Read Online Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates - Free Book Online

knew that if it were wholly restored she wouldn’t have said “one last drink.” Mercifully, then, all their talk was of other things until the time came for the Davenports to say goodnight.
    “Ma’am?” Michael inquired at the door. “If you can ever forgive me for the rug, do you think we can still be friends?”
    “Oh, don’t be silly,” Pat said, and she touched his arm with what felt like kindness. “I’m sorry I got mad.”
    But walking home alone with Lucy was another matter.
    “Well,
of course
she ‘forgave’ you,” Lucy said. “What are you,some little boy who feels all goody-good again because his mother’s ‘forgiven’ him? Oh, couldn’t you see how poor they are from the moment we walked into that place? Or at least how poor they’ve always been until the past year or so? And now that he’s begun to earn real money they’re putting every dollar of it into the country place they’ve bought. They’ll be making a whole new life for themselves on the strength of his work, and you can be sure it’ll be a splendid life, too, because they’re just about the most admirable people I’ve ever met. In the meantime they’re stuck here for a little while longer, so they made the awful mistake of having us over tonight. And when I saw you rip up that carpet – I really mean this, Michael – when I saw you rip up that carpet it was like watching a total stranger do some insane, destructive thing. All I could think was: I don’t know this man. I’ve never seen this person before.”
    She stopped talking then, as though talking could never lead to anything but exhaustion, and Michael had nothing to say. He felt more weak than resentful and he knew that no reply would be adequate, so he clenched his jaws to keep from making any reply at all. Once in a while, along the intervals of sidewalk between trees, he looked up at the winking stars in the black sky as if to ask if ever – oh, ever – there might come a time when he would learn to do something right.
    Things got better before the end of that spring.
    Michael did manage to get the job off his back – or almost. He persuaded
Chain Store Age
to let him become one of its several “contributing writers,” rather than an employee. He would work on a freelance basis now, visiting the office only twice a month to deliver his copy and to pick up new assignments; he would lose the security of a salary and all the “fringe benefits,” but he was confident he could earn at least asmuch money this way. And the best part, he explained to his wife, was that he could set his own schedule: he could pack all the
Chain Store
stuff into the first half of each month, or maybe even less than that, and have the rest of the time to himself.
    “Well,” she said. “That’s very – encouraging, isn’t it?”
    “Sure as hell is.”
    But far more encouraging, for both of them, was that he finished his book of poems – and that it was accepted almost at once by a young man named Arnold Kaplan, who’d been an acquaintance of his at Harvard and was now an editor at one of the more modest New York publishing houses.
    “Well, sure it’s a small house, Mike,” Arnold Kaplan explained, “but it beats the shit out of some university
press
imprint.” And Michael was ready enough to agree with that, though he had to acknowledge that some of the younger poets he most admired – people with steadily growing reputations – were published by university presses.
    He was given an advance of five hundred dollars – a fraction, probably, of what Tom Nelson earned for a single twenty-minute watercolor – and because the amount was so meager the Davenports decided to spend it all in one place: they bought what turned out to be a surprisingly good used car.
    Then came the galley proofs. Michael winced or cursed or cried out in pain as he pounced on each typographical error, but this was mostly to conceal from Lucy, if not from himself, the vast pride he felt on seeing