A Tragic Honesty (23 page)

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As the weather changed, Yates took long solitary walks and thought what a shame it was that his wife and daughter had never experienced London like this—“a far cry from the drab and grimy town we saw all winter,” he wrote Sheila. Watching other parents with their “meats” was a torment, but one he couldn't help indulging in; he kept thinking of things he might have done with Mussy, such as taking her out on a rowboat in Hyde Park, and now perhaps he never would. He observed, too, the springtime tradition of “interesting-looking” people who congregated on the terrace of his favorite pub on Sunday afternoons, “like a big outdoor cocktail party,” but he felt less and less inclined to join them. “My euphoria over the pleasures of bachelor life [has] pretty well palled,” he wrote with doleful understatement—though reminders of married life were hardly an unadulterated pleasure: When a doctor at the “air clinic” remarked that he'd once examined Sheila, Yates was at first pleased and then dour as the man seemed to remember the occasion all too vividly (“I got the distinct impression that he wanted to compliment me on the firmness of your breasts”).

The brooding monotony of his days was broken somewhat by the arrival of a roommate, a fortyish fellow named Bill Bray, who introduced himself as a stage director and theatrical business manager “between jobs.” Yates noted with relief that the man was “decidedly not queer,” but thought it a bad sign that he “seem[ed] to spend most of his time drifting around trying to borrow money while he waits for the big job.” His roommate's picaresque lifestyle did, however, provide Yates with new material for his letters: He wrote how Bray had applied for National Assistance, but when a state welfare inspector came around to their flat, he found Bray passed out amid a litter of beer bottles; the inspector took a dim view and left, while Bray “spent the rest of the day muttering about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind.” Then Bray had a scheme to get himself hired as an extra in a big American movie about King Arthur being filmed in Epping Forest; he thought that Yates, with his height, would make a perfect stand-in for the actor James Stewart and clear a thousand dollars for nine weeks' work. Alas, it didn't pan out, and finally Bray took what he called a “
very
temporary job” at an ice-cream parlor in Kensington, offering to “work [Yates] in as a counter-man or bus-boy.”

When Yates wasn't waxing witty or wise or pitiful in his letters, he had a tendency to become bitter—the result of many hours of dark rumination. “Here's this month's alimony, with all my love,” he wrote. “And I'll be damned if that isn't a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigrammatic definition of our marriage.” And such was their odd dynamic that Sheila's most loving letters tended to provoke the most biting replies. After she received (for the purpose of typing and feedback) the manuscript of “Lament for a Tenor,” she wrote how “proud” she was: “I sort of forgot about being proud of you … and not just because of your work or because you're good-looking—because you have good taste in life … your coming home now could be nothing but good for me”; Charlie had even offered to loan them money for a boat ticket. For Yates this was surely the answer to his fondest prayer—but the more he thought about it, the more agitated and even enraged he became, or so the crescendo of his response suggests:

Charlie's offer of the $165 is awfully damn nice, and very touching. Maybe I'll take him up on it, but let's give Tenor a chance to sell first, okay? Because I'd rather come home that way if I can. And don't you think, anyway, that we ought to let a little more time elapse?… When I come home it will probably be our absolutely last damn chance for a good life together, and I want to be sure we're both ready.… When you are [ready],… you won't
think
my coming home might be good for you, as you say you do now—you'll know damn well it would be … because you'll be ready to god damn it be my girl, and no crap about it.… I guess I'm the most naive son of a bitch in the world. But there isn't anything so terrible about being naive, is there? It's a far more appropriate trait for people our age, and a more fruitful one too … than the kind of sickly, emotion-starved world-weariness you find in the Chelsea pubs. Or to put it another way, I
like
being “born yesterday,” because it gives me a pretty good chance of being alive tomorrow, when everybody else is dead.

By then Yates was all too familiar with Sheila's capriciousness and/or ambivalence where he was concerned. He knew that her loving, April Wheeler–like exaltations were temporary at best, and liable to be followed by some squelching matter-of-fact Shirleyism. “God damn it I love you, Sheila,” he wrote, followed by the preemptive appraisal “I have now laid myself wide open for you to say coolly, in your next letter, that you see what I mean and it's very touching, but that you really don't feel equal to looking into the future at this point and can't make any promises, so I must not get my hopes up.” And while he tried to end this letter on a somewhat positive note, with a bit of neutral humor about Bill Bray, it only spurred him on to a last caustic snipe: “You'd probably flirt outrageously with him if you were here.”

Sheila's response was mollifying: “Everything you say about us is quite right and perfect, Rich”—and with that she pretty much let it go. This was partly an honest concession (“it's one thing to know where the trouble lies and another to get out of it”) and partly an aversion to argument, even epistolary, with such a tenacious foe as Yates. Besides, she had other things to worry about. As it happened she'd gone ahead and moved in with Dookie, only to find her “still living on the usual financial cliff”: Dookie's rent (shockingly high to begin with, as she felt she needed extra studio space and never mind how to pay for it) was so badly in arrears that eviction was imminent. And while Dookie spoke of “income just over the horizon” (the City Center job), her older sisters Elsa and Margaret, whose dotage she ridiculed, did their best to provide her with eating money.
*
But otherwise everything was fine: “Dookie is not bitter about any of it,” Sheila noted, “[and] right now she is busy fixing herself an outfit to wear to a big glamorous affair tomorrow evening.” Nor had Dookie changed in other fundamental respects, bad or good: “She still does a hell of a lot of talking but I've learned to tune out tactfully … and she is wonderful with Sharon.” But the bottom line was this: “You should think very seriously about what you might feel to be living again in the same city with Dookie's finances.”

Yates's reply reflected his eagerness to make amends for his previous outburst. He assured her that he was equal to coping with Dookie's periodic duns, however much he used to protest about the “strain” they put on him, which he now dismissed as a “pretty childish attitude”: “If I can't help her, I can't—and until I can it certainly shouldn't matter much how close to her I live.” In the meantime he was glad to know that Dookie's spirits were high withal, which of course was “the most important thing.”

With Dookie facing another eviction, Sheila went about trying to solve her own living situation. Briefly she considered buying a house amid the dystopian sprawl of Levittown, near their friends the Cains, who admitted the place was a “wasteland.” But then one could hardly beat the price—a GI loan paid for the house, with carrying charges of sixty-three dollars a month—so Sheila figured it wouldn't hurt to look. She was not impressed: “The Levittown houses are clean and modern and very tempting but the people are simply awful and once the joy of the Bendix had worn off, we'd all go crazy”; besides, she added, the nursery schools in the area were full of “strident Jewish supervisors” and overcrowded to boot. For the time being, then, she decided to find an apartment in the city and get a job, though the idea of buying a place in the suburbs was something she wanted her husband to bear in mind (“if we become a family again”).

Meanwhile Yates awaited news of “Tenor,” and found himself in a “creative slump”: He was still without a good idea for a novel, and was sick of writing short stories and living hand-to-mouth with a “completely aimless, pointless, useless bastard” like Bill Bray for company. Two pieces of bad news had deflated him further: His six best stories were returned in a batch by the English magazine
Argosy,
whose editor remarked on their “Americanness” and “bitter astringency of tone” (“You certainly shoot to kill, don't you?”); and the next day he learned that
Collier's
had declined “Tenor,” since they “[didn't] have room for another story about the emotional problems of a young boy.” Monica McCall remained confident, though by then her mood wasn't contagious.

Yates tried to cheer himself up by observing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth—a “terrific show” whose vast cheering crowds only served to remind him of his loneliness, which in turn suggested how much worse things might have been if Sheila were there: “I know perfectly well,” he wrote her, “that your cop-fear would have kept us home all day in a great family snit, with you redundantly insisting that if I wanted to go there was nothing to stop me, and me bellowing the whole
point
of the thing would be lost unless you came too. I guess there are certain advantages in bachelorhood after all.” One such advantage was decidedly
not
his roommate Bill Bray, who got loudly drunk every night and brought home a “grubby, homely Village type who not only Does It but talks about it in clarion tones, almost entirely four-letter words,” Yates wrote. “The sad thing about old Bill is that he has absolutely nothing to show for his forty-odd years, despite what would seem to be all the advantages of breeding, native intelligence and good looks.” If nothing else, the man acted as an impetus for Yates's getting out of the flat more often. He was even willing to accompany his cousin-in-law Barbara to a quaint choral concert at her club, which involved “about a million print-dress biddies” and other solid citizens singing to her majesty's health, a spectacle that moved Yates strangely: “It was so painful and so heartbreakingly nice that it was enough to make you fall in love with this country forever.” A couple weeks later he took a four-hour bus trip to visit Aunt Mary in Sussex, and then rode all the way back the same afternoon to catch a “wolloping good party” at the flat of Mrs. Pierce (the nursery school proprietor), where Bill Bray turned up and “got blind, fall-down drunk as usual.”

With such a cautionary figure in mind, Yates proposed that he end his expatriation forthwith and get on with supporting his family in the manner to which they wished to become accustomed. Mussy was soon to be put in a seedy, city-subsidized nursery where “there mightn't be anyone for [her] to have extra-curricular activities with,” or so Sheila worried (though the situation was saved by the presence of two other “true blue shabby-genteel” parents and their daughters), and that was but a small aspect of the whole intolerable situation. “We're never going to get rich out of short stories,” Yates wrote. The only “real dough” to be made was in the novel he'd sooner or later write, but until then it was time to face facts: “Don't you think it might be a healthier idea … if I
quit
writing stories, come home and get a really good job of the sort that Monica might be able to help me get, or that I might get myself on the strength of my
Atlantic
story, and mark time
that
way until the novel idea comes along?” Yates was desperately ready to “start living a decent upper-middle-class life—car, clothes, house, etc.” And by a “really good job” he didn't mean Remington Rand: “a moral defeat [that] might put me back in the hospital (Fairfield, if not Halloran).” Nor did he wish for any kind of “physically grueling” newspaper work, but rather some kind of “well-paid” job on the staff of a magazine or publishing firm. And lest this seem a headlong retreat into respectability, Yates reminded Sheila of all the things he'd gained from his two years in Europe: “Monica, the
Atlantic,
the nibble from Morrow, and a great deal of practical writing experience without which I'd probably never have the guts to tackle a novel, let alone to write a good one.”

Sheila professed to be appalled by the idea: “If you had a job that would be the end and in your heart you know it.… What would our crazy marriage be if you came here and made us comfortable with a 9–5 job?… I can find a man easily who can give me that kind of life and be a lot better company than you'd be doing it.” Perhaps, but such shrill insistence that he remain abroad and follow his dream (“Stay in England,” she ordered him; “write and forget about us all”) suggested a rather unflattering subtext—namely, that her husband's company wasn't much desired either as a writer
or
a nine-to-five drone.

Yates agreed to table the matter for the time being, though not before venting his wounded feelings: Her “violent opposition,” he wrote, was rife with the sort of “childishly arbitrary” overstatements that they'd “both have to outgrow” if they were “ever going to be adults, together
or
separately.” He pointed out that the “social and economic limbo” of their lives was just as inhibiting to creative endeavor as a regular job would be, and the latter was less likely to involve “inadequate housing, illness, family strife, neurotic brooding and frenetic moves around the world.” And really, he wondered, wherefore this sudden precious concern for his writing, which she'd once regarded as little more than a “knack” that distracted him from more worldly pursuits? “You
do
seem to have funny ideas as to what my talent is all about … now it's become a sacred flame which must be hovered over and protected at all cost while the world is held perilously at bay.” He assured her that he had no intention of coming home and “demand[ing] restitution of [his] conjugal rights,” though if he
did
decide to return it would be “altogether [his] business.” He repeated his basic position: “I love you and would like to live with you and Mussy again more than anything, but I will not be Pinner again … and now make it clear again, that the only way you'll get me back is by wanting me.” He then enumerated, at greater length than ever, the many ways in which he was making himself “a more desirable package than the bundle of raw nerve-tissue” she'd known in the bygone past: