all be happy here, don’t you?”

  Frank Brogan was drafted during the first week of September. On his last day at the plant he gave Evan Shepard a new set of keys to the Jackson Heights apartment, and he said “Let me have two more nights there, okay? Then you can move your stuff in whenever you’re ready and it’ll be all yours.”

  The words “whenever you’re ready” were the only part of the deal that rode uncomfortably with Evan as he started home that afternoon—How could you ever tell when you were ready for anything?—and he thought it might be a good idea to stop off at his father’s house and talk it over.

  “No, Evan,” Charles said as they sat facing each other squarely across the kitchen table. “I don’t think this is a wise move at all. Gloria’s going to take it badly, and I must say she’ll have my sympathies. You’ll be ducking out of your agreement with her; you’ll be leaving her stranded here and probably broke as well; you’ll be letting her down in ways even a normally stable person would resent—and what you have to consider is that she’s not a normal person. If you’d seen her in the hospital that day you’d never question that again.”

  “Oh, I never have questioned it, Dad. But look: this was Rachel’s idea. I’m just going along with it because I think she’s right. Trying to live without any privacy was a dumb mistake from the start. We both want to put an end to it, and the sooner the better. Simple as that.”

  Steam from a pan of boiling carrots had clouded Charles’s spectacles. He removed them and began wiping the lenses thoroughly with a paper napkin, and Evan noticed once again, as he’d noticed for years, that all the decisiveness could vanish from the old man’s face when you caught him with his glasses off. There was nothing to fear in a face like that; there was hardly any “character” there at all.

  “Well, Evan, you’ll do what you want, as always. All I can do is watch and wait and wish you luck—though I wish I had greater confidence in your judgment. In the principles underlying your judgment, is what I’m trying to say.”

  The glasses were fitted back into place now, restoring Charles to himself. “But for whatever it may be worth,” he said, “I can tell you this: hurting a sick woman like this, under these circumstances, is a thing I’d never do. It’s a thing I’d never even consider.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you would,” Evan said. “But then, you’d probably never’ve gone into sharing the rent with her in the first place, right? So it’s not your problem, is it. It’s Rachel’s and mine, right?”

  “Is that my son out there?” Grace called from the other room. “Because I want to tell you something, young man. I don’t care how important this conference of yours is, or how much money depends on it or anything else. I want you to come in here right now and give your mother a hug.”

  “Well, I think this is the saddest evening we’ve had all summer,” Gloria said, “with Philly having to leave us tomorrow. Oh, but never mind, dear. We’ll all be sad and we’ll miss you terribly, but you must know how proud we are that you’re doing so well at Irving.”

  And to all three of her listeners, seated and smiling around the living room, it was clear that her avowal of sadness was only a formality. Ever since she’d been released from hiding she had gone so happily about the business of her days that the very texture of her voice had taken on a new lightness and strength.

  Clenching his fists, Phil stretched both arms wide in a pantomime of sleepiness and said he was glad to be through at Costello’s. He could go to bed tonight and wake up at the same time as everyone else.

  “Oh,
and it’s a nice evening for us too,” Rachel said, making the circle of happiness complete. “Evan doesn’t have to be at work until noon tomorrow because the plant’ll be closed all morning for inventory. It’s like having a little vacation.”

  “Wonderful,” Gloria said. “Would anyone like more coffee?”

  It wasn’t until they were alone in their own room, getting ready for bed, that Evan had a chance to tell his wife about Jackson Heights.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I mean I know it’s good news, and it’s what we’ve been waiting for and everything; I just wish it didn’t have to—”

  “Didn’t have to what?”

  “I wish it didn’t have to happen right now, is all. I’ll sort of hate to tell her, is the thing.”

  “Well, you won’t have to, dear: I’ll do the talking for both of us. Be best to do it tomorrow night, wouldn’t you say? After your brother’s gone?”

  And Rachel said she supposed so. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in a fresh blue nightgown, very slender again now and looking truly attractive, in her “perishable” way, for the first time in months. He was briefly tempted to make a nuzzling lunge for her, but that might only take the edge off the delicious plans they’d made.

  “Gee, this is funny, though, isn’t it,” she said, “that I should feel so bad about something I know is good.”

  “You’ll feel better in the morning,” he assured her. “I imagine you’ll feel better about a whole lot of things in the morning, after we’ve—you know—after we’ve taken a little inventory of our own.”

  They had kept a careful calendar. Tomorrow, according to doctor’s orders, would be their first day for getting laid again in the regular way. And if love in the afternoon had always seemed even better than love at night, there were no words glorious enough for the way it could be in the later hours of the morning.

  At breakfast, the young Shepards could scarcely refrain from giving each other long, significant looks, and Phil Drake couldn’t help but notice they were holding hands tightly under the table.

  At Gloria’s customary signal of liberation—“Well, I’ll clear away these messy plates”—they all stood up. The young Shepards lingered long enough for saying goodbye to Phil and wishing him the best of luck at school; then they seemed almost to dance upstairs in their eagerness for seclusion.

  Phil allowed a decent interval to elapse—five minutes or ten—before going up to his own room and methodically packing his suitcase. But when he’d finished doing that he began to know, without doubt or trepidation, what he was going to do next. His plan and the execution of it were almost one and the same: walk up the hall, set the suitcase soundlessly on the floor, use one forefinger to part the dotted-swiss curtain against the pane of glass, and have a look.

  Oh, Jesus, it was the loveliest and most terrible thing he’d ever seen; it was the source of the world; and his shame was so immediate that he let the fabric slip back into place after only a second or two.

  Evan suddenly froze in her arms and said “Look!”

  “Look at what?”

  “Somebody’s hand just let go of the whaddyacallit outside. The door curtain. I saw it move.”

  He had been almost ready to come, strong in the knowledge that he’d satisfied her, but it was hopeless now. All he could do was fall out of her and lie on his side, on his own ribs, breathing hard, and when he could speak again he said “So I guess your little brother likes to watch, doesn’t he.”

  “Evan, I don’t believe you really saw that,” she told him; “I think you imagined it.” But because she was breathing heavily too she had to wait a few heartbeats for her voice to come back. “Everybody knows it’s easy to imagine things and then think they’ve happened.” And she paused for breath again. “Besides, that’s simply not the kind of thing Phil would ever, ever—”

  “Wanna bet?” he demanded. “Wanna bet he hasn’t been standing out there all summer? Taking little peeks and playing with himself?”

  “I’m not listening to any of this. I won’t hear any more of this vile, horrible—”

  “Who said you had to listen? Whoever said you had to hear?”

  Then he was up and lurching around the room to pull on his factory clothes with an angry little excess of energy in the buttoning and buckling and the zipping up.

  “I know what I saw,” he said, “and I’m not about to forget it.”

  Phil Drake’s final moments of leaving Cold Spring Harbor would always be blurred in his memory. He knew he must have hauled his suitcase downstairs fast because a station taxicab was already honking for him in the driveway; he knew he must have made a stop in the kitchen to accept one last sloppy embrace from his mother; then he was on the train and the whole rotten little town was far behind him.

  “Well, I think these’ll be—serviceable,” Curtis Drake said in the early afternoon of that day.

  “Oh, sure they will,” Phil said. “They’re fine. And thanks a lot, Dad.”

  “You’re entirely welcome.”

  They were standing in blue-white fluorescent lighting at one of several “midtown retail outlets” in a chain of men’s clothing stores often and loudly advertised on the radio. Curtis had easily persuaded his son that two new suits from a place like this would be a better deal than spending almost the same amount of money on a new tweed jacket—especially since the old tweed jacket had now been made presentable again with the leather patches on the elbows.

  The two suits, brown and blue, had begun to worry Phil a little because he suspected they might be all wrong for the Irving School; even so, they had the look of valuable merchandise in the salesman’s quick hands as he folded them in a tricky way and nestled them one after the other into the tissues of separate, suitcase-sized cardboard boxes that were then lashed together with clean yellow twine.

  Some of the floor men here might be slobs, lazy and rude in their work, making no secret of their wish for better ways to make a living, but this one understood the business. The money’s changing hands and the cash register’s ringing up of the total were never the end of your sale: it was the style and finesse you showed in the follow-through that brought the customers back; these things were important if you wanted to keep your bank account on the sweet side—if you wanted any more weekends in the Catskills with your girl before the army claimed your ass. The final touch in your performance was pure flourish: you reached beneath the counter and withdrew, as if from nowhere, a slim five-inch cylinder of spoolwood with small metal arms protruding from either end. You quickly bent the prongs to span the distance between strands of twine; then hook-snap at one end and hook-snap at the other: you could offer up a neat little carrying handle and the whole fucking transaction was over.

  “Here you go, young man,” he said, “and I think you’ll get a lot of good wear out of these suits. Or no, wait—” And he tilted his head to one side to give Phil an appraising look. “Considering your age and your general build, you’ll probably outgrow them before they get half the wear they deserve; am I right? What are you, fourteen?”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “Oh; sorry. Still, looking younger than your age is a luckier thing than looking older, right? For example, I’m twenty-six and most people take me for over thirty—that could give me a few problems in later life, am I right?” And he turned his fading smile to Curtis. “Well, thank you again, sir. Very much.”

  As soon as they were out in the brilliance and roar of the street again, Curtis said “Well, I wouldn’t feel bad, Phil, just because some clerk in a store makes a wrong guess about your age. You’ll get your full growth soon enough, and you’ll fill out too. Seems to me that ought to be the least of your worries these days. So. Want to head on over to Grand Central?”

  What Phil liked best about the Men’s Bar at the Biltmore, apart from the very name of it, was that nobody’s age seemed to matter there in the brief and profitable seasons of traveling prep-school boys. Soon a tall, cold draft beer was set before him, at one
of the little tables along the wall, and a double scotch, with ice and water, had been prepared for his father. Some things seemed never to change: the pallor and fatigue in Curtis Drake’s face would always give way to a look of ruddy health after a few swallows of whiskey, and by the time of the second round there’d be a fine sparkle in his eyes, reminiscent of rare and unexpected Christmas mornings long ago.

  “What’s the matter, Phil? You’re not still brooding about that little clothing-store clerk, are you? You don’t want to let things like that prey on your mind. Matter of fact, I was hoping we’d have more time today, so we could talk at some length about this general business of your growing up. I know you can’t make any plans now beyond school and the army—that’s only reasonable, for as long as the war goes on—but I wonder if you’re prepared to grow into a few responsibilities of another kind. What I’m getting at, Phil, is that your mother is a very fragile person.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “She’s extremely insecure and childish; she’s always had to depend on someone else for survival.”

  “I know all that, Dad; you don’t have to explain this kind of—”

  “Well, all right. But the point is, that burden’s always been mine in the past, and now I’m trying to think about the future. It can’t be your sister’s responsibility because your sister has a family of her own, so I imagine it’s going to be yours. Oh, I’m not saying this is anything that necessarily ought to—you know—ought to concern you greatly for the present, Phil, but it’s something to keep in mind. All right? Are we agreed, then? Can I have your hand on it?”

  “Sure,” Phil said, and they shook hands as soberly as men closing a deal that involved a fortune, though Phil didn’t yet understand the terms.

  “And now,” Curtis said, “if you don’t mind my sitting here like a tired old man, I think you’d better make a run for it. Everything else can wait, you see, but a train doesn’t wait for anybody.”