A Tragic Honesty (7 page)

Yates remembered the Caliche Road all right, in whatever form it took, but as time went on he became less inclined to collude in his mother's delusions. Indeed, his childhood tendency to be an accomplice to such folly, as well as its foremost victim, would forever rankle. As much as anything this was the goad that made him determined to expose the truth, no matter how depressing, that people like Dookie are apt to bury beneath layers of everyday self-deceit. For Yates it was a matter of good art, though it certainly applied to life as well—to friends, family, and (arguably with the poorest result) himself. “The most important thing,” he liked to say, “is not to tell or live a lie.” Pity and forgiveness were important too, however hard they came when one knew the worst about a person. Once, when Yates was responding to questions about his work, a young woman commented on how
awful
the mother was in
A Special Providence
—“so careless and thoughtless and self-centered”—and asked Yates what
he
thought of her. “Oh, I don't know,” he said quietly. “I guess I sort of love her.”

CHAPTER TWO

A Good School: 1939-1944

By the fall of 1939 they were back in the Village, and all was well again, at least as far as Dookie was concerned. She'd somehow wangled a commission to sculpt a bust of the boxer Joe Louis; in fact, a photograph of her doing so—with the great heavyweight posing in person and the artist's awestruck children looking on—appeared in the
New York Herald Tribune
and other newspapers around the country. “We're celeberaties [
sic
],” Yates wrote Stephen Benedict, amid doodles of the various photographic groupings sent out by the Associated Press. “And you had to see the lousy one. Roof [Ruth] looks ten times as big as [I do], mater looks like she was a 300 pounder, and I look like I was nine years old.” For as long as his mother worked on the bust, Yates was one of Louis's biggest fans. He and Dookie were given ringside seats at the Louis–Arturo Godoy fight at Madison Square Garden, where Yates sat scribbling a “blow-by-slug” description of the “prolims” for Benedict: “I can't describe the Louis fight, cause I want to enjoy that without interruption. Do you blame me? If you never got this letter, you'll know Joe lost, and I died of heart-failure.” He enclosed a peanut shell from the Garden, and later a “chip off the old block” from the completed Louis bust—which was eventually placed in the permanent collection of the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences.
*
Meanwhile former champion Jack Dempsey was next; Dookie dubbed the incipient series her “Sports Hall of Fame.”

Around this time Yates wrote many letters to his best friend Stephen, whose family had moved to California for the year. Apart from a sort of sophisticated whimsy and an ear for colloquial language (as an example of both, he addresses Stephen as “T-bon” throughout, to mimic the pronunciation of a Japanese friend the latter had made), the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old Yates gave little indication in these letters of the grimly precise writer he'd soon set out to become: Spelling and punctuation are almost entirely random, the penmanship sprawls, and as for substance—well, the letters are mostly about cats, or
kahts
as Yates calls them. Even Joe Louis is “just like a big kaht,” and Yates's own
kaht
has just run away, hence he doodles the pet bounding off in a whiff of smoke. Occasionally he makes some passing mention of his new school, or a movie he's just seen (“the Cowardly Lion was a giggle”), or Joe Louis of course, but he rarely strays altogether from the main theme:

I really wrote you the verra nite what I gotcher letter. But the giggleiest thing happened! You see mine honorable sister took an excuse to her verra strict princepal [
sic
], and (oh-ho-ho-haw) she (this'll kill you) was about to depart from the principle's [
sic
] desk, and (haw-
haw
) she glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw that her “excuse” bore the picture of a
kaht,
and a “Dear T-bon.” Laugh? I thought I'd die!!

The passage gives a fair idea of Yates's epistolary style, perhaps the kind of mock-refined patois affected by some of the more precocious wags at Scarborough Country Day. Certainly the letters suggest that he badly misses both Benedict and the school, more in what he omits than otherwise (“It will be peachy to see the T-bon this summer”). But the overall impression is one of flighty evasive boredom, rather like a child playing with his food; reading between the lines and doodles, it seems as if there was little in Yates's life except cats and Joe Louis that he much cared to write or even think about. In fact one is vividly reminded of the fourteen-year-old Phil Drake in
Cold Spring Harbor,
a boy who can “cut through a lot of confusion” with his occasional insight, “even if all he wanted to do was fool around with the cat or examine his face in the mirror, even if he lapsed into the kind of willfully exasperating childishness that suggested he would always be younger than his age.” As for these willfully childish letters to “T-bon,” their subtext is suggested by Yates's reaction to them forty years later, when Benedict sent him copies in the hope he'd find them amusing. Yates was not amused: It was good to hear from Benedict again, he wrote back, but not so good to get the letters; he didn't like to think about that time in his life.

“My school is peachy (oh-so),” Yates wrote in October 1939, and for his friend's benefit drew caricatures of his new teachers; as a cartoonist Yates was adept at finding just the right physical detail (an effete way of folding the arms, an asymmetrical scowl) to reveal the essence of his subject. Yates may have found the all-male staff of Grace Church School to be a group of ludicrous grotesques, but at least the location was convenient (less than two blocks from the family's latest apartment on West Eleventh), and Dookie was no doubt pleased by the Episcopal affiliation (“the only aristocratic faith in America”). The school, however, was probably not as “peachy” as Yates made it out to be. In his novel
Uncertain Times,
Yates's alter ego William Grove casts back to his traumatic first day of school as a thirteen-year-old, “as the only new boy where everyone else had known each other all their lives”:

He was standing alone in the school yard when another boy came up to him with a look of lazy menace, said “Hey there, Bubbles” and turned away again. And there was no denying that his face at thirteen did have a sort of bubbly look: eyes so girlishly round they seemed incapable of squinting in a manly way; lips so plump that only an effort of will could compress them into dignity. Luckily, or mercifully, the name “Bubbles” had failed to catch on, and later in adolescence he had managed almost to come to terms with his face.

The key word is
almost
. Yates—a strikingly handsome man by any standard, at least in his youth—disliked the way he looked. With the same faculty that made him a decent amateur cartoonist and superb fiction writer, he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, “bubbly,” and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual. The beard he grew in his forties was by way of partially concealing his “Aubrey Beardsley mouth” (as one friend put it), and the gathering bags under his eyes helped take care of the roundness somewhat, though he never stopped squinting a little for formal portraits.

But there's really not much reason to think Yates was more than normally miserable that first year at Grace Church School, or rather that school life per se was more than a minor cause of whatever misery he felt. That the “Bubbles” tag (or its equivalent) did in fact “[fail] to catch on” is borne out somewhat by the lapel pin for “leadership” he was awarded in December, along with pins for “improvement” and “an average of above 80 for the last month.” Yates's “actual size” doodles of these pins (smaller than a fingernail) also suggest that he was aware of just how dubious they were, though perhaps his giddiness in relating the news to “T-bon” is not entirely a matter of self-mockery: “You might be inerested [
sic
] in getting an ear
ful
of the glee
ful
fact that due to my duti
ful
studies …
I
, R. Walden Yates, was awarded 3 little bronze lapel-pins.” But if this means that Yates was not quite a pariah, he doesn't seem to have been all that popular either. In the many letters he wrote that year, amid all the manic chatter about cats and movies and so on, there's only a single glancing reference to a potential new companion: “Me and another guy who swings a wicked harmonica, have a sort of an orchestra (not as good as the scarborough jitterbugs).” Clearly he missed Scarborough, and especially his friend Stephen, whose return in June at least gave him something to look forward to.

But it wasn't to be. Dookie had decided to rent a cottage that summer near Milton, Vermont, in the mountains around Lake Champlain. Yates tried hard to coax Benedict into joining them: “You're invited to a peachy joint in VT where there's a lake—a free rowboat a big mountain a bathing suit a rustic cabin and best of all Homer [the cat] will be there!!” At the bottom of the letter is a cartoon of Homer lugging his suitcase in the direction of a festive sign (“VERMONT!”), followed by a typical Yatesian witticism: “Remember: ‘You can't get ‘T.B.' in ‘V.T.'” All for naught. Benedict couldn't come, and Yates was faced with the task of finding friends among fellow campers. “Bud Hoyt is getting to be quite chummy and stays late every nite at our cottage playing every kind of game from slap-jack to monopoly,” he wrote enticingly to T-bon a few weeks later, but that was the only mention of Bud Hoyt or anybody else. In late July he wrote a last wan postcard—“You can still come, you know”—by which time he'd probably reverted to spending his days in the usual manner, à la Phil Drake, “fooling around on the floor with the cat … hearing his mother's relentless talk and longing for it to stop, dying a little when the alcohol began to thicken her tongue.”

*   *   *

Along with the curative powers of fresh water and mountain air, another motive for the Vermont sojourn was to escape from creditors again; during their last days on Eleventh Street the family had been reduced to using the backstairs, the better to sneak in and out of their apartment without alerting the landlord. But Dookie had a flair: When the family came back in August she found a much better place at 62 Washington Square, one of four brownstones on the south side of the park known as “Genius Row,” where writers such as Stephen Crane, O. Henry, and Frank Norris had lived around the turn of the century. The mystique appealed to Dookie, and besides, they had the entire ground floor to themselves. Soon the place was filled with students and statuary and the industrious odor of plasticene; life was back to normal again.

More or less. By then Ruth was nineteen, and college had never been in the picture; her flirtation with Buchmanism had long passed, and she'd begun dating a series of men whom Dookie found feckless and even a little sinister. The change in Ruth had been troublingly abrupt: Just a year before, she'd carried on a kind of calf-love courtship with Russell Benedict, who was almost two years younger than she; but when he returned from California he found that Ruth regarded him as little more than a boy. “I'd lost out to much older suitors,” he remembered, “but she was nice about it—Ruth was always nice—and there were no hard feelings.” She'd met some of these older men while working as a volunteer for the Associated Willkie Clubs of America, where Dookie had hoped she'd find some nice Republican boys from good families. And so she did, or rather they were Republican, but neither they nor certain others struck Dookie as remotely suitable. Happily the whole dilemma was solved on Easter Sunday 1941, shortly after a family of war refugees moved into the apartment upstairs.

Actually they were American, despite their faintly British accents. Frederick “Fritz” Rodgers, the father—perhaps
patriarch
is more apt—had been sent to London many years before by his employer, Cherry-Burrell, a company that designed dairy machinery. While the father traveled around Europe selling pasteurization units in countries with a high incidence of bacterial disease, his son Fred junior attended the exclusive Mr. Gibbs's School in London, along with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy's children and the future actor-playwright Peter Ustinov, who became Fred's good friend. During the Blitz the family was removed to rural Surrey, until the British government advised them as Americans to leave the country. And so they came in somewhat reduced circumstances to live in that upstairs apartment on Genius Row, obligingly vacated by a bohemian aunt who painted.

Dookie was rather smitten by the gentlemanly Fritz Rodgers, all the more so when her sociable inquiries revealed a family pedigree that must have made her swoon. Fritz's sickly wife Louise was a descendant of John Alden, who'd come over on the
Mayflower
with William Bradford, and her father was a Nantucket Gardner, no less, whose home on India Street would later become an historical landmark. Nor was such distinction limited (as in the case of Dookie's children) to one side of the family. In fact the name Rodgers is all but synonymous with American naval history: Fritz was the great-grandson of John Rodgers, the “Father of the American Navy,” and was maternally linked with Matthew C. Perry, who forced Japan to reopen trade with the West, and Oliver Hazard Perry, who won the Battle of Lake Erie. All the Rodgers men had pursued naval careers as a matter of course—a tradition that, alas, came to an end with Fritz himself, who became legally blind during his third year at Annapolis after a boxing mishap. Since then he'd dabbled in a number of things—architecture, poetry, acting, scientific inventions—and such a wide range of cultivation, coupled with Old World manners and a liking for sherry, made him an almost ideal companion for Dookie. Theirs was a platonic bond, facilitated somewhat by the fact that Louise Rodgers spent most of her time in bed.