The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (39 page)

She was a sharp-featured, pretty girl named Carol, married at an age she often said had been much too young, and it didn't take her long to discover that she hated London. It was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.

Besides, she and Warren hadn't been getting along well for a long time. They may both have hoped the adventure of moving to England might help set things right, but now it was hard to remember whether they'd hoped that or not. They didn't quarrel much—quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage—but they hardly ever enjoyed each other's company, and there were whole days when they seemed unable to do anything at all in their small, tidy basement flat without getting in each other's way. “Oh, sorry,” they would mutter after each clumsy little bump or jostle. “Sorry . . .”

The basement flat had been their single stroke of luck: it cost them only a token rent because it belonged to Carol's English aunt, Judith, an elegant widow of seventy who lived alone in the apartment upstairs and who often told them, fondly, how “charming” they were. She was very charming too. The only inconvenience, carefully discussed in advance, was that Judith required the use of their bathtub because there wasn't one in her own place. She would knock shyly at their door in the mornings and come in, all smiles and apologies, wrapped in a regal floor-length robe. Later, emerging from her bath in billows of steam with her handsome old face as pink and fresh as a child's, she would make her way slowly into the front room. Sometimes she'd linger there to talk for a while, sometimes not. Once, pausing with her hand on the knob of the hallway door, she said, “Do you know, when we first made this living arrangement, when I agreed to sublet this floor, I remember thinking, Oh, but what if I don't
like
them? And now it's all so marvelous, because I do like you both so very much.”

They managed to make pleased and affectionate replies; then, after she'd gone, Warren said, “That was nice, wasn't it.”

“Yes; very nice.” Carol was seated on the rug, struggling to sink their daughter's heel into a red rubber boot. “Hold still, now, baby,” she said. “Give Mommy a break, okay?”

The little girl, Cathy, attended a local nursery school called The Peter Pan Club every weekday. The original idea of this had been that it would free Carol to find work in London, to supplement the Fulbright income; then it turned out there was a law forbidding British employers to hire foreigners unless it could be established that the foreigner offered skills unavailable among British applicants, and Carol couldn't hope to establish anything like that. But they'd kept Cathy enrolled in the nursery school anyway because she seemed to like it, and also—though neither parent quite put it into words—because it was good to have her out of the house all day.

And on this particular morning Carol was especially glad of the prospect of the time alone with her husband: she had made up her mind last night that this was the day she would announce her decision to leave him. He must surely have come to agree, by now, that things weren't right. She would take the baby home to New York; once they were settled there she would get a job—secretary or receptionist or something—and make a life of her own. They would keep in touch by mail, of course, and when his Fulbright year was done they could—well, they could both think it over and discuss it then.

All the way to The Peter Pan Club with Cathy chattering and clinging to her hand, and all the way back, walking alone and faster, Carol tried to rehearse her lines just under her breath; but when the time came it proved to be a much less difficult scene than she'd feared. Warren didn't even seem very surprised—not, at least, in ways that might have challenged or undermined her argument.

“Okay,” he kept saying gloomily, without quite looking at her. “Okay . . .” Then after awhile he asked a troubling question. “What'll we tell Judith?”

“Well, yes, I've thought of that too,” she said, “and it
would
be awkward to tell her the truth. Do you think we could just say there's an illness in my family, and that's why I have to go home?”

“Well, but your family is
her
family.”

“Oh, that's silly. My father was her brother, but he's dead. She's never even met my mother, and anyway they'd been divorced for God knows how many years. And there aren't any other lines of—you know—lines of communication, or anything. She'll never find out.”

Warren thought about it. “Okay,” he said at last, “but I don't want to be the one to tell her. You tell her, okay?”

“Sure. Of course I'll tell her, if it's all right with you.”

And that seemed to settle it—what to tell Judith, as well as the larger matter of their separation. But late that night, after Warren had sat staring for a long time into the hot blue-and-pink glow of the clay filaments in their gas fireplace, he said “Hey, Carol?”

“What?” She was flapping and spreading clean sheets on the couch, where she planned to sleep alone.

“What do you suppose he'll be like, this man of yours?”

“What do you mean?
What
man of mine?”

“You know. The guy you're hoping to find in New York. Oh, I know he'll be better than me in about thirteen ways, and he'll certainly be an awful lot richer, but I mean what'll he be like? What'll he
look
like?”

“I'm not listening to any of this.”

“Well, okay, but tell me. What'll he look like?”

“I don't know,” she said impatiently. “A dollar bill, I guess.”

Less than a week before Carol's ship was scheduled to sail, The Peter Pan Club held a party in honor of Cathy's third birthday. It was a fine occasion of ice cream and cake for “tea,” as well as the usual fare of bread and meat paste, bread and jam, and cups of a bright fluid that was the English equivalent of Kool-Aid. Warren and Carol stood together on the sidelines, smiling at their happy daughter as if to promise her that one way or another they would always be her parents.

“So you'll be here alone with us for a while, Mr. Mathews,” said Marjorie Blaine, who ran the nursery school. She was a trim, chain-smoking woman of forty or so, long divorced, and Warren had noticed a few times that she wasn't bad. “You must come round to our pub,” she said. “Do you know Finch's, in the Fulham Road? It's rather a scruffy little pub, actually, but all sorts of nice people go there.”

And he told her he would be sure to drop by.

Then it was the day of the sailing, and Warren accompanied his wife and child as far as the railroad station and the gate to the boat train.

“Isn't Daddy coming?” Cathy asked, looking frightened.

“It's all right, dear,” Carol told her. “We have to leave Daddy here for now, but you'll see him again very soon.” And they walked quickly away into the enclosing crowd.

One of the presents given to Cathy at the party was a cardboard music box with a jolly yellow duck and a birthday-card message on the front, and with a little crank on one side: when you turned the crank it played a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” And when Warren came back to the flat that night he found it, among several other cheap, forgotten toys, on the floor beneath Cathy's stripped bed. He played it once or twice as he sat drinking whiskey over the strewn books and papers on his desk; then, with a child's sense of pointless experiment, he turned the crank the other way and played it backwards, slowly. And once he'd begun doing that he found he couldn't stop, or didn't want to, because the dim, rude little melody it made suggested all the loss and loneliness in the world.

He was tall and very thin and always aware of how ungainly he must look, even when nobody was there to see—even when the whole of his life had come down to sitting alone and fooling with a cardboard toy, three thousand miles from home. It was March of 1953, and he was twenty-seven years old.

“Oh, you poor man,” Judith said when she came down for her bath in the morning. “It's so
sad
to find you all alone here. You must miss them terribly.”

“Yeah, well, it'll only be a few months.”

“Well, but that's awful. Isn't there someone who could sort of look after you? Didn't you and Carol meet any young people who might be company for you?”

“Oh, sure, we met a few people,” he said, “but nobody I'd want to—you know, nobody I'd especially want to have around or anything.”

“Well then, you ought to get out and make
new
friends.”

Soon after the first of April, as was her custom, Judith went to live in her cottage in Sussex, where she would stay until September. She would make occasional visits back to town for a few days, she explained to Warren, but “Don't worry; I'll always be sure to ring you up well in advance before I sort of
descend
on you again.”

And so he was truly alone. He went to the pub called Finch's one night with a vague idea of persuading Marjorie Blaine to come home with him and then of having her in his own and Carol's bed. And he found her alone at the crowded bar, but she looked old and fuddled with drink.

“Oh, I say, Mr. Mathews,” she said. “Do come and join me.”

“Warren,” he said.

“What?”

“People call me Warren.”

“Ah. Yes, well, this is England, you see; we're all dreadfully formal here.” And a little later she said, “I've never quite understood what it is you do, Mr. Mathews.”

“Well, I'm on a Fulbright,” he said. “It's an American scholarship program for students overseas. The government pays your way, and you—”

“Yes, well of course America is quite good about that sort of thing, isn't it. And I should imagine you must have a very clever mind.” She gave him a flickering glance. “People who haven't lived often do.” Then she cringed, to pantomime evasion of a blow. “Sorry,” she said quickly, “sorry I said that.” But she brightened at once. “Sarah!” she called. “Sarah, do come and meet young Mr. Mathews, who wants to be called Warren.”

A tall, pretty girl turned from a group of other drinkers to smile at him, extending her hand, but when Marjorie Blaine said, “He's an American,” the girl's smile froze and her hand fell.

“Oh,” she said. “How nice.” And she turned away again.

It wasn't a good time to be an American in London. Eisenhower had been elected and the Rosenbergs killed; Joseph McCarthy was on the rise and the war in Korea, with its reluctant contingent of British troops, had come to seem as if it might last forever. Still, Warren Mathews suspected that even in the best of times he would feel alien and homesick here. The very English language, as spoken by natives, bore so little relation to his own that there were far too many opportunities for missed points in every exchange. Nothing was clear.

He went on trying, but even on better nights, in happier pubs than Finch's and in the company of more agreeable strangers, he found only a slight lessening of discomfort—and he found no attractive, unattached girls. The girls, whether blandly or maddeningly pretty, were always fastened to the arms of men whose relentlessly witty talk could leave him smiling in bafflement. And he was dismayed to find how many of these people's innuendoes, winked or shouted, dwelt on the humorous aspects of homosexuality. Was all of England obsessed with that topic? Or did it haunt only this quiet, “interesting” part of London where Chelsea met South Kensington along the Fulham Road?

Then one night he took a late bus for Piccadilly Circus. “What do you want to go
there
for?” Carol would have said, and almost half the ride was over before he realized that he didn't have to answer questions like that anymore.

In 1945, as a boy on his first furlough from the Army after the war, he had been astonished at the nightly promenade of prostitutes then called Piccadilly Commandos, and there had been an unforgettable quickening of his blood as he watched them walk and turn, walk and turn again: girls for sale. They seemed to have become a laughingstock among more sophisticated soldiers, some of whom liked to slump against buildings and flip big English pennies onto the sidewalk at their feet as they passed, but Warren had longed for the courage to defy that mockery. He'd wanted to choose a girl and buy her and have her, however she might turn out to be, and he'd despised himself for letting the whole two weeks of his leave run out without doing so.

He knew that a modified version of that spectacle had still been going on as recently as last fall, because he and Carol had seen it on their way to some West End theater. “Oh, I don't believe this,” Carol said. “Are they really all whores? This is the saddest thing I've ever seen.”

There had lately been newspaper items about the pressing need to “clean up Piccadilly” before the impending Coronation, but the police must have been lax in their efforts so far, because the girls were very much there.

Most of them were young, with heavily made-up faces; they wore bright clothes in the colors of candy and Easter eggs, and they either walked and turned or stood waiting in the shadows. It took him three straight whiskeys to work up the nerve, and even then he wasn't sure of himself. He knew he looked shabby—he was wearing a gray suit coat with old Army pants, and his shoes were almost ready to be thrown away—but no clothes in the world would have kept him from feeling naked as he made a quick choice from among four girls standing along Shaftesbury Avenue and went up to her and said, “Are you free?”