A Tragic Honesty (6 page)

The arrangement was probably not as volatile as it's depicted in the story “Trying Out for the Race,” or rather there seems not to have been any (lasting) clash between the two mothers; but the respective dysfunctions of the families appear to be faithfully portrayed. “Some time let's have a little discussion about that sentiment-smothered thing called maternity,” Elisabeth Cushman wrote Yates somewhat later, having referred to her daughter in the same letter as a “zombie child.” From this one might safely assume the factual basis of the frenzied quarreling between Elizabeth Hogan Baker and her nine-year-old daughter in the story, culminating in such remarks as, “I wish that child were at the bottom of the sea.” Bad mothers and a tendency to throw tantrums were things Nancy and Richard had in common as children, with a difference in the former's case that might have proved fortunate to the latter: “I know she'll come back,” Nancy says calmly to Russell/Richard in the story,
*
after her mother abandons her for an assignation in the city. “She always does”—whereupon the boy reflects that “an attitude like that was exactly what he needed in his own life.” Whether or not by Nancy's example, a somewhat greater maturity on Richard's part is suggested by the fact that, around the age of ten, he began to make a friend or two among boys his own age; and lest he seem a sissy in their eyes, he made a point of either ignoring or terrorizing his female housemate during their visits, as she remembers to this day.

*   *   *

The move in 1937 to Beechwood, the vast estate of Frank A. Vanderlip in Scarborough-on-Hudson, was the result of Dookie's work as a sculpting teacher. The Westchester Workshop in White Plains didn't pay much, but Dookie's loneliness and boredom must have been desperate enough by then to make her classes more than worthwhile, especially since her students (as Yates described them in
A Special Providence
) tended to be “women of her own age or older, prosperously married and vaguely dissatisfied.” A few of these women befriended Dookie, and one of them arranged for her to meet the chatelaine of Beechwood, Mrs. Vanderlip herself, who seems to have been charmed: She not only agreed to rent Dookie one of the outbuildings but also gave her the use of a large studio space where she could teach private classes and thereby make enough money, in theory, to pay for the privilege of being in such rarefied surroundings.

And for a time they were happy. Beechwood was congenial in almost every respect: The fifty-acre estate was a well-manicured wilderness of elms and beeches and giant rhododendron bushes, in the midst of which ran a clear brook and many slate paths, past statuary and gardens transplanted whole from European castles. Above it all loomed the Vanderlip's five-story mansion, visible from every part of the estate, and a constant reminder of the sort of aristocratic grace to which Dookie so wistfully aspired. Just as importantly, the Vanderlips themselves were no philistine tycoons but rather great patrons of education and the arts. On the property was the ultraprogressive Scarborough Country Day School, founded by Frank Vanderlip in 1913, a place where arts and crafts were emphasized almost as much as science and math. Creativity in general was much admired, and talented people were always welcome at Beechwood: Isadora Duncan had danced on the lawn, and another great chronicler of the American middle class would later occupy a house there. “The swimming pool is curbed with Italian marble,” John Cheever wrote in a 1951 letter from Beechwood, at the beginning of his almost-ten-year tenancy, “lucent and shining like loaves of fine sugar.”

The Yates family had recourse to the same pool, not far from the northeast corner of the estate, where they lived in a white stucco gatehouse. Formerly the school's kindergarten, it consisted of a single large room (about thirty feet square) plus a tiny bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The quarters were tight as ever—the children had to sleep in the main studio-cum-living-room—but at least now there was less reason for the timid Richard to hide inside with his mother and sister. Dookie had enrolled her children in Scarborough Country Day (needless to say she couldn't really afford the tuition), and the eleven-year-old Yates blossomed there. “He used to speak of it as the peak of his childhood popularity,” said his daughter Sharon, “followed by a long, nasty descent into an unhappy puberty.”

The school philosophy placed heavy emphasis on fostering “growth” and “uniqueness,” and this allowed Yates to tap into a latent (at least where the outside world was concerned) silliness that stood him in good stead among children almost as quirky as he. He was much given to making droll and generally inoffensive fun of students and teachers alike. When the art teacher asked the class to paint a picture expressing their emotions, Yates submitted a blank sheet of paper titled “Gloom”—a work that belied his remarkable facility as a cartoonist. “He doodled on everything,” his friend Stephen Benedict remembered, “papers at school, doilies, letters—images of cats, caricatures of teachers, Joe Louis, Adolf Hitler.” Such doodling remained an abiding interest, but at the time Yates's fame as a poet was far greater. “The doggerel poured out of him,” said Benedict, and the headmaster's daughter, Mary Jo McClusky (who had a crush on Yates), wrote him a fan letter forty years later in which she remarked, “I remember how you used to delight us all with your spur-of-the-moment poems—guess you were destined to be a writer!” A writer of prose anyway; a sample of Yates's output from this time suggests he was unlikely to rival his beloved Keats:

The only noise I hear all day,

is the clanking of a can.

I drive a dirty-smelly truck,

for I am a garbage man.

The city dumps its waste on me,

to throw into the river.

And I can't stand that gooey smell,

it kinda turns my liver.

Yates was elected president of his class,
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which must have seemed an apotheosis of sorts after the morbidities of his early childhood.

Stephen Benedict and his older brother Russell were Yates's best friends in Scarborough, and the youngsters' activities suggest the kind of off-center precocity Yates may have had in mind when he described the “interesting” products of progressive education in
A Special Providence
. Stephen and Richard formed the Scarborough Jitterbugs, a two-man ocarina band that approximated such popular standards as the Andrews Sisters' “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” and “Oh, Johnny, Oh!” “We energetically rehearsed, then tootled away on numerous occasions for anyone who'd listen,” Benedict recalled. “Almost every piece would be punctuated by one of us with the sepulchral
moo
of an enormous bass ocarina, certain to break up anyone in range. That sad yet comic sound will forever bring Dick to mind.” Perhaps encouraged by her son's ocarina prowess—or just the general ambience of juvenile creativity—Dookie hired a Mr. Bostelman to give Richard private violin lessons at the gatehouse; either the instrument didn't catch on or Dookie didn't pay the man or both, but Yates's musical career seems to have stalled with the Scarborough Jitterbugs. Meanwhile Russell Benedict (influenced by Yates's sister?) started a weekly newspaper in his basement, the
Scarborough News Sheet
—six pages of society items, gossip, cartoons and gags (Yates's contribution), and the odd subversive bit such as a photo Russell had taken, and pasted in all one hundred copies, of a drowned vagrant woman on a slab at the local morgue. Corpses withal, such a novel and nourishing world came at a crucial time for Yates, and had a lingering impact that went well beyond the obvious. He pondered this in a 1961 letter, written after a reunion with Stephen Benedict and two weeks before the publication of his first and most famous novel:

Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937–39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough, whose amateur theatre group (“The Beechwood Players”) served as the original for “The Laurel Players” in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: “Revolutionary Road.” Pretty Freudian, buddy.

*   *   *

The “sad yet comic”
moo
of the bass ocarina (a strikingly apt leitmotiv for the life of Richard Yates) should be sounded at this point, as things began to fall apart in Scarborough. For one thing, Yates's relative popularity wasn't likely to last while his “long, nasty descent” into puberty gained momentum. By the age of thirteen he was already taller than most of his peers, but not much developed in other respects—if anything, the attenuation of his body seemed to make him weaker, and he could hardly have appeared more clumsy if he'd tried milking it for laughs (which he didn't). And despite the school's emphasis on creativity and so forth, it also lavished prestige on its student athletes, especially in the upper grades, and this universal fact of prep-school life boded ill for Yates. Even Stephen Benedict—who was smaller and a year younger—always prevailed in their frequent wrestling matches, which seemed to bother Yates in a quiet way. For the rest of his life, in fact, he'd be haunted by a sense of physical inadequacy, which would manifest itself in a number of curious and not-so-curious ways.

And then of course there was the matter of Yates's poverty, for which his seedy, undernourished appearance served as a kind of advertisement. Most of his schoolmates came from wealthy or at least comfortably middle-class families, and Yates was made keenly and increasingly aware of their snobbery. Susan Cheever, who experienced the same paradox while living at Beechwood, wrote, “We had the luxuries of the very rich—rolling lawns, a swimming pool, gardeners who doffed their caps—but we were tenants, scraping to get by.” And here was the dark side of Scarborough: Though creativity and personal charm were pluses, they were no substitute for money, and one learned the hard way how suddenly one's sense of belonging could evaporate when a few bills weren't paid. For her part Dookie worked hard to preserve her cherished foothold on the estate: She tried to recruit more students as well as improve her own work (in the hope of that elusive, lucrative “one-man exhibition”) by dispensing with garden sculpture in favor of direct stone carving and abstract forms. But her progress as an artist brought little material reward, and the good life she'd come so close to grasping began to slip away.

It had to be a bitter business. Almost nightly the Vanderlips entertained in their downstairs parlor, and the elegant guests in their evening clothes could be seen through tall lighted windows. Dookie herself had attended the larger parties in the ballroom, amid grand pianos, liveried servants, and the great Van Dyck painting
Andromeda,
as such occasions tended to be open to the nicer and more creative part of the public—to all, that is, but the truly impecunious, as the Yateses would soon become. But then at least one member of the family definitely benefited (as an artist anyway) from such harsh reversals, since a lifelong sense of exclusion informed the best of Yates's work (a scene in
A Special Providence,
for example, has Alice arriving at “Boxwood” and attending the Vander Meers' lavish Christmas party; it pays homage to a similar scene in
Madame Bovary
).

From the practical viewpoint of which she was wholly incapable, Dookie never had any business living at Beechwood, though she wasn't one to give up without a fight. No doubt she tried to get her children's scholarships increased at the school, and was denied on the basis of merit (or lack thereof).
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And no doubt she got her exasperated ex-husband to agree, yet again, to exceed the terms of the divorce agreement and pay off the more immediate bills. Perhaps Dookie continued to hope that the larger situation could still be saved somehow (more students, a one-man show), even as she grew more “cranky,” as Stephen Benedict recalled, “combined with a good deal of cynicism about life in general, which she clearly felt had not been good to her.” Life would get a lot worse: Before long she was telling her children not to answer the door, and finally the Vanderlips took legal action to evict her and recover the many months of unpaid rent. There was no time to finish the school year when Dookie and her children fled an entire region of creditors in the spring of 1939. “All I remember is that you sort of disappeared overnight,” the headmaster's daughter wrote Yates, “and no one would tell me why, and I was heartbroken!”

They found refuge of sorts in Austin, Texas, where Aunt Elsa had gone to live after her marriage to the math professor. This much we know, and if we trust
A Special Providence
(and perhaps we should at this point, at least in terms of the big picture), we can also assume that Elsa's semiretired husband was something of an anti-Semite who drank too much and liked to hold forth on such topics as “the menacing rise of the American Negro.” What matters for our purpose is that he seems to have found Dookie distasteful and bullied her son, a mama's boy (he thought) who should be back in school. “I
hate
him! I
hate
him!” Alice Prentice ends up screaming at her hapless sister. “Oh, I know you only married him because he was all you could get, but you're a fool! He's a
beast
!” Or words to that effect, which understandably might have led to both mother and children staggering through a sweltering construction site with their suitcases in hand and a total of seventy-five cents among them. What's interesting and pertinent about this scene, as rendered in the novel, is the way the “cheerful, heartening” son helps his mother overcome her exhaustion by encouraging her to imagine that the hot “caliche” dust is actually snow, a freezing blizzard from which they have to escape as quickly as possible. “For years, whenever they were faced with any ordeal, she would gain strength from saying ‘Remember the Caliche Road?'”