A Tragic Honesty (76 page)

Yates wanted to hear more, and subsequently invited the widow to meet him at the Crossroads, where he pumped her with questions and begged her to send him a copy of the Avon yearbook (which she did). As Ann Wright Jones remembered the occasion, “I got the impression that Bick's tragedy applied even more to [Yates]—he could never pull out of the past, his family, and apply his perceptiveness to the larger world. At least Bick found some release in his teaching, by relating to children.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Young Hearts Crying: 1979-1984

“Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired” particularly impressed a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate named Laura,
*
who was on the editorial staff of the
Atlantic
. “Since then I've read all the novels, each one unique, wise, and heartbreakingly fine,” she wrote an editor at Pocket Books, whom she hoped to persuade to reissue Yates's work in paperback. “I'm outraged that
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,
a collection that, along with
Revolutionary Road,
ought to be read by every student of twentieth-century American literature, languishes in a grim (and expensive) hardcover edition published by a reprint house (Greenwood Press).”

Almost a year would pass between the publication of “Joseph” and Yates's first actual meeting with the young
Atlantic
editor, but meanwhile she became known among friends and associates as a relentless advocate of his work—a fan, in short. “I'm the one who's been stalking you,” she finally introduced herself in so many words (at a party she made a point of attending because she knew Yates would be there). By then she'd sat in the audience at two of his readings but shyly refrained from approaching him on both occasions; as she later explained to his daughter Monica, she had low self-esteem at the time—the “girl with glasses” syndrome. She was, however, an attractive young woman (“prettier than she thinks” was how Yates put it), and also possessed the proverbial good personality: She was smart, well-mannered, and capable of making Yates laugh. For many years he'd go on quoting witty things she'd told him. After their first night together, she wrote him about certain of her misgivings: “[I worried] your friend Mary [Robison] … would come back from Ohio with her New Year's resolution … to live with you and love with you in a nice apartment in Boston … and write touching stories about being almost happy in
The New Yorker
.” He'd explained the photograph on his desk.

Yates was twice her age but seemed older, wheezing and frail, and the fact that he was able to hang on to her, if only for a while, attests to a powerful lingering charm. At his best he was nothing if not “understanding and knowing and kind” (as Mary Robison pointed out), all the more so in the presence of pretty young women. But in the case of Laura—the last significant romance of Yates's life—perhaps the best explanation is a basic human tendency to idealize artists because of their work. As Peggy Rambach observed, “Dick's writing was so sensitive, so tender toward children, that Laura figured he'd be that person.” He was and he wasn't, but in any case she pursued the man who was. As a courting gesture—lest she get a “sweet send-off” at the outset—she mailed him the complete lyrics to one of his favorite old tunes, “Mountain Greenery”: “Whatever happens,” she wrote, “it's a great song and I'd love to hear you sing it and, non sequiturally speaking, I love you.” And he seemed to love her too, though as Monica Yates remarked, “The physical aspect was hard to fathom.”

For a while, though, he seemed rejuvenated—relative, that is, to the morose disheveled old man who smoked and muttered at the Crossroads. While in Arkansas for a reading that February, he was the life of several parties—not only the drunkest but the most ebullient guest. “Dick was bombed, but he was
on,
” remembered a married woman with the improbable name of Booghie, with whom he shamelessly flirted. “Do you remember me—Booghie?” she wrote him afterward. “We sat on the couch and you promised to love me forever, and give me big bucks, and kisses all over and we sang songs, and I fell in love.… It was the high point of my winter.”

Yates even found pretexts for introducing Laura to his daughters—without, however, quite violating his old taboo against exposing them to girlfriends as such. Monica was in her last year of college and considering a career in publishing, so it simply made sense for Yates to invite her to Boston in order to meet a nice, smart “friend” of his who could advise her about the profession. Also, Monica had recently published a story in the
Boston Globe,
whereupon Dubus wrote her a kind letter to the effect that she should “stick to her guns” and keep working on her stories rather than be pressured into writing a novel (“I got the impression,” said Monica, “that he was justifying his own career mostly”). As Yates assumed she'd want to meet Dubus too, he proposed that the five of them—Andre and Peggy, he and Laura, and Monica who was about the same age as the other two women—get together for dinner. Monica agreed, but reluctantly: She'd read between the lines
re
Laura's true status and found the prospect of being in the midst of older men and their daughterly girlfriends “creepy”; besides, she was a “mess” at the time—unhappy, high-strung—and didn't relish having to deal with her father in person, knowing he'd be drunk. And so he was, though his well-spoken young “friend” made a good impression; as for Dubus, he was almost as drunk as Yates. Monica was appalled: “Both he and Dad were
very
boisterous. Andre kept telling these tedious anecdotes about going into bars and charming the locals:
‘So I walked in and pretty soon the whole place was eating out my hands!'
etcetera. Again and again the waiter warned him and Dad to lower their voices. An
awful
night.” Laura herself seemed to enjoy such outings and contribute to the general hilarity, though they soon palled in Peggy Rambach's case: “I was
very
bored during Andre's meetings with Dick. I was the woman and hence ignored. My mind would wander, I'd daydream, concentrate on the length of Dick's cigarette ash and so on. It reminds me of how Dick once inscribed a book to us: ‘To Andre with all my respect…'—and this and that, on and on, then
finally
—‘and to Peggy, who is a lovely girl.'”

Though arguably there was no connection, Monica Yates had a psychotic episode shortly after that meeting with Dubus et al. Like her sister a decade before, she'd taken an hallucinogenic drug (mushrooms) and hadn't come down; like her father she thought she was Christ; like both she had a history of depression. “I was anorexic early in college—five foot nine, 107 pounds—then during my last year I got fat,” she said. “I was very upset about this, and I was messing up in a lot of other ways, too—losing close friends, my boyfriend, that sort of thing.” After a week in the Northampton mental hospital, her mother arranged for her to be transferred to Grasslands in Westchester, where she stayed for six weeks. At the time she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given the drug Haldol, though an outpatient psychiatrist decided it was an isolated incident and took her off medication. When it was all over, Monica went to Durango, Colorado, where Martha and Gina had recently moved; she found work in a nursing home, though mostly she “holed up” and wondered what had happened to her and worried about the future. Her father worried too—“Join the club,” he'd told her—though his main advice was just to get on with her life and try not to think about it. She thought about it anyway (“Dad didn't do
enough
of that,” she said; “the crazier he got, the more he'd deny it”), and perhaps as a further reaction against fate, she became deeply religious. This, however, worked no better than being a chemistry major. During a lonely solo bicycle trip that took her through the Bible Belt, she called her father: “Dad, I don't want to go to heaven if these people are the ones who'll be there!” “Well of
course,
baby,” he replied. “Everyone knows
that
.”

Meanwhile Sharon Yates's life had grown increasingly tranquil in her father's absence. Two years before, she'd met her future husband Richard Levine, a shy man who'd felt daunted in the presence of his girlfriend's rather celebrated, saturnine father. “Every time Jimmy Carter tells another lie,” Yates dourly quipped on meeting Levine, “he grows another tooth.” That night at dinner, Levine grew uneasy as the silence expanded at their table; he'd expected Yates to be a lively raconteur, but the man sat leaning to one side with his face set. As it happened, he and Sharon were eavesdropping on a nearby table—a mutual habit when together—and every so often they'd remark caustically on what they overheard. That was in 1977, and on July 21, 1979, Sharon and Levine eloped. Yates was disgusted at first—he'd wanted to walk his daughter down the aisle and give her away—but he soon got over it. A little later they visited him in Boston, and after dinner he took them back to his crepuscular apartment and opened a bottle of champagne.

*   *   *

Yates's story collection proceeded apace, though he'd had to change the title
Five Kinds of Dismay
because he now planned
six
stories rather than five, and one of them hadn't struck him as particularly dismaying. He'd suggested
Aspects of Home
to Sam Lawrence, who found it “too academic”; Yates altered it to the less Forsterian
Broken Homes
. “Nobody's eyes light up much on hearing my tentative title,” he wrote. “The idea, see, is that all the stories will touch in some way on fucked-up families.” A somewhat younger author who also favored such themes—indeed was indebted to Yates in a number of ways and modest enough to admit it—visited Boston that summer. “I wanted to tell you again how pleased I was to meet you and to be able to spend a few hours with you,” Raymond Carver wrote. “You've been one of my heroes since I first read
Revolutionary Road
and was just stopped dead in my tracks with admiration.” Carver had presented Yates with a copy of his first collection,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,
and now enclosed a second,
Furious Seasons,
with the diffident caveat that Yates read only
four
of the stories therein (he listed them). “Don't take any of this, please, as an obligation of any sort,” he added. It's unknown whether the two ever met again.

Meanwhile Yates was in financial trouble. In the fall he accepted a one-semester appointment at Harvard Extension teaching two classes—fiction and expository writing (the latter a subject he hadn't taught since his New School days)—but was still unable to pay nine hundred dollars in back taxes to the state of Massachusetts. When they threatened to seize his property (one pauses to wonder what Yates had to fear from such a threat), he called his friend Joe Mohbat in Brooklyn. Usually when he called to talk to the Mohbats, the lonely Yates would immediately apologize for taking up their time (“I know you have better things to do”), but this was different. As Mohbat remembered, “He took a while getting around to it, but he sounded pretty desperate. He insisted I draft a note and charge interest and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if he went without meals to pay me back; it ate him up to ask for money.” Yates's first installment on the loan was somewhat delayed when the check became buried amid the chaos of his desk—“where, as you'll see,” he wrote Mohbat, “it picked up a few traces of roach shit”—but Yates was nonetheless grateful for what he considered the rather ambiguous favor of “[saving his] ramshackle life.”

At that point poverty was a lesser sorrow. Though Yates and Laura were still somewhat together after several months, the end was near. The usual problems applied, though in certain ways the two remained compatible despite Yates's lapses; by then, however, he needed more than just an “emotional nurse” (the function he ascribed to past girlfriends and wives), he needed someone to care for him physically—a lot to ask of anybody, much less a charming young woman with her life ahead of her. Such was his infirmity that Geoff Clark was “horrified” when he saw Yates that fall in Rhode Island, noting how Laura was obliged to “guide him about”: “[A]fter a quick beer in the union before his reading, Dick, requiring assistance, took minutes—hours, it seemed—to climb the union stairs, stopping periodically on a step, clinging to the railing as he breathed heavily, agonizingly, gathering himself for the next step.” During his readings, too, Yates was often derailed by coughing and what Clark described as “lip-smacking pauses that broke the rhythm.”
*
As for what it was like sharing a bedroom with Yates—the couple spent a night at Clark's house during the visit, and through the wall he heard Yates “hacking, coughing, muttering, groaning, pacing” all night long.

“I think this may be my last foray into the magic world of young girls,” he wrote Mohbat that same month. “Got to face facts, and I'll soon be 54, which everybody knows is the time for carpet slippers and companionship with some pleasant lady whose brains have been utterly scrambled since her third husband walked out in 1965.
That's
what's great about young girls, apart from their vastly superior flesh: their brains haven't yet had time to be scrambled by the world.” Yates tried to be philosophical about things, but he was heartbroken and dreaded the loneliness that lay ahead. When the young woman calmly declined a belated proposal of marriage, Yates tried to win her back—or simply forestall the inevitable—with his prose. Probably he spent at least a week polishing the seven typed pages of comic
pensées
and vignettes that make up “Notes Toward an Understanding of Laura M—,”
*
an effort reminiscent of those strenuously witty letters he had written Barbara Beury twenty years earlier, though even more wistful and funny and sad. “Talk of marriage brings on an intellectual power-failure in most contemporary girls,” he wrote.