A Tragic Honesty (81 page)

During these lost years Yates's greatest source of grief and regret was his estrangement from his older daughters. They still spoke on the phone, but face-to-face meetings were rare and tended to go awry. Gina remembers a number of dinners with her father and Monica that ended in fights between the two, the little girl sitting meekly between them until Monica bolted to her feet and stormed out of the restaurant. “He had this Victorian paterfamilias idea that he'd be the benevolent Dad and I'd be the cheerful, doting little girl,” said Monica. “But you can't be a doting daughter to a guy who falls apart like that. You
have
to be strong. After a fight, Dad would say, ‘Oh, I just wanted us to be like
this,
' and I'd say ‘It
can't
be like that, because I'm not like that and you're not like that.'” What made the impasse more painful was that he and Monica were best friends when Yates was sane and sober. On Sunday mornings they'd talk on the phone for two or three hours at a time, and there was nothing they couldn't discuss freely: “I loved his take on things,” she said. “He always
got
it
,
he always said the right thing.” And he always disappointed her in the end. Monica was the one others called when Yates had a breakdown, and by her mid-twenties she was not only jaded but fed up. “I sensed a sort of prurient relish on the part of the callers: ‘You can't
believe
what's happened,' they'd say, as if they wanted to test my reaction to it.” She was tired, too, of the terrible fights afterward, which often began with Yates berating her for getting involved, then losing all control (“Oh fuck you, baby!”) when she defended herself. As ever, too, he'd refuse to admit that there was anything much the matter with him. “What'd I do that seemed so
‘crazy'
?” he'd say over and over. Everyone else was to blame.

As for Sharon, she'd found refuge in a family of her own, and cultivated a kind of benign distance from her father. The fact that she wasn't particularly literary left them without much common ground, even less so when Yates turned out to have remarkably little interest in his grandchild. “Oh yes, dear,” he'd sigh absently when Sharon talked about Sonia. His indifference toward such subjects as potty training and nursery schools was perhaps understandable, though it was a bit puzzling that such a doting father would become such an apathetic grandfather. It bothered Yates a bit, too. “Am I a monster?” he asked Vonnegut. “Nah,” said the latter. “They're not your kids. That's just how it is.” Still, Yates hadn't entirely lost his knack for being charming with little girls, and would draw Sonia out on the phone with ingenuous, particular questions about whatever she wanted to prattle about. And he still deferred, usually, to a child's interests in mixed company. “Sonia, you should let Grandpa finish his story first,” the girl's parents would admonish her when she interrupted one of his anecdotes. “Ahh, who wants to hear about that anyway?” Yates would say, dropping the subject. Whatever his good intentions, though, Yates's rare visits seldom passed without mishap. While at the Levines' house in 1983, he promptly drank a case of beer and had a seizure. Later, when his daughters visited him in the psychiatric ward, Monica remarked that his toenails needed clipping. “Yeah,” Yates intoned, calmly dotty. “You're just going to clip my nails like a prostitute.”

One way that Yates tacitly acknowledged his failings, and tried to make amends, was through his generosity with money. “He'd give it to you when he got it and you'd never hear about it again,” said Monica. Even his ex-wives were happy to admit this point in his favor. Sheila, despite an otherwise withering appraisal of Yates, gives him due credit for never missing a child-support payment. And later, when the grown-up Monica was working in New York at underpaid editorial jobs, Yates sent her two hundred dollars a month for three years. Everything else, after his own food and rent were covered (and sometimes when they weren't), went to Gina. In later years Yates tended to run through advances before his books were finished and then try to wrestle more out of Sam Lawrence, who was galled by the knowledge of where the money was liable to go. When Martha and Gina moved to Denver in 1983, Yates paid extra for the girl to attend private school, and one friend noted the paradox of Yates's buying her an elaborate antique dollhouse while he, Yates, lived in two wretched rooms. And that wasn't all: “By God, I'm sending her to Harvard if it's the last thing I do!” was a constant refrain.

But then Gina made him happy, and she wasn't fazed in the least by the roaches and dustballs of Beacon Street. She learned early, too, while listening to Monica's literary discussions with her father (“All this bleakness is just
bunk,
Dad! Life isn't that bad!” “Fine fine, baby, throw
all
my books out the window!”), that it might be best to avoid the whole subject of writing, his career, etc., and for the most part she always did. Their Sunday phone chats were determinedly light-hearted and all about her—school, what she'd eaten for breakfast, what she was wearing or looking at or planning to do that day. If Gina seemed inattentive or lazy, Yates would tell her with mock severity to sit up and put her feet on the floor; other than that there was little or no friction. During his lifetime Gina never learned of his mental illness (she thought the pills were for emphysema), nor did he burden her—as he did Monica—with the more desperate details of his daily affairs. “I have loved your father for many years,” Dubus told Gina when they stayed at his house in Haverhill. Dubus was the only friend she ever met during her visits to Boston, and Dubus was grateful for the girl's existence. “Andre was always worrying about Dick,” said Dubus's first wife Pat. “That he would get sick, lonely, and die. They loved each other.”

Others worried too, however distantly. Dubus used to say he could always tell how Yates was doing based on the overall mood of his latest book, and even strangers could sense that all was not well. “I'm writing to tell you that I think you're the best living writer in America,” read a fan letter from this time. “Evidently, you've had a hard life and might not be that comfortable or happy, but your work is superb.” Gloria Vanderbilt felt the same—about the work anyway. In the spring of 1983 she sat next to Vonnegut at a cocktail party and asked if he'd ever heard of a writer named Richard Yates: “I think he's wonderful,” she said. “I adored
The Easter Parade
.” Vonnegut replied that in fact Yates was a friend, and informed her that he lived in Boston and would probably appreciate hearing from her. “On impulse [I] hoped to meet you in Boston,” she wrote Yates, after a failed attempt to arrange an impromptu luncheon at the Ritz. “I wanted to tell you that because of
you
light comes not only through chinks and cracks but you flood my window with light. I love you and thank you.” Yates wrote back suggesting they get together the next time he came to New York, if she wasn't “repelled by the idea,” and she assured him that “repelled” was hardly the word: “Scared, perhaps, a little. You know so much about women.” Wendy Sears cringed when a giddy Yates told her of his imminent rendezvous with Vanderbilt—“I thought ‘My
God,
what will happen when she actually meets him?'”—but apparently it came off without a hitch: Vanderbilt wrote afterward that she “could have talked on and on” to Yates, and even phoned him that Thanksgiving and put a number of her friends and fellow admirers on the line. The problem, perhaps, was their
second
meeting. When Yates was almost destitute a couple of years later, Sears wrote an urgent letter to Vanderbilt about the plight of her favorite author. Within a few days the famous heiress phoned Sears and explained, coldly, that she didn't have that kind of money.

*   *   *

By 1984 Yates's relationship with Dr. Winthrop Burr had deteriorated. During their early years together Yates would sometimes acknowledge that the sessions were a comfort—that they “made him less afraid of himself,” as Burr put it—but when the psychiatrist began to emphasize alcoholism as a major factor, Yates grew more and more hostile. Finally, after one enforced hospitalization too many, Yates became so enraged during a session that Burr walked out on him: “He was shouting so loud you could hear him down the hall,” said Burr, “calling me stupid, saying I lacked imagination, that my whole profession was corrupt and had fed off him all these years—used him as a guinea pig, done him no good.” Later Yates came to the clinic, drunk, and confronted Burr with an ambulance bill. Since his last hospitalization hadn't been necessary in the first place, said Yates, he insisted that Burr pay. Burr pointed out that Yates was drunk (he denied it) and asked him to leave. After that there were no more psychotherapy sessions. Yates still came in for medication refills, and was civil but laconic when Burr asked how he was doing. A short while later Burr left the VA, but offered to take Yates on as a private patient at a reduced fee; Yates declined, though he did write Burr a gracious, rather apologetic letter thanking him for all his help. “Take care of those two beautiful girls,” he closed, referring to a portrait in Burr's office of his young son and daughter. Burr continued to contact his successor at the VA and inquire about Yates's condition, but the woman wasn't able to tell him much.

Yates became increasingly cantankerous toward an unimaginative world that had used him ill. “Ahh that's ridiculous!” he'd snap at any remark that didn't jibe with his calcified worldview. For old times' sake Wendy Sears was willing to invite Yates over for
very
special occasions—his fifty-eighth birthday, say—but it was an ordeal to be suffered strictly out of the goodness of one's heart. Any remonstrance, no matter how diffident, over Yates's slovenly ash spilling or aggressive opinionating was apt to spark a tantrum; it was better to let things go and watch the clock. Meanwhile Yates's ambivalence toward such “well-bred” women as Sears and her cohorts became even more pointed, as he detected bad taste and pretension at every turn. One such woman's cluttered, bohemian digs in Cambridge were, to Yates, an “absurd” attempt to deny her birthright, and when Sears and another Brahmin girlfriend worked as caterers' maids, Yates refused to accept that they needed the money. “Oh how madcap,” he declared sarcastically.

Happily his literary fame was showing signs of resurgence. The year before,
Revolutionary Road
had been reissued as a Delta paperback, which attracted a long, laudatory notice by Michiko Kakutani in the daily
Times
: “More than two decades after its original publication, it remains a remarkable and deeply troubling book—a book that creates an indelible portrait of lost promises and mortgaged hopes in the suburbs of America.” Yates's readership, such as it was, seemed primed for the publication of
Young Hearts Crying
in the fall, and already Yates was not only under way with his next novel, but eager to get started on the one after that. “It's nice that Barrett Prettyman (or whoever it was) suggested publishing a collection of my Bobby Kennedy speeches,” Yates wrote Sam Lawrence in June,

but I've got a better idea: a novel about that period, with Bobby serving as one of the characters and even Jack having a walk-on part. Wendy Sears will be prominently featured, as will a haggard fellow who begrudges every hour spent at speechwriting because it's denying him his life's work; and there'll be a large, mostly funny supporting cast.… I've been collecting notes and sketches for it over the past several years; I know how it's going to begin and develop and where it will go from there. I'm planning to call it
Uncertain Times
unless a snappier title comes along.

Lawrence saw nothing ominously uncharacteristic about such an overt, political roman à clef—on the contrary, he thought the idea “infinitely better” than any book of speeches. Unfortunately he wasn't Yates's publisher anymore: A few months back he'd become a casualty of budget cuts and had moved his imprint to Dutton; as a result Yates's next two novels, both under contract to Delacorte, would be published as “Seymour Lawrence” books in name alone. But the Kennedy novel struck Lawrence as a possible commercial breakthrough for Yates, and he wanted to be part of it: “The people at Dutton, from the President on down, are your fans,” he wrote. “I wish we could sign a contract right now.”

Yates was almost solvent for the first time in years. That August he and three others (Peter Taylor, Stanley Kunitz, and William Meredith) were awarded NEA Senior Fellowships worth twenty-five thousand dollars each—“to support and honor creative writers who have received the highest critical acclaim, but whose work may not be widely known outside the literary field.” As Frank Conroy explained on behalf of the Endowment, Yates had been selected by three separate panels of distinguished writers to receive the honor: “That's great,” Yates replied (in a voice Conroy described as sounding “like it was coming from the back of a cement mixer which was also making cement while he spoke”); “when do I get the check?” Daunted as ever by the fearful prospect of facing an award reception alone, a bashful Yates asked “Wendy Serious” to be his “girl” again; she declined, of course, though she was willing to attend the reception with him. The evening was blessedly uneventful: Yates mingled a bit stiffly for a while, then stuck close to Sears and only snapped at her once (when she expressed a fondness for the work of John Irving). The high point came when Frank Conroy tipsily serenaded Yates on the piano, though the latter was eager to leave all the same.

As the October publication of his sixth novel approached, Yates's ship appeared to be coming in at last. “I think
Young Hearts Crying
is the finest thing you've done,” Sam Lawrence wrote. “The writing is flawless, the dialogue rings absolutely true, and the characters come immediately to life and stay that way. It's a broader canvas than
Revolutionary Road
(to which it will no doubt be compared). There are stark agonizing moments and virtuoso passages of comic relief. I'm proud to have my name on the title page.” As with Yates's first novel—to which
Young Hearts Crying
would indeed be compared—an advance excerpt was published in
Esquire,
which described Yates as “one of America's least famous great writers.” It was remarkable redemption for a man who, eleven years and five books before, had threatened to shoot the magazine's fiction editor.