Read Cold Spring Harbor Online

Authors: Richard Yates

Cold Spring Harbor (9 page)

BOOK: Cold Spring Harbor
7.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Oh, I know, dear,” Evan said quietly.

“God, and here I am talking about it when I said I wouldn’t. Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. I don’t mind if you talk.”

“She’s really sort of—crazy, Evan. I mean that. She’s always been crazy. Oh, I don’t suppose anybody’d want to commit her to an insane asylum or anything, but she’s crazy. All my life she’s kept coming up with some scheme for a new place to live every year, and I think she always really
has
believed it’d make everything happier for us, each time. Isn’t that crazy? Oh, and she used to say my father’s a ‘coward’ because he hasn’t gotten ahead in business; that’s crazy too.”

Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother. Maybe it happened with sons and their fathers, too, or with all grown children and the ever-diminishing presence of parents in their lives; in any case, the knowledge didn’t prevent her from pressing on, as if to see how far she would dare to go.

“… And she doesn’t smell very good, either.”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Smell very good. I guess that’s a horrible thing to say about my own mother, but it’s true. It may be that she doesn’t take baths often enough, or that when she does take a bath she forgets to use the soap, but I’ve dreaded getting up close to her as long as I can remember. And do you know a funny thing, Evan? I’ve never told anybody about that until this very minute.”

“Well, good,” he said. “I like it when we tell each other things.”

“She smells sort of like—rotten tomatoes,” Rachel said in a hesitant, tentative way, distorting her face with the need to find a precise comparison, “or maybe more like old, rancid mayonnaise.”

The pleasure of disparaging her mother was fading fast—maybe it would always be something you couldn’t sustain very long—and besides, she wanted to go back and think about the completely unexpected remark her husband had just made: “I like it when we tell each other things.”

Wasn’t it supposed to be the girl, rather than the man, who said unashamedly vulnerable things like that? But the lingering expression of it was still there in Evan’s eyes, and it was enough to make her tingle. She might even have tried to praise him for it, or to thank him in some way, if he hadn’t spoken up first.

“How do you suppose your mother ever found this place?”

“Oh, probably from an ad in the paper: she always reads the real-estate section. She’s spent her whole life reading the real-estate section.”

“Seems funny, though, doesn’t it, that a house of that size would be so reasonable? And furnished too?”

“Well, she did say the furniture isn’t much, but she said it’s ‘tasteful’ enough. Oh, and this is funny, Evan: she told me the house is ‘very nicely located,’ and I think all she
means by that is that it’s not far from where your parents live. Isn’t it sort of—embarrassing, really, what a crush she has on your father?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“So anyway I’ve got the address written down, and the name of the rental agent, but I didn’t really think you’d—”

“Well, it’d be worth looking into, wouldn’t it?” Evan said. “And I mean Jesus—” He gave a brief, self-deprecating laugh. “Jesus, my
father’d
sure as hell like it, wouldn’t he?”

The word “ramshackle” occurred to Rachel as they left the car and walked up to the house her mother’s heart was set on: long, two stories high, white clapboard with a black tarpaper-shingled roof. It was similar to other cheaply built houses around the village, but its angularity was softened by a wealth of shrubs and trees; you couldn’t quite see all of it at once.

“Plenty of space in there,” the rental agent said, pocketing his bunch of keys, and he hung back to let the young people go first.

The interior walls had a makeshift look—big panels of light-gray insulation board that were framed and held in place by strips of wooden lath with all the hammered-in nail heads showing—but they were the same kind of walls that Evan’s parents had in their house, so Rachel decided not to call attention to them.

And there was certainly plenty of space. The downstairs part of it alone looked roomy enough to accommodate four people, neither two of whom would necessarily have much to do with the other; and upstairs, that sense of strict mutual privacy became convincing.

Their bedroom, with the little adjacent room that would be the baby’s, was practically an apartment in itself. There were generous windows along two sides of it, and there was
a small fireplace that brought quick erotic visions into Rachel’s mind. They could get laid here on the hearth rug by firelight, any time they happened to feel like it, with flames and shadows dramatizing every subtle movement of their flesh.

“I like the fireplace,” she said to Evan, “don’t you?”

“Yeah, well, it’s a nice advantage.”

“You mean a ‘decided’ advantage,” she told him, prompting him to come up close and wink and give her a hug, while the rental agent looked discreetly away.

And Rachel would always remember it was that bedroom fireplace, with its ample little hearth rug, that won both of them over to her mother’s plan.

By the end of Philip Drake’s first year at the Irving School there was a hole the size of an apple in one elbow of his tweed jacket. He couldn’t get it repaired because it was the only jacket he owned, and that small predicament seemed entirely in keeping with a greater hopelessness.

“Ah, Drake, you’re hopeless,” he’d been told, unnecessarily and many times, often just before being put through some crowd-pleasing humiliation that would turn out to be worse than the last. From the day of his talkative, overconfident arrival at Irving he had failed and failed at learning how not to behave like a jerk; and everybody knew what kind of life a jerk could expect in prep school. All through the fall and winter his hopelessness had been almost complete, and the worst of it was knowing he’d brought it on
himself: he had “asked for it,” as other boys were always quick to point out.

With the coming of spring there’d been surprising improvements: he began to attract less public ridicule and even managed to make two or three respectable friends. There was some basis for assuming things would be better next year (and “next year” would always hold a shining promise of renewal for every schoolboy), but first he would have to spend the whole of a summer at home—and “home,” for Phil Drake, had now become as sketchy and treacherous an assignment as the dormitory he’d gone blundering into, talking and smiling, last September.

He wouldn’t have minded going back to his mother’s most recent apartment, the one on Hudson Street with the flaking walls and the doors that wouldn’t quite shut, and with the good mirror where you could look for signs of maturity long overdue; it might not have been much, that place, but it was something he knew. All he could predict about Cold Spring Harbor was that his sister would be lost to him there—a married, pregnant woman—and that he would have to find some way of making peace with the taciturn, intimidating stranger she was married to.

After the sleek and quiet railroads of New England he found the rocking, clangoring Long Island train an insult to the nerves. He could hardly wait for the ride to be over, and so he was ready—standing in the aisle with his hauled-down suitcase in his hand, even before the conductor called “
Cold
Sp’ng Harb’ ”—or at least he was as ready as anyone could reasonably expect.

“Philly!” his mother cried, coming quickly across the living room of a long, oddly made house. “Oh, you look wonderful. Oh, let me feast my eyes on you.”

She didn’t usually want to feast her eyes on him until
she’d had a few drinks, and it must still be too early in the afternoon for that; or maybe, here in the country, she had taken to drinking all day.

“What’s the matter with your coat, dear?”

“The matter with my what?”

“Your nice tweed jacket. It looks sort of all—slick.”

“Well, it’s very dirty, is the thing. When you’ve only got one of these you can never send it to the cleaners, you see, because you have to wear it every day.”

“Turn around,” she told him, and when she saw the hole in the sleeve she said “Oh, what a shame. Well, but listen: tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have it dry-cleaned right away, and we’ll have some nice leather patches sewn onto the elbows. How would that be?”

And he could barely detect the weariness in his own voice when he said it would be fine.

“Rachel’s dying to see you. She’s upstairs in bed. Oh, it’s nothing serious; just some little complication of pregnancy kind of thing, and the doctor wanted her to rest for a few days. So. Bring your bag, and I’ll take you up to your room—oh, and I’m so hoping you’ll like it, dear, because from the moment I saw that room I thought ‘This is the place for Philly.’ ”

The staircase was walled in with the same insulation-board paneling that formed all the other walls; he guessed it must be part of some thrifty Long Island method of building.

“Well, this is fine,” he said of his room. “I mean, really; it’s very nice.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” she said. “So glad you like it. See how big the closet is? Now come across the hall and see
my
room.”

And once again, walking in and looking around, he assured her that everything was fine. Then she led him down to the other end of the hall, where they came to a closed
door of paned glass that was tightly covered on the outside with a dotted-swiss curtain.

“Wait, though, dear,” his mother said. “She may be sleeping. I’ll check.” She parted the curtain with one forefinger, peeked inside, and said “Oh, good; she’s awake.” Then she knocked on one of the panes and called “Rachel? Your wonderful brother is home. Can he come in?”

“Well, of
course
he can.”

And so he found his sister propped against pillows, putting aside what looked like a detective novel. She pulled up the bedclothes as if to hide her pregnancy but he got a glimpse of it anyway, unexpectedly big and heavy-looking under the flimsy stuff of her nightgown, when she raised her arms to give him a hug.

“Bring over that chair and come sit with me, Phil,” she said. “Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve
seen
you.”

She wanted to know “all about” his year at school, and he gave her a brief, carefully edited summary of it, trying to imply that he’d had a pretty good time and concluding with an anecdote funny enough to make her laugh. Their mother lingered smiling in the open doorway for a little while, as though hoping to be included in their talk; then she went back downstairs.

“… Oh, this is nothing,” Rachel said of her illness. “It’s just a dumb little bladder infection, but I think my doctor wants to keep me in bed until he collects a whole shelf of urine samples. First he gave me red pills, so the samples came out red; then he gave me blue pills, so the samples came out blue; and so on, and so on. I don’t think he’ll stop until he gets every color of the rainbow. No, but really, I’m fine. Never felt better in my life.”

And that was easy to believe, from the look of her bright face. He noticed too that she’d changed this year: she looked older and prettier, in subtle ways, and he wondered
if all girls were transformed like this when they started getting laid.

“Well, you’ve got a nice big room here,” he said.

“Oh, yes.”

He got up and took his chair back to the wall where it belonged. Then he said “My room’s nice too. And I guess the house itself is kind of a bargain, isn’t it. How d’you suppose she ever found it?”

“Oh, well.” And Rachel gave him a quick, significant glance. “I think it probably helps if you’ve spent your whole life reading the real-estate section, don’t you?”

Only rarely did the Drake children allow themselves a smile or a wink at their mother’s expense—anything beyond that would have seemed a sacrilege—but they both suspected it would be a good thing if they could ever let themselves go. They might even be able, then, to talk about such matters as the way she smelled.

“No, but the main problem here is the dampness,” Rachel was saying. “Have you noticed that? The whole house is damp. It wasn’t something any of us noticed until after we’d moved in, but now there’s no getting away from it. And Evan
hates
a damp house.”

Back in his own room, unpacking his jumbled suitcase, Phil thought he could begin to notice the dampness—a faint tang of mildew in the air—but he didn’t believe it was really the main problem here at all, and didn’t believe his sister thought so either. The main problem, the thing about this house there was no getting away from, the part of the bargain that Evan Shepard must hate and hate, was having to live with Gloria Drake.

Because there was nothing else to do he went downstairs and sat around the living room for half an hour, first in one deep chair and then, to no purpose, in another. He supposed his mother was in the kitchen and hoped she’d stay there, even if it meant she would have more and more to
drink. It wasn’t easy to remember, now, that there’d been homesick times at Irving when he’d missed her as badly as if he were seven or eight years old.

BOOK: Cold Spring Harbor
7.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Nightmare Time by Hugh Pentecost
Murder Most Persuasive by Tracy Kiely
East of Orleans by Renee' Irvin
Cheat by Kristen Butcher
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Quinn's Revenge by Amanda Ashley