Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  And his embarrassment did seem only momentary: when the apologies were over he subsided in his chair and looked as though he felt better.

  “… Has Evan told you about what’s happening at the plant, Charles?” Rachel inquired, and her sweet young face showed an earnest pride in being able to call her father-in-law by his first name.

  He said Evan had indeed told him, and that it was excellent news; then the news itself was revealed in their discussion of it. Evan had been named as a likely candidate for the job of “parts-control supervisor,” a responsibility to be taken along with his regular work as machinist; if it came through it would mean a pay raise substantial enough to bring the hope of engineering school a little closer.

  And Gloria made appropriate murmurs of approval and congratulation, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Parts-control supervisor” sounded as grindingly tedious as any other title Evan might bring home from the plant; and for that matter, even “mechanical engineer” seemed scarcely a term to put stars in a girl’s eyes.

  It wasn’t easy to remember now that she had ever sensed the devil in Evan Shepard: as long as she’d known him here, in the close quarters of Cold Spring Harbor, he had impressed her only as a very, very dull young man. And that was always a source of dismay, because his father conveyed such an innate and unfailing elegance.

  “You always look so elegant, Charles,” she said. “That must be a brand-new summer suit, isn’t it?”

  “No,” he told her, tugging the coat of it straight. “Matter of fact it’s a very old summer suit; I’ve been wondering if I can make it last through one more summer.”

  “Well, it’s certainly very—certainly very handsome. Very debonair.” Then she brightened with a new thought. “Tell me something, Charles: are you always called ‘Mr. Shepard,’ or do people sometimes use your military title—sort of ‘Colonel Shepard’ or whatever it may have been.”

  “Oh, no, no,” he said quickly. “I retired as a captain, you see, and that’s not at all the kind of rank that carries over into civilian life.”

  “Oh, that’s marvelous,” she cried. “ ‘Captain Shepard.’ I think that sounds extremely distinguished”—and here she turned happily to one and then the other of her children—“don’t you?”

  “Well, but no. Look,” Charles told her, straining for patience. “Let me explain this if I can. If you ever meet a man in civilian life called ‘Captain,’ he’s most likely to have been in the navy, don’t you see? Rather than the army? Because the naval rank of captain is far more—exalted: it’s only one notch below a rear admiral; whereas the army’s use of the same designation is an entirely different and lesser thing. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  It seemed to Charles that he hadn’t heard this much of his own voice in weeks, or months, and he wasn’t even sure he had yet made himself clear, though she’d responded with several little nods of comprehension as he talked. But now she said “Oh. Well, I don’t care about any of that. I’m going to refer to you as ‘Captain Shepard’ anyway. Always.” And she gave him a loose smile of lipstick and stained teeth.

  There was probably nothing to be done about a woman like this. Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

  “… Oh, and I’ll never forget that wonderful afternoon on Hudson Street,” she said an hour later as he hung smiling in the open doorway, all but dying to go home. “And wasn’t it a funny way to meet? Just imagine: if your car hadn’t happened to break down exactly where it did, and if you hadn’t happened to ring our doorbell, among all those hundreds of other people’s bells …”

  Surprisingly, there were pleasant interludes in that big, damp living room—times of mutual trust that seemed to promise better times ahead.

  “You’re sixteen now, right, Phil?” Evan asked him once.

  “Right.”

  “Well, then, you ought to have your driver’s license. They teach you how to drive up there at whaddyacallit? At your school?”

  “No, that’s not the kind of thing they—no, they don’t.”

  “Well, hell, it’s easy enough to learn. Want to go out for a lesson on Saturday?”

  “Sure,” Phil said. “That’d be fine, Evan, if you have the time. I’d like that a lot.”

  On most other afternoons, when Evan got home from the plant, he would hurry upstairs to be secluded with his wife until dinnertime; but today he was having his whiskey with her down here in the living room—and the remarkable thing was that neither of them seemed to mind including Phil in the easy flow of their after-work talk. They even laughed together at one or two of Phil’s jokes, as though Evan were just beginning to discover what a nice, bright kid he could be; and Phil could only hope they hadn’t noticed the little spasms of shivering that repeatedly seized his shoulders and made him hug his arms as if he were chilled. None of this could probably have happened if Gloria hadn’t been busy in the kitchen: it was her turn to cook dinner.

  “It’s a deal, then,” Evan was saying. “We’ll go out after lunch and we’ll—or no, wait; damn. I’ll have to be gone on Saturday.”

  And Rachel’s face seemed to sag a little. This would be one of the alternate Saturdays when Evan left home for an all-day visit with his daughter.

  “Well, we’ll do it some other day, is all, Evan,” Phil said, “and thanks. It’s something I’d really like to do.” If they could begin to do things together, almost as if they were friends, it might make all the difference; besides, there was a blood-quickening sense of adulthood in the very idea of knowing how to drive a car.

  Evan squinted and frowned at his wristwatch; then he looked up again, apparently invigorated, and said “How about getting started right now? We’ve still got a couple hours of daylight; maybe more.”

  “Well sure, Evan, if you’re not too—you know—not too tired or anything.”

  “Nah, nah, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Evan drank off the last of his bourbon and put his glass on the coffee table. “So. If you can pack up a couple of beers for us, dear, we’ll be on our way. Or make it four beers, okay? Or make it six.”

  “Coming right up, sir,” Rachel said as she hurried away to the kitchen; and Phil was glad to see her so pleased but wished she could have veiled it just a little. A subtler display of happiness might have been less embarrassing.

  He and Evan were waiting at the front door, slumped in identical postures with their thumbs in their belts, when she came back with a heavy paper bag that clinked with bottles.

  “Here you go, gentlemen,” she said. “Have a good time.”

  But Gloria trailed her into the living room, looking even more bewildered than usual, and said “What’s this?”

  “A driving lesson,” Rachel told her.

  “Oh!” Holding her drink in one hand, she used the other to make a gesture of fear: the back of the wrist pressed to her brow, with the limp fingers splayed and hanging like a broken wing. “Oh, but you will be careful, Evan, won’t you?”

  “Careful of what?”

  “Oh, well, I know I’m a foolish woman, but I’m terrified of cars. I’ve always been terrified of cars.”

  Phil was almost too ashamed to see what her gesturing hand was up to now, but he could predict it, and he looked anyway: she was cupping her left breast.

  And it might have been nothing more than that—the mortification of his mother’s carrying on—but from the moment he climbed into the passenger’s side of Evan’s car he was afraid he might fail at whatever test would have to be passed this afternoon. He felt a little better once they were out on the road; he’d found he could keep his spirits up by taking one greedy swig of beer after another, and Evan’s agreeably calm demeanor at the wheel was reassuring too.

  There was, Evan said, an almost deserted stretch of macadam some four or five miles from here; that would give them a good place to start. Then, opening a new topic, he asked how Phil felt about the way the war was going.

  “Well, I ha
ven’t really kept up with the papers or anything,” Phil said, “but I guess it’s not so good, is it. Looks like it’ll take a long time to win.”

  And Evan gave him a slightly mocking glance. “What makes you so sure we’re going to win?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say I’m sure, Evan; I mean I guess it could go the other way; all I meant was—”

  “Fucking right. Fucking right it could go the other way. And wouldn’t that be something?”

  This was the first time Phil had ever heard him say “fucking,” though he probably said it often at work every day. Maybe he even said it to Rachel when they were alone, or maybe not; but then, what the hell did he say to Rachel when they were alone? And what, apart from “darling,” did she say to him?

  “Wouldn’t that be something? Having Hitler in charge of everything? We’d be taking orders from the German army around the clock, and probably from the Japs as well. Can you imagine that?”

  No, he couldn’t. Phil Drake hadn’t yet been able to imagine very much about the war; he couldn’t even picture himself in the army, despite all the talk at school about an imminent lowering of the draft age to eighteen. It wouldn’t happen to him for two more years, and nothing that far in the future was worth imagining now. Still, Evan Shepard’s bleak vision of national defeat was disturbing—or would have been, if it hadn’t prompted Phil to remember Evan Shepard’s perforated eardrums; then he let himself relax a little in the car upholstery.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “I guess I’ll be lucky even to finish school before I’m taken in.”

  Phil Drake might not be much bigger or heavier at eighteen, but he’d be stronger and smarter and hardly ever silly any more. Except for a few widely scattered Irving School boys there would be nobody to remember what a jerk he’d been, and so the army might be the making of him; it might be the time of his life. Just before going overseas he would come home on furlough, wearing a uniform that could only make Evan Shepard weak with envy, and he’d say “Well, how’re things going at the plant, Evan?”

  Or, to be fair, Evan might have found his way into some second-rate engineering school by then, years older than any of his classmates, with Rachel at some menial daily work to make ends meet. But even a line like “How’s college, Evan?” would be good enough, coming from a soldier in wartime. It would take care of the situation; it would do the job.

  “This’ll be as good a place as any,” Evan said as he brought the car to a stop on a straight, empty blacktop road between a great many trees; then he got out and came walking solemnly around the hood.

  Squirming and sliding over into the driver’s seat as uneasily as if he knew he would never belong there, Phil made a frowning, nodding little show of attentiveness while his brother-in-law hunched close beside him to explain the gear shift.

  “Keep the letter H in your mind,” Evan said. “The gears are arranged in an H pattern, and it’s very easy to remember once you’ve learned: it gets to be second nature. Watch, now. First; second; third; reverse. Got it?”

  “Well, I think so,” Phil said, “but I’ll have to go over it a few more times. I mean it’s not exactly second nature yet, if you see what I mean. Another thing: I don’t quite get what it is the different gears do. The three forward gears, I mean.”

  “What they ‘do’?”

  “Well, I didn’t say that right. What I mean is, I understand they provide three different degrees of power, but I don’t quite—”

  “Well, no; the power’s in the engine, Phil,” Evan said patiently.

  “I know, I know; I mean of course I know the power’s in the engine; all I meant was, they provide for the transmission of power in three different—”

  “No, the transmission is what turns the rear axle.”

  “Yeah. Well, look, I don’t think I’m really as dumb about this as I may seem, Evan; I’m probably only asking a lot of questions because I’m nervous, is all.”

  And Evan gave him a quizzical look. “What’re you nervous about?”

  Later, when the car was carefully set in motion with Phil at the controls, things only got worse. “… No, easy; easy on the clutch,” Evan had to tell him, more than once, because Phil’s trembling left foot kept working the pedal heavily and in spastic haste. Then the car did accelerate nicely for a few hundred feet, and he felt the thrill of its gathering speed until Evan said “Jesus!” and wrested the wheel from him with one quick, strong hand—just in time, as it turned out, to keep them from veering into a roadside ditch that looked about four feet deep.

  Another time, when Phil was trying again to find the knack of letting the clutch in and out, they lurched and stalled dead in an embarrassing smell of gasoline.

  “You flooded it,” Evan told him.

  “I what?”

  “You flooded the fucking carburetor.”

  That was how the lesson went until darkness began to fall—nothing really taught; nothing really learned—and when Evan drove them silently home he appeared to be sulking, as though he’d been offended by the afternoon. It was clear now that there would be no further driving lessons unless Rachel could find some agreeable way of encouraging them; it seemed too, from the set of Evan’s handsome profile, that he might now be thinking of ways to let her know, tonight, what a hopeless fucking idiot her brother was.

  And Phil knew there might not be much profit or future in hating your brother-in-law, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t figure him out and see him plain. This dumb bastard would never get into college. This ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job. This asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right. Fuck him.

  “Well, hi!” Rachel called, looking up from the sofa as they came in, and her lips were shaped for saying “How’d it go?” but instead she said nothing. For years, ever since she’d been ten or eleven, her face had taken on this troubled, frightened look whenever there might be reason to dread an unfortunate report of Phil’s performance in the outside world.

  Gloria was sitting across from her, hunched in the middle of a reminiscent anecdote and talking steadily. She didn’t even seem to notice that Evan and Phil were home—she had apparently forgotten her fears of violent wreckage on the road—and she didn’t seem aware that Rachel was no longer listening to her.

  Then it was dinnertime. When Rachel had plugged in the electric fan she plugged in her radio, too, and placed it on the table. They were just in time, she announced, for Death Valley Days.

  “For what, dear?” Gloria asked.

  “Death Valley Days. It’s my favorite program. And they have a different story every week, you see, so it’s not like a serial. If you happen to miss a few weeks, that doesn’t spoil your enjoyment of it the next time.”

  And nothing, clearly, was going to spoil Rachel’s enjoyment of it tonight. Absorbed in the opening lines of radio dialogue, she tucked into her meat and potatoes with the look of a girl determinedly at peace.

  Beneath the cowboys’ amiable voices you could hear their boots clumping along a hollow wooden sidewalk; then came an unexpected pistol shot. There were several masculine calls of command, one of them delivered in falsetto, and soon, with the music rising to suggest dramatic tension, there was a thundering of horses out across the great desert plain.

  Gloria’s face was terrible with weakness and reproach as she brought a wrinkled paper napkin to her mouth and blotted it in two or three places. She seemed to be trying several different ways of sitting in her chair, as if no position were comfortable or even secure. Then she wiped a few damp strands of hair from her forehead, lifted her chin to make herself heard above the cowboy sounds, and said “Well; personally, I’ve always thought the dinner hour was for conversation.”

  On some days, with Evan gone at work, the house seemed to be steeped in idleness. Almost any activity, any way of stirring up the air in new directions, was worth considering.

 
“I know what let’s do,” Gloria cried as she and Rachel were clearing away the lunch dishes. “Let’s go to the movies.”

  And Phil could see at once that Rachel wasn’t sure if she cared for the idea. As a mature young woman, thoroughly familiar with sexual intercourse and other intimate matters of that kind, could she really be expected to take part in an afternoon at the movies with her mother and her little brother? Still, she was visibly tempted; she was thinking it over.

  “Well,” she said at last, “all right—if you’re sure we’ll be back before Evan gets home. I don’t want him ever coming home to an empty place.”

  “Oh, that’s silly, dear. There’s all the time in the world, if you’ll just give me a minute to change my clothes. Do you want to change too?”

  Rachel said she guessed she did, and it took longer than a minute; soon, though, their party of three was ready to set out, on foot, for the village. This was like old times.

  When the Drake family went to the movies, wherever they happened to be living, they never bothered to find out what time the main feature began: much of their pleasure came from waiting for a prolonged confusion to clarify itself on the screen. Eventually, after various tantalizing elements of plot had gained more and more coherence either in development or in resolution, each of the Drakes would try to be the first to turn and whisper “This is where we came in”; then, more often than not, they would agree to stay through the end again, in order to intensify the story they already knew.

  The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole. Things of the world might serve to remind you at every turn that your life was snarled and perilously incomplete, that terror would never be far from possession of your heart, but those perceptions would nearly always vanish, if only for a little while, in the cool and nicely scented darkness of any movie house, anywhere. And for Phil Drake, the light-dappled shadows of this particular movie were especially sweet: he could sense the hushed presence of his mother here and his sister there, where they belonged. Oh, it might only be further proof of how young he was for his age and of what a wretched year he’d had at school, but these two women were still the people who mattered most to him.