A Tragic Honesty (70 page)

*   *   *

By 1976 Monica Yates had begun to distance herself from her father. Her sudden exposure to the worst of his mental illness two years before had been bad enough, but even when he was relatively stable it was distressing to speak to him; Monica was less passive than her older sister, and after a lifetime of hearing Yates complain about one thing or another—“pulling for pity” she called it—impatience had taken over, and she often hung up on him. Also, of course, he was rarely sober: “There was a window,” she said. “He'd wake up tremendously hungover, and put himself together for about two hours. Then he wrote, and then he went out and got drunk for the rest of the day.” Meanwhile her mother was “the opposite extreme”—briskly pleasant and self-possessed to the point of aloofness—and Monica was sick of them both. She graduated high school early and considered escaping via the Peace Corps; instead she spent a year at nursing school and then enrolled at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) as a chemistry major—mainly because pure science was the last thing her father would have picked himself, and Monica wanted to avoid the “self-indulgence” of anything connected with the literary life.

In late March Yates was asked to interview at Amherst College for an opening as writer-in-residence. Though he hated the idea of teaching full-time again, he needed the money and was anxious for almost any change in his present situation; above all, it would mean living near his daughter, who still had little idea of his importance as a writer. And the job seemed his for the taking: The chairman of the English department, William Pritchard, was a great admirer (as Yates might have surmised from the man's review of
Disturbing the Peace
a few months before), and was thrilled to learn from DeWitt Henry that Yates was available. Whether the fix was in or not, though, Yates was so terrified of making a poor showing in his daughter's eyes that, as the date approached, he was almost on the verge of a breakdown. He had to give a reading in addition to the interview, and felt certain that his stories would seem dated to Amherst students, while he himself would come across as a “whiskery old bullshit artist.”

The trip got off to a good start. He went to Rhode Island first and gave a reading at Roger Williams as the guest of his protégé Geoffrey Clark, whose unconditional esteem always brought out the best in him; also, he made the acquaintance of another admiring writer and “good guy,” Robert Stone. He then moved on to Amherst. Monica lived in a walk-up apartment, where her father's arrival was heralded by a hideous burst of coughing that brought her “health-freak friends” out of their rooms to gaze, appalled, at the bewhiskered apparition pausing every few steps to gasp for air and/or light another cigarette.

Prior to his interview with Amherst president Bill Ward, Yates and Monica had lunch with Pritchard and a colleague, neither of whom knew what to make of the coughing, laconic, oddly hostile Yates. “When do I see the head honcho?” the latter kept asking between paroxysms, or whenever the two men's genial patter subsided. Pritchard wondered if Yates had any idea who he (Pritchard) was; perhaps Yates hadn't read that admiring review of
Disturbing the Peace
? Pritchard's colleague, meanwhile, spoke with a kind of British accent that seemed to set their guest's teeth on edge.

After his interview with Yates, President Ward took Pritchard aside. “My God, Bill, you think this is going to work out?” Pritchard just shook his head. (Ward was an affable Irishman and heavy smoker himself; it was a bad sign that Yates hadn't warmed in his presence.) By then Yates had given his reading to a group of students in Pritchard's living room, followed by one of the most gruesome Q&A sessions anybody had ever witnessed. Yates, who coughed more than he spoke, may or may not have known that the students had input into the selection process; perhaps he thought the whole thing was just a formality, and a tiresome one at that. “He was the opposite of ingratiating,” Pritchard recalled. “Some of the students' questions might have been pretty inept—like, ‘Where do you get your ideas?'—but Yates didn't give an inch. His responses were sour, superior, humorless. Sort of like, ‘Take it or leave it.'”

“Went through the sweaty business of reading and asskissing at Amherst,” Yates wrote Geoffrey Clark, “then waited more than a week only to have them give me—you guessed it—the cough drop.”
The cough drop
was one of Yates's favorite terms for rejection, derived from John O'Hara (who used it to characterize his treatment at the hands of the literary establishment): The idea was that when a teacher hands out all the candy, she gives the last hapless kid a cough drop. Yates was not only hurt and embarrassed by the whole fiasco, but puzzled to boot: “Still can't figure out why,” he wrote, “since I thought I'd played my cards pretty well up there. The department chairman's letter was some lame nonsense to the effect that there is agitation to hire a woman or a black.” Pritchard remembers all too well the “equivocating” letter he'd had to write, as well as Yates's poignant response: “I'd said, ‘Send me your expenses.' Yates had come up on the bus, and he mailed me this scrap of ugly brown paper in an envelope with something like ‘$36.03' scrawled on it.”

Denied a prestigious job and lowered still further (he thought) in his daughter's regard, Yates holed up in his apartment and tried to comfort himself with some marijuana Clark had given him in Rhode Island—but the highs, he found, were too much like going crazy. “Or maybe,” he wrote, “it's just that I shouldn't do it alone.” By then he didn't have much choice in the matter.

Not uncommonly, though, Yates's work was flourishing in inverse proportion to his personal fortunes. He was making excellent progress with his new novel, and
The Easter Parade
was scheduled to be a Book-of-the-Month Club dual main selection (with Judith Guest's
Ordinary People
) for September. The deal would help pay off his debt to Delacorte, but far more important to Yates were all the new readers he'd gain—more than one hundred thousand if only one in ten subscribers took the book. Yates cheerily noted that Delacorte's first response to his novel had been “tepid,” but now they were “climbing all over” him. As Sharon Yates remembered, “There was a general sense of
this is it
”—the rediscovery would soon be in full swing.

Then in late June Yates set his apartment on fire. “Three guesses how,” he later told Dubus, “and the first two don't count.” As ever, he'd started the day with a cigarette in bed, then gone to the bathroom to throw up and shower. Apparently Yates put the butt in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa bed, and the sheets began to smolder when he threw them off to get up—then he opened the bathroom door and created a cross-draft that caused the bed to burst into flames. According to the “funny story” Yates later made of the incident, when he discovered the fire he ran all the way to the ground floor and woke everybody in the building, knocking on all the doors as he made his way back up.
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By the time he attempted to reach his desk and recover the one-hundred-page manuscript of
A Good School,
he was prevented by a wall of flames that badly burned his face and hands. He also inhaled a lot of smoke, and was perhaps only semiconscious when the firemen arrived through the window, from which they thoroughly doused the apartment and destroyed whatever of Yates's effects the fire had missed (with at least two exceptions, noted below). Yates was rushed to the Bellevue ICU and was all but inconsolable when, coming to, he learned that firemen had seen him naked. Meanwhile the hair was scorched off his face, his hands were bandaged mitts, and his lungs were in even worse shape than before.

Word traveled fast. Sam Lawrence, who knew Yates could never be bothered to make copies of his manuscripts, called their old friend Frank Russell in East Hampton and begged him to go to Yates's apartment immediately and find out if
A Good School
could be salvaged. Russell obliged, and when he squinted into the drenched, smoky room he spotted a crisp black square on Yates's desk. A former intelligence operative in Southeast Asia, Russell soaked the manuscript in glycerine for a few hours, then peeled the pages apart and Xeroxed them between sheets of acetate. Also intact was a large steamer trunk in which Yates kept letters and original manuscripts; Lawrence subsequently urged him to relinquish the latter into the care of Boston University without further delay.

Among Yates's visitors at Bellevue was Kurt Vonnegut, who found his friend in a fetal position amid hissing oxygen equipment. “Aren't you celebrating the Bicentennial a little early?” Vonnegut quipped. Yates gave him a sheepish, so-what-else-is-new look and asked for a cigarette. Now he'd have to buy an entirely new wardrobe, he mused. Worse (though he kept this part to himself), he had no health insurance, and Bellevue was costing him hundreds of dollars a day for however long it took for smoke-damaged lungs and third-degree burns to heal. From this potentially disastrous situation arose what would prove to be one of the great blessings of Yates's later life: Sharon, sifting through the rubble of her father's apartment, found his honorable discharge in the steamer trunk and got the idea to transfer Yates to the VA hospital across the street from Bellevue. His medical records followed, and thereafter were readily available whenever Yates found himself back in the care of the Veterans Administration. Rarely would he be hounded anymore by exorbitant bills from private doctors.

Around this time he was visited by an attractive stranger from Boston—a woman in her early thirties named Joan Norris, whom Lawrence had hired to handle PR for
The Easter Parade
. The novel had so overwhelmed her that when Dan Wakefield mentioned Yates's predicament, she impulsively caught a plane to New York. Early rumors suggested that Yates had been blinded in the fire, so Norris was relieved to find the man browless and blistered but decidedly able to see. “You look fabulous in green,” she said, and Yates chuckled and croaked for a cigarette. She held it to his lips and told him of all the people in Boston, her friend Wakefield for one, who
adored
his work and wished him a full and speedy recovery. The information stayed in his mind.

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A week after the fire Sharon Yates found her father muttering and rocking in bed, and when she tried to speak to him—“Here's the bathrobe you wanted”—he answered with non sequiturs: “Bathrobe on the rooftop? Clothes on the barn?” Disoriented by his injuries, Yates had forgotten to mention the matter of psychotropic medication to his doctors; also, as he got older, physical problems tended to lead to a concomitant mental collapse. Anyway Yates was moved to the psychiatric ward, where he soon became merely eccentric again. “I figured out what happened,” he told Sharon in a calm but intense voice. “See, the reason I'm like this is I lost my glasses. And I can't see! And if I can't see, my brains get scrambled.”
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A couple weeks later he called Sam Lawrence and expressed agitated concern that Delacorte planned to promote
The Easter Parade
as “a woman's book”; mostly, though, he vented frustration over the fact that he was still cooped up in a hospital. A few days later he checked himself out.

At first Yates was homeless but otherwise in fine fettle. He cashed his latest monthly check from Delacorte and took a room at the same raffish hotel where he'd gone to eat breakfast for the last year or so; presumably, too, he bought a few items of clothing. Then he called Frank Russell and offered to take him to dinner as a show of gratitude for saving his manuscript. Russell and his friend Galen Williams (founder of the organization Poets and Writers) met Yates at the specified location—a dingy bar in the twenties called Three Ravens, where the awful food was somewhat redeemed by the liveliness of their host, who waxed in charm and animation as the evening wore on. Yates wanted to go barhopping, and began drinking brandies one after the other without visible effect. Williams had never smoked before, and Yates persuaded her to match him cigarette for cigarette. The night ended around three in the morning. “I'm looking for a girl,” Yates told his friends, and they invited him to dine at Williams's apartment the following night, a Friday; they promised to find him a date in the meantime.

Williams awoke feeling so ill from cigarettes that she almost went to the hospital. Despite her frailty, she managed to get Yates a date—an attractive colleague from Poets and Writers—but the whole business exhausted her, and she could hardly move for the rest of the evening. Happily Yates proved a low-maintenance guest. Quite content with the Chinese takeout Russell ordered for the four of them, Yates coaxed his date away at a seemly hour to join him for a nightcap elsewhere. Before he left, he accepted his friends' invitation to stay at their house in East Hampton for as long as he liked, the better to rest up from his recent ordeal. Russell and Williams agreed to call at his hotel in the morning.

The next day Russell was stopped in the hotel lobby by police, who informed him that a man upstairs had a gun. Russell (familiar with Yates's condition, all the more so because he was bipolar himself) explained that he was a friend of the suspect, who was having mental problems as the result of injuries suffered in a fire. He assured police that Yates was harmless, quite a well-known writer in fact, but in any event Russell would take full responsibility. They let him pass. “Oh hi, Frank,” Yates greeted him. He was crouched behind a sofa with a large stick in his hands. “Listen: The place is surrounded by Germans at the back. Some of my guys are in front with automatic weapons, but we've really got to be careful.” (Words to that effect.) Russell said the cops downstairs were on their side, so that Yates could slip out a side door while Russell covered him with a B.A.R. Yates thought it just might work, and once he was outside Russell waved him into the car and they took off for Long Island.