Easter Parade

by Richard Yates

  ‘I see. Well, I’m glad you did call. Can I turn the light on now?’

  ‘I guess you might as well.’

  Emily felt along the wall for the light switch, and when she found it the room exploded into clarity. There was blood on the tangled sheets and on the pillow; there was blood down the front of Sarah’s slip and all over her swollen, wincing face, and in her hair.

  Emily sat down in a chair and shaded her eyes with one hand. ‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe this for a minute. You mean he beat you?’

  ‘That’s right. Could I have a cigarette, dear?’

  ‘Well, but Sarah, are you badly hurt? Let me look at you.’

  ‘No, don’t. Don’t come any closer, okay? I’ll be all right. If I can just get up and wash my face I’ll be – I should’ve done this before you came.’ She struggled to her feet and went unsteadily into the bathroom, from which came the sound of water running in the sink. ‘God,’ she called back. ‘Can you imagine this face being introduced to Roderick Hamilton backstage?’

  ‘Sarah, look,’ Emily said when they were together in the bedroom again. ‘You’re going to have to tell me a few things. Has this happened before?’

  Sarah had managed to get her face almost clean; she was wearing a robe and smoking a cigarette. ‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘Happens all the time. I guess it’s been happening once or twice a month for about – well, twenty years. It’s not usually as bad as this.’

  ‘And you’ve never told anyone.’

  ‘I almost told Geoffrey once, years ago. He saw a bruise on my face and asked me about it and I almost told him, but I thought, No, that would only make more trouble. I don’t know; I guess I probably would’ve told Daddy about it, if he’d lived. The boys have seen it happen a few times. Tony Junior told him once if he ever saw him do it again he’d kill him. He said that to his own father.’

  There were liquor bottles and an ice bucket on a low cabinet against the wall, and Emily looked at them with longing. All she had to do was make herself a drink – and she wanted a strong one – but she willed herself to stay in her chair, still shading her eyes with her hand as if unable to look her sister full in the face. ‘Oh, Sarah,’ she said. ‘Oh, Sarah. Why do you put up with it?’

  ‘It’s a marriage,’ Sarah said. ‘If you want to stay married, you learn to put up with things. Besides, I love the guy.’

  ‘What do you mean, “I love the guy”? That sounds like a line out of some corny— How can you “love” someone who treats you like—’

  A key scraped and turned in the lock, and Emily stood up to face him. She had her opening words prepared and ready.

  He came in blinking in surprise at seeing her. His expressionless face looked a little drunk, and he was dressed for the evening in a dark summer suit that Sarah had probably picked out in some cheap suburban department store.

  ‘How was the play, you son of a bitch?’ Emily asked him.

  ‘Don’t, Emmy,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Don’t what? Isn’t it about time somebody talked straight around here? How was Roderick Hamilton, you bullying, wife-beating bastard?’

  Tony ignored her, moving past her with the look of a despised little boy ignoring his tormentors, but the room was so small that he had to brush against her on his way to the liquor cabinet. He set out three generous, hotel-room water tumblers and began pouring whiskey.

  His silence didn’t faze her, and she decided that if he handed her a drink she would throw it in his face, but first she had a few more things to say. ‘You’re a Neanderthal,’ she told him, remembering what Andrew Crawford had called him long ago. ‘You’re a pig. And I swear – are you listening to me? I swear to God if you ever touch my sister again I’ll—’ There was no way to finish that sentence except to repeat Tony Junior’s threat, and she repeated it: ‘I’ll kill you.’

  She drank – apparently he had handed her a drink, and apparently she’d accepted it without thinking – and only now, with the alcohol spreading warm through her chest and down her arms, did she begin to realize how much she was enjoying herself. It was fine to be passionately in the right on so clear an issue – the scrappy kid sister as avenging angel; she wanted this exhilaration to go on and on. Glancing over at Sarah, though, she wished Sarah hadn’t washed her face and covered her slip and straightened up the bedclothes to hide the bloodstains; it would have made a more dramatic picture the other way.

  ‘It’s okay, Emmy,’ Sarah said in the same calming, understanding way she had always said it in childhood when Emily was out of control. Sarah had a drink in her hand now too; for a moment Emily was afraid she might have to stand here and watch while Tony sat down on the bed beside his wife and they performed the old smiling, arm-entwining ritual from Anatole’s, but that didn’t happen.

  Tony seemed to draw composure from Sarah’s ‘It’s okay, Emmy’; he looked into Emily’s eyes for the first time, with an infuriating suggestion of a smile, and said ‘Not really ve’y much one can say, is there? Won’t you sit down?’

  ‘I will not sit down,’ she answered, and immediately spoiled the effect of that line by taking another long drink from her glass. The high pleasure of the confrontation was gone. She felt like a strident intruder in something that was none of her business. She managed to get off a few more plangent statements before leaving – things she couldn’t remember afterwards, probably repeating her own and Tony Junior’s hollow threat of murder – and she asked Sarah several times, with what sounded like fake solicitude, if she was sure she’d be ‘all right’; then she was out in the elevator and then she was home, feeling like a fool.

  It took a great effort of will to keep from calling Michael Hogan (‘It’s just that I feel I can’t be alone tonight,’ she would have said, ‘and there’s a whole weekend to get through…’); instead she had a few more drinks by herself and went to bed.

  The phone rang late the next morning and she was almost sure it would be Michael Hogan (‘Feel like having dinner?’) but it wasn’t.

  ‘Emmy?’

  ‘Sarah? Are you all right? Where are you?’

  ‘Downtown – I’m in a phone booth. Tony drove on back, but I told him I wanted to stay in the city. I wanted to sort of think things over. I’ve been sitting in the park and—’

  ‘Sitting in the park?’

  ‘Washington Square. It’s funny how everything’s changed. I didn’t know our old house was gone.’

  ‘That whole block was torn down years ago,’ Emily said, ‘when they built the Student Center.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I didn’t know that. Anyway, if you don’t have any special plans I thought maybe you might come down and meet me here. We could have breakfast, or brunch or something.’

  ‘Well,’ Emily said, ‘sure. Where will I find you?’

  ‘I’ll be in the park, okay? On one of the benches right near where the old house used to be. You don’t have to hurry; take your time.’

  On the way downtown Emily weighed the possibilities. If Sarah had left her husband she might want to stay with her sister for a while – maybe a long while – which would inconvenience Michael Hogan. Still, Michael did have an apartment of his own; they could work something out. On the other hand, maybe she was only ‘thinking things over’; maybe she would go back to St. Charles tonight.

  The park was filled with baby carriages and with laughing, athletic young men throwing frisbees. Its whole design had changed – the paths ran in different directions now – but Emily had no trouble remembering, in passing, the approximate place where Warren Maddock, or Maddox, had picked her up.

  Sarah looked as pathetic on her bench as Emily had expected – small and dowdy in her wrinkled beige, lifting her soft, bruised face to the sun and almost visibly savoring visions of another time.

  Emily took her to a cool, decent coffee shop (she knew that if they went to a real restaurant there would be irresistible Bloody Marys, or beers) and for an hour or two they talked in circles.

  ‘�
�� We’re not getting anywhere, Sarah,’ she said at last. ‘You say you know you ought to leave him; you even say you want to leave him, and then when we start going into the practical aspects of that you come back to this business of “I love the guy.” We’re talking in circles.’

  Sarah looked down at the congealed remains of egg and sausage on her plate. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I always talk in circles, and you always talk in a straight line. I wish I had your mind.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of “mind,” Sarah, it’s just—’

  ‘Yes it is. We’re a lot different, you and me. I’m not saying one way of looking at things is better than the other, it’s just that I’ve always thought of marriage as being – well, sacred. I don’t expect other people to feel that way, but it’s the way I am. I was a virgin when I got married and I’ve been a virgin ever since. I mean,’ she added quickly, ‘you know – I’ve never played around or anything.’ With the words ‘played around or anything’ she brought her cigarette quickly to her lips and squinted over it, either to hide embarrassment or to suggest a veiled sophistication.

  ‘Well, fine,’ Emily said. ‘But even if marriage is sacred, doesn’t that imply that both parties ought to agree on it? What’s sacred about the way Tony treats you?’

  ‘He does the best he can, Emmy. I know that may sound funny, but it’s true.’

  Emily exhaled a great cloud of smoke and sat back to look around the coffee shop. In a booth across the aisle a couple of young lovers were murmuring, side by side, the girl’s fingers tracing little elliptical patterns on the inner thigh of the boy’s tight, well-faded blue jeans.

  ‘Listen, Sarah,’ she said. ‘Let’s take this whole discussion back to where we were a few minutes ago. You can stay at my place as long as you like. We can work together at finding you a place of your own, and a job. And you don’t have to think of it as a permanent separation; think of it as—’

  ‘I know, dear, and it’s very sweet of you, but there are so many complications. For one thing, what could I possibly do?’

  ‘There’s any number of things you could do,’ Emily said, though the only thing she could picture was Sarah working as a receptionist in some doctor’s or dentist’s office. (Where did all those pleasant, inefficient middle-aged ladies come from, and how had they gotten their jobs?) ‘That’s not important,’ she hurried on. ‘The only important thing now is to make up your mind. Either go back to St. Charles, or start a new life for yourself here.’

  Sarah was silent, as if pretending to think it over for the sake of appearances; then she said ‘I’d better go back,’ as Emily had known she would. ‘I’ll take the train back this afternoon.’

  ‘Why?’ Emily said. ‘Because he “needs” you?’

  ‘We need each other.’

  So it was settled: Sarah would go back; all of Emily’s days and nights would be free for Michael Hogan, and for whatever man might follow him in the long succession. She had to admit she was relieved, but it was a relief that couldn’t be shown. ‘And what you’re really afraid of,’ she said, intending it as a kind of taunt, ‘what you’re really afraid of is that Tony might leave you.’

  Sarah lowered her eyes, displaying the fine little blue-white scar. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Whenever Emily thought about her sister over the next few years – and it wasn’t often – she reminded herself that she’d done her best. She had spoken her mind to Tony, and she’d offered Sarah sanctuary. Could anyone have done more than that?

  Sometimes she found that Sarah made an interesting topic of conversation with men.

  ‘I have a sister whose husband beats her all the time,’ she would say.

  ‘Yeah? Really beats her?’

  ‘Really beats her. Been beating her for twenty years. And do you know a funny thing? I know this sounds awful, talking about my own sister, but I think she sort of enjoys it.’

  ‘Enjoys it?’

  ‘Well, maybe she doesn’t enjoy it, exactly, but she takes it in stride. She believes in marriage, you see. She said to me once “I was a virgin when I got married and I’ve been a virgin ever since.” Isn’t that the damnedest statement you’ve ever heard?’

  When she talked that way with a man – usually half drunk, usually late at night – she would regret it profoundly afterwards; but it wasn’t hard to assuage her guilt by vowing that she wouldn’t do it again.

  Besides, there wasn’t time for anxiety. She was busy. Early in 1965 Baldwin Advertising obtained what Hannah Baldwin called a dream account: National Carbon, whose new synthetic fiber Tynol seemed almost certain to revolutionize the fabric industry. ‘Think what nylon did!’ Hannah exulted. ‘The sky’s the limit on this thing, and we’ve lucked in on the ground floor.’

  Emily developed a series of ads introducing the fiber, and Hannah loved them. ‘I think you’ve got it licked, honey,’ she said. ‘We’ll knock their eyes out.’

  But instead there was a troublesome hitch. ‘I can’t imagine what’s wrong,’ Hannah told Emily. ‘National Carbon’s legal counsel just called me; he wants you to go in and talk to him about the campaign. He wouldn’t say anything on the phone, but he sounded very grim. His name’s Dunninger.’

  She found him high in a great steel-and-glass tower, alone in his carpeted office. He was big and sturdy, with a heavy jaw and a voice that made her want to curl up and ride in his pocket like a kitten.

  ‘Let me take your coat, Miss Grimes,’ he said. ‘Sit down – no, come around here and sit beside me; then we can go over the material together. In general I think it’s fine,’ he began, and as he talked she looked beyond the layouts and pages of copy to explore the whole ample surface of his desk. Its only ornament was a photograph of a lovely dark-haired girl, probably his daughter; they probably lived in Connecticut, and when he got home every day he would play a few fast sets of tennis with her before they went in to shower and change and join Mrs. Dunninger for cocktails in the library. And what would Mrs. Dunninger be like?

  ‘… There’s just one point,’ he was saying. ‘One phrase, and unfortunately it’s a phrase that appears over and over in your, uh, copy. You say Tynol has “the natural elegance of wool.” That could easily be construed as misrepresentation, you see, when we’re talking about a synthetic. I’m afraid if we let it go we’ll have the F.T.C. on our necks.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Emily said. ‘If I say “You have the patience of a saint,” it certainly doesn’t mean you are one.’

  ‘Ah.’ He leaned back in his chair, smiling at her. ‘But if I say “You have the eyes of a strumpet,” there might conceivably be room for doubt.’

  They sat laughing and talking for longer than their business required, and she couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to be happily taking stock of her legs and her body and her face. She was thirty-nine, but his eyes made her feel much younger.

  ‘Is that your daughter?’ she said of the photograph.

  He looked embarrassed. ‘No, it’s my wife.’

  And she couldn’t say ‘I’m sorry’ or anything like that without making it worse. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘She’s lovely.’ Then she mumbled that she’d better be going, and stood up.

  ‘I think you’ll find “natural” is the offending word,’ he said, walking her to the door. ‘If you can get around that I don’t think there’ll be any problem.’

  She told him she would do her best, and as the elevator dropped her back to reality she revised her fantasies: he didn’t live in Connecticut; he lived in an East Side penthouse where that beautiful girl pouted and preened in mirrors all day, waiting for him to come home.

  ‘Miss Grimes?’ he said on the telephone a very few days later. ‘Howard Dunninger. I just wondered if you might have lunch with me.’

  Almost the first thing he told her, as they sipped wine in what she described to herself as a ‘wonderful’ French restaurant, was that he wasn’t really married at all: he and his wife had sep
arated three months ago.

  ‘Well, “separated” is a euphemism,’ he said. ‘The fact is she left me. Not for another man; just because she was tired of me – I imagine she’d been tired of me for some time – and she wanted to see what freedom is like. Oh, it’s understandable, I suppose. I’m fifty; she’s twenty-eight. When we started living together I was forty-two and she was twenty.’

  ‘Isn’t it a little romantic to keep her picture on your desk?’

  ‘Pure cowardice,’ he said. ‘It’s been there so long I thought people in the office might think it looked funny if I put it away.’

  Where is she now?’

  ‘California. She wanted to put the greatest possible distance between us, you see.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’

  ‘Only from my first marriage; that was a long time ago. Two boys. They’re grown now.’

  Chewing fresh French bread and salad, glancing around at the well-dressed, sophisticated-looking people at other tables, Emily realized it would be easy to make love with Howard Dunninger this very afternoon. Hannah wouldn’t care if she didn’t show up at the office, and surely the general counsel for National Carbon could set his own schedule. They had both outlived the time of trivial responsibilities.

  ‘What time do you want to get back, Emily?’ he asked as the waiter set a gleaming little cognac glass beside her coffee.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter; no special time.’

  ‘Good.’ His thin lips curled into a shape of shyness. ‘I’ve done so damn much of the talking I’ve hardly gotten to know you. Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Well, there’s not really much to tell.’

  But there was: her autobiography, edited and heightened here and there for dramatic effect, seemed impossible to conclude. She was still talking when he guided her out across the blazing sidewalk and into a taxicab, and when the cab let them off at his apartment building. She stopped talking finally in the elevator – not because she was finished but only because it seemed important to be quiet here.