CHAPTER TWO

A Good School: 1939-1944

By the fall of 1939 they were back in the Village, and all was well again, at least as far as Dookie was concerned. She’d somehow wangled a commission to sculpt a bust of the boxer Joe Louis; in fact, a photograph of her doing so—with the great heavyweight posing in person and the artist’s awestruck children looking on—appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers around the country. “We’re celeberaties [sic],” Yates wrote Stephen Benedict, amid doodles of the various photographic groupings sent out by the Associated Press. “And you had to see the lousy one. Roof [Ruth] looks ten times as big as [I do], mater looks like she was a 300 pounder, and I look like I was nine years old.” For as long as his mother worked on the bust, Yates was one of Louis’s biggest fans. He and Dookie were given ringside seats at the Louis–Arturo Godoy fight at Madison Square Garden, where Yates sat scribbling a “blow-by-slug” description of the “prolims” for Benedict: “I can’t describe the Louis fight, cause I want to enjoy that without interruption. Do you blame me? If you never got this letter, you’ll know Joe lost, and I died of heart-failure.” He enclosed a peanut shell from the Garden, and later a “chip off the old block” from the completed Louis bust—which was eventually placed in the permanent collection of the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences.* Meanwhile former champion Jack Dempsey was next; Dookie dubbed the incipient series her “Sports Hall of Fame.”

Around this time Yates wrote many letters to his best friend Stephen, whose family had moved to California for the year. Apart from a sort of sophisticated whimsy and an ear for colloquial language (as an example of both, he addresses Stephen as “T-bon” throughout, to mimic the pronunciation of a Japanese friend the latter had made), the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old Yates gave little indication in these letters of the grimly precise writer he’d soon set out to become: Spelling and punctuation are almost entirely random, the penmanship sprawls, and as for substance—well, the letters are mostly about cats, or kahts as Yates calls them. Even Joe Louis is “just like a big kaht,” and Yates’s own kaht has just run away, hence he doodles the pet bounding off in a whiff of smoke. Occasionally he makes some passing mention of his new school, or a movie he’s just seen (“the Cowardly Lion was a giggle”), or Joe Louis of course, but he rarely strays altogether from the main theme:

I really wrote you the verra nite what I gotcher letter. But the giggleiest thing happened! You see mine honorable sister took an excuse to her verra strict princepal [sic], and (oh-ho-ho-haw) she (this’ll kill you) was about to depart from the principle’s [sic] desk, and (haw-haw) she glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw that her “excuse” bore the picture of a kaht, and a “Dear T-bon.” Laugh? I thought I’d die!!

The passage gives a fair idea of Yates’s epistolary style, perhaps the kind of mock-refined patois affected by some of the more precocious wags at Scarborough Country Day. Certainly the letters suggest that he badly misses both Benedict and the school, more in what he omits than otherwise (“It will be peachy to see the T-bon this summer”). But the overall impression is one of flighty evasive boredom, rather like a child playing with his food; reading between the lines and doodles, it seems as if there was little in Yates’s life except cats and Joe Louis that he much cared to write or even think about. In fact one is vividly reminded of the fourteen-year-old Phil Drake in Cold Spring Harbor, a boy who can “cut through a lot of confusion” with his occasional insight, “even if all he wanted to do was fool around with the cat or examine his face in the mirror, even if he lapsed into the kind of willfully exasperating childishness that suggested he would always be younger than his age.” As for these willfully childish letters to “T-bon,” their subtext is suggested by Yates’s reaction to them forty years later, when Benedict sent him copies in the hope he’d find them amusing. Yates was not amused: It was good to hear from Benedict again, he wrote back, but not so good to get the letters; he didn’t like to think about that time in his life.

“My school is peachy (oh-so),” Yates wrote in October 1939, and for his friend’s benefit drew caricatures of his new teachers; as a cartoonist Yates was adept at finding just the right physical detail (an effete way of folding the arms, an asymmetrical scowl) to reveal the essence of his subject. Yates may have found the all-male staff of Grace Church School to be a group of ludicrous grotesques, but at least the location was convenient (less than two blocks from the family’s latest apartment on West Eleventh), and Dookie was no doubt pleased by the Episcopal affiliation (“the only aristocratic faith in America”). The school, however, was probably not as “peachy” as Yates made it out to be. In his novel Uncertain Times, Yates’s alter ego William Grove casts back to his traumatic first day of school as a thirteen-year-old, “as the only new boy where everyone else had known each other all their lives”:

He was standing alone in the school yard when another boy came up to him with a look of lazy menace, said “Hey there, Bubbles” and turned away again. And there was no denying that his face at thirteen did have a sort of bubbly look: eyes so girlishly round they seemed incapable of squinting in a manly way; lips so plump that only an effort of will could compress them into dignity. Luckily, or mercifully, the name “Bubbles” had failed to catch on, and later in adolescence he had managed almost to come to terms with his face.

The key word is almost. Yates—a strikingly handsome man by any standard, at least in his youth—disliked the way he looked. With the same faculty that made him a decent amateur cartoonist and superb fiction writer, he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, “bubbly,” and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual. The beard he grew in his forties was by way of partially concealing his “Aubrey Beardsley mouth” (as one friend put it), and the gathering bags under his eyes helped take care of the roundness somewhat, though he never stopped squinting a little for formal portraits.

But there’s really not much reason to think Yates was more than normally miserable that first year at Grace Church School, or rather that school life per se was more than a minor cause of whatever misery he felt. That the “Bubbles” tag (or its equivalent) did in fact “[fail] to catch on” is borne out somewhat by the lapel pin for “leadership” he was awarded in December, along with pins for “improvement” and “an average of above 80 for the last month.” Yates’s “actual size” doodles of these pins (smaller than a fingernail) also suggest that he was aware of just how dubious they were, though perhaps his giddiness in relating the news to “T-bon” is not entirely a matter of self-mockery: “You might be inerested [sic] in getting an earful of the gleeful fact that due to my dutiful studies … I, R. Walden Yates, was awarded 3 little bronze lapel-pins.” But if this means that Yates was not quite a pariah, he doesn’t seem to have been all that popular either. In the many letters he wrote that year, amid all the manic chatter about cats and movies and so on, there’s only a single glancing reference to a potential new companion: “Me and another guy who swings a wicked harmonica, have a sort of an orchestra (not as good as the scarborough jitterbugs).” Clearly he missed Scarborough, and especially his friend Stephen, whose return in June at least gave him something to look forward to.

But it wasn’t to be. Dookie had decided to rent a cottage that summer near Milton, Vermont, in the mountains around Lake Champlain. Yates tried hard to coax Benedict into joining them: “You’re invited to a peachy joint in VT where there’s a lake—a free rowboat a big mountain a bathing suit a rustic cabin and best of all Homer [the cat] will be there!!” At the bottom of the letter is a cartoon of Homer lugging his suitcase in the direction of a festive sign (“VERMONT!”), followed by a typical Yatesian witticism: “Remember: ‘You can’t get ‘T.B.’ in ‘V.T.’” All for naught. Benedict couldn’t come, and Yates was faced with the task of finding friends among fellow campers. “Bud Hoyt is getting to be quite chummy and stays late every nite at our cottage playing every kind of game from slap-jack to monopoly,” he wrote enticingly to T-bon a few weeks later, but that was the only mention of Bud Hoyt or anybody else. In late July he wrote a last wan postcard—“You can still come, you know”—by which time he’d probably reverted to spending his days in the usual manner, à la Phil Drake, “fooling around on the floor with the cat … hearing his mother’s relentless talk and longing for it to stop, dying a little when the alcohol began to thicken her tongue.”

*   *   *

Along with the curative powers of fresh water and mountain air, another motive for the Vermont sojourn was to escape from creditors again; during their last days on Eleventh Street the family had been reduced to using the backstairs, the better to sneak in and out of their apartment without alerting the landlord. But Dookie had a flair: When the family came back in August she found a much better place at 62 Washington Square, one of four brownstones on the south side of the park known as “Genius Row,” where writers such as Stephen Crane, O. Henry, and Frank Norris had lived around the turn of the century. The mystique appealed to Dookie, and besides, they had the entire ground floor to themselves. Soon the place was filled with students and statuary and the industrious odor of plasticene; life was back to normal again.

More or less. By then Ruth was nineteen, and college had never been in the picture; her flirtation with Buchmanism had long passed, and she’d begun dating a series of men whom Dookie found feckless and even a little sinister. The change in Ruth had been troublingly abrupt: Just a year before, she’d carried on a kind of calf-love courtship with Russell Benedict, who was almost two years younger than she; but when he returned from California he found that Ruth regarded him as little more than a boy. “I’d lost out to much older suitors,” he remembered, “but she was nice about it—Ruth was always nice—and there were no hard feelings.” She’d met some of these older men while working as a volunteer for the Associated Willkie Clubs of America, where Dookie had hoped she’d find some nice Republican boys from good families. And so she did, or rather they were Republican, but neither they nor certain others struck Dookie as remotely suitable. Happily the whole dilemma was solved on Easter Sunday 1941, shortly after a family of war refugees moved into the apartment upstairs.

Actually they were American, despite their faintly British accents. Frederick “Fritz” Rodgers, the father—perhaps patriarch is more apt—had been sent to London many years before by his employer, Cherry-Burrell, a company that designed dairy machinery. While the father traveled around Europe selling pasteurization units in countries with a high incidence of bacterial disease, his son Fred junior attended the exclusive Mr. Gibbs’s School in London, along with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s children and the future actor-playwright Peter Ustinov, who became Fred’s good friend. During the Blitz the family was removed to rural Surrey, until the British government advised them as Americans to leave the country. And so they came in somewhat reduced circumstances to live in that upstairs apartment on Genius Row, obligingly vacated by a bohemian aunt who painted.

Dookie was rather smitten by the gentlemanly Fritz Rodgers, all the more so when her sociable inquiries revealed a family pedigree that must have made her swoon. Fritz’s sickly wife Louise was a descendant of John Alden, who’d come over on the Mayflowerwith William Bradford, and her father was a Nantucket Gardner, no less, whose home on India Street would later become an historical landmark. Nor was such distinction limited (as in the case of Dookie’s children) to one side of the family. In fact the name Rodgers is all but synonymous with American naval history: Fritz was the great-grandson of John Rodgers, the “Father of the American Navy,” and was maternally linked with Matthew C. Perry, who forced Japan to reopen trade with the West, and Oliver Hazard Perry, who won the Battle of Lake Erie. All the Rodgers men had pursued naval careers as a matter of course—a tradition that, alas, came to an end with Fritz himself, who became legally blind during his third year at Annapolis after a boxing mishap. Since then he’d dabbled in a number of things—architecture, poetry, acting, scientific inventions—and such a wide range of cultivation, coupled with Old World manners and a liking for sherry, made him an almost ideal companion for Dookie. Theirs was a platonic bond, facilitated somewhat by the fact that Louise Rodgers spent most of her time in bed.

And then there was the man’s only son and namesake, who not only had the blood of the Aldens and Gardners and Rodgers and Perrys running through his veins, but was the spitting image of Laurence Olivier. As a former student at one of England’s best public schools, his accent was more pronounced than that of his parents or even his London-born sister, and his manners seemed impeccable. For all the surface polish, though, Fred was something of a mystery even to his own family. “Charming but opaque” is how his younger sister described him with the benefit of much hindsight; “I never did know what made him tick.” Unlike the rest of the family, Fred had little interest in books or art or for that matter anything that smacked of learning or culture. Rather than attend university he’d served a few years of apprenticeship with an engineering firm in England, and when he returned to the States he found work as a machinist with Grumman Aviation in Long Island—a job he held, with very occasional promotion, for the rest of his life. “I’m a laborer,” he liked to say in that elegant accent of his, and indeed he preferred the company of other laborers at the aircraft plant. At first blush this suave, handsome, well-born young man seemed to have little in common with the proletariat; his fine manners held him in check, though like Tony Wilson in The Easter Parade he had a good sense of humor and “seemed always to be laughing at some subtle private joke that he might tell you when you got to know him better.” And then you got to know him better and he’d tell you: “Oh, I believe in humanity. Humanity’s perf’ly all right with me. I like everyone but coons, kikes, and Catholics.” That was the Fred his friends knew.

But all Dookie knew in 1941 was that Fred was the son of a gentleman and the descendant of many more, and probably she was being sly when she asked her daughter to take a basket of Easter eggs to the little girl who lived upstairs. By then Ruth (through her Willkie contacts) had found a paying job with United China Relief, and for publicity purposes her employer had loaned her an elaborate silk dress and Mandarin hat to wear to the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade. Thus attired, Ruth knocked on the Rodgers’s door and was met by a young man in grease-stained overalls who appeared to be Laurence Olivier blithely impersonating a laborer. The rest of her life was decided in that moment.

*   *   *

In the months leading up to her marriage, Ruth was away much of the time on all-day drives with Fred, and the fifteen-year-old Richard was lonelier than ever. As the clouds of puberty gathered around him, he began to resent his life and covet his sister’s imminent freedom. He was even getting a little tired of his adored and adoring Dookie—her constant talk, tipsy jokes, silliness about money, the magazines she always smeared with lipsticky fingers, the dusty, noisy mess of her sculpting, the whole dingy rigmarole of being “free spirits.”

Nor was school any escape. The only subjects he tended to pass anymore were English and History (“and I only passed History because I could fake it”); such was his depression that he simply couldn’t muster the effort to work at things that didn’t interest him. And among the things that didn’t interest him were math and science, foreign languages, any kind of athletics that required his own participation, and (perhaps above all) having to relate to boys with whom he felt nothing in common, so alien was his experience to theirs. He didn’t even like to read much; rather he spent most of his time, as ever, hiding in movie theaters and imagining a different sort of life for himself, and by way of further escape he began to write about it. Such “movie-haunted” stories were consistently praised by his English teachers, even stories that the author considered “pretty awful.”* At age fifteen he’d suddenly found a vocation, and no matter how much difficulty it caused him in the years ahead, he never seriously considered a different one.

Of course Dookie had never doubted that her son was special; if he failed in school it was because his needs were different from those of ordinary boys. Meanwhile it must have pained her deeply to see what an unhappy, brooding adolescent he’d become. More than anyone she knew how sensitive he was, how like herself, and clearly he needed more understanding than he was liable to get at a pedestrian little church school in the Village. Or so she might have thought when, early that summer, she learned of a prep school in Connecticut that believed in individuality. As Yates described this pivotal moment in A Good School, she was at the lavish wedding of one of her sculpting students (“a rich girl [who] must have romanticized my mother as a struggling artist”), when an overbearing grande dame insisted that Dookie look into Avon Old Farms for her gifted, maladjusted son; that it was the “only school in the East that understands boys.” After that it would have been quite in character for Avon’s headmaster at the time—a zealous recruiter named Brooke Stabler—to respond to Dookie’s letter of inquiry with a personal visit to Genius Row and, having come this far, to pitch the school as precisely the sort of place where the otherwise foundering son of a sculptor was likely to flourish, and moreover to offer her on the spot a scholarship for half the (rather exorbitant) tuition. And finally, of course, it was entirely like Dookie to insist that Vincent Yates see the need, whether he could afford it or not, to send their son to a proper New England boarding school—until the man relented, at last, as usual.

Avon Old Farms was the brainchild of Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle, though the school might have seemed (as Yates put it) “conceived in the studios of Walt Disney.” Mrs. Riddle herself might have been so conceived, for the figure she struck as a stout, glowering dowager lent itself to the cartoonist’s art. Born Effie Pope, she adopted her maternal grandmother’s name, Theodate, at the already formidable age of twelve, and from that point on led a life of exemplary activity and idealism. She was the very tissue of which legends (local ones, at least) are made: Though whacked on the head by a heavy beam and given up for dead, Theodate survived the sinking of the Lusitania and went on to become Connecticut’s first female architect. She deplored cold rationalism, and thus was able to reconcile an ardent socialism with the enormous personal fortune she inherited as a young woman; and finally she combined all her assets—fortune, idealism, architectural prowess, and not least an iron will—in building what would be, both in design and principle, “an indestructible school for boys.”

For this purpose she acquired three thousand acres of lush woodlands around the Farmington River near the town of Avon, about twelve miles from Hartford. She designed her school in the English Cotswold style, and insisted it be built using red sandstone from local quarries. She further insisted, with bizarre but rather endearing fanaticism, that the five hundred or so construction workers restrict themselves to the use of seventeenth-century tools (e.g., broad axes and old-style staples and wedges), and even to “work by rule of thumb and to judge all verticals by eye.” When she discovered a worker using a modern level and plumb rule, Mrs. Riddle became furious and sacked the lot of them; she hired a smaller group of costly artisans and finally ended up spending more than five million 1926 dollars to complete the project to her exacting satisfaction. And for a while it may have seemed worth it: The campus was like a Cotswold Brigadoon buried in the woods of Connecticut, what with the “gabled slate roofs whose timbers had intentionally been installed when the wood was young so that in aging they would warp and sag in interesting ways,” as Yates described it, noting also the flagstone paths, the wide lawns, the lead-casement windows, and so on.

But all this was only a part—arguably the lesser part—of Mrs. Riddle’s vision. Aspirando et perseverando was and is the Avon motto, and to embody this Mrs. Riddle chose as her mascot a winged beaver, hence the central tenet of her philosophy: No matter how modest one’s abilities, if one persevered like a certain tenacious long-toothed rodent, then there were no heights to which one could not aspire. And it was precisely the student of modest ability—or thwarted potential as the case may be—that intrigued Mrs. Riddle. “There were always those who were wealthy, who wanted to play polo in a relaxed atmosphere,” said alumnus Reed Estabrook, describing a typical Avon student in those days. “But most of us had been in academic trouble for one reason or another (like myself), or social trouble, at a more traditional school.” The intolerance for misfits so commonplace at such bastions as St. Paul’s, Andover, and Exeter was anathema to the arch-progressive Avon, which was innovative in a number of ways. Seventy-five years ago there was an on-site psychologist to commiserate with some of the quirkier students, as well as a remedial reading program instituted by Harvard-trained specialists. Indeed, Avon’s remarkable success with both the quirky and dyslexic was its greatest claim to fame, and nowadays on-site psychologists and remediation programs are de rigueur at all but the most benighted schools.

But the paramount issue for Mrs. Riddle was breeding—an elusive concept, to be sure. Though Avon was “founded for the sons of the gentry,” the phrase is misleading; the socialist founder was stern in pointing out that “good breeding is not dependent on birth” but rather cultivated after a fashion that Mrs. Riddle, in her Deed of Trust, was at pains to prescribe in rather byzantine but not wholly unreasonable terms. The matter almost defies summary (though the Deed is an interesting and readable document) but goes something like this: Manners, character, breeding if you will, are far more important than any academic test, which is not to say that intellectual discipline isn’t important, merely that it needs to be pursued in terms of one’s individual abilities and interests, and in conjunction with some form of creative manual labor—hence the “community service” requirement for every Avon student. “The Founder believes that a boy who has never known the hardship of work on a farm, in a forest, or in shops … has been deprived of one of the most valuable experiences that life can offer for the development of character.” But all this is moot if one doesn’t maintain “smartness in attire,” and to this end the founder insisted on an almost Wodehousian dress code: During the day students wore either a herringbone tweed jacket or the official Avon blazer (burgundy, brass buttons, a winged beaver on the pocket), and at night they dressed for dinner in Oxford gray pin-striped trousers, black double-breasted suit jackets, white shirts with stiff detachable collars and hand-tied bow ties. “A slovenly, slouching lad is pleasing to no one,” wrote Mrs. Riddle, and added a quote from William James: “‘If a young man does not dress well before he is twenty, he will never dress well.’”

All very true, no doubt, and undeniably influential in the moral and sartorial development of one Richard Yates. “Given good-enough clothes and shoes,” one of his characters reflects, “you could always look dignified whether you were or not, and almost everybody could be counted on to call you ‘sir.’” Now is not the time to pause over how much Yates took all this to heart, except to note that it went well beyond clothing and is best summarized by the inscription above the entrance to Scarborough Country Day: Manners Maketh Man. Frank Vanderlip and Theodate Riddle were alike in that essential sentiment, which was much impressed on Yates before, during, and even after Avon.

Prior to the decadent reforms of Headmaster Stabler, Mrs. Riddle had directed her students to buy uniforms exclusively at Brooks Brothers, by far the most traditional American clothier. But in an effort to make Avon more accessible to its growing number of scholarship students, Stabler had defied the Deed of Trust and switched the school’s exclusive franchise to the more downscale Franklin Simon.* Avon students were advised to buy at least two tweed jackets, two sets of evening clothes, and one (optional) Avon blazer—but even at Franklin Simon’s moderate prices, Yates could only afford one of each (and no blazer), as well as a few pieces of “community service” attire such as dungarees, work shirts, and boots from an Army and Navy store.

Finally, before his departure, Yates spent a rare evening in his father’s company. “His home was refreshingly clean and neat after the chaotic sculpture shop where I lived,” Yates noted in A Good School. “When we’d stacked the dishes we sat around talking for a couple of hours—hesitantly and awkwardly, as always, but I remember thinking we’d done better than usual.” Before long Yates would have reason to be glad about the relative success of this visit, and in the meantime his father—determined to be gracious despite the “preposterous” expense of Dookie’s latest venture—presented him with an old heavy suitcase and a “fitted leather shaving kit, new-looking and stamped with his initials,” which Yates managed to keep for several years until he lost it in Germany during the war.

“And in 1941, there arrived at the School a young man by the name of Richard W. Yates,” wrote Gordon Ramsey in his history of Avon, “who combined shrewd powers of observation and even more vivid powers of guesswork to salt away reminiscences for a novel, patently about Avon Old Farms, which appeared in 1978 under the title A Good School.” According to Ramsey, the reactions of Yates’s former classmates and teachers to “this obvious roman à clef” ranged from “apoplectic” to “philosophic and amused.” In fact the latter was far more the norm (among the few who actually read the book), and naturally such reactions depended on the reader’s sense of humor as well as how lightly one got off. As for denying that a particular character was (essentially) oneself, Yates made that difficult by hardly bothering to change names or physical details, and most of the novel’s key episodes are based memorably on life. “That’s me, all right,” said Harry Flynn of the character Terry Flynn, when told of the latter’s crooked pinkie, and such a formula applies pretty much to the rest of the characters as well.* “What a flood of memories your top-notch cast brought back,” Mason Beekley (Avon ’44) wrote Yates after the book appeared, and his response was representative. “Aside from being just plain well-written and excellently crafted, your book—so close to being biographical—provided an immensely poignant experience for me, and I thank you for that.” Most of Yates’s classmates have a generally fond memory of the school, as well as a sense that their experience—as the last class of the old Avon, drafted almost entirely into the war—was extraordinary, a story that needed to be told, and those who read the book were (mostly) glad Yates had seen fit to tell it.

And unlike most of his stories, this one began unhappily and ended on a somewhat hopeful note. As with his characters Robert Prentice and Phil Drake and William Grove, Yates’s first year at prep school “was almost unalloyed in its misery.” Apart from being poor, unathletic, untidy, and immature in every respect, Yates fancied himself a writer of all things, and (whether he meant to or not) looked the part. What he had to endure is the sort of everyday hazing that, however silly and unfounded, the victim never quite forgets. At the time Yates internalized his rage, and later sublimated it into his work; in fact one of his most common themes is pertinent, what he described (in a note to his story “A Really Good Jazz Piano”) as “the pain implicit in any form of condescension.” Yates came to despise condescension and sensed it everywhere, at all times, and the cathartic power of art went only so far toward calming him. Those who knew him as an adult and wondered at his bizarre outbursts—not always explicable in terms of alcohol or mental illness—would do well to consider what he suffered as the poorest, weakest boy at a New England prep school (much less as the smothered son of an unstable, alcoholic sculptress).

But then it would have been worse at almost any other school. Not only were there a fair number of misfits to rival Yates—Avon students were known to refer to themselves as “Avon Old Queers”—but a state of economic democracy was enforced to a remarkable degree. By the founder’s design it was all but impossible for students to spend money: Other than occasional snack sales there were no vendors on campus, and it was a mile and a half to the nearest entrance to the estate. The dress code, too, served its purpose, as everyone wore the same clothes and were therefore equally inclined to play the parts of proper gentlemen. Also, in what would seem a tremendous boon for weaklings, athletics were restricted to intramural competition between two teams, “Diogenes” and “Eagles,” as Mrs. Riddle thought games with other schools were a waste of time and emotion, and that athletics in general were much too emphasized at that age.

The playing field could hardly be leveled enough in Yates’s case. He later told a friend that he was “held together by safety pins” at Avon, and such a remark resonates beyond the literal. Yates, especially that first year, was the quintessential “slovenly, slouching lad” who pleases no one. “Thin, haggard, disheveled,” was how one classmate described him, and his good friend Hugh Pratt elaborated: “Dick was obviously poorer than the other students. He had to wear the same thing over and over, and it affected his demeanor: He was not happy-go-lucky.” But the most vivid description of the fifteen-year-old Yates is found, as usual, in his own words—that is, from the viewpoint of teacher Frenchy La Prade in A Good School, as he confronts the “gangly, dreary-looking” William Grove: “The kid was a mess. His tweed suit hung greasy with lack of cleaning, his necktie was a twisted rag, his long fingernails were blue, and he needed a haircut.”

Worst of all, and despite Mrs. Riddle’s good intentions, athletics were the absolute key to social success, and everybody had to participate in at least two sports a semester. Those who were relegated to what was called the “track and soccer scenario” were stigmatized as sissies, and Yates was perhaps the most representative figure. “He was fragile,” said classmate Jim Stewart, “and that’s a bad thing to be at that age.” For most of that first year, then, Yates was goaded into fights he had no hope of winning, paddled by upperclassmen, and humiliated in a number of more intimate ways. “The shower room was the worst part of [his] day,” Yates wrote of William Grove. “Not only was he absurdly thin and weak-looking, but he hadn’t yet developed a full growth of pubic hair: all he had was some brown fuzz, and there was no hiding it.” By all accounts the queer jokes were most prevalent during shower time: The group would shrink away from their victim, as if to avert sexual assault, and then lock him out of his dorm room, naked, when he was due to report to the refectory. And because of Yates’s frailty and fatal lack of pubic hair, such high jinks were liable to get even more out of hand, as happened one night toward the end of that first semester.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in A Good School is when Grove is held down and molested by a group including Terry Flynn, Ret Lear, and Art Jennings. To be more exact, Grove’s sparse pubic hair is shaved off; then a vigorous but unsuccessful attempt is made to bring him to climax while Grove, with pathetic bravado, begins “laughing artificially and shouting through his laughter: ‘Yeah, yeah, keep trying, you sonofabitches, keep trying—wow, are you guys ever having yourselves a good time.’”

Did it really happen that way? Ret Hunter, in a letter he wrote Yates in 1979, seemed unable or unwilling to recall: “Most of my friends have said everything from, ‘Sue the bastard,’ to ‘What a sad, unhappy boy he must have been.’ Irv Jennings said, ‘You must admit, Ret, we were a couple of bastards!’ The truth is somewhere in the middle.” Irv Jennings, when asked about the incident, denied any direct involvement—though he did admit to being a witness and offered a few clarifying details: Yates was not actually masturbated, he said; rather a bottle of hair tonic was poured on his genitals to make (so the joke went) his pubic hair grow. And really it seems as if the whole episode ended almost fortunately for Yates: That is, when his genitals began to swell painfully from the tonic, his tormentors became worried that he’d report them to the headmaster, with almost certain expulsion to follow. But he never did; the whole thing blew over, and Yates was left alone after that—though like Bill Grove, he might have spent a number of nights “wondering how he was going to live the rest of his life.”*

*   *   *

On December 6, 1941, Yates’s sister Ruth married Fred Rodgers in an Episcopal ceremony. The bride’s side of the church was somewhat depleted by the calculated absence of Dookie’s sisters, and Vincent Yates (whose family was something of a mystery to his children) also came alone; nor were there many contemporaries of the bride, since Ruth’s life had been too chaotic and itinerant for her to make lasting friendships. But friends and relatives of the Rodgers family, who came in force from Long Island, Cape Cod, and beyond, made a more than respectable gathering, and along with Fred’s pals from Grumman there were as many as a hundred guests at the reception in the St. Regis Hotel. Dancing to a live orchestra followed the sit-down dinner, and Dookie made the most of the Shocking Pink dress and hat she’d bought for the occasion. A study in contrast was her son Richard—on a weekend pass from Avon—who seemed to resent his mother’s extroversion and wasn’t inclined to celebrate. He moped around and said little, while his mother danced with Fritz Rodgers and otherwise carried on as if to compensate for her son’s dreariness.

Ruth was happy. She adored her husband and was utterly devoted to him and the three children they would produce in the first four years of marriage. In those early days she relished every aspect of motherhood, even the act of giving birth, which she likened to an operatic experience à la Wagner, and she loved Wagner. During the war Fred continued to work at the Grumman plant as enlisted naval personnel, and Ruth would wash his uniforms in the bathtub while listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. “She was smart and beautiful,” said her sister-in-law Louise, who described Ruth as having “a Judy Garland personality and a Joan Crawford look.” But really Ruth was hard to pigeonhole one way or the other; for all her gentle, seeming simplicity, she was a person of considerable refinement. She read widely, wrote stories for her children, and became an expert gardener—and while some of her finer nuances may have been lost on her husband, he loved and appreciated her in his fashion. For a while it was a far better life than she’d known before. And to a seemly but increasing degree, Ruth tried to distance herself from Dookie in favor of her husband, children, and comparatively stable in-laws, though Dookie wasn’t easily gotten rid of.

*   *   *

While away at his sister’s wedding, Yates missed a memorable moment or two at Avon. That Sunday one of the administrators, Commander Hunter, disrupted activity on the polo field to announce, with tears in his eyes, that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Then, as if to punctuate the matter, Mrs. Riddle’s long-suffering husband—who’d always served as the voice of reason during her more imperious moods—died the very next day. The two events would have intricate consequences for Avon, not altogether unpleasant as far as Yates was concerned. In any event he came back to an already changing atmosphere—a mood of fatalism that became all the more palpable a few days later, with the death of poet-hero John Magee (Avon ’40) in the Battle of Britain.*

By the spring semester Headmaster Stabler was trying to instill a spartan, martial spirit in the students with an ambitious new program of “wartime discipline” (air-raid drills, blackouts, more community service), one aspect of which had a distinct impact on Yates’s life at Avon and beyond. A schoolwide essay contest was held on the theme of “America at War”—and the winner was Yates, whose reward was a place on the staff of the school newspaper, The Avonian, to which he’d end up devoting most of his time and energy for the next two and a half years. The Avonian was something to do, or rather something he could do, having failed at everything else. It wasn’t, however, any great social coup; there was no real prestige in any nonathletic activity, but at least The Avoniangave him a pretext for mingling with other would-be writers, whose absence from the fields of glory was almost as conspicuous as his own.

The first real friends he made were older boys who sympathized with his loneliness. Davis Pratt,* a sixth former, was something of a role model—“an individualist, a pixie,” as his teacher Clarence Derrick recalled, “the type of person the Avon educational philosophy was designed to enroll and foster.” Pratt’s teachers indulged his aversion to conventional studies and gave him the freedom to pursue his own interests: photography and ornithology. Thus he found both his vocation and avocation at Avon, and when he wasn’t wandering around the woods with his binoculars and camera, he was a friendly reader of Yates’s apprentice fiction, which he compared to the work of Thomas Wolfe (an unequivocal compliment in those days). The two corresponded during the war and died within a year of each other, though it’s doubtful they stayed in touch in the meantime. Still, a look at Pratt’s later career suggests a bond of sorts: He went on to become the first curator of photography at Harvard, where (according to his New York Timesobituary) he’d started as an unpaid volunteer. Clarence Derrick expressed the “moral of Davis Pratt” as follows: “If no niche exists, create one for yourself through persistence, dedication and hard work.” Such a process, in Yates’s case, also began in earnest at Avon.

Lothar Candels, who wrote The Avonian’s humor column (“The Beaver’s Log”), formed what he called a “mutual admiration society” with Yates. Candels was the son of the school cook—a trained European chef who prepared excellent meals but was nonetheless regarded as “a menial”—and thus was no stranger to condescension and outright persecution. Both he and Yates were rather quirky young men with unconventional interests: Candels, in addition to being an occasional writer and photographer, was an avid butterfly collector; once, when he’d proudly mounted a rare moth, a cloddish classmate (whose fictional counterpart figures prominently in A Good School) leaned his elbow on the glass and deliberately damaged the specimen. But Candels was so good-natured that most of the students were fond of him, and like Davis Pratt he became a kind of “parent figure” (as he put it) to the unhappy Yates. “He was always stooped,” Candels remembered, “as though he were carrying around a burden.” Even then Yates was given to sudden brooding depressions—during which, if coaxed, he’d speak in a desultory way of his family, his poverty, his feelings of oddness and despair. Often he wondered aloud whether he should see the school psychiatrist. But his own melancholy seemed to embarrass him, much less talking about it, and he was willing to be kidded out of his funks by the kindly, waggish author of “The Beaver’s Log.” And no matter how fragile Yates seemed in other respects, Candels was impressed by the strength of character he showed as a writer, his precocious sense of total commitment—an enthusiasm he was generous in sharing. “Dick inspired me to write,” said Candels, who later courted his wife by composing sonnets. “He was a sensitive and very touching young man.”

*   *   *

“I suppose you know Ruth is married now, and not only that but she is going to have a baby about the first of October,” Yates wrote Stephen Benedict in the summer of 1942.* “She and her husband, and Mother and I are all living here in Cold Spring Harbor which is a swell little town on the North Shore, about thirty-five miles from New York.”

The ménage to which Yates came home that summer in Cold Spring Harbor—so gruesomely evoked in his novel of the same name—was almost certainly Dookie’s idea. The elder Rodgerses, Fritz and Louise, had moved out of Genius Row and gone to live in Nantucket for a while; with Ruth married and Richard away at Avon, Dookie found herself alone in an apartment she could scarcely afford in the first place, and now her child-support payments were cut in half. Meanwhile Ruth and Fred had a baby on the way, but the best they could do on his modest salary was a tiny Long Island apartment where they lived for a few months after the wedding. Little doubt, then, that Dookie took it on herself to solve their problems with her usual flair: Combining their meager incomes, they could just afford to rent a dilapidated clapboard house on the fringe of one of the more affluent communities on the North Shore—the hilly beaches of which had been immortalized in the stained-glass designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose estate was one of the many fine old places overlooking Cold Spring Harbor.

That summer Dookie and Richard really got to know Ruth’s husband for the first time, and both formed an enduring dislike of him (and vice versa). It must have been a shock for Dookie, who believed so wholly in the idea of aristocracy, to be confronted with this awful daily reminder that every advantage of breeding and education could, sometimes, result in such a consummate lout as her son-in-law. And then to be fair: A better man than Fred might have buckled under the strain of having to live with Dookie. What must have been a fatal incompatibility is nicely suggested by the family dinner scenes in Cold Spring Harbor: “Well,” says Gloria Drake; “I’ve always thought the dinner hour was for conversation.” Fred appears as the cretinous Evan, shorn of his accent but essentially intact: “Evan Shephard hardly looked up from his plate, even in response to murmured questions from his wife, and his stolid concentration seemed to suggest that eating, no less than the day’s work of fathering children, was just another part of a man’s job in the world.” Nor was this laconic laborer likely to find much in common with his bumbling, bug-eyed brother-in-law, and perhaps their one attempt to bond was very like the abortive driving lesson Evan gives Phil in the book, though the latter’s humiliation (that is, Yates’s) probably made little difference in his overall view of Fred: “[He] 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 ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job.… Fuck him.”

In desperate need of pocket money and escape, Yates looked all over the countryside for a summer job, but discovered that most places wouldn’t hire anybody under the age of eighteen. Finally he found employment of sorts as a parking-lot attendant at a roadside restaurant called Costello’s: “All I do is rush around in a chauffeur’s cap and tell people where to park their jalopies,” he wrote Benedict. The chauffeur’s cap had been his own idea: Except for a token sum of five dollars a week he was paid entirely in tips, which began to pick up once he’d found an official-looking cap in an Army and Navy store and thus ceased being a random kid wagging a flashlight. One hesitates to make too much of this episode, Yates’s first paying job, though it’s fair to say that it whetted his appetite for financial independence—within a few months he’d be more or less self-supporting for the rest of his life—and then, too, one can hardly imagine the relief he felt at having some excuse to work all night and sleep most of the day.

Avon, no doubt, seemed a waiting Arcadia when the time came for Yates to return in mid-September. The living experiment in Cold Spring Harbor had turned cold indeed, at least this particular trial, and a parting of the ways was imminent. The elder Rodgerses were planning at last to resume residence of their family estate in St. James, Long Island, as soon as the tenant’s lease expired in the fall, and they’d invited Fred and Ruth to join them there with the newborn baby. Dookie, meanwhile, would return to New York, but for now she pouted around the house and, always sensitive about her age, openly rued the prospect of becoming a grandmother (“Can you imagine me as a grandmother?” says Pookie in The Easter Parade; “I can’t even imagine you as a mother,” her daughter reflects). And in the midst of it all was Richard, whose departure from the scene, for any number of reasons, was almost surely as frantic as Phil Drake’s:

[His] final moments of leaving Cold Spring Harbor would always be blurred in his memory. He knew he must have hauled his suitcase downstairs fast because a station taxicab was already honking for him in the driveway; he knew he must have made a stop in the kitchen to accept one last sloppy embrace from his mother; then he was on the train and the rotten little town was far behind him.

*   *   *

Yates’s last two years at Avon were far happier than his first. He would always be the butt of a certain amount of teasing, but it became more benign as he learned to handle it better. Rather than trying to swagger off insults with more of the same (and getting beaten up or paddled), Yates became a soft-spoken eccentric who rolled with the punches. “I guess I left the coat hanger in by mistake,” he’d say, if a person made fun of his sometimes rigid posture, the way his shoulders tended to bunch and shudder around his ears when he was tense. But perhaps the best way of preempting attack was, after all, simple good manners, and around this time Yates apparently began to take Mrs. Riddle’s precepts to heart. He may have had an apple-size hole in the elbow of his only tweed jacket, and hair that stuck out at an odd angle, but Yates was courteous—shy, formal—or so certain of his would-be enemies remember him.

Happily he didn’t have to strain himself with everybody. That second year he was named editor in chief of The Avonian and art director of the Winged Beaver (the school yearbook), and hence became a campus figure of sorts. Best of all, he began to make a few friends his own age. Perhaps the first of these was Pierre Van Nordan, whose relative weirdness is evoked by the uncharitable “Van Loon” conferred on his alter ego in A Good School. According to the Winged Beaver, Van Nordan was a connoisseur of “guns, game, Omar Khayyam, women and beer,” and A Good School suggests he also had a penchant for sitting on the toilet longer than necessary. Whatever the case, Van Nordan was in fact regarded as a bit of a curiosity, and probably Yates (like Grove vis-à-vis Van Loon) eventually kept him at a distance while at Avon; however, Yates was at Van Nordan’s bedside when the latter died of Hodgkin’s disease in his early thirties, as the friendship had deepened in later years.

A more improbable friendship, and one that perished of natural causes shortly after the war, was the one Yates pursued with the studious Hugh Pratt. Pratt’s greatest appeal appears to have been his almost daunting respectability: Apart from his work as editor of the Winged Beaver and associate editor of The Avonian, he was one of the school’s top scholars and a standout football player to boot. Above all he was serious, and demanded seriousness from his friends. At least one thing he and Yates had in common was a fondness for late-night bull sessions of the loftier sort; both were charter members of something called the “Midnight Oil League.” Beyond that the attachment is harder to fathom. Like Hugh Britt in A Good School, Pratt was quick to reproach Yates for failures of taste and more obvious personal shortcomings: “You’re always late for everything,” says Britt when Grove asks to be his roommate; “you flunk courses and don’t seem to care; you’re sloppy; that kind of thing could make trouble if we roomed together.” A mutual friend described Pratt as Yates’s “opposite,” and Pratt seemed to agree in every respect but one: “Dick was not frivolous about his writing. He’d scribble over reams of blank paper. Every Saturday we’d build a fire in the Senior Club, and Dick would just sit there and write all day.”

The extent to which Yates was playing a role for his friend, whose stability and high-mindedness he clearly envied, is worth considering; for that matter such posing in general—and Yates was nothing if not self-conscious as a young man—was arguably essential to his becoming what he was so determined to be. When Grove is announced as the winner of the “America at War” essay contest, he finds that he’s developed “a strange new ability to see himself whole, from the outside, as if through a movie camera twenty feet away”; and Grove maintains this perspective when he plays, with relish, “his role as sportswriter”:

He would shamble along the sidelines, carrying a clipboard and a chewed pencil to record each play; when a game was stalled he would squat and write, holding the clipboard on one tense thigh and very much aware that a number of smaller kids were peering over his shoulder; when the game broke open again he’d get up and run with it, almost as fast as the ball carrier, with the little kids racing in his wake.

Yates’s devotion to such tasks was so conspicuous at Avon that he was ultimately regarded as the embodiment of writerly aspiration, and indeed his influence was pervasive: He wrote almost every word of the newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school’s eighteenth-century printshop. “Dick ran everything of a literary nature,” said classmate Gilman Ordway. “He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—become a writer of fiction.”

And finally, with the arrival of fellow fifth former Ernest Bicknell Wright, Yates’s success might have seemed, in its limited way, more or less complete. “Bicky” Wright was the rebellious scion of an old-money family in Philadelphia (he later had his name removed from the Social Register), and Avon was a last resort after he’d been expelled from two previous prep schools. Like his counterpart “Bucky” Ward in A Good School, Wright immediately “earned an outlaw’s celebrity” by smoking on campus before he was seventeen and cultivating a moody, slouching persona in general. The son of a bullying, alcoholic father who openly professed not to like his children much, Wright despised authority and was alternately witty and bitter about it.

He and Yates could hardly believe their luck: Both flunked courses and didn’t care, both were sloppy, both were rather curious physical specimens (the diminutive Wright would grow six more inches after he left Avon), and both felt alienated from their surroundings (whatever those happened to be); above all, both coped by making fun of the world. Now each had a perfect audience in the other. As Yates characterized the friendship in A Good School: “It was almost like falling in love. Bucky Ward could make him laugh over and over again until he began to feel like a girl who might at any moment cry ‘Oh, you keep me in stitches!’” Wright was noted in the Winged Beaver as “the possessor of the school’s quickest comeback,” but in this respect Yates became (somewhat to his own surprise) a worthy rival. They had a ritual: Whenever one came up with a particularly choice witticism, the other would pretend to preserve it forever in the top drawer of a Platonic cabinet, filing it away with a flourish of the wrist. Indeed the friendship might have been all but ideal, were it not for Wright’s weakness for melodrama. “Things!” cries Bucky Ward in A Good School. “Christ, Grove, do you ever get so you can’t stand things?… You oughta see my family’s house. Oh, it’s very nice and it’s very big and it cost my father a hell of a lot of money, but I can never make him understand it’s just another thing.” And so on. For Yates, who preferred to keep his weltschmerz to himself, such displays made for uncomfortable moments. He liked Wright better when he was funny.*

Yates was almost in danger of becoming a reasonably happy young man when his fifty-six-year-old father died suddenly of pneumonia (and general exhaustion, one suspects) on December 14, 1942. Family lore has it that Vincent died on the very day his daughter’s second son was conceived, and moreover that this son, Peter, grew up to be an almost exact replica of his maternal grandfather (not to mention a minister like his great-grandfather). Alas, little else is known of Vincent’s death outside Yates’s fiction, though fortunately ample explication is found there. In fact the episode is treated similarly and at length in A Good School, The Easter Parade, A Special Providence, and especially “Lament for a Tenor.” The protagonist of “Tenor,” Jack Warren, is having breakfast in the refectory when he’s discreetly informed by the headmaster that he has an urgent message to call home. This he does, and though he feels nothing on hearing the sad news except “an automatic tightening in his chest,” he’s impressed by his mother’s uncontrollable weeping, as if she were “a real widow.” In both this story and A Special Providence, Yates’s alter ego is just able to stop himself from saying, in effect, “What the hell, Mother, are we supposed to cry when he dies?” An uncomfortable session with the headmaster follows in “Tenor” (the man speaks vaguely of God’s will and arranges for Warren to leave on an afternoon train), after which the young man heads back to his room to pack and decide how best to get through the next few hours at school: “it was oddly enjoyable to have a secret like this, and he mounted the rest of the stairs with theatrical gravity, an inscrutable, tragic young man.” But he’s troubled by how empty he feels. “You couldn’t very well cry over a man you hardly knew,” Warren reflects, casting back to their last few meetings, which lately “had spaced out to three or four a year, usually just a restaurant lunch and an awkward afternoon during one of Jack’s holidays.”

In “Tenor” and elsewhere, Yates made note of his father’s obvious deterioration in recent years—that he looked “smaller and grayer,” that he coughed and drank more—though the man always treated his son with alert solicitude, and seemed to accept that it was incumbent on himself to keep the conversation going. One thing that evidently disturbed Yates in retrospect was his failure to call his father “Dad.” In A Good School Bill Grove finds it “all but impossible”: “He remembered having no trouble with the more childish ‘Daddy,’ years ago, but ‘Dad’ eluded his tongue. He tried to avoid the problem, on the rare occasions when he saw the man, by arranging his remarks in such a way as to require calling him nothing at all.” But both Grove and Jack Warren are able to relieve their consciences somewhat by remembering the relative success of that last paternal visit at school, when father and son went for a pleasant-enough stroll around campus and the latter managed, finally, to say “Dad.”

For the most part, though, the whole event seems to have evoked very little in the way of conventional sentiment. “You know, my father’s really a pretty boring guy,” Jack Warren remarks to his roommate after that visit, and once he knows his father is dead he reads over the man’s last (unanswered) letter, which is full of well-meaning banality: “Was sorry to see you’re still having trouble with that mark in math. You know the way to improve your math, or anything else for that matter, is just say to yourself, ‘Who’s going to win? This math, or me?’” Little wonder Yates felt bound to admit that he was, after all, his mother’s son, or that his most definite emotion when his father died was a kind of piquant self-pity. When Jack Warren manages a few cathartic sobs on the train home, it dawns on him that he’s really crying “for himself—a boy bereaved,” whereupon he begins to retch rather than cry. The same moment recurs in The Easter Parade, when Emily stops crying over her father as soon as she realizes her tears are “wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.”*

It could be that Dookie’s far more elaborate grief indicated a greater awareness of certain grim consequences to follow, along with perhaps a genuine fondness for the man and a slight pang for having hastened his decline. Whether she really kissed his corpse on the mouth à la Pookie Grimes and Alice Prentice is impossible to say, though the image serves nicely to suggest the disgust she provoked in her son on that occasion, and ever more frequently afterward. “It was her fault,” Robert Prentice reflects at the funeral. “She had robbed him of a father and robbed his father of a son, and now it was too late.” For a number of reasons Yates’s disenchantment with his mother would accelerate after Vincent’s death, and that may have been the man’s most impressive legacy, both in terms of his son’s life and his son’s work. But Vincent remained something of a two-dimensional figure in Yates’s mind: a mild-mannered, well-meaning fellow who tried to make the best of a terrible mistake—though just how terrible Yates could scarcely appreciate until years later, when his father became a more haunting abstraction. “All I’m really qualified to remember is the sadness of his later life—the bad marriage that cost him so much, the drab little office from which he assisted in managing the sales of light bulbs for so many years, the tidy West Side apartment … where I can only hope he found love before his death.”

*   *   *

Yates spent that Christmas vacation mastering the fine points of a habit that probably killed his father and would eventually kill him, too. But then Yates always loved to smoke, and perhaps it was worth it as far as he was concerned: It gave a shy, nervous person something to do with his hands; it made him alert; he liked the taste; and besides he didn’t much care about his health anyway. But it all began (and to some extent persisted) as the purest form of adolescent affectation, a way of looking—at last—somewhat masculine and grown-up: “Cigarettes were a great help because any big-eyed, full-lipped boy could be made to look all right if he smoked all the time.” With his friend Bick, Yates had begun smoking illicitly during his first semester as a fifth former, but others had made fun of his beginner’s cough; now that he was about to turn seventeen, and eligible to light up at will in the Senior Club, he was determined to outsmoke the lot of them. As he described his self-training in A Good School:

First he had to learn the physical side of it … how to will his senses to accept drugged dizziness as pleasure rather than incipient nausea. Then came the subtler lessons in aesthetics, aided by the use of the bathroom mirror: learning to handle a cigarette casually, even gesturing with it while talking, as if scarcely aware of having it in his fingers; deciding which part of his lips formed the spot where a cigarette might hang most attractively … and how best to squint against the smoke.… The remarkable thing about cigarettes … was that they added years to the face that had always looked nakedly younger than his age.

For the rest of his time at Avon, Yates was rarely seen outside the classroom without a butt dangling off his lip, and clearly he looked forward to the day when he’d never have to abstain at all—never have to leave his round-eyed vulnerable face exposed without a smoke screen to squint behind.

Most students at Avon spent their free time, especially during weekends, availing themselves one way or another of Mrs. Riddle’s vast estate, her picturesque farms and woodlands, playing polo, perhaps, or venturing into Hartford for a meal and a movie. Yates—never one for the outdoors and too poor for polo or Hartford—was almost always (from 1943 on) to be found at either the Avonian office or the Senior Club, smoking and writing. The ambience of the Senior Club particularly appealed to him, what with its leather sofas and armchairs, its phonograph and pool table, its overall conduciveness to “learning how to behave in college” (the closest Yates would ever come to that milieu). Occasionally he’d bestir himself for a game of pool—at least one classmate remembered him (likely in error) as “quite good”—but mostly he sat, smoked, drank coffee, and wrote.

One of the stories he finished as a fifth former, “Forgive Our Foolish Ways,” was featured in the 1943 Winged Beaver. It is Yates’s earliest surviving fiction, and its thousand or so words describe the spiritual conversion of a dying soldier, hitherto a hard-boiled skeptic. A representative patch of prose: “He remembered running like a scared rabbit across the sand, hearing the machine guns spitting at him, and being half-crazed with horror and fear. He remembered feeling that his face must look like a frightened child’s, mouth open and cheeks jogging loosely.” That last phrase is promising, as are certain others (“writhing like a squashed beetle”), but otherwise the story is unremarkable: At first its wounded protagonist boldly dismisses the “phony ideas” of those who believe in a “phony God,” but while dying he’s surrounded by “an immense, radiant, all-inclusive light” and hears “a great choir,” and so on. For what it’s worth, the story is somewhat better than the three or four others featured in that year’s Winged Beaver, and seems to give a fair sense of what was on Yates’s mind at the time.

But a far better forum for his ideas—and abilities, too, at least as they stood then—was The Avonian, and perhaps the best proof of this is the last issue of that school year, dated June 9, 1943. At the bottom center of the front page is a box headlined “In Memoriam”:

As we go to press, tragic news reaches us. It is with profound sorrow that we announce the death of David James Stanley, one of the finest men Avon has ever known. Dave was killed at sea, just three weeks after his departure from School to join the United States Merchant Marine. The loss to Avon is irreparable, his memory imperishable.

Nothing brought the reality of war closer to Avon than the death of David Stanley, the lovable young man who appears as Larry Gaines in A Good School. Handsome and sweet-natured, Stanley had just become engaged to Alice Sperry, the pretty seventeen-year-old daughter of Avon’s biology teacher. Stanley had finished school early to join the merchant marine and thus avoid the regular draft, when—only a day or two before Avon’s graduation ceremony—his ship collided with a munitions vessel and sank to the bottom of Hampton Bay. As recorded in A Good School, the last issue of the newspaper was minutes away from press (in fact a blackly ironic item remains on page four, listing David Stanley as “Most Likely To Succeed”) when the news reached Avon; alone, amid a community stunned with grief, Yates had to keep his head and compose a brief but seemly tribute, then reconfigure the front page and see The Avonian into press. Not only did he succeed, but the editorial he’d written for that issue could hardly have been more appropriate under the circumstances. Addressed to the graduating class, it put into well-considered words what was surely on the mind of every Avon student in 1943, more than ever after the death of David Stanley:

In times like these, when everyone’s future is completely uncertain, those of us who are leaving cannot help but be thankful for the steady and secure existence Avon has afforded us. A few of the boys graduating today may never come out of the war alive. All of them will undoubtedly experience more trying and dangerous times than have ever confronted a generation of young men since history began.

Yates won a special award that year for his work on The Avonian, and deservedly so: Under his editorship the newspaper was “larger in size and more inclusive in scope” (so noted the Winged Beaver), and such improvements were appreciated more widely than one might expect. “You publish a splendid newspaper,” wrote an alumnus stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “I cannot in any way find fault with it, and I admire the wit of the news articles, the frankness of the editorials … [and] congratulate you sincerely on a masterpiece among school papers.” Lest one think this sort of thing caused Yates to take himself too seriously, consider a filler item on page two of that same Avonian: “If the writing in this issue seems rather bumpy in spots, please don’t condemn it too much. Our beloved Editor (?) was in the infirmary with the measles and consequently every single article in this Avonian has contacted [sic] the frightful disease.” Clearly the wag who used to jape about “kahts” and garbagemen and “‘T.B.’ in ‘V.T.’” was still alive, if not altogether well.

*   *   *

Among friends Yates still spoke of his mother admiringly, as a “struggling artist,” while remaining entirely silent on the subject of his father’s death. During the man’s life, though, Yates never really grasped what was involved in the subsidy of a struggling artist such as Dookie, and may have wondered why his father had waxed so solemn, so deadly earnest, whenever he tried to explain that someday she’d be Richard’s responsibility.

The day had come. Dookie was left with nothing after Vincent’s death, and when Yates returned to New York that summer he found her living in a cheap hotel on East Thirty-ninth Street, all her sculpture and remaining furniture in storage. She was predictably far behind in both rent and storage payments, and eating her meals out of cans. At something called the Ultima Optical Company she’d found a job grinding lenses, though she longed for something more glamorous and remunerative. Some twenty years before, as a single “career gal” in Manhattan, she’d been a fashion illustrator, and to that line of work she devoutly wished to return. One assumes her son was at least as skeptical as Robert Prentice in A Special Providence: “Even he could see how still and labored and hopelessly unsaleable-looking her drawings were, though she explained it was all a question of making the right contacts.”

While Dookie applied her native flair to making contacts and grinding lenses, Yates found work as a copyboy at the New York Sun. Though the Sun “[wasn’t] really much of a paper” (as Walter Grimes explains to his daughters in The Easter Parade), Yates enjoyed the role of an honest workingman. At the time the extra income made it possible for him and Dookie to move to a larger furnished apartment only a block away from the Ultima Optical Company on West Fifty-fifth, if somewhat farther from the Sun on Chambers Street. Also, the job gave him good material for his next short story (more on that below), some of which was deftly recycled for his fourth novel more than thirty years later.

For a while Yates may have enjoyed being the breadwinner at the age of seventeen, but the romance soon began to pall. The combined salaries of a copyboy and a lens grinder didn’t amount to much, but Dookie was utterly debonair about the future. Night after night she jabbered about the contacts she was making in the fashion world, as well as the lucrative “one-man show” that was right around the corner, while her son listened and the canned soup simmered. As for Richard’s hard work to pay for groceries and most of the rent, Dookie pretended with friends that it was just “a little laboring job … you know the kind of thing boys do in the summertime.” And then, as if there were no pressing question of how to pay fees at an expensive private school in the fall, Dookie blew much of their wages on a new wardrobe—this, of course, to establish herself in the fashion world. “You sound just like your father,” she’d sigh, when he ventured to suggest that they be more thrifty. Finally he began to lose his temper. When thus cornered (especially about money), Dookie tended to throw a kind of stylized fit—partly a matter of genuine hysterics, no doubt, and partly a matter of enlightened self-interest. In one form or another the performance is given by all her fictional personae, though perhaps most vividly by Alice Prentice:

And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor.… She lay facedown, quivering all over and making spastic little kicks with her feet, while he stood and watched.… It had happened often enough, in various crises, that he knew she wasn’t really having a heart attack; all he had to do was wait until she began to feel foolish lying there.

As it turned out, Dookie never did generate enough contacts to break back into the fashion world, though shortly before her son returned to school she managed to find a job in a factory that made department-store mannequins. This was better suited to her talents than lens grinding, but all such work was “harsh and degrading,” as Yates put it in “Regards at Home”—“pitifully wrong for a bewildered, rapidly aging, often hysterical woman who had always considered herself a sculptor with at least as much intensity as I brought to the notion of myself as a writer.”

*   *   *

Were it not for his home life and the wartime possibility of imminent death, Yates’s final year at Avon might have been idyllic. As noted in A Good School, his classmates were actually nice to one another—not only because they were seniors, but also because of a general wish to live and let live in what little time was left before being drafted. The mood was one of rather blithe pessimism. Rumor had it that Mrs. Riddle and Headmaster Stabler—never on the best of terms—had reached an impasse over the budget and other matters, and even the faculty seemed a bit tongue-in-cheek about bothering with one’s work. Yates’s favorite English teacher, Dr. Knowles, occasionally spent whole classes in self-absorbed silence, studying Japanese characters with a magnifying glass and chuckling at nothing in particular. And when the school warden—an amiable but overserious sixth former named David Bigelow (who affected not to care when people called him “Shorty”)—tried to enforce the headmaster’s blackout regulations, he was met with such brazen ridicule that the memory angers him still.

Yates thrived. Because of his excellent record as editor he was given the unprecedented privilege of running The Avonian without the aid of a faculty adviser, and the newspaper became more influential than ever—not only was it sent to training camps around the country, but also to every theater of war where alumni served. It was an ideal time to be a lackadaisical student wholly committed to other, more glorious pursuits, and Yates relished his role as a kind of maverick litterateur. Witness his senior profile in the Winged Beaver (accompanied by a snapshot of Yates sneering, with a cigarette):

As Editor during his last two years, Dick’s familiar figure has been seen many a Tuesday afternoon, draped in a pair of gray trousers and wilted blue shirt as he strides about with a harassed look. At five fifteen he totters into the Avon Club, lights the usual cigarette, and falls on the most comfortable sofa. The crisis has passed and our next Avonianwill come out after all.

Yates was also the school’s most gifted cartoonist, and his caricatures of Stabler and staff were prized as keepsakes among the students. As art director of the Winged Beaver (and later associate editor), he provided the yearbook illustrations for two years, and his lead cartoon for the 1944 edition was apt: a hulking, ape-faced drill sergeant holding a uniform in one hand and crooking a fat finger at some unseen recruit with the other. It was precisely what awaited them all, and everything else seemed beside the point. The time was right for antiheroes, and Yates was eulogized as such in the Winged Beaver: “And then Dick Yates, Our Editor,/ Our Novelist divine/ Who burned his midnight oil so much/ He switched to turpentine.”

Yates’s picturesque fretting over his various Avonian duties was mostly reserved for daylight hours; at night he burned his oil to work on fiction, and lost no time pouring his impressions from the New York Sun into a short story, “Schedule,” which he finished early that autumn. Yates was proud enough of this effort to send it to Thomas Wolfe’s agent and biographer, the rather celebrated Elizabeth Nowell,* who responded with an almost three-page, single-space critique that was remarkable in its prescience. “I think you’re pretty good,” she began, and continued in the same tone of candid, qualified congratulation. Nowell didn’t know how old Yates was, only that he was in school, but noted that his story was far better than many she’d read by amateur adults. “I don’t mean by that that I think you are ready to be published, but … keep on writing and getting surer of yourself: cutting deeper in the groove. The main thing is that you have a fine quality to your writing: the kind of feel to it that really good stuff has. As long as you’ve got that you’ll never lose it.”

“Schedule,” which appeared in the 1944 Winged Beaver, is an apprentice work of unmistakable promise, and perhaps worth dwelling on at some little length. “The best part of [the story is] the very fine background of it,” Nowell rightly pointed out, “the way you make the reader really see and hear and smell the newspaper building and all the departments in it.” The first quarter of the story, in fact, is given over to some five hundred words of wonderfully irrelevant atmosphere: “The cigarette smoke rose listlessly, curling toward the ceiling, until it met the draft from the open top-halves of the windows and was whirled sharply out into the morning sunlight”—and from there we move on to the makeup editor “gingerly” sipping his coffee, to the pressroom workers with their “jaunty square hats of folded newspaper” (readers of The Easter Parade take note), to the great press machines “turning out newspapers fifteen a second, pushing them out wet with ink and hot from the dryers,” and so forth.

“It seemed to me you had known a newspaper like this and had wanted to write about it,” Nowell observed, “but had had to have some sort of regular story to weave it around so had taken Al Shapiro as the center of it.” Just so: The great wave of descriptive eloquence with which the story begins washes up, finally and rather randomly, at the feet of Al Shapiro, whose menial task is to bundle the newspapers in twine. Shapiro is a kind of ur-version of the typical Yatesian loser: He wants to be a writer, but his prole father makes him drop out of school to haul ice; later he tries to take a journalism class (where all the students are younger and better dressed than he), but is humiliated by a tweedy pedant who advises him to learn basic grammar first; and finally, fifteen years later, the now middle-aged Al’s diminished dreams take him all the way back to high school, despite the ridicule of a vulgar wife (“‘Listen, Al, I don’ want no high school boy for a husband’”). In the end a coworker named Moe makes the mistake of teasing Al in precisely the wrong terms—“‘Christ almighty, are you gonna be ignorant all your life?’”—whereupon Al goes berserk and attacks the man with his twine cutter.

But mere plot summary fails to do justice to the many fine things here, such as the nicely sustained time theme—the schedule of various newspaper editions posted throughout the narrative (even as time runs out on poor Al Shapiro), the “great living monster” of the press machine rolling inexorably on to make the newspaper (as the story ends) “on time.” Clearly Yates had worked hard and learned a few things about craft over the past year, and indeed Elizabeth Nowell not only detected his talent but also his autodidactic tendency: “I think you have enough natural feeling for writing to teach yourself and do it far better than anyone else can do it.” This borders on the prophetic, and may explain why Yates kept the letter all his life, perhaps for the purpose of occasional reassurance.

*   *   *

According to federal law a high school student in 1943 could be drafted in the middle of his senior year if his eighteenth birthday fell before January. This applied to three of Yates’s classmates—who took summer school to prepare for winter graduation and subsequent induction—among them Bick Wright. That year Wright had served as associate editor of The Avonian and succeeded Candels as the wit behind “The Beaver’s Log”; this meant that Yates was necessarily exposed to his friend’s vagaries on a more or less constant basis, which seems to have frayed their old rapport. Still, Bick’s departure was a potent reminder that things were coming to an end, and probably the two marked the occasion in much the same way as Grove and Ward in A Good School—that is, by staying up late in the newspaper office and sharing a pint of smuggled whiskey (“it tasted so awful that Grove couldn’t imagine the source of its celebrated power to give pleasure, let alone enslave the soul”). Nor is there much reason to doubt that Wright was just as “dramatically morose” as Ward, full of gloomy bravado in the wake of a Dear John letter he’d just received: “‘I don’t care anymore.… I don’t care what happens to me in the Army or anything else.’” In any case he left that December; Pierre Van Nordan took over as associate editor, Yates became the new dorm inspector of Building One, and things continued to end.

It was a bad Christmas. As Yates would tell it later (not for laughs), this was the year he was “kidnapped” by Avon—forbidden to go home for the holidays because his tuition hadn’t been paid since his father’s death. Extreme measures were therefore indicated, though this one was no more successful than others. Dookie temporized as usual, and Yates spent Christmas with the Avon staff, who if anything were less happy about it than he.

Of course the really remarkable thing is their indulgence in allowing him to stay at all, even as a Yuletide hostage. It suggested the larger problem: Headmaster Stabler, in his zeal to recruit less privileged but otherwise well-suited students, had perhaps overlooked the possibility that Mrs. Riddle would choose to cut her losses at some point. But Stabler had all but ensured this result by enacting a number of reforms without the founder’s consent: Not only did he switch the clothing franchise from Brooks Brothers to the plebeian Franklin Simon (and was planning to abolish the dress code altogether), but also he changed the name from Avon Old Farms to the Avon School, tinkered with curriculum, insisted on a greater religious presence, and to that end erected a hideous Hodgson Portable Chapel on the campus. This last touch, in particular, seemed to gall Mrs. Riddle. She’d become increasingly bellicose since the death of her husband, and when Stabler presumed to mar the architectural purity of her “indestructible school,” she dropped the bomb: Either abide by the letter of her Deed of Trust, she demanded, or all support would be forever withdrawn. Stabler and the faculty resigned en masse, perhaps in the hope of calling her bluff, but the widow Riddle was not a bluffer. In a letter to her mutinous underlings she noted that she’d spent “seven-ninths of [her] fortune in building and supporting the School,” but now saw no alternative but to close at the end of the academic year. “A noble experiment had somehow gone wrong,” wrote historian Gordon Ramsey.

At any other time the students might have taken the news in the same spirit with which they mocked themselves as “Avon Old Queers,” but given the bleak immediate future it was a real blow, yet another of life’s moorings giving way. “Our school is closed, and probably the future will record many a similar disillusionment,” a student wrote in that year’s Winged Beaver. As for Yates, the yearbook noted: “He does plan a college education and a career as a professional writer, but that must wait until peace.” Something else that would have to wait was Yates’s diploma, which was withheld pending the Godot-like prospect of his tuition payment.

No matter. Yates was a graduate in spirit and more or less in fact; and besides, the school was in the process of becoming a home for blinded veterans.* And then after a fashion he did find a way to pay his debt to Avon, and to his father too, really, perhaps in penance for having been so dismissive of both. On the one hand Yates would always remember Avon as a “dopey little school,” but he also realized it had been almost perfect for the strange young man he was, and like Bill Grove he felt beholden to his father for paying his way—until the poor man died, that is, having given up his life in more than one respect so that his son could become the writer he was meant to be. Yates wished he could thank him for that:

I might even have told him—and this would have been only a slight exaggeration—that in ways still important to me it was a good school. It saw me through the worst of my adolescence, as few other schools would have done, and it taught me the rudiments of my trade. I learned to write by working on the [newspaper], making terrible mistakes in print that hardly anybody ever noticed. Couldn’t that be called a lucky apprenticeship?