A Tragic Honesty (93 page)

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

There was a long silence. “Sorry, sweetheart,” said Yates, “I better hang up. I'm crying like a damn fool.”

One of the last people to see Yates alive was Scott Bradfield, author of the novel
The History of Luminous Motion
. Three weeks before Yates's death, Bradfield had arranged an interview for the London
Independent
. “Richard Yates was America's finest post-war novelist and short story writer,” the article began, “but he was a surprisingly difficult man to contact.” Bradfield had tried tracking Yates down through his latest publisher, Vintage, whose people knew nothing of his whereabouts and seemed indifferent to promoting the author of a few three-year-old paperback reprints. “I've been ill, you see,” said Yates, when Bradfield finally managed to get him on the phone, “and I may go into the VA hospital shortly, but I'd really like to do this, I really would.” A couple days later Bradfield drove all the way from Chicago to Tuscaloosa, and spent a few hours chatting with Yates in his living room. Though “extremely cordial,” Yates seemed disinclined to discuss his work much, and would bridle mildly at what he called “slick” questions. “You're giving me too much at once,” he said, or “I'm just not smart enough to answer big questions about things like ‘themes' and ‘purposes' in my work.” He was especially exasperated by the “slick” tag
realist
: “All fiction is filled with technique,” he said. “It's ridiculous to suggest one technique is any more realistic than any other.” Again and again Yates tried to steer the discussion away from himself, even if it meant interviewing the interviewer: Where did Bradfield get that T-shirt? Where was he born? What did he want to do next?

“Finally we broke for lunch,” Bradfield wrote, “and there was something dimly Yatesian about how the rest of the afternoon developed—a constant slippage between intentions and effects.” When Yates discovered that his favorite steak house was already closing, he drove them to the Red Lobster franchise restaurant, where he was faintly disappointed to find that their only steak was a New York cut—much too big. Bradfield urged him to order it (“This is on
The Independent
. Let's break the suckers”), but Yates scrupulously refused: “[a] waste,” he said, and ordered the chicken. Exhausted when they returned to Alaca Place, Yates nonetheless offered his guest a last beer and took cordial leave of him. “‘It was very, well, enjoyable,' he said, showing the sort of care with which he has selected virtually every single word of his published prose. Not a ‘great' afternoon. Not even ‘exciting' or ‘funny' or ‘wonderful.' But ‘enjoyable,' yes. It was very, well, enjoyable.” When the article ran on November 21, Yates was already dead, and Bradfield appended a suitable envoi: “I can live with the uncomprehending publishers, the dumb reviews of his work, the dull place he ended up in, even the second-rate restaurant and the slow, awkward circuit around the driveway we made three or four times before Yates could find the exit on to the main road.… [But] I wish he'd ordered the goddamn steak.”

*   *   *

“Keep this,” Yates had scribbled next to a sentence typed on a piece of looseleaf and attached to the manuscript of
Uncertain Times
: “This book is dedicated to men and women of the United States Veterans' Administration, past and present, in gratitude for their courtesy and kindness no less than for their excellent medical care.”

It's more accurate to say that writing
and
VA hospitals had kept Yates alive over the years, so that he gladly accepted their occasional slipshod treatment, even to the bitter end. For years VA doctors had put off operating on Yates's inguinal hernia, which had become more and more painful as his coughing got worse and he had to drag tanks around. The hernia was forever popping out like a sausage link, but it took several grueling trips to Birmingham before the doctors finally deemed it “emergency” enough to operate. By that time Yates was almost dead anyway—but then, he'd always wanted to die in a hospital where people would clean him up. “Sam, I'm dying,” he gasped to his publisher a few days before the trip. “I can't work anymore. I can't do anything.”

When Gina called from Mexico that Sunday, Yates cheerfully assured her it was only a routine procedure. They were about to say good-bye when the phone cut out, a common occurrence. “In the past,” Gina remembered,

we had agreed that if we got cut off before saying goodbye, we would just leave it until the following week. Even so, I was inexplicably compelled to ask the [concierge] to call back. After about half an hour he got through. Dad said, “You didn't have to call back—we were finished!” And I said, “I know, I just wanted to say goodbye and I love you!” He said he loved me too, and we hung up.

Monica considered hiring a private nurse (or coming down herself) to tend her father following the operation, but in the end she simply couldn't afford it—besides, as Yates blithely insisted, it was no big deal. After surgery on Thursday, November 5, he told Monica the wound wasn't closing properly and they might have to operate again; a little later he left a message on her machine: “Don't worry, baby, they put this mesh thing in, and it's going to be okay.”

Probably his last conversation, Friday night, was with Susan Braudy. He sounded unwell, and when she pressed him about it, he admitted—his voice dropping a little sheepishly—that he was in a lot of pain. “Ask the nurse for painkillers!” said Braudy, and Yates promised he would. He left the phone off the hook when he tried to hang up, and Braudy continued to listen as a nurse asked Yates if he needed anything. “No,” she heard him say, “I'm fine.”

At around three in the morning Yates apparently had a coughing fit that caused him to vomit. No nurse was around (though arguably a person in Yates's condition should have been recuperating in the ICU), and he struggled to get out of bed. The next morning they found him on the floor, dead of suffocation.

Epilogue

Yates used to ruminate gloomily about the kind of obituary he'd get—“two inches in the
Times,
” he'd say, “
at best,
and the only book they'll mention is
Revolutionary Road
.” One likes to think he would have been pleased that he was at least somewhat mistaken, since in fact the
Times
's lead obituary for Monday, November 9, was Yates's; and while it's true that his first and most famous novel was the only one discussed at length, the other titles were duly listed and collectively described as being “about self-deception, disappointment, and grief.” The rest of his career was limned from Yonkers to Avon to the army to Remington Rand, from speechwriting to teaching and two broken marriages. Sam Lawrence got in a plug for
Uncertain Times,
though he added that he wasn't sure yet whether the manuscript was in “publishable form.” Yates was dubbed in the headline a “Chronicler of Disappointed Lives.” Fair enough.

Monica was the first to be notified of her father's death, and for a long time she felt “complete desolation and brokenheartedness”: “I didn't know how I was going to keep going without him. Who else would respond to me like that? No one else would really see me the way he did, and think I was so interesting, and
get
what I was saying when I said it.” Monica had become so attached to her father that, as his health failed, she begged him to reassure her that
some
sort of afterlife existed so they could be reunited. But Yates wasn't having any of that: “Nah baby,” he'd say, “just blackness!” Gina was still in Mexico when her father died; she called him that Sunday as usual, hoping he'd already be home after his “routine procedure.” Fearing the worst when he didn't answer, she called her mother, who'd just gotten the news from Sharon. “Gina burst into tears,” Martha recalled. “Destroyed.” Outside the family, the person who probably took Yates's death the hardest was Andre Dubus, who seemed not only devastated but angry when he called his first wife Pat. “Dick
let
himself die,” he sobbed.

Two weeks later Monica and Sharon went to Tuscaloosa to pack up their father's things and decide what to do about the body, which was being kept in cold storage at a local funeral home. There were a few complications. Yates was entitled to a free burial at the VA cemetery in Alabama, but his daughters agreed he wouldn't have liked that, so they arranged to pay for cremation; at the last moment, though, the funeral home director discovered that a
third
daughter existed—in Mexico—and refused to proceed without her signature. Monica and Sharon joked about stowing the body in Yates's old Mazda and shipping it home, but as it happened there was no extra charge for a few more weeks of refrigeration. Meanwhile they had to clear out the bungalow on Alaca Place. Allen Wier and some graduate students had already cleaned up the worst of it, including the loose change strewn about the floor, which they'd left for the daughters in a tidy plastic bag. Yates's remaining effects were as follows: an air-conditioner and typewriter, which were stashed in the Mazda and trucked back to Brooklyn; some books and unpacked boxes of letters (“I should throw this shit out,” Yates had said in May
re
his life's store of letters, but Monica talked him out of it); a spavined old sofa, table, and bed; some soiled sheets in the back of the closet which Yates had lacked the energy to clean. The books and letters were mailed home, the rest abandoned. On the plane back to New York, Monica and Sharon sat putting the loose change into rolls. “Our inheritance!” they laughed. “The family fortune!”

On December 16, 1992, Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut hosted a memorial service for Yates at the Century Club in Manhattan. In his eulogy Vonnegut spoke of the “forced march” he'd made through all nine of Yates's books before preparing his remarks: “Not only did I fail to detect so much as an injudiciously applied semicolon; I did not find even one paragraph which, if it were read to you today, would not wow you with its power, intelligence, and clarity.” He remembered how his old friend Yates had always “yearned to live as F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when Fitzgerald was rich and famous and young, to jump into the Plaza fountain with his clothes on and his pockets stuffed with paper money”; but even though Yates was “a more careful writer than Fitzgerald, and one who was even more cunningly observant,” he could never escape the middle-class life he wrote about so well. Finally Vonnegut looked back on the early days of their friendship at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City. “One of our colleagues was Nelson Algren,” he concluded, “another world-class story-teller and outsider who died broke, but who was more famous than Yates because he had made love to Simone de Beauvoir. These things matter.”

Vonnegut read tributes by Dubus and Loree Rackstraw, then a number of illustrious people—Yates's “good if not close” friends—read from his work: Styron, Frank Conroy, Barrett Prettyman, David Milch, Dan Wakefield, and Robert Stone. Richard Price and Richard Levine gave reminiscences, as did Yates's short-lived girlfriend from the mid-seventies, Carolyn Gaiser, who startled the crowd (
“Who
is
that?”
) with a wittily impious evocation of Yates as, essentially, a lonely alcoholic given to “monumental” tantrums. The last item on the program was a long “requiem” by Sam Lawrence, read by his son Nick because of the former's stammer. Among other things Lawrence remembered his boozy Harvard Club dinners with Yates in their youth, and dwelled at curious length on facts and figures relating to their various contracts. All in all, though, it was a fair and heartfelt summation of Yates's career. “He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place,” said Lawrence. “He wrote the best dialogue since John O'Hara, who also lacked the so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O'Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech.” Lawrence ended, “You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C'mon, Sam, knock it off. Let's have a drink.'”

And so they did. While a jazz pianist played the standards Yates had loved so well, an odd assortment of long-lost friends and family ate, drank, and caught up. Yates's nephews Peter and Fred Rodgers were there, as was his niece Ruth (“Dodo”), who spoke bitterly about her alcoholic mother. Grace Schulman was there; at one point guests had been asked to stand and share memories of Yates, and she mentioned the advice he'd given her as an apprentice poet (“Write with balls, Grace!”) as well as the way he'd insisted on fining her and Jerry a dime for saying “unkind words about absent people.” Wendy Sears was there, and read aloud a letter the lonely Yates had written from Hollywood in 1965, all about how cheered he'd been by a Father's Day poem from the eight-year-old Monica. Bob Riche was there, despite having written a 1990 novel whose protagonist Bill Brock (named after Riche's oafish persona in
Young Hearts Crying
) reflects thus on his old friend “Pritch Bates”: “[He] managed to squeeze out a half-dozen largely ignored lifeless novels in which with increasing bitterness he blamed his mother, his father, his sister, his ex-wives and whatever former friends he once had for the miserable mess he has since made of his life.”
*
And Bob Parker was there, though he was a bit unsettled to learn that Monica (“I'm surprised to see
you
!”) was bitterly aware of his 1985 lampoon, “A Clef”: “So big deal Bob Parker,” she wrote him afterward,