A Tragic Honesty (48 page)

Yates's job had been considered “provisional” pending the FBI report, after which the news was finally released to the press: “After searching for months,”
Newsweek
belatedly reported in its September 16 issue, “Robert Kennedy has found a new speechwriter. He is 37-year-old novelist Richard Yates … who has just finished a screenplay for William Styron's
Lie Down in Darkness
. (Styron suggested him for the job.) The Attorney General started looking after a stormy session with Negro leaders in New York convinced him that his civil-rights speeches were missing the mark.”
*
At last Yates would get some credit in the public mind for RFK's occasional eloquence, though perhaps the most intriguing result of the
Newsweek
announcement was a phone call: Was this Richard Yates the
writer,
a woman wanted to know, and if so how long had he been working in Washington? “Yes,” Yates replied to the first question, and “about four months” to the second. The woman sighed, explaining that she'd been seeing a guy in the Village who claimed to be Richard Yates, though various people had suggested he was an imposter. “Can you imagine?” Yates told friends. “People getting
laid
claiming they're me?”

But such glee over reminders (ribald and otherwise) of his literary importance was mingled with rue. It almost hurt to be told that the French edition of
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
had been selected as Best Foreign Book of the Month, that reviews were ecstatic, when Yates himself had lost faith in his ability to write a short story. As for his stalled novel, he certainly wouldn't be able to make his January delivery date now that he'd indefinitely committed himself to Kennedy, and really he wondered if he'd ever finish the book at all, or if he should even try. Sam Lawrence tried to goad him back to work with an offer of five hundred dollars a month until the book was finished, but Yates declined: He was already in debt to the publisher and had little incentive to accept further advances at his own risk.

Yates's company became more of a mixed blessing than ever. In the early days of their courtship, Wendy Sears had caught glimpses of his occasional volatility, but never in her life had she witnessed such uncontrollable rage as when she let drop that her mother had questioned whether “Richard Yates” was his real name. Yates was convinced the woman had meant to imply he was some kind of fraud—déclassé, a foreigner perhaps, not worthy of her blueblood daughter and so forth. It didn't help that the woman had also seen fit to belittle the
Back Bay Ledger
(“Never heard of it”), which had provided one of the more glowing blurbs for
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
. “He went berserk,” said Sears, “and he wasn't even drunk. It went on and on—
‘What does she know?'
—for almost two hours, shouting, his face red. It was like something snapped in his brain.”

Yates seemed to prize the fact that Sears came from “sturdy” Brahmin stock, but it also piqued his deepest insecurities. The worst of his outbursts were almost always related to matters of class, and he often gave Sears the impression of railing against an abstraction rather than her (
“You rich Boston debutantes! Who the hell do you think you are?”
). “It had become important lately to find good reasons for losing his temper at Wendy,” Yates wrote in
Uncertain Times
*
—this in the context of a “fictionalized” account of his meeting one of Sears's cousins: a young man who happened to remark that he wanted to work for the FBI in order to carry a gun. “That cousin of yours,” says Grove, “is nothing but a spoiled, stupid, brutal fucking kid.… He's a graduate of Exeter … he's a graduate of Brown University; and now all he wants to do in the world is carry a pistol. That's how fascists are made, sweetheart: That's the way the Nazi party was conceived and born.” Perhaps, but in real life Sears had readily conceded that such a remark was unworthy of her cousin, that in fact he wasn't a bad sort at all, but anyway why was Yates screaming at
her
?
She
hadn't said anything about wanting to carry a pistol. And why drag Exeter and Brown into it?

The worst lay ahead. In early November Sam Lawrence came to town and took the couple to Billy Martin's Carriage House on Wisconsin Avenue, a “suave, expensive and quiet restaurant” (as Yates described it), where one could have drinks around the piano before adjourning to a gilded dining room. Yates liked that sort of thing and seemed at ease, when suddenly he bellowed that Lawrence was a
son of a bitch
and stood ranting at him for reasons that nobody (Yates included) could later fathom. Sears begged him to sit down and be quiet, Lawrence looked bemused, and finally “four hefty waiters” carried the shouting, writhing author out the door and threw him bodily into the street. The piano played louder throughout the ordeal, like a saloon scene in a Western movie. Sears fled the restaurant and walked home, weeping with humiliation, while Lawrence paid the check and implored the management not to call the cops. “That, I guess, is the kind of awful experience that can sometimes be laughed off,” Yates wrote with retrospective serenity in 1972, “as [Lawrence] and I were able to do the very next day, when I crept to his hotel to apologize and retrieve my raincoat.” Yates was somewhat less apologetic to Sears, and when he described the scene to Joe Mohbat it was “almost as if [Yates] were talking about a separate person, a person he didn't like, a character in a book: ‘Can you
imagine
such an asshole?'”

*   *   *

After the FBI report, Yates made an effort not to drink while at work, but it was a losing battle. Eight or nine hours of sobriety a day, at a job he now actively disliked, meant that he drank with even greater abandon at night and on weekends—so much so, in fact, that temperance at any time became out of the question. Every morning he'd be ashen and shaky with hangover, and the only remedy was to sneak well-paced shots of vodka throughout the day. Neither his heart nor his head was in his work anymore, and people in the office began to notice: His speeches were less original, even a bit lifeless, and Yates himself seemed fed up with more than just the work. When Kennedy and Guthman returned from a trip to the Midwest, the latter remarked that “people out there” were “the
real
Americans”—the folks who paid taxes and fought wars and so forth. Yates held his tongue, but later exploded to Wendy Sears: “That asshole! What does he mean, ‘the
real
Americans'? What, the
Negroes
aren't real?” Yates thought it a fatuous, reactionary thing to say, and all too typical of the basic hypocrisy that lurked at the heart of the whole political establishment, however much obscured by the liberal cant of the Kennedys. He wanted out.

Wednesday, November 20, was the attorney general's birthday, and his staff was invited to a White House reception that night for the Supreme Court and other members of the judiciary. For the first and last time Yates shook hands with President Kennedy, the object of his scorn and perhaps wistful envy, and then danced with Wendy Sears in the East Room. At one point he ran out of cigarettes, and was aghast to discover there were none on the premises.

Two days later Joe Mohbat and reporter Jack Vandenburg of the UPI were returning from lunch when they passed the teletype room on the fifth floor, where Yates stood watching the chattering ticker. He waved them inside: “They shot the president!” he hissed. “They shot the fucking president!” The reporters ran to their phones, and Yates left for the airport to spend the weekend with his daughters in New York. He was back in time to watch the funeral cortege pass beneath the fifth-floor balcony of the Justice Department. Unlike many of the others, Yates was somber but dry-eyed. The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, and Yates and Wendy met the Mohbats for a restaurant dinner in Potomac, Maryland. The four hardly spoke. Yates shook his head a few times and said “Holy shit.”

Yates had wanted to quit “gracefully,” he wrote a friend—“and just about that time the president decided to go to Dallas. And one of the millions of tiny changes brought about by
that
tragic business was that my job was dissolved. So I didn't have to quit after all, and was able to leave Robert with no hard feelings.” In the wake of the assassination, at least, Yates had come to think of the attorney general as “Robert”—not the more common “Bob,” or even (as in moments of particular ambivalence) one of “the fucking Kennedys.” Whatever else Yates thought of the man, he didn't doubt his basic decency anymore: Not only had Kennedy treated him with kindness and tact over the FBI matter, but it was hard not to have tender feelings for a man as ravaged with grief as the president's brother.

Yates continued to take a dim view of JFK. In the words of John Wilder in
Disturbing the Peace,
he considered the president “a rich boy, a glamour boy, a senator who'd never once spoken out against McCarthy even after it was safe for anyone to do so, a candidate who'd bought the primaries and rigged the convention.” In fact Yates made that exact remark, more or less, while explaining to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. why he (Yates) remained “an unregenerate Stevenson man”; and Schlesinger's reply was essentially that of Paul Borg in the novel: “I think we have to agree that Stevenson was a Greek. Kennedy's a Roman. We need Romans in the country now.”
*
But Yates didn't buy that. To him Kennedy was a shallow opportunist, the ultimate triumph of surface over substance, and such a president should be deplored no matter what he manages to accomplish (via the efforts of others, as Yates would have it). Perhaps to mock his own unworldliness, though, Yates considered the following quote from Schlesinger as a possible epigraph to
Uncertain Times
: “Never look for political ideas in a literary mind.”

*   *   *

Yates's sister Ruth had deteriorated rapidly since her decision, a few months before, to remain with her husband. That summer she'd been too drunk to attend her daughter Dodo's high school graduation, and Fred was far from sober when he arrived (late) for the ceremony. “Everybody in town knew about the situation,” their daughter recalled. “It was a horrible experience growing up in that house, especially after Fred [Jr.] went into the service and Peter went off to school.” Dodo had never really known her mother as a sane, functioning person: By the time the girl reached puberty, Ruth had given up most of her avocations at Fred's behest; she drank in the morning and tried to sleep it off during the day, in hope of being “fresh” when her husband returned from work. Their daughter would find bottles stashed all over the house, even around the mailbox where she waited for the school bus; one morning Ruth caught the girl trying to remove the hidden bottles and came after her with a kitchen knife. Another time Dodo found her mother in the closet trying to hang herself with knotted neckties: Fred had been out of town, and Ruth was terrified of his coming home that evening and finding her drunk again.

“She felt like everything was drifting away from her,” said her sister-in-law Louise. Not only were the children gone most of the time, but her husband had gotten into the habit of “working overtime” and leaving town as often as possible “on business.” A few months after Ruth had called her brother for help, she turned up at Louise Rodgers's Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night. “Your brother doesn't love me anymore,” she was sobbing. “I have nothing to live for.” That Fred had girlfriends was hardly a mystery (“He was spoiled, from a good family, so he figured he could do what he wanted,” said his daughter); more puzzling to his children was why he wouldn't arrange (or let anyone else arrange) some kind of long-term care for his alcoholic and now suicidal wife. When confronted, he'd say he was “handling it.”

That winter, Ruth called her brother again and asked if she could come stay with him in Washington. This time Yates gently talked her out of it: He was working hard on his novel and needed privacy; besides, his apartment was too small, and most of the time he shared it with Wendy Sears. The truth was that he'd come to believe his sister was a hopeless case, and felt contempt for the way she'd “fucked up her life”—become the victim of a man like Fred Rodgers, whom (Yates was sure of it now) she'd never really leave. And even though Ruth's call depressed him, he told Sears he was “glad it happened.” It brought him back to the “hard facts of life,” he said, so he could get on with putting those facts on paper and not worry about being so goddamn “literary.”

A few weeks later Ruth was in Central Islip, the state mental hospital on Long Island. She'd crashed into a parked car, and a boat anchor in the back of her station wagon had shot forward and hit her in the back of the head. When Yates visited her at the hospital, her shaved scalp was swathed in a large turbanlike bandage; but the injury was incidental to the main diagnosis of acute alcoholism that had brought her to Central Islip. Somewhere, too, among the 122 buildings of the vast asylum was Dookie, who'd been moved there after St. Johnland became too expensive.

Ruth would be in and out of Central Islip for what remained of her life, but she no longer discussed such matters with her brother. A few weeks after her first hospitalization she typed a letter to Yates full of chatty domestic news: Her son Peter had presented her with a secondhand Underwood portable for her birthday; Fred Jr.'s wife had just given birth to a baby girl who looked exactly like Fred Sr. (“this makes [my husband] very angry, because it makes him tend to feel like a grandfather, and he doesn't care for the idea”); she'd been harvesting blackberries all week even though she hated blackberries (“I do this, remembering what the man said when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest—‘Because it's there'”); and finally she hadn't visited Dookie lately because her driving was “limited to strictly local stuff, at least until I gain a little more self-confidence and grow a little more hair.” The entire letter was transcribed almost word for word in
The Easter Parade,
where it serves as evidence that Sarah Grimes has surrendered herself to the illusion that she is “the happiest, most contented little housewife in the world.” For the purpose of his novel, though, Yates saw fit to cut the last line of Ruth's actual letter: “It's quite lonely around here.”