A Tragic Honesty (3 page)

And now the day's close at hand.

But, dear, it's far enough away,

Yet soon we'll be one happy band.

I'll close wishing you a good day.

For the honeymoon they went to Dayton.

*   *   *

Over the next eighteen years Amos and Fannie had seven children, at least four of whom, it's safe to say, were made more or less in their parents' image. The oldest daughter Ida lived to the virtuous age of ninety-one, and spent her dotage painting flowers in watercolor and collecting
Saturday Evening Post
covers in bound fifty-two-page volumes, one for each year.
*
Margaret, Mina, and Love Maurer married young and moved away from Greenville; later they joined Ida and their parents in ostracizing their brother Rufus, who'd gone to Washington, D. C., and married a Jew. Elsa Maurer was different, somewhat; at least as respectable as her sisters, and deeply spiritual, she inherited these qualities without quite the dose of provincial bigotry that went with them. Rather late in life she married a math professor who, within a few years, drowned off the coast of Galveston; before and after this event, Elsa devoted her life to contemplating the Infinite and helping her sister Ruth, the youngest and most wayward of the lot. As with Rufus, the rest of the family would have little to do with Ruth and vice versa—which left Elsa, who always had both time and a bit of money to spare.

Ruth Walden Maurer was born December 31, 1891, though her entry in
Who's Who of American Women
gives her birthday as exactly five years later, as do her entries in all the various artists' directories and even her Social Security application. Indeed, it's likely that her own children—who called her “Dookie” to distinguish her from her daughter and namesake—were unsure of their mother's age until a sad day in 1961 when circumstances forced them to find a birth certificate (“
you
know how Pookie's always been about her age,” says Sarah Grimes in
The Easter Parade
). But such fudging was a minor detail in a vast reinvention that began almost at birth—a quest for self-realization by a woman who was, as her son wrote of her model in
A Special Providence,
“remarkable and gifted and brave”:

How else could anyone explain the story of her life? At the turn of the century, when all the sleeping little towns of Indiana had lain locked in provincial ignorance, and when in that environment a simple dry-goods merchant named Amos Grumbauer had raised six ordinary daughters, wasn't it remarkable that his seventh had somehow developed a passion for art, and for elegance, and for the great and distant world of New York?

Give or take a few syllables, the passage sticks to the facts, as does most of Yates's fiction about his family. Just like Alice Prentice in
A Special Providence,
Dookie left her hometown before she finished high school, and was in fact one of the first female students at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where she studied China Painting and Drawing from Life. At the time she had only a vague idea of becoming an artist, and wouldn't settle on a particular métier until much later. Her immediate goal was to gain the skills to get out of Ohio and find a job in New York, and never to look back except in scorn and derision. For the rest of her life Dookie scoffed at everything that struck her as bland and bourgeois, though in one respect (at least) she never left Greenville: No matter how bohemian she later affected to be, or how destitute she often became, Dookie was always proud to call herself a “good Republican.” “[S]he had probably grown up hearing the phrase ‘good Republican' as an index of respectability and clean clothes,” Yates speculated in a later story. “And maybe she had come to relax her standards of respectability … but ‘good Republican' was worth clinging to.”

Dookie would later say she married beneath her, and no doubt she meant a number of things by that; at least in one respect, though, she married about as far above herself as she could get. For Richard Yates's lineage on his father's side is very distinguished indeed—what's more, Yates was aware of this. “I know,” he replied, when his nephew Peter (an amateur genealogist) told him they were direct descendants of one of the country's first great men, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth. The most powerful colonial governor, a man of legendary virtue, Bradford is perhaps best known as the self-taught author of
History of Plimouth Plantation
—a classic among literary annals, notable for its directness of style, the author's determination to tell the truth in the plainest possible language. Yates, if he gave the matter much thought (and there are reasons to suspect he did), may well have been proud of such an ancestor.

The Bradford connection came through Yates's paternal grandmother, Clarissa Antoinette Cleveland, a member of the same illustrious, many-branched family that produced Grover, the country's twenty-second and twenty-fourth president, and Moses, the founder of Cleveland, Ohio. In 1864 Clarissa married a seminarian, Horatio Yates, who later became one of the most active and respected Methodist clergymen in central New York. The followers of John Wesley stress the social responsibility of Christians, and Horatio Yates clearly took that aspect of his calling to heart. After moving his growing family from one tiny pastorate to another throughout Cayuga County, Yates became chaplain of Auburn State Prison in 1887, a year after the birth of his eighth and last child, Vincent Matthew, the father of Richard Yates. Vincent's formative years, then, were spent (happily or not) in the parsonage of a prison that was infamous for its brutality. The so-called Auburn system was informed by the spirit of Calvinism, a belief in the utter depravity of humankind, and its foremost mandate was to break the prisoners' spirits through beatings and floggings, forced labor, solitary confinement, shaved heads, striped suits, and lockstep. Such a life was conducive to thinking about one's heavenly reward, and in 1826 the Auburn warden, Gershom Powers, conceived the idea of a resident chaplain—a man “activated by motives of public policy and Christian benevolence,” he wrote. “Residing with convicts, and visiting their solitary and cheerless abodes, they will consider him their minister, their guide, their counselor, and their friend.”

The evidence suggests that Horatio Yates was all these things. One of his grandson's most cherished possessions was a violin lovingly carved by a prisoner for Chaplain Yates, with a woman's head at the end of the fingerboard and a mother-of-pearl inlaid case.
*
Horatio Yates's devotion to his wayward flock became a matter of public record in August 1890, when the country's first capital punishment by electrocution took place at Auburn State Prison. William Kemmler had killed his common-law wife Tillie Ziegler with a hatchet, and was held in a single cell for almost a year waiting for death. Horatio Yates visited the man several times a week, and read to him from a picture Bible (Kemmler was mentally deficient). The prisoner's last hours were spent in prayer with the kindly chaplain, who proved such a comfort that Kemmler insisted he be one of the twenty-six witnesses to the execution. “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck,” said Kemmler as he was strapped to the chair. “I believe I am going to a good place and I am ready to go.” Horatio Yates, having convinced the poor man of God's infinite mercy, sat and watched with the others as shock after shock failed to kill him—as he gasped and gurgled, his teeth grinding audibly, the capillaries bursting on his cheeks, the room filling with the stench of roasting flesh and feces, until several witnesses fainted and the district attorney ran retching for the door. Chaplain Yates's reaction went unrecorded, though the episode might have put things in a curious perspective for a while. In any case he continued to serve as chaplain for seven more years, and his passing in 1912 was noted at respectful length by all the Auburn newspapers.

His son Vincent was destined for a life of comparative obscurity. A small man of average good looks and few apparent pretensions, he made little impression on his son or the world at large except in a single respect: He had a lovely tenor voice, though not quite enough talent or monomania to make a career out of it. “I think he sang professionally a few times,” Yates surmised in
A Good School
. “I imagine he joined the General Electric Company in Schenectady as a delaying action, in order to have a few dollars coming in while he continued to seek concert engagements, but before very long the company swallowed him up.” This is Yates being characteristically scrupulous; most likely he knew very little about his father's life, and even in a piece of fiction (albeit one published as an “autobiographical foreword” in the
New York Times Book Review
) he would not pretend otherwise. It's quite possible that Vincent Yates tried to sing professionally, failed, and then accepted the truth of his relative mediocrity and spent the rest of his life, sadder but wiser, as a small-time corporate drone—that he was, in short, a kind of Yatesian hero: the modest man who refuses to live a lie. That, anyhow, is the way Yates portrays him in the fiction, though it appears to have been a somewhat revisionist view.

Outside his work Yates rarely discussed his father. To his friends, family, and even his psychiatrist he dismissed Vincent as a cipher, someone he hardly knew. But imaginatively he tried hard to fathom this rather dull but decent man who spent most of his adult life as an assistant regional sales manager for General Electric (Mazda Lamp Division); who was patient and reliable in meeting the demands of a flamboyant, profligate ex-wife; and who had a fine singing voice but at some point gave it up for good. Yates's fullest fictional treatment of his father is “Lament for a Tenor,” his second published story, written eleven years after Vincent's death.
*
It seems to reflect a rather guilty impulse to pay belated homage to the man. The protagonist is a sixteen-year-old boy who tries to find something to mourn in a dead father he'd always neglected; among other things he recalls one of his infrequent visits to his father's office, where a framed photograph of a salesmen's outing at Tupper Lake had caught his eye: “[H]e came upon his father … between two heavy bald men whose glasses flashed in the sun.… He looked as if he'd tried all weekend to get into the spirit of the thing … [but] was lonely and tired now, anxious to go home and even beginning to feel sorry for himself, an operatic tenor lost among the salesmen.” A series of further flashbacks culminates in an epiphanic moment when, as a very small child, the protagonist actually heard his father sing: “When his voice came, it was amazingly big and rich, filling the room: ‘
La donna è mobile/Qual piuma al ven-n-to
…'” And though his father botches the final high note with a cough (“my wind's shot”), the son is “too full of pride and love to speak.”

Vincent is an essentially idealized figure in the fiction (
too
idealized in the case of “Tenor,” which might explain why the story was never collected): His typical function, at least in the later work, is to serve as foil to the selfish, pretentious characters based on Yates's mother, and both parents suggest a larger dialectic between realistic and romantic viewpoints—that is, between people like Vincent who refuse to deceive themselves, who don't insist on their own importance, and people like Dookie who do. To some degree Vincent may have been such a paragon (certainly he was good about paying alimony), but in everyday life, at least, his son wasn't particularly sentimental about him, and was even somewhat equivocal about who neglected whom. “I didn't give a shit about
why
he wasn't home,” said Yates. “I just wanted him there.”

*   *   *

Dookie and Vincent were married on July 3, 1920. She was pushing thirty, and he was on the brink of premature middle age, and one assumes that both were lonely. Later Dookie would deplore having married such a tedious man, and perhaps God alone can measure the magnitude of Vincent's regret, but at the time it might have made a kind of sense. Both had fled from rather claustrophobic home lives—in Vincent's case a literal prison, no less—where each had been the youngest and least conventional of a large family.
*
Both had a degree of artistic talent, and all the better for Dookie that Vincent had given up his own manqué striving to devote himself to a mundane but respectable career; he could thus support her growing desire to become a sculptor. And finally, by most accounts, both were alcoholics, as both their children would be.

Their daughter, Ruth, was born August 4, 1921, and spent her first eight years in the picturesque village of Hastings-on-Hudson, ten or so miles upriver from Manhattan. Later Ruth would say that those early years in Hastings had been the happiest of her life—as much a reflection on the relative happiness of her adulthood as on that idyll by the Hudson. Be that as it may, her parents' marriage was two-thirds over when her brother, Richard Walden,
*
was born on February 3, 1926, in a Yonkers hospital. He later wrote that his sister's nostalgia for the Hastings era made him envious “because [he] could scarcely remember it at all.” And since Yates wasn't inclined to write about things he couldn't remember in terms of mimetic mood and detail, his fiction gives only a faint glimpse of that time—as in
Cold Spring Harbor,
when the father's “look of ruddy health after the first few swallows of whiskey” reminds his son, vaguely, “of rare and unexpected Christmas mornings, long ago.” Hardly a vision of Proust-ian enchantment, but for Yates it would have to suffice. By the time he was three, the best of his childhood was over.

To understand why his parents divorced one may look in a number of directions. Dookie's artistic pretensions had become more desperate with time, and it may have been that Vincent didn't take these seriously enough, or at any rate balked when she asked him to pay for a year of study in Paris. And perhaps, for Dookie, all this was part of a greater malaise—a sense that she was being “stifled” like her counterpart Pookie in
The Easter Parade,
who “always used to compare herself with the woman in
A Doll's House
.” As for Vincent, there were probably times when the dull grind of breadwinning got him down, and like the father in
A Special Providence
he may have been driven to the odd bout of debauchery (“he would disappear for three and four days at a time and come home reeking of gin, with lipstick all over his shirt”). And perhaps, too, it was partly a matter of Vincent's enthusiasm for Democratic Party politics, his friendships with “dreadful little Irish people from Tammany Hall,” as the Dookie surrogate (a “good Republican”) puts it in “Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired.”