A Tragic Honesty (11 page)

For the most part, though, the whole event seems to have evoked very little in the way of conventional sentiment. “You know, my father's really a pretty boring guy,” Jack Warren remarks to his roommate after that visit, and once he knows his father is dead he reads over the man's last (unanswered) letter, which is full of well-meaning banality: “Was sorry to see you're still having trouble with that mark in math. You know the way to improve your math, or anything else for that matter, is just say to yourself, ‘Who's going to win? This math, or me?'” Little wonder Yates felt bound to admit that he was, after all, his mother's son, or that his most definite emotion when his father died was a kind of piquant self-pity. When Jack Warren manages a few cathartic sobs on the train home, it dawns on him that he's really crying “for himself—a boy bereaved,” whereupon he begins to retch rather than cry. The same moment recurs in
The Easter Parade,
when Emily stops crying over her father as soon as she realizes her tears are “wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.”
*

It could be that Dookie's far more elaborate grief indicated a greater awareness of certain grim consequences to follow, along with perhaps a genuine fondness for the man and a slight pang for having hastened his decline. Whether she really kissed his corpse on the mouth à la Pookie Grimes and Alice Prentice is impossible to say, though the image serves nicely to suggest the disgust she provoked in her son on that occasion, and ever more frequently afterward. “It was
her
fault,” Robert Prentice reflects at the funeral. “She had robbed him of a father and robbed his father of a son, and now it was too late.” For a number of reasons Yates's disenchantment with his mother would accelerate after Vincent's death, and that may have been the man's most impressive legacy, both in terms of his son's life and his son's work. But Vincent remained something of a two-dimensional figure in Yates's mind: a mild-mannered, well-meaning fellow who tried to make the best of a terrible mistake—though just
how
terrible Yates could scarcely appreciate until years later, when his father became a more haunting abstraction. “All I'm really qualified to remember is the sadness of his later life—the bad marriage that cost him so much, the drab little office from which he assisted in managing the sales of light bulbs for so many years, the tidy West Side apartment … where I can only hope he found love before his death.”

*   *   *

Yates spent that Christmas vacation mastering the fine points of a habit that probably killed his father and would eventually kill him, too. But then Yates always loved to smoke, and perhaps it was worth it as far as he was concerned: It gave a shy, nervous person something to do with his hands; it made him alert; he liked the taste; and besides he didn't much care about his health anyway. But it all began (and to some extent persisted) as the purest form of adolescent affectation, a way of looking—at last—somewhat masculine and grown-up: “Cigarettes were a great help because any big-eyed, full-lipped boy could be made to look all right if he smoked all the time.” With his friend Bick, Yates had begun smoking illicitly during his first semester as a fifth former, but others had made fun of his beginner's cough; now that he was about to turn seventeen, and eligible to light up at will in the Senior Club, he was determined to outsmoke the lot of them. As he described his self-training in
A Good School
:

First he had to learn the physical side of it … how to will his senses to accept drugged dizziness as pleasure rather than incipient nausea. Then came the subtler lessons in aesthetics, aided by the use of the bathroom mirror: learning to handle a cigarette casually, even gesturing with it while talking, as if scarcely aware of having it in his fingers; deciding which part of his lips formed the spot where a cigarette might hang most attractively … and how best to squint against the smoke.… The remarkable thing about cigarettes … was that they added years to the face that had always looked nakedly younger than his age.

For the rest of his time at Avon, Yates was rarely seen outside the classroom without a butt dangling off his lip, and clearly he looked forward to the day when he'd never have to abstain at all—never have to leave his round-eyed vulnerable face exposed without a smoke screen to squint behind.

Most students at Avon spent their free time, especially during weekends, availing themselves one way or another of Mrs. Riddle's vast estate, her picturesque farms and woodlands, playing polo, perhaps, or venturing into Hartford for a meal and a movie. Yates—never one for the outdoors and too poor for polo or Hartford—was almost always (from 1943 on) to be found at either the
Avonian
office or the Senior Club, smoking and writing. The ambience of the Senior Club particularly appealed to him, what with its leather sofas and armchairs, its phonograph and pool table, its overall conduciveness to “learning how to behave in college” (the closest Yates would ever come to that milieu). Occasionally he'd bestir himself for a game of pool—at least one classmate remembered him (likely in error) as “quite good”—but mostly he sat, smoked, drank coffee, and wrote.

One of the stories he finished as a fifth former, “Forgive Our Foolish Ways,” was featured in the 1943
Winged Beaver
. It is Yates's earliest surviving fiction, and its thousand or so words describe the spiritual conversion of a dying soldier, hitherto a hard-boiled skeptic. A representative patch of prose: “He remembered running like a scared rabbit across the sand, hearing the machine guns spitting at him, and being half-crazed with horror and fear. He remembered feeling that his face must look like a frightened child's, mouth open and cheeks jogging loosely.” That last phrase is promising, as are certain others (“writhing like a squashed beetle”), but otherwise the story is unremarkable: At first its wounded protagonist boldly dismisses the “phony ideas” of those who believe in a “phony God,” but while dying he's surrounded by “an immense, radiant, all-inclusive light” and hears “a great choir,” and so on. For what it's worth, the story is somewhat better than the three or four others featured in that year's
Winged Beaver,
and seems to give a fair sense of what was on Yates's mind at the time.

But a far better forum for his ideas—and abilities, too, at least as they stood then—was
The Avonian,
and perhaps the best proof of this is the last issue of that school year, dated June 9, 1943. At the bottom center of the front page is a box headlined “In Memoriam”:

As we go to press, tragic news reaches us. It is with profound sorrow that we announce the death of David James Stanley, one of the finest men Avon has ever known. Dave was killed at sea, just three weeks after his departure from School to join the United States Merchant Marine. The loss to Avon is irreparable, his memory imperishable.

Nothing brought the reality of war closer to Avon than the death of David Stanley, the lovable young man who appears as Larry Gaines in
A Good School
. Handsome and sweet-natured, Stanley had just become engaged to Alice Sperry, the pretty seventeen-year-old daughter of Avon's biology teacher. Stanley had finished school early to join the merchant marine and thus avoid the regular draft, when—only a day or two before Avon's graduation ceremony—his ship collided with a munitions vessel and sank to the bottom of Hampton Bay. As recorded in
A Good School,
the last issue of the newspaper was minutes away from press (in fact a blackly ironic item remains on page four, listing David Stanley as “Most Likely To Succeed”) when the news reached Avon; alone, amid a community stunned with grief, Yates had to keep his head and compose a brief but seemly tribute, then reconfigure the front page and see
The Avonian
into press. Not only did he succeed, but the editorial he'd written for that issue could hardly have been more appropriate under the circumstances. Addressed to the graduating class, it put into well-considered words what was surely on the mind of every Avon student in 1943, more than ever after the death of David Stanley:

In times like these, when everyone's future is completely uncertain, those of us who are leaving cannot help but be thankful for the steady and secure existence Avon has afforded us. A few of the boys graduating today may never come out of the war alive. All of them will undoubtedly experience more trying and dangerous times than have ever confronted a generation of young men since history began.

Yates won a special award that year for his work on
The Avonian,
and deservedly so: Under his editorship the newspaper was “larger in size and more inclusive in scope” (so noted the
Winged Beaver
), and such improvements were appreciated more widely than one might expect. “You publish a splendid newspaper,” wrote an alumnus stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “I cannot in any way find fault with it, and I admire the wit of the news articles, the frankness of the editorials … [and] congratulate you sincerely on a masterpiece among school papers.” Lest one think this sort of thing caused Yates to take himself too seriously, consider a filler item on page two of that same
Avonian
: “If the writing in this issue seems rather bumpy in spots, please don't condemn it too much. Our beloved Editor (?) was in the infirmary with the measles and consequently every single article in this
Avonian
has contacted [
sic
] the frightful disease.” Clearly the wag who used to jape about “
kahts
” and garbagemen and “‘T.B.' in ‘V.T.'” was still alive, if not altogether well.

*   *   *

Among friends Yates still spoke of his mother admiringly, as a “struggling artist,” while remaining entirely silent on the subject of his father's death. During the man's life, though, Yates never really grasped what was involved in the subsidy of a struggling artist such as Dookie, and may have wondered why his father had waxed so solemn, so deadly earnest, whenever he tried to explain that someday she'd be Richard's responsibility.

The day had come. Dookie was left with nothing after Vincent's death, and when Yates returned to New York that summer he found her living in a cheap hotel on East Thirty-ninth Street, all her sculpture and remaining furniture in storage. She was predictably far behind in both rent and storage payments, and eating her meals out of cans. At something called the Ultima Optical Company she'd found a job grinding lenses, though she longed for something more glamorous and remunerative. Some twenty years before, as a single “career gal” in Manhattan, she'd been a fashion illustrator, and to that line of work she devoutly wished to return. One assumes her son was at least as skeptical as Robert Prentice in
A Special Providence
: “Even he could see how still and labored and hopelessly unsaleable-looking her drawings were, though she explained it was all a question of making the right contacts.”

While Dookie applied her native flair to making contacts and grinding lenses, Yates found work as a copyboy at the
New York Sun
. Though the
Sun
“[wasn't] really much of a paper” (as Walter Grimes explains to his daughters in
The Easter Parade
), Yates enjoyed the role of an honest workingman. At the time the extra income made it possible for him and Dookie to move to a larger furnished apartment only a block away from the Ultima Optical Company on West Fifty-fifth, if somewhat farther from the
Sun
on Chambers Street. Also, the job gave him good material for his next short story (more on that below), some of which was deftly recycled for his fourth novel more than thirty years later.

For a while Yates may have enjoyed being the breadwinner at the age of seventeen, but the romance soon began to pall. The combined salaries of a copyboy and a lens grinder didn't amount to much, but Dookie was utterly debonair about the future. Night after night she jabbered about the contacts she was making in the fashion world, as well as the lucrative “one-man show” that was right around the corner, while her son listened and the canned soup simmered. As for Richard's hard work to pay for groceries and most of the rent, Dookie pretended with friends that it was just “a little laboring job …
you
know the kind of thing boys do in the summertime.” And then, as if there were no pressing question of how to pay fees at an expensive private school in the fall, Dookie blew much of their wages on a new wardrobe—this, of course, to establish herself in the fashion world. “You sound just like your father,” she'd sigh, when he ventured to suggest that they be more thrifty. Finally he began to lose his temper. When thus cornered (especially about money), Dookie tended to throw a kind of stylized fit—partly a matter of genuine hysterics, no doubt, and partly a matter of enlightened self-interest. In one form or another the performance is given by all her fictional personae, though perhaps most vividly by Alice Prentice:

And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor.… She lay facedown, quivering all over and making spastic little kicks with her feet, while he stood and watched.… It had happened often enough, in various crises, that he knew she wasn't really having a heart attack; all he had to do was wait until she began to feel foolish lying there.

As it turned out, Dookie never did generate enough contacts to break back into the fashion world, though shortly before her son returned to school she managed to find a job in a factory that made department-store mannequins. This was better suited to her talents than lens grinding, but all such work was “harsh and degrading,” as Yates put it in “Regards at Home”—“pitifully wrong for a bewildered, rapidly aging, often hysterical woman who had always considered herself a sculptor with at least as much intensity as I brought to the notion of myself as a writer.”