A Tragic Honesty (22 page)

Then, over Christmas, Charlie had a breakdown so severe that he was committed to Fairfield Hospital in Connecticut. What exactly happened is unclear, though apparently Charlie had frightened his mother in some way, and she in turn wrote frantic letters to Sheila begging her to come home.
*
It would later transpire that Charlie had developed a kind of mania where his mother was concerned, such that he became enraged in her presence—loudly forcing her to sit down and listen to “the Truth” (a word he tended to capitalize all his life). He hadn't resorted to violence yet, but there was no telling what the future would bring. “If he were free today,” Sheila observed shortly after the breakdown, “it might be only a matter of time before he went for mother.… He might, for instance, only burn [her] house down, but he just might kill or maim her.”

The news came as a mixed blessing to Sheila, but a blessing nonetheless: Naturally she was worried about her brother (less so about her mother) and quite eager to return for his sake alone, but for a long time she'd wanted to leave London on any pretext whatsoever, and this one was pretty well incontestable. To anyone who asked, then, the Yateses explained that Sheila had been “called back to attend to a Bryant family emergency,” and this was true enough; what was less true was that Yates intended to follow “in a month or so,” as soon as he could afford to book his own passage. In fact he and Sheila had agreed to an indefinite “trial separation”—and so matters stood on March 25, 1953, when Yates stood on a Southampton dock and watched his wife and daughter dwindle into the mist aboard the
Ile de France
. After a while he trained back to London and their basement flat, hauntingly deserted except for a surly Angora cat named Sweetheart.

The next day Yates wrote a loving letter to Sheila, in which he tried to strike a balance between muted desperation (“Talk about
missing
a person!”) and brave self-sufficiency. Charlie was the most important person for now, he said, and their own problems would have to wait: “Don't worry about money, because I'm going to make it by the bushel-basket now that I've got these long empty days to work with.… Don't worry even for a minute about my taking care of myself. I'm eating enormous, beautifully planned meals and drinking absurd quantities of milk.” The letter marked the launch of a long campaign to win his wife back, and if that meant contriving an absurdly idealized image of himself—as a conscientious breadwinner who worries about big balanced meals and drinking his milk—then so be it. At the same time Yates couldn't resist a dig at his wife's sentimentality and the awful failings implied thereby; when he mentioned that he'd gone to see the movie
Come Back, Little Sheba
and found it “excellent,” he added that
she
would have called it “depressing”: “You'd have been shattered by some of the grislier scenes (like a ward for violent alcoholics) and would have dissolved in tears over the ‘happy' ending.” That said, Yates ended the letter on a properly desolate, needy note: “I still have a tendency to buy vegetables for three, and tiptoe through Mussy's room at night, and heart-rending crap like that, but Sweetheart sets me a good example by not giving a damn.”

Sheila found that she was lonely too, despite having wanted nothing so much as escape for the past six months. As she watched the forlorn Yates waving good-bye from that dock, it may have dawned rather heavily on her that, apart from her husband and daughter, there was virtually nobody in her life but a mother she couldn't stand and a brother who'd gone crazy. “Dear Rich,” she wrote from the ship, “I felt so sad when you faded into the distance,” and she added that Mussy “gets heartrending on the subject of her Daddy at bedtime every night.” She went on to describe a “gala soirée” on the boat as being “the masses in action.”

When they docked in Hoboken, she and Mussy were greeted by the curious threesome of Marjorie, Dookie, and Aunt Elsa, who described the scene in a letter she wrote her nephew a few weeks later: “Sheila and Ruth and Sheila's mother talked in the lounge while waiting for luggage.… How very unfortunate that Mrs. Bryant could not have had at least
one
of Ruth's attributes as a mother.” (She was referring, of course, to Dookie's
positive
attributes, such as a loving heart.) “[Mrs. Bryant] has nothing to give, and everything to take. She was cordial enough to me at the pier, but I know her type of personality so well.” One imagines a lightbulb flashing over Yates's head as he read that suggestive phrase, “nothing to give, and everything to take”—at least a subliminal origin, perhaps, of one of his all-time favorite character names, “Mrs.
Givings,
” the ungiving mother of the mad John in
Revolutionary Road
.

Sheila, too, was repulsed as ever by her “knick-knacky and scatter-ruggy” mother (“a mental case, to be sure”), but had to be civil as long as she was living in the woman's house in Danbury (“like one of those spreads in
Better Homes and Gardens
”). This, however, was easily done, as Sheila had long ago conquered the worst of her aversion to Marjorie; she only wished her brother could cultivate the same detachment. “Charlie's hate is making him sick because he loves her, or did,” she wrote Yates in April. “Mother, on the other hand, hates him but it doesn't violate anything because she has no feeling for him.… She doesn't feel anything for me either and the fact that she doesn't has long since stopped affecting me at all. And until Charlie feels as I do about her he'll be very sick in all departments of his life.” Little wonder that Sheila, in such company, should discover a renewed fondness for her husband.

*   *   *

Yates was determined to make the most of his “Jody” success, and now he had the further incentive of seeming a worthy provider in Sheila's eyes. He asked Monica McCall if there was any chance his “more shopworn stories”—terminal cases such as “Foursome,” “Comptroller,” and something called “Stay Away from Liquids”—would sell on the English market. McCall suggested he show them to her colleague Dorothy Daly at the Curtis Brown agency in London, and a month later Daly reported that Yates's work was “well-written” but “far, far too American in outlook to find a home here.” Yates continued to cast about. He even briefly revived his cartooning career, with particular emphasis on his old specialty,
kahts,
a portfolio of which he sent to Sheila with instructions to pass it on to McCall. Mussy was delighted by her Daddy's drawings—“[she] showed everybody the pictures of Sweetheart,” Sheila wrote—but McCall was less so: “I know nothing about placing of pictures,” she tersely replied.

Meanwhile Yates realized his best career move by far would be to write a novel—he might never again have such a bonus of time, money, and freedom. But quite simply he didn't know how to proceed: “[M]ost of my ideas so far seem better suited to short stories,” he wrote Stephen Benedict, “and before I start a novel I want to be very damn sure I've got a grip on a novel-sized theme. But I may take the plunge any day, and the notion of a possible advance from Morrow makes it particularly tempting.” Instead he wrote “Lament for a Tenor,” the sort of exercise in explicit autobiography that always made him uneasy, no matter how well the actual writing seemed to go. In fact he thought the story might turn out to be his best yet in terms of the market, and he found himself envisaging future scholars “trying to explain the streak of sentimentality that spoiled all my work.” With that in mind, his smile may have been a bit on the wry side when he read McCall's ecstatic response: “Oh that is a
wonderful
story! If
The New Yorker
made any sense they would buy it, but if they don't I swear by everything I know that I will sell it.” As usual, her instincts would prove sound.

Yates's busy careerism was partly by way of distracting himself from an awful loneliness. Apart from the pubs he had no social life to speak of, and even the pubs were beginning to pall. As he wrote Sheila, none of the regulars “ever seems to
talk
about anything—never, I mean, say anything worth listening to.… None of them seems to like one another, either—when they get hold of an outsider, like me, they all take turns backing him into a corner and giving him the straight low-down on all the others present.” He also remarked on the gratingly repetitive Anglicisms to which he was subjected: “[T]he favorite adverb for everything is ‘madly' (This pub's getting madly smart, you know; I'm feeling madly hungover today) … [and] any sort of neurosis, real or suspected, is ‘really quite mental.'” Nor did he have Aunt Mary to keep him company anymore, since she'd left in April to spend the season at her cottage in Sussex. When he got desperate enough he'd go visit her daughter Gemma, whom he found rather dull and abrasive but well-meaning, and a decent cook besides. It was Gemma who suggested he find a roommate, since Yates had qualms now about paying so little rent but doubted he could afford more. That he thought the roommate idea “pretty good,” rent question or no, says volumes about his state of mind: “[I]t'll be nice to have someone to share the cleaning and shopping chores,” he wrote, “and once the warm weather is here we won't necessarily have to be big buddies, because this place is really two separate rooms.” In the same letter he was also at pains to point out that he'd sold their bicycle to Gemma for the lavish sum of thirty shillings (“how's
that
for the opposite of kick-me-again?”), that he'd managed to gain weight (“high testimony to my conscientiousness”), and that he was “efficiency personified about the housework.” A changed man, in short, albeit a rather despondent one: “It's a wrench passing other meats [babies] on the street, and listening to them chatter on busses.”

Whether Yates's loneliness led all the way to a disastrous affair with a Piccadilly prostitute, à la “Liars in Love,” will have to remain a matter of conjecture. His daughter Monica doesn't recall his ever admitting as much, and as she points out, “[H]e wouldn't have
not
admitted it,” since he was nothing if not candid with her. But as readers familiar with “Liars” will have realized by now, most of its details about Yates's life in London are almost scrupulously accurate, from the chronology (“It was March of 1953, and he was twenty-seven years old”) to the exact location of the basement flat at 2 Neville Terrace (“where Chelsea met South Kensington along the Fulham Road”) to the English aunt who comes down to use the bathtub every morning, and so on. At any rate, something decidedly fishy appears to be lurking amid the pitiful braggadocio of a letter Yates wrote Sheila in June:

In the past three months.… I've learned that women—not just a particular kind of woman (and it's remarkable how few kinds there really are), but women in general—find me attractive as all get-out. They don't need any special indoctrination or any apologies, they just
like
me, and this has come as an enormous surprise. (It will also, I'm sure, give you a badly distorted idea of the way I've been spending my time, but never mind that for now.) The value of this is that it has enabled me to relax in a certain fundamental way for the first time in my life. It will make me a much more relaxed, less neurotic and less demanding kind of husband, I can assure you.

One could go on deconstructing this passage, but suffice to say that if the “women in general” who found Yates “attractive as all get-out” were anything like the devious, aggressive whore Christine in “Liars,” then he was probably more eager than ever to return to the relative calm of domesticity. Though perhaps, too, he looked forward to a distant day when he could recollect the “subtler pleasure in considering all the pathetic things about [Christine]—the humorless ignorance, the cheap, drooping underwear, the drunken crying.”

Sheila appears to have enjoyed less exotic diversions, though apart from her family problems she did feel a great relief at being home again. The United States was like “a beautiful sunlit garden” to her, “where it's even lovely to die or be sick.” Lest her husband take this the wrong way, she added that she wasn't worrying so much about their separation anymore because “we both miss each other very much [and] know it's a good idea.” Meanwhile an old childhood friend named Fess was teaching her how to drive (a skill she'd eventually attempt to pass on to Yates with curious results), and poor Charlie was disturbed as ever. The psychiatrist at Fairfield had told Sheila her brother was “completely recessed”—in other words, “acting like a very small child,” as when he caused a brawl on the ward by pulling a chair out from under another patient. Nor did the shock treatments seem to help, and for a while they were stopped in favor of psychotherapy per se, though Charlie was a reluctant analysand at best. He had a way of saying
Why
? or
Prove it,
when he bothered to say anything at all.

Oddly enough, Mussy adored her deranged uncle and vice versa; she also proved an excellent go-between in Sheila's relations with Marjorie and Dookie. The first was “genuinely fascinated” by the child: Once when Mussy passed her grandmother a cookie during tea and topped this with a pack of cigarettes and a polite, “Haf a chicherette, gramer,” the poor woman was stunned. “Did you teach her that?” she asked Sheila, who replied, “No. She does it because she likes to.” Whereupon Marjorie tried to pay Sheila a rare compliment: “I guess I never saw a child that had been handled right.” But no sooner were the words out that she got a “frantic” look and said, “But I couldn't, I just couldn't with you two,” and fled the room. As for Dookie, she was quite comfortable as a grandmother, which didn't require her to be either a role model or a provider. At the time she was supporting herself by sculpting souvenir bunnies and turkeys for the holidays (this while hoping for more dignified employment at the City Center art complex), and by far her favorite audience for that sort of thing was little Mussy, who liked to wear Dookie's smocks and play with her plasticene animals. Nor was Dookie a bad companion to Sheila, especially now that the nervous old woman was out from under the scrutiny of her exasperated son. In fact she was often amusing and shrewd on subjects other than herself: After a rare gathering of the Maurer family (Ida's husband had died), Dookie remarked with cold satisfaction that her sisters were “in their second childhoods”; and on the subject of her son's work, she astutely observed that there were “innumerable things” he didn't write about because of her. For a while Sheila considered it a “terrific bulwark” to know she could always move in with Dookie if life became intolerable with Marjorie.