A Tragic Honesty (14 page)

In “The Canal” Lew Miller takes this in silence, and the moment is meant to be emblematic of all the humiliation he felt—and still feels five years later—as a fuckup soldier. Yates's main revision of the scene in
A Special Providence
is revealing: Prentice recognizes the unfairness of the reprimand and finally stands up for himself (“Don't be telling me I can't keep up”), which might reflect Yates's change of heart about his own soldierly conduct—at least somewhat assisted by the belated good report of Frank Knorr—in the decade-plus that passed between writing “The Canal” and transplanting it into his second novel. In fact the fundamental problem with early drafts of
A Special Providence
was the lack of growth, the
non
–coming of age, of its autobiographical protagonist (a
prentice
no less); but Knorr's insistence that Yates was, after all, a good soldier, is momentously evoked in
Uncertain Times
(where Knorr appears as “Frank Marr”) as “something like what patients in psychotherapy call a breakthrough … [that] would strengthen the whole latter part of the book, strengthen the tone of the book itself, and now [Grove] felt he could attack the writing of it with new confidence.” Thus the meekly self-loathing Lew Miller became the more resilient Robert Prentice, by far a more hopeful (and accurate) portrait of the artist as a young GI. And Yates too, though he generally remained “hilarious” on the subject, later came to speak of his war experience with a certain pride.

*   *   *

By the end of April the 75th Division was mostly distributed among a number of soggy foxholes near Braumbauer and Plettenberg, Germany, in what was said to be a blocking position. After a few weeks of this, Yates's company was removed to one of the towns and given drier accommodations, and amid such relative luxury the war in Europe abruptly came to an end. Yates—who over the past few months had learned to drink (“out of badly made shoes and boots,” he liked to say)—celebrated the surrender as many did, by staying drunk all night and sleeping most of the day, and perhaps “fraternizing” to some degree with the many unattached German women. Soon his unit was moved to the pleasant town of Kierspe-Bahnhof, where their nominal duty was to guard a thousand newly liberated Russians. Meanwhile the festivities continued, and despite the odd pang (over “Quint” perhaps, or the Dortmund-Ems Canal), Yates seems to have enjoyed himself immensely.

Dookie, however, was having a hard time of it back in New York. While her son's induction had enabled her to quit the mannequin factory—as a “Class A Dependent” she received a small sum from the government—she was lonely, bored, and poor, and the letters she'd gotten from overseas left her sick with worry. She tried to distract herself with membership in various art organizations: She was recording secretary of something called Artists for Victory, and also active in Pen and Brush, the National Association of Women Artists, and others. But she was essentially alone in the world, and Richard's absence made that clearer than ever. Her daughter contrived to see less and less of her, and apart from tiresome old Elsa she had no other family to speak of.

She was halfheartedly working on a statuette of the flag raising at Iwo Jima (an Artists for Victory job) when news of the German surrender came over the radio; such was her ecstasy that she tore up the papier-mâché marines and hurled them out the window, as if with a flash of insight into their true artistic worth. With her one good friend, Elisabeth Cushman, she went to an Episcopal church and prayed for her son's safe return and constant company thereafter, and lit a candle to that effect, and then the two women retired with a bottle of rye. When the equally lonely Cushman—“after my 85th drink,” she noted—suggested they live together again, Dookie replied with tipsy bitterness, “I wouldn't be a bit surprised … it will serve us right!” Happily for both it wouldn't be necessary: Dookie's prayers would soon be answered, and as for Cushman, she moved to California a few months later and stayed there.

Meanwhile Yates and his Avon friends were comparing notes and planning reunions. Bick Wright hadn't heard from Yates in so long that he was “seriously afraid something had happened to [him].” That noted, Wright called his friend “assinine” [
sic
] for writing the following bit of garbled bravado: “Combat doesn't seem so bad from what I've seen about it.” “I've seen enough of this horror and death to last me a hundred lifetimes,” Wright rejoined, and he meant it too. In fact his experience bore a bleak resemblance to Yates's: Wright had also been widely reviled as a feckless preppy wise-ass, and one sergeant had always made a point of assigning him first scout in hope that the Germans would shoot him.
*
Having survived all that, Wright gloomily predicted that now he'd be sent to the Pacific, but hoped Yates and he could someday “take a toot around the country, hitch-hiking and what-have-you.” Davis Pratt's vision of postwar life was somewhat less picaresque: Together in New York, he wrote Yates, they'd “enjoy good food, women and our interests together gathering at odd hours over some oysters at out of the way places.” As for that other, graver Pratt (Hugh), he was more concerned with the philosophical side of peace. When Yates suggested that his own war experiences were “meaningless,” at least until properly digested, Pratt begged to differ—-or not, depending on how one interprets such dicta as, “Your knowledge of what has happened mayhap be used to illustrate an attitude toward life whose sources will lie somewhere else.”

Whatever Yates's world-weary pronouncements, the rest of his time overseas was pleasant enough, if a bit uneventful. Like Colby in “A Compassionate Leave,” his service in Germany with the Army of Occupation “had begun to give every promise of turning into the best time of [his life],” when suddenly that summer he was transferred to Camp Pittsburgh near Reims, one of several redeployment camps named after American cities and cigarette brands, whose postwar purpose was to process soldiers back to the States. Yates's duties there were mostly clerical—that is, he processed others as opposed to being processed himself, since he still had plenty of time to serve according to the point system. Camp Pittsburgh offered a lot less in the way of liquor and wenching, but on the whole there was something to be said for “the order and the idleness of life in these tents in the grass. There was nothing to prove here.”

One of the things a young soldier had to prove is suggested by the rotary condom dispenser of which the character Colby avails himself (in vain) prior to a three-day pass in Paris: “He was very likely the only soldier in Europe ever to have spent three days in Paris without getting laid.” Whether Yates had any better luck, either then or before with all those lonely nihilistic German women, merits a moment of consideration. Yates was almost certainly a virgin when he entered the army; an all but total lack of female company was a notorious liability of life at Avon, where the best one could do was an occasional tea or dance at Ethel Walker's or Miss Porter's (always well-chaperoned, and besides such girls tended to take a dim view of Avon “fairies”). As for fictional evidence, the luckless Colby is but one of several callow young soldiers who bear a resemblance to Yates: Prentice loses his virginity almost in spite of himself, toward the end of basic training, while Warren Mathews of “Liars in Love” remembers how (“as a boy on his first furlough from the Army after the war”) he longed to buy time with one of the “Piccadilly Commandos” in London, but ended up “despis[ing] himself for letting the whole two weeks of his leave run out without doing so.” As we shall see, Yates seems to have gotten over the worst of his squeamishness while in the army, with the help of alcohol perhaps, but to some extent sex would always be a problematic business.

Yates got a pleasant reprieve from the dullness of camp life in December, when as part of an army employment program he was sent to England to work for three weeks as an apprentice reporter on the
Halifax Courier and Guardian
. Life in Halifax was very peaceful, and Yates made a good impression on all. His editor, a kindly fiftyish fellow named Harwood, referred to Yates as “one of the brethren of the Press” and later thanked him for giving “color to our hard-working life.” But Harwood was sheepish about how little there was for Yates to do in Halifax, where even at the liveliest of times one had to scrape for news (hence the “hard-working” part). At the time meat and money were scarce, and not a single cigarette was for sale, the latter fact perhaps the most newsworthy item where Yates was concerned. But he made out all right. He and three other “juniors” in the office loafed and joked all day, and on weekends went to the Empress Dance Hall—where Yates met what may have been his first actual girlfriend, a stenographer named Joan. For two years they corresponded, and such was their lingering intimacy that Joan never bothered to write her last name or, for that matter, say anything remotely of interest. “Connie says you went out with me for a plaything whilst you were in Halifax,” she chides him with an almost audible northern twang, though such rakishness seems well beyond Yates at the time. Indeed, he gave her a bracelet and ring, the first of which she went on wearing but
not
(as she punctiliously noted) the second, suggesting a novice attempt at betrothal on Yates's part. This tendency to become deeply attached to unlikely people would remain one of his most poignant and self-destructive qualities.

Yates spent the rest of his leave and a bit more in London, and was technically AWOL when he made friends with Tony Vevers at the Red Cross Club. Vevers was an Englishman who'd joined the U.S. Army after his family had emigrated during the Blitz. As a fellow prep-school boy and aspiring painter, he and the Anglophilic Yates found much to discuss while happily staggering from one pub to the next. Still in the flush of his Halifax conquest, Yates managed to impress Vevers with his relative suavity toward the opposite sex: Already he was seeing a young woman from the American Embassy, and was able to wangle a date for Vevers as well. The four attended a Brahms recital, after which Yates (possibly fortified from a flask) dropped to one knee like Al Jolson and began to sing “Mammy.” “He was full of a sort of guileless joie de vivre then,” Vevers recalled many decades later, with a rueful emphasis on
then,
since in the meantime he'd found himself in one of Yates's novels. For a while, though, the friendship would give him little to regret.

Yates was demobilized on January 15, 1946, and the next five months seem to have been filled with little more than idle waiting at one of the tent cities in France, with an occasional bit of Parisian monkey business to dispel the boredom. “Yates, please tell me how one guy manages to get into as many scrapes as you, and then manages to worm his way out of it undamaged,” a friend wrote in March, but no details of such scrapes follow. “You don't sound very keen on France,” wrote Halifax Joan, perhaps giving a better sense of Yates's mood at the time. No doubt he was homesick by then, or at least ready for a change. Most of his Avon friends were already back in the States and getting on with their lives, albeit with a kind of dreary sameness that might have given Yates pause. Hugh Pratt and David “Shorty” Bigelow had already settled on their future wives and careers (medicine, business), while Pratt—after years of spieling about Schopenhauer et al.—had even found God. Yates was perhaps a little bemused by Pratt's revelation, to say nothing of the news that Bick Wright had resolved his own perplexities by deciding to become a clergyman.

“Your news is great news,” wrote the good Mr. Harwood of Halifax on June 14, five days before Yates was discharged at Fort Dix with a Good Conduct Medal and the rank of private first class. “Now you will be able to stretch that long length of yours, and, craning up to the topmost sky-scraper, exclaim, ‘Now wot?'”
Now wot
indeed.

*   *   *

Yates's permanent address on his honorable discharge is “High Hedges, St. James L.I., New York,” and it was there that he was welcomed back from the war by Dookie, Ruth, and the Rodgers clan. High Hedges was the eight-acre estate bought by Fritz Rodgers's parents in 1916 for their retirement, though at the time it had no such imposing name. In fact the former North Shore golf course was rather weedy and nondescript; Fritz himself had designed the sixteen-room, white clapboard main house as well as a three-bedroom cottage originally built for his mother's widowhood (where Ruth and Fred had lived since the birth of their second child). For many years after he'd inherited the place, Fritz had rented it out while he and his family lived in England, and the name “High Hedges” is said to have been the whim of a tenant struck by the overgrowth of Oriental vines planted years before by Fritz's green-thumbed mother. But
The Easter Parade
suggests another possibility: “Does it have a name?” Pookie asks Geoffrey Wilson. “You know, the way estates have names.” “Overgrown Hedges,” Wilson proposes as a joke, which Pookie earnestly refines into “Great Hedges”: “That's what I'm going to call it, anyway.… ‘Great Hedges,' St. Charles, Long Island, New York.”

Be that as it may, Yates's homecoming at High Hedges seems to have been a rather dismal affair—though one can imagine (assisted by a similar scene in
A Special Providence
) Dookie's elation on being reunited with her cherished son and soul mate: “Her frizzled gray head scarcely came up to his breast-pocket flap and she was frail as a sparrow, but the force of her love was so great that he had to brace himself in a kind of boxer's stance to absorb it.” The others were more restrained, but went out of their way to be nice, and indeed Richard seemed badly in need of their niceness. “He moped around the whole time,” Ruth's sister-in-law Louise remembered. “He was very depressed—didn't know what to do with his life.” That was undoubtedly true, though Yates's uncertain future wasn't the only thing likely to depress him. Dookie, now fifty-four and hunched with osteoporosis, was again facing destitution now that her son was out of the army. For the time being she was dependent on the Rodgerses, a fact that might have led Yates to brood over the general ethos of High Hedges. His brother-in-law was, if anything, more loutish than ever, and the two men quietly despised each other; the walls of the cottage where Ruth and Fred lived were covered with illustrations of the navy Hellcats and Wildcats built by Fred's employer. Most nights the adults would gather at the main house, which stank of mildew, to get drunk together—even Fritz's valetudinarian wife, who liked her sherry well enough to leave bed during the cocktail hour until she delicately passed out and was carried upstairs. Little wonder Yates wanted to escape and figure things out, though it meant abandoning his poor mother again.