A Tragic Honesty (10 page)

That summer Dookie and Richard really got to know Ruth's husband for the first time, and both formed an enduring dislike of him (and vice versa). It must have been a shock for Dookie, who believed so wholly in the idea of aristocracy, to be confronted with this awful daily reminder that every advantage of breeding and education could, sometimes, result in such a consummate lout as her son-in-law. And then to be fair: A better man than Fred might have buckled under the strain of having to live with Dookie. What must have been a fatal incompatibility is nicely suggested by the family dinner scenes in
Cold Spring Harbor
: “Well,” says Gloria Drake; “I've always thought the dinner hour was for conver
sa
tion.” Fred appears as the cretinous Evan, shorn of his accent but essentially intact: “Evan Shephard hardly 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 of fathering children, was just another part of a man's job in the world.” Nor was this laconic laborer likely to find much in common with his bumbling, bug-eyed brother-in-law, and perhaps their one attempt to bond was very like the abortive driving lesson Evan gives Phil in the book, though the latter's humiliation (that is, Yates's) probably made little difference in his overall view of Fred: “[He] knew there might not be much profit or future in hating your brother-in-law, but that didn't mean you couldn't figure him out and see him plain.… This ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job.… Fuck him.”

In desperate need of pocket money and escape, Yates looked all over the countryside for a summer job, but discovered that most places wouldn't hire anybody under the age of eighteen. Finally he found employment of sorts as a parking-lot attendant at a roadside restaurant called Costello's: “All I do is rush around in a chauffeur's cap and tell people where to park their jalopies,” he wrote Benedict. The chauffeur's cap had been his own idea: Except for a token sum of five dollars a week he was paid entirely in tips, which began to pick up once he'd found an official-looking cap in an Army and Navy store and thus ceased being a random kid wagging a flashlight. One hesitates to make too much of this episode, Yates's first paying job, though it's fair to say that it whetted his appetite for financial independence—within a few months he'd be more or less self-supporting for the rest of his life—and then, too, one can hardly imagine the relief he felt at having some excuse to work all night and sleep most of the day.

Avon, no doubt, seemed a waiting Arcadia when the time came for Yates to return in mid-September. The living experiment in Cold Spring Harbor had turned cold indeed, at least this particular trial, and a parting of the ways was imminent. The elder Rodgerses were planning at last to resume residence of their family estate in St. James, Long Island, as soon as the tenant's lease expired in the fall, and they'd invited Fred and Ruth to join them there with the newborn baby. Dookie, meanwhile, would return to New York, but for now she pouted around the house and, always sensitive about her age, openly rued the prospect of becoming a grandmother (“Can you imagine me as a grandmother?” says Pookie in
The Easter Parade
; “I can't even imagine you as a mother,” her daughter reflects). And in the midst of it all was Richard, whose departure from the scene, for any number of reasons, was almost surely as frantic as Phil Drake's:

[His] 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 rotten little town was far behind him.

*   *   *

Yates's last two years at Avon were far happier than his first. He would always be the butt of a certain amount of teasing, but it became more benign as he learned to handle it better. Rather than trying to swagger off insults with more of the same (and getting beaten up or paddled), Yates became a soft-spoken eccentric who rolled with the punches. “I guess I left the coat hanger in by mistake,” he'd say, if a person made fun of his sometimes rigid posture, the way his shoulders tended to bunch and shudder around his ears when he was tense. But perhaps the best way of preempting attack was, after all, simple good manners, and around this time Yates apparently began to take Mrs. Riddle's precepts to heart. He may have had an apple-size hole in the elbow of his only tweed jacket, and hair that stuck out at an odd angle, but Yates was
courteous
—shy, formal—or so certain of his would-be enemies remember him.

Happily he didn't have to strain himself with everybody. That second year he was named editor in chief of
The Avonian
and art director of the
Winged Beaver
(the school yearbook), and hence became a campus figure of sorts. Best of all, he began to make a few friends his own age. Perhaps the first of these was Pierre Van Nordan, whose relative weirdness is evoked by the uncharitable “Van Loon” conferred on his alter ego in
A Good School
. According to the
Winged Beaver,
Van Nordan was a connoisseur of “guns, game, Omar Khayyam, women and beer,” and
A Good School
suggests he also had a penchant for sitting on the toilet longer than necessary. Whatever the case, Van Nordan was in fact regarded as a bit of a curiosity, and probably Yates (like Grove vis-à-vis Van Loon) eventually kept him at a distance while at Avon; however, Yates was at Van Nordan's bedside when the latter died of Hodgkin's disease in his early thirties, as the friendship had deepened in later years.

A more improbable friendship, and one that perished of natural causes shortly after the war, was the one Yates pursued with the studious Hugh Pratt. Pratt's greatest appeal appears to have been his almost daunting respectability: Apart from his work as editor of the
Winged Beaver
and associate editor of
The Avonian
, he was one of the school's top scholars and a standout football player to boot. Above all he was serious, and demanded seriousness from his friends. At least one thing he and Yates had in common was a fondness for late-night bull sessions of the loftier sort; both were charter members of something called the “Midnight Oil League.” Beyond that the attachment is harder to fathom. Like Hugh Britt in
A Good School,
Pratt was quick to reproach Yates for failures of taste and more obvious personal shortcomings: “You're always late for everything,” says Britt when Grove asks to be his roommate; “you flunk courses and don't seem to care; you're sloppy; that kind of thing could make trouble if we roomed together.” A mutual friend described Pratt as Yates's “opposite,” and Pratt seemed to agree in every respect but one: “Dick was not frivolous about his writing. He'd scribble over
reams
of blank paper. Every Saturday we'd build a fire in the Senior Club, and Dick would just sit there and write all day.”

The extent to which Yates was playing a role for his friend, whose stability and high-mindedness he clearly envied, is worth considering; for that matter such posing in general—and Yates was nothing if not self-conscious as a young man—was arguably essential to his becoming what he was so determined to be. When Grove is announced as the winner of the “America at War” essay contest, he finds that he's developed “a strange new ability to see himself whole, from the outside, as if through a movie camera twenty feet away”; and Grove maintains this perspective when he plays, with relish, “his role as sportswriter”:

He would shamble along the sidelines, carrying a clipboard and a chewed pencil to record each play; when a game was stalled he would squat and write, holding the clipboard on one tense thigh and very much aware that a number of smaller kids were peering over his shoulder; when the game broke open again he'd get up and run with it, almost as fast as the ball carrier, with the little kids racing in his wake.

Yates's devotion to such tasks was so conspicuous at Avon that he was ultimately regarded as the embodiment of writerly aspiration, and indeed his influence was pervasive: He wrote almost every word of the newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school's eighteenth-century printshop. “Dick ran everything of a literary nature,” said classmate Gilman Ordway. “He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—become a writer of fiction.”

And finally, with the arrival of fellow fifth former Ernest Bicknell Wright, Yates's success might have seemed, in its limited way, more or less complete. “Bicky” Wright was the rebellious scion of an old-money family in Philadelphia (he later had his name removed from the Social Register), and Avon was a last resort after he'd been expelled from two previous prep schools. Like his counterpart “Bucky” Ward in
A Good School,
Wright immediately “earned an outlaw's celebrity” by smoking on campus before he was seventeen and cultivating a moody, slouching persona in general. The son of a bullying, alcoholic father who openly professed not to like his children much, Wright despised authority and was alternately witty and bitter about it.

He and Yates could hardly believe their luck: Both flunked courses and didn't care, both were sloppy, both were rather curious physical specimens (the diminutive Wright would grow six more inches after he left Avon), and both felt alienated from their surroundings (whatever those happened to be); above all, both coped by making fun of the world. Now each had a perfect audience in the other. As Yates characterized the friendship in
A Good School
: “It was almost like falling in love. Bucky Ward could make him laugh over and over again until he began to feel like a girl who might at any moment cry ‘Oh, you keep me in
stitches
!'” Wright was noted in the
Winged Beaver
as “the possessor of the school's quickest comeback,” but in this respect Yates became (somewhat to his own surprise) a worthy rival. They had a ritual: Whenever one came up with a particularly choice witticism, the other would pretend to preserve it forever in the top drawer of a Platonic cabinet, filing it away with a flourish of the wrist. Indeed the friendship might have been all but ideal, were it not for Wright's weakness for melodrama.
“Things!”
cries Bucky Ward in
A Good School
. “Christ, Grove, do you ever get so you can't stand
things
?… You oughta see my family's house. Oh, it's very nice and it's very big and it cost my father a hell of a lot of money, but I can never make him understand it's just another
thing
.” And so on. For Yates, who preferred to keep his weltschmerz to himself, such displays made for uncomfortable moments. He liked Wright better when he was funny.
*

Yates was almost in danger of becoming a reasonably happy young man when his fifty-six-year-old father died suddenly of pneumonia (and general exhaustion, one suspects) on December 14, 1942. Family lore has it that Vincent died on the very day his daughter's second son was conceived, and moreover that this son, Peter, grew up to be an almost exact replica of his maternal grandfather (not to mention a minister like his great-grandfather). Alas, little else is known of Vincent's death outside Yates's fiction, though fortunately ample explication is found there. In fact the episode is treated similarly and at length in
A Good School, The Easter Parade, A Special Providence,
and especially “Lament for a Tenor.” The protagonist of “Tenor,” Jack Warren, is having breakfast in the refectory when he's discreetly informed by the headmaster that he has an urgent message to call home. This he does, and though he feels nothing on hearing the sad news except “an automatic tightening in his chest,” he's impressed by his mother's uncontrollable weeping, as if she were “a real widow.” In both this story and
A Special Providence,
Yates's alter ego is just able to stop himself from saying, in effect, “What the hell, Mother, are we supposed to
cry
when he dies?” An uncomfortable session with the headmaster follows in “Tenor” (the man speaks vaguely of God's will and arranges for Warren to leave on an afternoon train), after which the young man heads back to his room to pack and decide how best to get through the next few hours at school: “it was oddly enjoyable to have a secret like this, and he mounted the rest of the stairs with theatrical gravity, an inscrutable, tragic young man.” But he's troubled by how empty he feels. “You couldn't very well cry over a man you hardly knew,” Warren reflects, casting back to their last few meetings, which lately “had spaced out to three or four a year, usually just a restaurant lunch and an awkward afternoon during one of Jack's holidays.”

In “Tenor” and elsewhere, Yates made note of his father's obvious deterioration in recent years—that he looked “smaller and grayer,” that he coughed and drank more—though the man always treated his son with alert solicitude, and seemed to accept that it was incumbent on himself to keep the conversation going. One thing that evidently disturbed Yates in retrospect was his failure to call his father “Dad.” In
A Good School
Bill Grove finds it “all but impossible”: “He remembered having no trouble with the more childish ‘Daddy,' years ago, but ‘Dad' eluded his tongue. He tried to avoid the problem, on the rare occasions when he saw the man, by arranging his remarks in such a way as to require calling him nothing at all.” But both Grove and Jack Warren are able to relieve their consciences somewhat by remembering the relative success of that last paternal visit at school, when father and son went for a pleasant-enough stroll around campus and the latter managed, finally, to say “Dad.”