A Tragic Honesty (18 page)

One thing that Yates's early idols had in common was their precocity: By the age of twenty-three Fitzgerald was the best-selling author of
This Side of Paradise,
the Voice of a Generation no less; at the same age Hemingway was the protégé of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and was on the verge of publishing perhaps the most influential volume of short stories by a twentieth-century American; and whether Yates knew it or not at the time, the Salinger who seemed to emerge fully fledged in the pages of
The New Yorker
at the age of twenty-nine had in fact been publishing forgettable but polished fiction for almost eight years. At twenty-three Yates himself remained unpublished, unmentored, and largely unencouraged as a fiction writer. Also worth noting: The young Fitzgerald and Hemingway were married to Zelda and Hadley respectively—one a zany, glamorous muse who was gifted in her own right, the other a tenderhearted servant of her husband's talent.

Yates had Sheila, who wished him well but “wasn't really interested.” She was happy to type his stories for him, but when it came to giving an opinion—as he'd insist—she just didn't know quite what to say. Actually, her letters prove that she was a rather shrewd intuitive reader, but “not literary” as she'd protest over and over, and besides she couldn't win with the guy: If she gave him a glib compliment (“marvelous”), he'd press her to be more specific, and her efforts to oblige him almost always went awry—either she liked the wrong things or the right things for the wrong reasons, or maybe she even
disliked
something for right or wrong reasons, whereupon he'd usually explode. It was futile, and after a while she became reluctant to say anything but “don't bother me,” which only made matters worse. Unsupported, plagued with doubt, cut adrift and blocked most of the time, Yates would lapse into what Sheila called “the broods”—an almost catatonic state of crystallized depression, during which he'd sometimes sit bunched in a chair for hours without so much as a flinch, staring glassily at nothing. It was disturbing at first, and then it became tiresome: self-indulgence, she decided. He should snap out of it.

Sheila was almost as miserable, and no wonder. Secretarial work was a bore, and when she came home there were any number of menial things to do before she even got dinner started—mainly the labor involved in keeping their dingy apartment habitable while her husband, a consummate “bubblehead,” left cigarette ashes all over the floor, the furniture, everywhere, and could hardly do any cleaning himself without breaking something. And if she showed her exasperation or even tried to tease him about it, he'd lose his temper and the fight would be on, until finally Sheila would cover her ears and refuse to say or listen to another word. The worst part was the utter hopelessness of it all: When would the drudgery, the screaming, end? When he became a famous writer?

Things had looked up for a while that previous winter, when Sheila decided to use the money she got for her twenty-first birthday to take acting classes at the New School. As Yates wrote in “Regards”: “She would come home breathless with what she was learning, eager to talk without any secretarial rhetoric at all; those were the best of our times together.” And when her acting class gave a public performance at the end of the term, Sheila's monologue from
Dream Girl
was such a hit that the New School offered her a full scholarship. Yates was thrilled, but then, after a few days' thought, she decided to refuse it: The class had been “fun,” she said, a nice break from her work at Botany Mills (where she was secretary to the market research director, her best job yet), but it was pointless to continue; to pursue acting seriously she'd have to study full-time, and of course that was impossible under the circumstances. “Well, Jesus,” says the husband in “Regards.” “You could quit that dumb little job tomorrow.
I
can take care of—” “Oh, you can take care of
what?
” snaps the wife.

I loved the girl who'd wanted to tell me all about “the theater,” the girl who'd stood calm and shy in the thunderclap of applause that followed her scene from
Dream Girl
. I didn't much like the dependable typist at Botany Mills, or the grudging potato peeler, or the slow, tired woman who frowned over the ironing board to prove how poor we were. And I didn't want to be married to anyone, ever, who said things like “Oh, you can take care of
what?
”

It was almost certainly after the brawl that followed, or sometime very early that summer, that the couple separated and Yates attempted suicide. One can only speculate about what was going through his head when he decided to cut his wrists: His wife was back with the Bialek sisters and wanted a divorce; the “big, ambitious, tragic novel” he'd begun with such hope that spring was now permanently stalled, and of course nobody wanted his short stories; his health was poor, his job was mindless, and there was little promise of anything better, ever. Plus he was very, very tired all the time, and probably at that moment very drunk as well. So he did it, and woke up the next day having to cope with the mess. Perhaps this episode was what he had in mind twelve years later, when Yates wrote apropos of the critic Alfred Kazin's remark that
Revolutionary Road
“locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage”: “Mr. Yates may understand things very well when it comes to writing fiction, and it's terribly nice for him that he can locate an American tragedy, but the awful part is that in real life he has come painfully close to participating in one … and being one himself, squarely on the field of marriage.” Arguably he'd have better reason at various times in later life to take such drastic action—but apparently he never did, except in the slow and steady fashion of four packs a day. In fact, he rarely missed an apt moment to denounce suicide as “self-indulgent,” especially when one had obligations to others. That summer Yates discovered he was about to have such obligations, whether he and his wife wanted them or not.

For better or worse, then, she came back to him and even quit her “dumb little job” at Botany Mills; the baby was due in March, and meanwhile Sheila sometimes wondered if she'd imagined what Yates had told her about that episode in her absence. But another glance at his wrists confirmed it all over again.
*

*   *   *

Sharon Elizabeth Yates (aka “Mousemeat,” “Mussy,” or simply “the Meat”) was born on March 22, 1950, and was mostly a cause for celebration. Yates was a doting, playful father, though he was awkward changing diapers and handling the baby in general and tended to stick her with pins. Also his writing (such as it was) had to be interrupted while they adjusted themselves to the baby's schedule, and the prospect of Europe seemed ever dimmer—which was sad, as the thought of quitting their old grind and pursuing the ghosts of Scott and Ernest amid the cafés of Montparnasse had become more appealing than ever. On the other hand, the most practical reason for going—to put an ocean between themselves and Dookie—had become less urgent, since the latter's tireless volunteerism had finally paid off: A few months before, Ruth Yates had begun a two-year term as president of the National Association of Women Artists, at a salary equal to what her son was making at Remington Rand. A rather startling turn of events while it lasted.

Soon a new and far graver concern rushed to fill the void. For several weeks Yates's health had been worse than usual: He coughed constantly and felt exhausted and out of breath; mornings he woke up dripping with sweat. His weight had dropped to 140 pounds. Sheila would stand and wait at the top of subway steps while her twenty-four-year-old husband wheezed behind her like an old man. Finally, a month or so after the baby was born, Yates got his chest X-rayed and learned he had advanced tuberculosis. That evening an official from Bellevue came to the apartment and took Yates away to the crowded TB ward, where he stayed for three weeks until space was found at Halloran, the veterans' hospital on Staten Island. “[A]ll I knew then,” he wrote, “was how good it felt to be encouraged—even to be ordered, by a grim ex-Army nurse wearing a sterile mask—to lie down and stay there.”

In some ways it would prove one of the best things that had ever happened to him. Halloran wasn't a bad place—with its remote manicured lawns, its reverie of hushed waiting within the separate, single-story TB building. The hundred or so shuffling or wheelchair-bound patients tended to be friendly with one another in a quiet, diffident way that suited Yates: He could talk and listen as much or as little as he liked, and for the most part he felt a genuine sense of solidarity with his fellow consumptives. As he noted in an early draft of “Regards”: “I think death was on all of our minds in those drowsing, melancholy wards, where the bedside radios droned all day in the very sound of boredom; most of us were in no real danger of dying, but our existence seemed clearly to be something less than life.” Every so often Yates would see a doctor for his pneumothorax treatment—a needle between the ribs to inject air into the lung and collapse it—but otherwise there was little to do but lie there.

He had plentiful means to distract himself from morbid thoughts: A group of his Remington Rand friends had chipped in and bought him a large box of Modern Library books; as his future publisher Seymour Lawrence put it, Halloran became Yates's “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” What had hitherto inhibited him most as a writer was a dire sense of his own ignorance; since high school his life had been a hamster wheel of war and work and worry, with Dookie's demands scotching any hope of repose in between. And while Yates would forever remain a slow, insecure writer with a wildly inflated idea of what he'd missed by way of college, his eight months in the TB ward began a lifelong process of autodidactic recompense. Some of the writers he got around to reading there (“without whose work I might never have put together a halfway decent book of my own”) included Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Sinclair Lewis, and Dylan Thomas; particularly he read (and reread) Chekhov, Conrad, Joyce, Jane Austen, Ring Lardner, and Keats. And Flaubert too, though he wouldn't accord
Madame Bovary
the sort of scrutiny it deserved (for his own purposes) until several years later.

“I was very independent at the time,” said Sheila, a bit of elliptical dialogue that would have made the authors of
Gatsby
and
Revolutionary Road
proud. With her husband indefinitely hospitalized on Staten Island, Sheila was for all purposes single again. She farmed the baby out to a kindly old couple in New Rochelle and found a job at the Dobeckmun Company on West Fifty-seventh, where she was secretary to a publicity director whose mission it was to promote the metallic yarn Lurex. Meanwhile a kindly coworker from Remington Rand, who was fond of Yates and fancied herself a photographer, offered to shoot a portrait of Sheila and the baby that would serve to keep Yates company during the lonely intervals between visits. “It was a strained time,” Sheila concedes; what with visiting the baby and doing her job and whatnot, she wasn't able to make it out to Halloran (“quite a schlep”) more than every week or so. And when she got there Yates was often reticent or surly or both, and always “smoking like a chimney,” tuberculosis withal, which made her wonder even more what conceivable future there was in staying married to such a man.

Her old Bronxville friend Ann Barker came to live with her in the Twelfth Street apartment, and proved a far more congenial roommate than either of the Bialek sisters or for that matter Yates himself. The two young women were a few doors down from eligible bachelors, and whether by chance or design the women's cat had a way of wandering into the men's apartment. At first the men simply tossed it out, until a neighbor advised them of its provenance (“that cat belongs to two pretty ladies”); the next time they returned it in person. A propitious visit: Within three months Barker was engaged to one of the men, John Kowalsky, while Sheila flirted with his roommate and several of his friends—an assortment of NYU and Columbia graduates, not a would-be writer in the bunch. When Sheila was overheard remarking that she was a “grass widow,” Barker reminded her that she wasn't divorced
yet
; “Oh, that doesn't matter!” Sheila hissed, as if it were just a bothersome formality.

When her husband was finally released as an outpatient in February 1951, Sheila decided to stay married on a “wait-and-see basis”: As a bitter Yates later described the situation, she'd decided to be “brave,” taking him back “as a partner in a sensible arrangement of joint parenthood.” A bit on the unromantic side, perhaps, though one can hardly blame Sheila: At twenty-three she had little to look forward to but a life of caring for an infirm “writer” who seemed disinclined to care for himself. There was, however, a peculiar sweetness to Yates—a tolerant devotion (or dependency) that Sheila came to appreciate better over time: “You're the only person who's ever loved me,” she wrote him later, “no matter how much I played outside the rules.” Another incentive for sticking around was the $207 a month Yates had been awarded for his “service-connected disability,” which was guaranteed for five years as long as his lungs were checked on a weekly basis at VA-approved clinics “anywhere in the world.” And since ten months had passed since his illness was originally diagnosed, he was entitled to a retroactive lump sum of more than two thousand dollars.

To Sheila the next move was clear: Paris. “Because I mean if we don't do it now” (says the wife in “Regards”), “while we're young enough and brave enough, when are we ever going to do it at all?” As Sheila recalled, Yates was suddenly intimidated by the idea: Though he'd “talked constantly” about Europe before his illness, “[tuberculosis] had sapped his will” and now he seemed bent on returning to Remington Rand. But Sheila had enough willpower for both of them; the allure of helping her boss promote Lurex had palled—she was ready for a change, the more drastic the better. Like April Wheeler tuning out her weak-willed, equivocating husband, she pressed ahead with the arrangements.