Liars in Love

by Richard Yates

  “… Oh, please,” Lucy was saying. “Please, Russell. Listen. Listen. I’ll bring you something nice, I promise, and you’ll find it when you wake up, and that’ll let you know I’m home.”

  “… Ah! Oh! Oh!…”

  “Please, now, Russell. Please…”

  On waking ashamed the next morning he found a small, well-made stuffed toy in the form of a lamb beside his pillow—a gift for a baby, or a girl. He took it to the wooden chest against the wall that contained all the other toys he had outgrown, put it inside, and closed the lid. He was a mother’s boy, all right, and at times like this it seemed useless ever to deny it.

  “You sure made a racket last night,” Nancy said to him later that day.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve heard you make a lot of racket too. Plenty of times.”

  He might have added that he’d even heard Harry Snyder make a racket, and Harry was a year older, but she hadn’t been present at Harry’s tantrum and so would probably not have believed it, or even have cared.

  School had as yet produced no real friends for Russell, and he worried about that, but Harry Snyder was the boy next door, and so a casual, loafing kind of friendship had been easy to achieve with him. One day they were intently hunkered down over many tin soldiers in the basement of Harry’s house when Mrs. Snyder came to the stairs and called down, “Russell, you’ll have to go home now. Harry has to come up and get ready because we’re all going for a drive to Mount Vernon.”

  “Aw, Mom, now? You mean now?”

  “Certainly I mean ‘now.’ Your father wanted to get started an hour ago.”

  And that was when Harry went into action. In three swift, merciless kicks he sent soldiers flying in all directions, ruining formations that had been all afternoon in the making, and he howled and flailed and cried like someone half his age, while Russell looked away in a wincing smile of embarrassment.

  “Harry!” Mrs. Snyder called. “Harry, I want you to stop this right now. Do you hear me?”

  But he didn’t stop until long after she’d come down and led him tragically upstairs; when Russell crept out for home he could still hear the terrible sound of it ringing across the yellow grass.

  Even so, there was an important difference. Harry had cried because he wanted his mother to leave him alone; Russell had cried because he didn’t—and therein lay the very definition of a mother’s boy.

  * * *

  On some winter evenings Elizabeth would set up her typewriter in the living room and be lost in concentration for hours, hammering out her newspaper features or trying for something more substantial that she might submit to a magazine. She sat as straight as a stenographer at her work, her spine never touching the back of the chair, and she wore horn-rimmed glasses. Sometimes a lock of her pretty blond hair would dislodge itself and fall over one eye, and she’d put it back with impatient fingers—often the same fingers that held a short, burning cigarette. There was always a full ashtray on one side of her machine; on the other, near the paper supply, a big block of milk chocolate lay carefully broken apart in its torn-open wrapper—the kind of Hershey bar that cost almost fifty cents. Everyone understood, though, that this chocolate wasn’t for passing around: it was the fuel Elizabeth needed when she wasn’t drinking.

  There were long intervals between spells of typing, when she would hunch over a pencil to revise and correct her pages, and then the silence was broken only by the occasional whack-whack-whack of a car’s loose tire chain whipping the underside of its fender along the packed snow and ice of the Post Road. During one such lull, on a night of heavy snowfall, the telephone rang for the first time in what seemed many weeks.

  “I’ll get it!” Alice Towers cried in headlong eagerness for the social life of junior high, but then she turned back and said, “It’s for you, Mrs. Baker.” And they all listened as Elizabeth murmured and laughed into the phone in a way that could only have meant it was a man.

  “My God,” she told Lucy when she’d hung up, “I think Judd Leonard is insane. He’s at the Hartsdale station and he says he’ll be here in a taxi in ten minutes. Can you imagine anybody coming all the way out here on a night like this?” But moving uncertainly back toward her scattered worktable, then turning and taking off her glasses, she couldn’t hide a shy, pleased look that transformed her suddenly into a girl. “Well, Jesus, Lucy, is my hair all right?” she said. “Are my clothes all right? Do you think there’s time to wash up and change?”

  Judd Leonard arrived with gusts of laughter and a great stamping-off of snow in the vestibule. His thin city shoes weren’t used to stuff like this and even his expensive overcoat looked forlorn, but he triumphantly displayed a heavy, snow-flecked paper bag that clinked with bottles of liquor. He gave Lucy Towers a kiss on the cheek to prove he had heard what a nice woman she was, and he was attentive to the children: he explained to them that he was an old broken-down word man and a very dear friend of Nancy’s mother.

  Everybody stayed up late that night. Lucy seemed to do most of the talking at first, telling Westchester anecdotes; then Elizabeth held forth at enthusiastic length on Communism, and Judd Leonard went right along with her. Even though he earned his living in private enterprise, he said, he’d be happy to see every vestige of it down the drain if that meant humanity might then have a chance. These were times of inevitable change; only a fool could fail to recognize that. Long after the children were in bed upstairs his rolling, thunderous voice filled the snowbound house. They listened as long as they could, comprehending or not, until they fell asleep in the rhythms of it.

  When the snow had stopped the following afternoon, Elizabeth and Judd departed quietly by taxi for the Hartsdale station. As they rode together on the train to New York he said, “Your roommate’s an imbecile. Give her three drinks and all she wants to talk about is garden parties.”

  “Oh, Lucy’s all right,” Elizabeth said. “She just takes a little getting used to. Besides, it’s a nice arrangement, sharing that house. It suits me.”

  “Ah, funny little Irish Scarsdale Bolshevik,” he said fondly, putting his arm around her. “You’re really not a hell of a lot smarter than she is, you know that?”

  By the third or fourth day of Elizabeth’s absence, Lucy assumed she was staying with Judd in New York for a while, commuting out to New Rochelle for work and back to the city each night. But wouldn’t it have been only considerate to let people know her plans? Wasn’t it a little thoughtless not even to have told Nancy?

  Russell Towers found it amazing that Nancy didn’t know where her mother was and gave no sign of being eaten alive with worry—seemed, in fact, not even to care. He hung around the open door of her room one day, after Elizabeth had been gone for a week or more, watching Nancy work on the floor with some art paper taken from school and with a colored-pencil set of her own.

  At last he said, “Heard from your mother yet?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Any idea where she is or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  He knew the next question might easily make him a fool in her eyes, but couldn’t hold it back. “You worried about it?”

  And Nancy looked up at him in a frank, thoughtful way. “No,” she said. “I know she’ll come back. She always does.”

  That was impressive. As he slouched away to his own room, Russell knew that an attitude like that was exactly what he needed in his own life. But he knew too, sitting on his bed to think it over, that it was out of the question. It was as far-fetched as trying to compare himself to the athletes shown on the backs of breakfast-cereal boxes. He was an anxious, skinny little kid, forever too young for his age, and anyone opening the lid of his toy chest would only find sickening proof of it.

  Alice Towers was once again the first to reach the phone when it rang a few nights later. “Oh, sure,” she said, and then, “It’s for you, Nancy. It’s your mother.”

  Nancy took the call standing up, with her back to the Towers family. After the opening “Hi” her words
were indistinct; then she was silent, listening, holding her shoulders in a high, unnatural way. At last, she turned and held out the phone to Lucy, who took it up quickly.

  “Well, Elizabeth. Are you all right? We’ve all been a little—concerned about you.”

  “Lucy, I need my child,” Elizabeth said in the old Irish-poetry voice. “I want you to send me my child tonight.”

  “Oh. Well, look. For one thing the last train’s probably been gone for hours, and besides, I—”

  “The last train leaves there at ten-thirty-something,” Elizabeth said. “Judd looked it up on the timetable. That gives her plenty of time to get ready.”

  “Well, but Elizabeth, I really don’t think this is a very good idea. Has she ever taken a train alone before? And at night?”

  “Oh, nonsense. It’s only a forty-minute ride, and Judd and I’ll be there to meet her, or at least I will. She knows that. I’ve told her, all she has to do when she gets off the train is follow the crowd.”

  And Lucy hesitated. “Well,” she said, “I suppose if you can promise to be there when she—”

  “‘Promise’? Am I expected to make a ‘promise’? To you? About something like this? You’re beginning to make me tired, Lucy.”

  Russell thought his mother looked hurt and bewildered and a little foolish after she’d hung up the phone, but she recovered quickly, and from then on she did everything right. In a tone that came out as a nice mixture of authority and affection, she sent Nancy upstairs to change her clothes and to pack. Then she called for a station taxicab, explaining that a nine-year-old girl would be traveling alone and asking if the driver could see her safely aboard the train.

  When Nancy came down in a fresh dress, with her winter coat and her overnight bag, Lucy Towers said, “Oh, good. You look very nice, dear.” And Russell couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was the first time he had ever heard his mother call her “dear.”

  “Oh, wait,” Nancy said, “I forgot.” And she ran upstairs again and came back with her grubby-looking teddy bear.

  “Oh, well, of course,” Lucy said. “And I’ll tell you what we’ll do.” She took the small suitcase on her lap and unfastened the clasps of it. “We’ll open this up and we’ll put old George right in there on top; that way you’ll know exactly where he is at all times.” And the best part of that, which Nancy’s bashful smile only confirmed, was that Lucy had remembered the teddy bear’s name.

  “Now,” Lucy said, and busied herself with her purse. “Let’s see about money. I only have about a dollar and a half over the price of your ticket, but I’m sure that’ll be enough. Your mother’ll be waiting in Grand Central, so there won’t really be any need for money at all. You’ve been in Grand Central before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the thing to remember when you’re alone is that all you have to do is follow the crowd. There’ll be a long platform and then a long ramp going up; then you’ll come out inside the station and that’s where your mother’ll be.”

  “Okay.”

  The cab’s horn sounded in the driveway then, and all three members of the Towers family went out over slick crusted snow, in a freezing wind, to wish Nancy goodbye.

  * * *

  She was gone for well over a week, and there were no telephone calls. When she came back, alone, having somehow arranged for her own taxi home from the Hartsdale station (and that in itself was something Russell wasn’t at all sure he’d have known how to do), she didn’t tell much about her trip.

  “Did you have a nice time in the city, Nancy?” Lucy Towers asked at dinner, while the maid moved softly around the table with plates of spaghetti and meat sauce.

  “It was cold most of the time,” Nancy said. “One day it was warm enough to go up and sit on the roof, so I did that, but I was only up there about an hour—one hour—before I was covered with soot. My hands, my face, my clothes, everything. Black.”

  “Mm, yes,” Lucy said, winding too thick a load of spaghetti onto her fork. “Well, the air in New York does get—very dirty.”

  * * *

  Harry Snyder’s tantrum over the tin soldiers had never been mentioned, but the long aftermath of it seemed to have made him a little testy in Russell’s presence. He had become hard to please and quick to find fault, and he stood around a lot looking “tough” with his thumbs hooked into the belt of his corduroy knickers.

  “Whaddya got in there?” he asked one afternoon in Russell’s room, indicating the toy chest.

  “Nothing much. Just old stuff my mother hasn’t thrown away.”

  But that didn’t stop Harry from going over and opening the thing. “Jeez,” he said. “You like stuff like this? You play with stuff like this?”

  “’Course not,” Russell said. “I told you, it’s just that my mother hasn’t ever gotten around to throwing—”

  “So why don’t you throw it away yourself, if you don’t like it? Huh? How come you have to wait for your mother to do it?”

  It was a bad moment, and the only thing to do was get Harry out of the room at once. But there was no getting him downstairs and outside, because he seemed to think it might be more interesting to stand for a while at the doorway of Nancy’s room, looking in.

  “Whaddya doing, Nancy?” he asked her.

  “Nothing; just putting my programs away.”

  “Your what?”

  “These, look. Theater programs. I’ve been to five different Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with my father, and I always save the programs. The next one we’re going to see is The Mikado.”

  “The McWhat?”

  “It means the emperor of Japan,” she explained. “It’s supposed to be very good. But my favorite so far is The Pirates of Penzance, and I think that’s Daddy’s favorite too. He sent me all the sheet music for it, the whole score.”

  Russell had never known her to be this talkative and high-spirited except when she brought a girl home from school, and even then what little could be heard of the conversation seemed mostly to be uncontrolled giggles. Now she was summarizing the libretto to the best of her ability, careful not to dwell on any aspect of it that might hamper Harry’s grasp of the whole. Early in her monologue she had made some slight gesture of welcome to the boys, and soon they were in virtual possession of her room: Harry seated in the only chair with the sheaf of theater programs on his lap, Russell standing near the window with his thumbs in his belt.

  “… And I think the best part,” she was saying, “the best part is this minor character of a policeman. He’s very stiff and gruff.” She paced a few steps and turned, pantomiming stiffness and gruffness. “He’s wonderful, and he sings this wonderful song.”

  And she took up the song, trying for a deep male voice and a Cockney accent, trying mightily not to smile:

  “When a felon’s not engaged in his employment

  —his employment”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you that part,” she said, smoothing her hair with a nervous hand. “There’s this whole chorus of people on the stage, you see, and they always come in and repeat the end of each line like that”:

  “—his employment

  Or maturing his felonious little plans

  —little plans

  His capacity for innocent enjoyment

  —cent enjoyment

  Is just as great as any honest man’s

  —honest man’s

  Our feelings we with difficulty smother

  —culty smother

  When constabulary duty’s to be done

  —to be done

  Ah, taking one consideration with another—”

  Harry Snyder distorted his face and made a slow, loud retching sound, as if this were the worst and most nauseating song he had ever heard, and to simulate vomiting he spilled all the theater programs onto the floor with a splat. That won him a tense little laugh of complicity from Russell, and then there was silence in the room.

  The surprise and hurt in Nancy’s face lasted only a few s
econds before she was furious. She might cry later, but she certainly wasn’t crying yet. “All right, out,” she said. “Get out of here. Both of you. Now.”

  And they could only stumble deliriously from the room like clowns, shoving each other and mugging, making it look like a mock retreat in order to make a mockery of her anger. She slammed the door behind them so hard that flakes of paint fell from the hallway ceiling, and for the rest of the afternoon they found nothing to do but fool around in the backyard, avoiding each other’s eyes, until it was time for Harry to go home.

  * * *

  When Elizabeth finally came back she looked “awful”—that was how Lucy described it to Alice.

  “You think it’s all over, then?” Alice asked. “With Judd?” She had come to rely on her mother for interpretations of adult behavior, because there was no one else to ask, but it wasn’t always profitable: last month a girl in the ninth grade had dropped out of school because she was pregnant, and Lucy’s revulsion at the news had precluded any interpretation at all.

  “Oh, well, I don’t know about that,” Lucy said now, “and I hope you won’t start asking personal questions or anything, because it’s really none of our—”

  “Personal questions? Why would I do that?”

  “Oh, well, it’s just that you’re always so inquisitive, dear, about other people’s private business.”

  And Alice looked wounded, an expression even more frequent on her face lately than on her mother’s, or her brother’s.

  The Towers family shied away from Elizabeth most of the time, and so did Nancy; it was like having a stranger in the house. Coming heavily downstairs in her spike heels, standing at the front windows to stare out at the Post Road as if in deep thought, picking at whatever food was set before her and drinking a lot after dinner as she paged impatiently through many magazines, Elizabeth didn’t even seem to notice how uncomfortable she made everyone feel.

  Then one night, long after the children were in bed, she cast aside The New Republic and said, “Lucy, I don’t think this is working out. I’m sorry, because it did seem like a good idea, but I think we both ought to start looking for other places to live.”