The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (14 page)

Sobel grabbed up the papers and shielded them with an arrogant forearm. He looked steadily at Finney and said, with a firmness that he must have been rehearsing for two weeks: “I'm showing this to Mr. Kramm. Not you.”

Finney's whole face began to twitch in a fit of nerves. “Nah, nah, Mr. Kramm don't need to see it,” he said. “Anyway, he's not in yet. C'mon, lemme have it.”

“You're wasting your time, Finney,” Sobel said. “I'm waiting for Mr. Kramm.”

Muttering, avoiding Sobel's triumphant eyes, Finney went back to his own desk, where he was reading proof on BROADWAY BEAT.

My own job that morning was at the layout table, pasting up the dummy for the first section. I was standing there, working with the unwieldly page forms and the paste-clogged scissors, when Sobel sidled up behind me, looking anxious. “You wanna read it, McCabe?” he asked. “Before I turn it in?” And he handed me the manuscript.

The first thing that hit me was that he had clipped a photograph to the top of page 1, a small portrait of himself in his cloth hat. The next thing was his title:

I can't remember the exact words of the opening paragraph, but it went something like this:

When I looked up I saw he had picked open the razor cut on his cheek and it was bleeding freely. “Well,” I said, “for one thing, I wouldn't give it to him with your picture that way—I mean, don't you think it might be better to let him read it first, and then—”

“Okay,” he said, blotting at his face with a wadded gray handkerchief. “Okay, I'll take the picture off. G'ahead, read the rest.”

But there wasn't time to read the rest. Kramm had come in, Finney had spoken to him, and now he was standing in the door of his office, champing crossly on a dead cigar. “You wanted to see me, Sobel?” he called.

“Just a second,” Sobel said. He straightened the pages of SOBEL SPEAKING and detached the photograph, which he jammed into his hip pocket as he started for the door. Halfway there he remembered to take off his hat, and threw it unsuccessfully at the hat stand. Then he disappeared behind the partition, and we all settled down to listen.

It wasn't long before Kramm's reaction came through. “
No,
Sobel. No, no,
no
! What
is
this? What are you tryna put
over
on me here?”

Outside, Finney winced comically and clapped the side of his head, giggling, and O'Leary had to glare at him until he stopped.

We heard Sobel's voice, a blurred sentence or two of protest, and then Kramm came through again: “‘Basic human mystery'—this is gossip? This is chatter? You can't follow instructions? Wait a minute—Finney! Finney!”

Finney loped to the door, delighted to be of service, and we heard him making clear, righteous replies to Kramm's interrogation: Yes, he had told Sobel what kind of a column was wanted; yes, he had specified that there was to be no byline; yes, Sobel had been provided with ample gossip material. All we heard from Sobel was something indistinct, said in a very tight, flat voice. Kramm made a guttural reply, and even though we couldn't make out the words we knew it was all over. Then they came out, Finney wearing the foolish smile you sometimes see in the crowds that gape at street accidents, Sobel as expressionless as death.

He picked his hat off the floor and his coat off the stand, put them on, and came over to me. “So long, McCabe,” he said. “Take it easy.”

Shaking hands with him, I felt my face jump into Finney's idiot smile, and I asked a stupid question. “You leaving?”

He nodded. Then he shook hands with O'Leary—“So long, kid”—and hesitated, uncertain whether to shake hands with the rest of the staff. He settled for a little wave of the forefinger, and walked out to the street.

Finney lost no time in giving us all the inside story in an eager whisper: “The guy's
crazy
! He says to Kramm, ‘You take this column or I quit'—just like that. Kramm just looks at him and says, ‘Quit? Get outa here, you're fired.' I mean, what
else
could he say?”

Turning away, I saw that the snapshot of Sobel's wife and sons still lay taped to his desk. I stripped it off and took it out to the sidewalk. “Hey, Sobel!” I yelled. He was a block away, very small, walking toward the subway. I started to run after him, nearly breaking my neck on the frozen slush. “Hey
Sobel
!” But he didn't hear me.

Back at the office I found his address in the Bronx telephone directory, put the picture in an envelope and dropped it in the mail, and I wish that were the end of the story.

But that afternoon I called up the editor of a hardware trade journal I had worked on before the war, who said he had no vacancies on his staff but might soon, and would be willing to interview Sobel if he wanted to drop in. It was a foolish idea: the wages there were even lower than on the
Leader
, and besides, it was a place for very young men whose fathers wanted them to learn the hardware business—Sobel would probably have been ruled out the minute he opened his mouth. But it seemed better than nothing, and as soon as I was out of the office that night I went to a phone booth and looked up Sobel's name again.

A woman's voice answered, but it wasn't the high, faint voice I'd expected. It was low and melodlious—that was the first of my several surprises.

“Mrs. Sobel?” I asked, absurdly smiling into the mouthpiece. “Is Leon there?”

She started to say, “Just a minute,” but changed it to “Who's calling, please? I'd rather not disturb him right now.”

I told her my name and tried to explain about the hardware deal.

“I don't understand,” she said. “What kind of a paper is it, exactly?”

“Well, it's a trade journal,” I said. “It doesn't amount to much, I guess, but it's—
you
know, a pretty good little thing, of its kind.”

“I see,” she said. “And you want him to go in and apply for a job? Is that it?”

“Well I mean, if he
wants
to, is all,” I said. I was beginning to sweat. It was impossible to reconcile the wan face in Sobel's snapshot with this serene, almost beautiful voice. “I just thought he might like to give it a try, is all.”

“Well,” she said, “just a minute, I'll ask him.” She put down the phone, and I heard them talking in the background. Their words were muffled at first but then I heard Sobel say, “Ah, I'll talk to him—I'll just say thanks for calling.” And I heard her answer, with infinite tenderness, “No, honey, why should you? He doesn't deserve it.”

“McCabe's all right,” he said.

“No he's not,” she told him, “or he'd have the decency to leave you alone. Let me do it. Please. I'll get rid of him.”

When she came back to the phone she said, “No, my husband says he wouldn't be interested in a job of that kind.” Then she thanked me politely, said goodbye, and left me to climb guilty and sweating out of the phone booth.

ALL THAT SUMMER
the children who were due to start third grade under Miss Snell had been warned about her. “Boy, you're gonna get it,” the older children would say, distorting their faces with a wicked pleasure. “You're really gonna
get
it. Mrs.
Cleary's
all right” (Mrs. Cleary taught the other, luckier half of third grade) “—she's
fine,
but boy, that
Snell
—you better watch out.” So it happened that the morale of Miss Snell's class was low even before school opened in September, and she did little in the first few weeks to improve it.

She was probably sixty, a big rawboned woman with a man's face, and her clothes, if not her very pores, seemed always to exude that dry essence of pencil shavings and chalk dust that is the smell of school. She was strict and humorless, preoccupied with rooting out the things she held intolerable: mumbling, slumping, daydreaming, frequent trips to the bathroom, and, the worst of all, “coming to school without proper supplies.” Her small eyes were sharp, and when somebody sent out a stealthy alarm of whispers and nudges to try to borrow a pencil from somebody else, it almost never worked. “What's the trouble back there?” she would demand. “I mean you, John Gerhardt.” And John Gerhardt—or Howard White or whoever it happened to be—caught in the middle of a whisper, could only turn red and say, “Nothing.”

“Don't mumble. Is it a pencil? Have you come to school without a pencil again? Stand up when you're spoken to.”

And there would follow a long lecture on Proper Supplies that ended only after the offender had come forward to receive a pencil from the small hoard on her desk, had been made to say, “Thank you, Miss Snell,” and to repeat, until he said it loud enough for everyone to hear, a promise that he wouldn't chew it or break its point.

With erasers it was even worse because they were more often in short supply, owing to a general tendency to chew them off the ends of pencils. Miss Snell kept a big, shapeless old eraser on her desk, and she seemed very proud of it. “This is
my
eraser,” she would say, shaking it at the class. “I've had this eraser for five years. Five years.” (And this was not hard to believe, for the eraser looked as old and gray and worn-down as the hand that brandished it.) “I've never played with it because it's not a toy. I've never chewed it because it's not good to eat. And I've never lost it because I'm not foolish and I'm not careless. I need this eraser for my work and I've taken good care of it. Now, why can't you do the same with
your
erasers? I don't know what's the matter with this class. I've never had a class that was so foolish and so careless and so
childish
about its supplies.”

She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down. When Miss Snell singled someone out for a special upbraiding it was an ordeal by talk. She would come up to within a foot of her victim's face, her eyes would stare unblinking into his, and the wrinkled gray flesh of her mouth would labor to pronounce his guilt, grimly and deliberately, until all the color faded from the day. She seemed to have no favorites; once she even picked on Alice Johnson, who always had plenty of supplies and did nearly everything right. Alice was mumbling while reading aloud, and when she continued to mumble after several warnings Miss Snell went over and took her book away and lectured her for several minutes running. Alice looked stunned at first; then her eyes filled up, her mouth twitched into terrible shapes, and she gave in to the ultimate humiliation of crying in class.

It was not uncommon to cry in Miss Snell's class, even among the boys. And ironically, it always seemed to be during the lull after one of these scenes—when the only sound in the room was somebody's slow, half-stifled sobbing, and the rest of the class stared straight ahead in an agony of embarrassment—that the noise of group laughter would float in from Mrs. Cleary's class across the hall.

Still, they could not hate Miss Snell, for children's villains must be all black, and there was no denying that Miss Snell was sometimes nice in an awkward, groping way of her own. “When we learn a new word it's like making a friend,” she said once. “And we all like to make friends, don't we? Now, for instance, when school began this year you were all strangers to me, but I wanted very much to learn your names and remember your faces, and so I made the effort. It was confusing at first, but before long I'd made friends with all of you. And later on we'll have some good times together—oh, perhaps a little party at Christmastime, or something like that—and then I know I'd be very sorry if I hadn't made that effort, because you can't very well have fun with a stranger, can you?” She gave them a homely, shy smile. “And that's just the way it is with words.”

When she said something like that it was more embarrassing than anything else, but it did leave the children with a certain vague sense of responsibility toward her, and often prompted them into a loyal reticence when children from other classes demanded to know how bad she really was. “Well, not too bad,” they would say uncomfortably, and try to change the subject.

John Gerhardt and Howard White usually walked home from school together, and often as not, though they tried to avoid it, they were joined by two of the children from Mrs. Cleary's class who lived on their street—Freddy Taylor and his twin sister Grace. John and Howard usually got about as far as the end of the playground before the twins came running after them out of the crowd. “Hey, wait up!” Freddy would call. “Wait up!” And in a moment the twins would fall into step beside them, chattering, swinging their identical plaid canvas schoolbags.

“Guess what we're gonna do next week,” Freddy said in his chirping voice one afternoon. “Our whole class, I mean. Guess. Come on, guess.”