A Tragic Honesty (26 page)

More than ever Yates's greatest scorn was reserved for his mother, about whom he was almost compulsively disparaging—and this, ironically, at a time when she was most deserving of his esteem. “You know where my mother works?” he asked a friend while in his cups. “She's the fucking
cloakroom lady
at the City Center gallery.” A more jaundiced view of Dookie's employment would be hard to imagine. She may obligingly have offered to stow the wraps of certain theatergoers who stood in her gallery during intermission, and the long corridor that comprised the gallery (actually the emergency exit from the Fifty-fifth Street auditorium) might easily have been taken as a lounge of sorts, but Dookie was no cloakroom lady. In fact, as the gallery's director, she was a colleague of George Balanchine and Jean Dalrymple, who headed the ballet and theater companies at what was then called New York's “temple for the performing arts.” It was through Dookie's efforts that painters such as Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, and Franz Kline served as jurors for the traditional, centrist, and avant-garde shows that alternated at the center, and it was Dookie who raised money for her impoverished gallery by helping to organize the annual Easter Bonnet Tea Dance in the main ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, where such celebrity judges as Celeste Holm and Helen Hayes gave prizes for “Prettiest Bonnet,” “Best Dancers,” and “Grandmother with the Loveliest Outfit.” (This event was later abolished in the wake of criticism that it was “too society” for the “people's theater.”) Dookie not only knew such luminaries as Holm and Hayes et al., she had lunch with them and called them Celeste and Helen, to say nothing of Bob, Larry, and Franz. Indeed, the gala opening of the gallery on September 29, 1953, was less than two weeks after Yates's return from Europe; perhaps his mother's curious ascendancy was a bit too much to digest, as well as a bit too good to be true.

To this day, anyhow, Dookie has her defenders and deserves them to some extent, though it's necessary to point out that such people knew her best during her redemptive City Center phase: Thus they perceived her as “amusing,” “outspoken,” and even “heroic,” while Yates (vis-à-vis his mother at least) was “sarcastic,” “impatient,” and “spiteful.”
*
Tony Vevers has a number of reasons for taking Dookie's side, not the least being that she gave him a job soon after he moved to New York. “I said, ‘I know your son,'” Vevers recalled, “and she said, ‘You're hired.' Just like that.” And not only was Vevers hired, but so was his wife Elspeth, who was put to work as Dookie's secretary despite the fact that she couldn't type. In short, Dookie took them under her wing, all because they were friends of her beloved son. She gave them theater tickets and got them into rehearsals to watch Balanchine and his company; she took them to lunch, where they drank martinis and met famous artists, and City Center paid for it all. “Ruth Yates was an extraordinary person,” said Louise Rodgers, who as a young woman helped Dookie in the gallery. “She was temperamental, yes, and I suppose she drank a lot, but she worked hard, and
everybody
drank a lot.”

By the time he returned from Europe, though, Yates had seen enough of his mother's drinking. In fact he could hardly bear her company, especially when friends were present: If she got tipsy and began to talk too much, Yates would roll his eyes and make faces at her while she wasn't looking, until finally he'd get so agitated that sometimes he'd have to leave the room. Even Sheila—who could understand better than most—thought her husband's attitude a bit much, though she herself could only take Dookie in moderate doses.

Happily for Dookie's sake, she had less need of their company or philanthropy. City Center kept her busy and paid her a living wage, and during weekends at High Hedges her grandchildren saved her from the worst of her loneliness. On Saturdays they'd visit her cozy, overgrown garage apartment on the estate (she stored her sculpture below), and Dookie would make them a treat of fried bananas in sugar. Even Yates gave her credit for being a good enough grandmother (despite her old complaint that she couldn't
imagine
herself as such), and would leave Mussy in her care for days at a time during the summer. But otherwise Dookie kept mostly to herself at High Hedges, though she still liked to visit Fritz and Louise for sherry in the evening. As for relations with her daughter, they were civil but strained: Ruth, out of loyalty to her husband (as well as grievances known only to herself), had made it clear at the outset that Dookie was not wanted by the younger Rodgerses at High Hedges; she relented when Dookie appealed to Fritz, but both women would nurse the hurt for the rest of their lives.

Ruth's life was as full as it would ever be: Her children were all at home and she was a happily attentive mother. Twice a week she worked at WGSM in Huntington, where she wrote scripts for radio programs on gardening and local history, and sometimes served as announcer as well. And whatever her differences with Dookie, they were kindred spirits in at least one respect—Ruth's early involvement with the Willkie campaign had led to a lifelong interest in Republican politics: Ruth was one of the first Republican committeewomen on Long Island, and wrote speeches for Nelson Rockefeller's gubernatorial campaign. But like her brother—who in time would write a number of political speeches himself (though not at gunpoint would he ever have written for a Republican)—she wanted to be a fiction writer most of all. So great was her ambition to “crack
The New Yorker
” with one of her “humorous sketches about family life,” that she papered her powder room with the magazine's covers as a form of hopeful tribute. Fred's position on the subject of his wife's diversions was this: They were fine as long as they didn't distract her from motherhood or cause any confusion as to who the real breadwinner was.

It was understood that Yates didn't visit High Hedges very often because of the enmity between him and Fred—or rather Fred served as a convenient excuse. The fact was, Yates loved and cared for his sister and would always feel a bond, but found her frankly dull and depressing. He made the trip to Long Island as a matter of duty, and tended to be cordial but distant while there. His niece Ruth (called Dodo by the family) remembers him as “a mellow sort of man” who smiled a lot, but often looked grave when he and his sister sat talking together, particularly in later years. Sometimes he'd spend time clearing brush on the property (hardly a characteristic activity otherwise), and though he was always kind to Ruth's children, he was rarely attentive or playful. Once he went on a squirrel-shooting expedition with six-year-old Peter (who can't remember whether “Uncle Dick” was delighted or horrified by the idea) and once he let thirteen-year-old Fred drive his new Chevy around the grounds, but that was about it. No matter how rare and tense his visits, though, Ruth was not a whit resentful: She adored her talented little brother, and always spoke of him with tender pride.

*   *   *

As anticipated, Yates won the
Atlantic
“First” award of $750 in December, and a few days later Seymour Lawrence came to New York and invited him to dinner at the Harvard Club. It was the beginning of a long and peculiar friendship. To be sure, things were less complicated in their salad days, when the two got along more or less famously—a bond assisted by their being exact contemporaries (Yates was eight days older) with similar tastes and tendencies. “We would order several Jack Daniel's on the rocks followed by sirloin steaks, rare please,” Lawrence recalled forty years later. “We would gossip, tell stories, talk about life and letters, who were the good guys and who were the shits.” At the time such meetings were particularly bracing for Yates, who liked being courted at the Harvard Club (“a big deal for me”) and by his own reckoning had no other “literary” friends to speak of.

And Sam Lawrence was almost as monomaniacal and quirky; if he hadn't existed it might have been necessary to make him up, at least for the sake of Yates and certain other worthy if problematic writers. “The first time I met Sam Lawrence,” a colleague remembered, “he was making an argument on behalf of one of his authors. The last time I spoke with him … he was doing the same thing.” Quite simply, Lawrence's life and work were indistinguishable. A man with a bad stammer who drank to overcome shyness, Lawrence had gravitated to writers from the beginning—without, it seems, ever seriously wishing to be a writer himself. As a freshman at Columbia he fell in with a “bad crowd” that included Kerouac and Ginsberg, until his mother made him transfer to Harvard, where he founded the magazine
Wake
and coaxed submissions from the likes of T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams. By the time he met Yates he'd been at the Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston for just over a year. By 1955 he was director of the firm, and thereafter would insist “I'm a publisher,
not
an editor”—that is, while he had sovereign faith in his editorial judgment (whose dictates he was always willing to follow in defiance of conventional wisdom), he wasn't remotely interested in the hands-on task of editing books. For a hands-off perfectionist such as Yates, this turned out to be an almost ideal arrangement, but most writers were less autonomous. In the latter case Lawrence had a solution—he simply farmed out the editing chores to his own stable of writers: Thus Kurt Vonnegut edited Dan Wakefield, Wakefield edited Tim O'Brien, and so on.
*
“Lawrence's writers were a happy little family,” said DeWitt Henry, who made the intriguing point that most of these writers were not only friends but tended to have drinking and realism in common—or, to put a finer point on it, that “alcohol and its vision” informed their themes to a remarkable degree: “the harrowing experience of reality without illusions that drives the pathology,” as Henry put it.

Be that as it may, in 1953 Yates and Lawrence were just a couple of boozy young men swapping gossip and dividing the good guys from the shits. Also there was the matter of mutual self-interest: Yates was a talented new writer whose inevitable novel Lawrence wanted to publish, but in the meantime Yates needed to sell his other work. At their first meeting, then, Lawrence agreed to reconsider a few stories that had been previously rejected by the
Atlantic
—among them the story of Vincent Sabella, the alienated welfare child, which Yates had retitled “Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern.” Yates thought the story one of his best, but Lawrence demurred: “The psychology did not ring wholly true,” he wrote Monica McCall, though he reiterated that “Dick Yates is a writer whom we respect and want to publish frequently.” That said, he rejected Yates's other stories a second time too, and his judgment of “Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern” would be validated by every magazine from
The New Yorker
to
Discovery
to the
Yale Review
—until a year later it was finally sent back to Yates by a “heartbroken” and “frankly stumped” Monica McCall.

In early 1954 Yates started a novel that failed to “jell,” and so returned to writing stories. In that genre the level of his work was now consistently excellent, but if anything less saleable than ever. With soul-killing monotony the consensus opinion was expressed by the formula
Extremely well-written, but …
“Fun with a Stranger” was well-written but inconsequential in terms of its payoff. “Out with the Old” was “a little masterpiece” according to McCall, but a doubtful sell because of the protagonist's pregnant teenage daughter. “The B.A.R. Man,” she thought, “belongs in
The New Yorker,
who won't buy it.” And a story called “Sobel” (later retitled “A Wrestler with Sharks”) was “a beauty as usual, though subject-wise not too easy a one.” Finally in August a rewrite of the two-year-old “Nuptials”—now called “I'll Be All in Clover” and soon to be called “The Best of Everything”—was bought by the magazine
Charm,
whose editors also reconsidered in favor of “Fun with a Stranger.” The two stories were Yates's only sales in 1954.

*   *   *

After less than a year on Perry Street, the world and Dookie were too much with the Yateses, and they decided to move to the country. Elspeth Vevers's mother owned a converted barn in northern Westchester, where the Yateses lived for most of that summer in an awkward communal arrangement with the Veverses and two other couples. The house was big, dark, and hot—a bit
too
much like a barn, converted or otherwise—and Sheila appealed to her mother to find them a better place. Marjorie Bryant was now one of the region's most successful real estate brokers, as well as an indefatigable fixer-upper in what spare time she allowed herself; as such, she was almost ominously eager to be of use to her daughter and son-in-law. In no time she found them a lovely A-frame carriage house in Salem, Westchester, on the estate of an affable Cossack named Guirey—a great horseman and drinker who'd known Tony Vevers at Yale. He and Yates hit it off, and for a while the place was almost perfect.

One of their first visitors was Bob Riche, who'd been invited to come out with his then-girlfriend Pamela Vevers. By the time Yates met Riche at the train station, though, the couple had broken up and Pamela was already dating theater director Ed Sherin.
*
Riche was devastated, and by his own admission had a hard time getting off the subject. Yates tried to console his tearful friend by making fun of the notoriously charming Sherin, whom he described as an “actor type.” But Sheila was less sympathetic. She went out of her way to talk about a delightful recent visit with Sherin and Pamela, and when Riche persisted in licking his wounds, she casually remarked, “Oh Bob, but he's
much
better-looking than you.” It began to seem an almost systematic attempt to demoralize Riche, culminating in an episode that haunts him still. As he tried to sleep in an open loft directly over his hosts' bed, he was disturbed by what struck him as an outrageous act of conjugal derision: “She was giggling and carrying on like a mad sex fiend,” he recalled, “and I always felt it was at the least a bit inappropriate, and more likely deliberate cruelty.” “More likely” indeed, as the Yateses had already turned Riche into something of a private joke; as Sheila later explained, “Bob was the sort of person who gets
analysis
year in year out,” and her husband (while fond of Riche) found him every bit as ridiculous.
*
But it is Sheila's glee that stuck in Riche's mind: “She had a laugh that snapped out like a whip,” he said.