The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (62 page)

But it became increasingly clear, as Lynch led up to the subject, touched on it, paused shyly and studied his cigarette, that what he really wanted to talk about was his girl. “I just started going with her when I was home this time,” he said, after Garvey had helped him along. “Started getting pretty serious. I know it sounds corny, but I never knew I could get that crazy about any girl. She's all I think about, all the time. I don't know, she's—” Gently he smoothed the sheet with the palm of his hand, finding, perhaps, that there were no words delicate enough for the thing he was trying to say. Then he grinned. “Anyway, all I want to do now is get married. Soon as I get out of here the right way, with an arrested case, I'm going to collect that pension, maybe get myself some kind of easy, part-time job, and then I'm going to get married. You're married, aren't you, Frank?”

Garvey said he was, and that he had two children.

“Boys?”

“Boy and a girl.”

“That's nice, a boy and a girl. They come here to see you?”

“My wife does; they don't let the kids in. She'll be here tomorrow,” he added. “You'll meet her. And maybe I'll get to meet your girl.”

Lynch looked up quickly. “No,” he said, “she won't be coming here. That's impossible.”

“Too far?”

“No, she just lives over in Jersey, it's not that. It's just impossible, that's all. “There was an embarrassed pause. “Look, I'm not trying to be mysterious or anything; don't get me wrong. I'll explain it to you some other time.”

Awkwardly, they talked of other things for a while, and then Lynch got out his stationery box and began to write a letter. He was still working on it, tearing up pages and starting them again, when the lights went out at ten o'clock, and he had to strike a match for light to put his writing things away. It must have been after midnight when Garvey was awakened by a harsh, repeated, strangely muffled sound; in his dream it had been a dog barking far away. He opened his eyes and listened. It was the sound of weeping, desperately stifled as if by a pillow, and it came from Lynch's bed.

Garvey was permitted to share the secret about the girl a week or so later, one evening when the climate between them seemed right for confidences. And after that, for the rest of the long summer of waiting for Lynch's lobe job, the shared secret brought Garvey into a special kinship, gave him a special responsibility.

He had seen it coming all through supper. When the trays were cleared away, Lynch came over to sit on the chair between their beds, and that was when it came out. “Look, Frank, this is just between you and me, understand? I figure I'll go nuts if I don't tell somebody.” He drew the chair closer. “This girl I've been telling you about. It's Kovarsky.”

“Who?”

“Miss Kovarsky. You know, the nurse.”

“Well, I'll be damned, Tom,” Garvey said. “Congratulations.”

“Now, listen, don't let on about this, whatever you do, understand?”

“Oh, hell, don't worry; I understand.”

“I started dating her after I got home,” Lynch went on in his half-whisper. “I never messed around with her here. Thing is, see, there's some kind of a regulation against nurses having personal contacts with the patients, and old Baldridge has it in for Mary anyway. She could lose her job if we're not careful. Hell, I wanted to tell everybody. I felt kind of proud about it, you know what I mean?”

Garvey started to speak, but Lynch said, “Sh-sh-sh,” for Costello was sauntering across the aisle, followed by Coyne.

“Lynch, old man,” Costello said. “We need a pair of pants. The lad here turned in his clothes like a good boy, and now he needs a pair of pants. You still got that suit in your stand, haven't you?”

“Coyne?” Lynch said. “What the hell, Coyne, you mean
you're
going out?” Garvey was surprised too. This was old stuff for Costello, but Coyne had been taking the cure conscientiously until now.

“Ah, just for a couple beers,” Coyne said. “We'll get back in time for the bed check at eleven.”

“Well, look, Coyne, you're welcome to the pants,” Lynch said, “whole suit if you want it, but I'd think twice about this going-out crap if I were you. I mean, you go out tonight, then you'll want to go out tomorrow night, and pretty soon—”

“Pretty soon he'll be just like me,” Costello broke in. “Right, Lynch? One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” He clapped Lynch on the shoulder and laughed. Coyne laughed with him, self-consciously, and so did Lynch, shaking his head. “Ah, don't worry, Lynch, I'll take care of the lad. Bring him back just like new, and that's a promise. You got Professor Garvey here for a witness. Right, Professor?”

Then they had gone toward the latrine, Coyne hugging Lynch's blue trousers furtively under his arm. Lynch shook his head again. “Guess I sound like some kind of an old lady, preaching that way, but that bothers me. I mean, a single guy, all right, let him kill himself if he wants to, but Coyne's married and he's got a few responsibilities. I can't see it. And that goes for you too, you bastard. I catch you goofing off, with that pretty wife of yours, I'll break your head.” He laughed. “How about that—and I'm the guy that used to raise all the hell around here, on Report all the time. But you see? That's what Mary's done for me. It's like I was married to her already.”

“That's fine,” Garvey said, “except for the business of having to keep it a secret. Must be pretty hard to take, when she's around every day.”

“It's not too bad. For one thing she's not around every day; half the time she works the other wards. And when she's here we kind of wink at each other and whisper a little bit, like when she's giving me a sponge bath or something. And then we write a lot of letters and I call her up when she's home. Not on this portable phone here in the ward, you get no privacy on that bastard. I use the booth down the hall, you know? The one that's supposed to be for the staff? I wait till nobody's around and then duck in there. It
is
a pain in the neck in some ways, though. Like this week, she's on the midnight-to-eight shift, you know? So a couple nights ago I thought I'd go into the nurse's office around one, maybe get to see her alone. Jesus, fourteen different guys coming in for sleeping pills and aspirins; we never had a chance.”

“You going to try it again?”

“Ah, what's the use. Be the same story. Besides, I got no business running around after midnight. I'm taking the cure this time, and anyway, after tonight she goes back on days.” He yawned and stretched his big arms, and then he leaned back with a reflective look. “Only thing that really bothers me, is the way some of these wise guys talk about her.
You
know the way a guy talks about a nurse—‘Boy, I'd like to get into
her
pants'; stuff like that. Sometimes I want to stand up and say, ‘Look, you bastards, lay off. That's mine.' You know what I mean?”

After lights out, he went on whispering about his girl and their five months together. From the start they had found they could sit for hours over a couple of beers, just talking, and have a wonderful time, which was something he'd never been able to do with a girl before. And there were times, long afternoons on a sand dune, for instance, and nights in the rich, dark secrecy of her parked automobile, when Lynch felt almost sick because he knew he had never been so happy. He had not taken her “all the way,” however. “I could have,” he said. “I could have twenty different times, we were so close to it—I'm not saying that to brag or anything, I just mean I could have very easily—but I didn't, and I think that was one of the things she liked about me at first. I guess all the other guys she'd been out with had knocked themselves out trying for it, and she got fed up with that stuff. I said, ‘Honey, I can wait. I know when something's worth waiting for,' and I think she liked that.”

Coyne and Costello did not get back for the eleven o'clock bed check, but fortunately there were several other empty beds then, and many voices in the latrine, so the five-to-eleven nurse, Mrs. Fosdick, let it go with a familiar cry through the latrine door: “I want everybody out of there in five minutes.” But when she came back again just before her shift ended, an hour later, she meant business. Her flashlight was trained on Coyne's empty bed this time, and Lynch tried to cover for him. “Coyne's in the latrine, Mrs. Fosdick.”

“Oh, yeah? How about Costello?”

“I think he's in there too.”

“Well, they
better
be,” she said, and the flashlight went away. Mrs. Fosdick was a squat middle-aged widow who did her job exactly the way Miss Baldridge liked it, and everybody said she would be the next charge nurse if Miss Baldridge went back into the Army. “Coyne?” she called. “Costello? You in there?”

There were muffled cries of “Yeah” and “Sure thing,” and a moment later the two of them came in to bed, giggling and weaving through the dark ward. “Jesus, that was a close call,” Coyne whispered to Lynch, tiptoeing across the aisle. “We just barely got in there, taking off our clothes, when she comes to the door and hollers in. Oh Jesus, I'm half loaded.” He sat down on the foot of Garvey's bed and told them all about it, giggling and filling the air with his sharp breath. They had taken the bus to some gin mill about a mile down the road and started off with beer, but then they met these two broads—kind of old, he said, but not too bad—and Costello started buying shots all around. “He's telling them his name's Costello and mine's Abbott,” Coyne said. “Jesus, that guy's a million laughs when he's half crocked. So anyway, here we are, drinking shots and having a big time, and all of a sudden I see it's eleven o'clock. I says, ‘Jesus, Costello, we better shove off.' He says, ‘Ah, don't worry so much.' Well anyway, I finally get him outa there, and he tells the broads we'll be back at twelve-thirty.”

“So you're going out again?” Lynch asked him.

“Sure, soon as that little Polak nurse, what's-her-name, comes on duty. Kovarsky. Costello says he can fix it up with her.” He stood up and peered across the dark aisle.

“Guess he's in the office now, talking to her. Oh Jesus, what a night.” Then he loped over to his own bed and lay down to wait, and Garvey tried to sleep. But half an hour later he heard someone stumbling around Lynch's bed again. “Lynch,” Coyne was saying, “You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Here's your pants. Guess we're staying in.”

“What happened?”

“Ah, my boy Costello. Now I can't get him outa the
nurse's
office. He's been in there for an hour, got his arm kinda halfway around her, and every time I go to the door he gives me this big wink and makes a sign for me to leave 'em alone. Guess he's really giving her the business.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lynch said, with what seemed to Garvey exactly the right degree of disinterest. “How's he making out?”

“Ah, Christ,” Coyne said. “I don't think he's getting to first base.”

Lynch put the pants away, turned over and settled himself for sleep.

The next afternoon he came back from a visit to the forbidden telephone booth with a confidential grin. “I just heard all about Costello last night,” he told Garvey. “Said she couldn't get rid of him till almost two. He was in there all that time trying to promote a date for himself.” He cocked one foot on the chair and rested a forearm on his meaty knee. “I got half a notion to take him aside and tell him he's wasting his time.”

“Why don't you?”

“I'm trying to keep this thing quiet, remember?” The feet came down and he straightened his back, hitching up his pajama pants. “First place, he'd never believe me, and in the second place he'll find out soon enough, if he keeps it up. She'll tell him if she has to.”

About a week later his confidence seemed badly shaken. The portable ward telephone, a coin-operated instrument on a wheeled platform that could be plugged in beside the beds, was a constant source of quarrels among the patients; its users were always accused of hogging it. Costello began hogging it more than anyone else, but after the first few arguments it became a standing ward joke, especially among the men on his side of the aisle, who started calling him Lover Boy. He would lie in bed and talk very low into the phone for an hour at a time, sometimes shielding the mouthpiece with his hand.

“You know who he's talking to, don't you, Frank?” Lynch asked one evening, half-smiling but looking annoyed. “You know who he calls up all the time?”

“Oh, hell,” Garvey said. “How can you be sure? Could be a different girl every night.”

“Look; when I tried to call her last night the line was busy until just about the time he got done over there. So tonight I listened real close when he made the call. It's her number he gave.”

“You mean just from the sound of the dial? You can't tell anything from that.”

“You don't dial numbers in Jersey, you give them to the operator. And it's her number he gave, right down to the
J
on the end.”

They both watched Costello mumbling and grinning into the telephone. “Well,” Garvey said, “you'll notice he does all the talking.”

“Oh, sure, I know that. I know he isn't making
out
or anything, don't get me wrong. Just makes me a little sore, that's all. I wonder what he
talks
about all that time.”

As soon as Costello hung up, Lynch walked out to the telephone booth. When he came back he lay down and listened to his radio for a while. Then quite suddenly he snapped it off and came over to Garvey's bed. “You know a funny thing, Frank? When I called her up I said—just a little sarcastic, you know, not sore or anything—I said, ‘Honey, you're a pretty busy girl.' Didn't want to come right out and say I knew it was Costello, you know what I mean? Might sound like I was jealous. And I figured she'd tell me about it, like she did before, but she didn't. Said it was her
sister
using the phone. So what could I say? Call her a liar? I don't know what the hell to think.”