Cold Spring Harbor (2 page)

“Well, if we’re going to argue about words, Doctor,” Charles said, barely keeping his temper, “I’ll have to tell you that I have no confidence in any word beginning with ‘psych.’ I don’t think you people know what you’re doing in that funny, shifty field, and I don’t think you ever will.”

And he’d never been sorry he’d said that, or that he’d gotten up and walked out of the office a minute later, even though it gave the doctor permission to sit there looking as piqued and vain, as dirty-minded and victorious as a portrait photograph of Sigmund Freud himself. Some things you did were worth regretting; others not.

Not very long ago, during the worst of his son’s difficulties, Charles had found himself unable to prevent the insidious current of psychiatric jargon from beginning to flow again, here in his own house, as various people urged him
to “get professional help” for Evan, or to “look into professional counselling” for him; and the funny part now was that he could remember being halfway tempted to go along with that kind of talk, if only because all other talk at the time had been so much more unsettling—talk of police probation and of juvenile court, even talk of reform school. Those were days when it often seemed there would always be a stranger’s angry voice on the phone, complaining about Evan, or a couple of cops at the door.

Well, it certainly was remarkable how a boy could change. And maybe things like this really did get better of their own accord, if you gave them time; maybe all you could ever do, beyond suffering, was wait and see what might be going to happen next.

From this sun porch, by leaning a little forward in his chair and looking out through an unshaded section of one window, even a man with weak vision could see the outlines of Evan Shepard concluding his day’s work in the driveway—putting tools away, tiredly straightening his spine, wiping his hands on a clean rag.

“And you know what else is really surprising, dear?” Charles said. “About Evan? He
looks
so much better. In the face, I mean. I don’t think we could ever have expected it, but he’s turning into a very—an extremely good-looking young man.”

“Oh, I know,” Grace Shepard said, using her voice for the first time all day, and smiling for the first time too. “Oh, yes, I know. He certainly is.”

And they could both sense that they weren’t the only observers to have noticed that.

Girls, even those who’d been revolted by the very sight of Evan Shepard a year ago, were beginning to agree among themselves that he was handsome; and there was at least one girl who’d thought he was handsome all along, whether she’d ever confided it to her friends or not.

Mary Donovan was a slender girl with rich, loose, dark red hair and the kind of pretty face that other girls called “saucy,” and she had been secretly partial to Evan Shepard since the seventh grade. It had made her feel awful to hear about any of his troubles—the time he’d laid open a younger boy’s scalp with a brick; the time the police had booked him on a charge of disorderly conduct and locked him up for the night “to teach him a lesson”; the time he’d broken into a hardware store and been caught at the drawer
of the cash register—and she may have been the first person in Cold Spring Harbor, apart from his parents, to care about the profound improvements that seemed to have begun in him all at once.

Mary had always assumed she would have an athlete for a lover—why not?—and so she found it slightly disappointing that Evan wasn’t athletic, though he looked strong and nimble enough for any team. Still, she soon discovered there were thrilling things to see—things to watch—in the very way he handled his car. Spraying gravel as he gunned away from school every afternoon, he would pull up short at the edge of the highway, craning his fine profile to watch and wait for an opening in the traffic, often with a light wind ruffling his wavy black hair; then he’d make a wide, swift, wonderfully confident turn into the right lane and take off, moaning away as far into the distance as her eyes could see, and beyond that. He was a boy born to drive, and in the heart of at least one girl he made driving into the equivalent of a spectator sport.

Standing alone to gaze after him, with her schoolbooks hugged at her breasts because that was the way all the other girls carried them, she began to understand that her life would never be the same.

On some nights, lying awake and restless in her fragrant bedroom, Mary Donovan would find it necessary to submit to make-believe. She would pretend that her own hands were those of Evan Shepard, and she’d allow them to roam and fondle various parts of herself, taking their time, having their way with her, until the sweet tension was almost unbearable; then at last she’d achieve the spasm and the helpless little cry that meant she could probably fall asleep. And when she saw Evan Shepard at school in the morning, after one of those nights, she would blush and feel almost as mortified as if he knew her secret and might tell everybody.

One autumn afternoon in a heavily echoing high-school corridor, when they were both seniors, Evan found the courage to ask Mary if she’d like to go to the movies, and she said okay.

After the show that night they sat clasping and kissing like young movie stars, in the moonlit privacy of his parked car, until Mary drew away from him with a little pout of promise. She worked and shrugged her way free of her upper clothing and let it fall around her waist; then she put both hands behind her to unfasten her brassiere, and when she’d shucked it off she gave him an uncertain look, as if to ask if she’d done the right thing.

“Oh,” he said in a voice hushed with reverence. “Oh, you’re nice. Oh, you’re really nice, Mary.”

With one lovely tit in his hand and the other unbelievably in his mouth, he knew now, from the incessant talk of other boys, that the next thing to do was use his free hand for trying to “get into her pants.” But he’d scarcely begun that move when Mary surprised him again. Squirming, she rearranged herself and shyly opened her legs to make it easier for him.

“Oh, Evan,” she said. “Oh, Evan.”

Very soon, then, in whispered agreement, they pulled themselves briefly together, got out of the front seat for a moment’s painful deprivation, and sank voluptuously into the back.

Love may not be everything in the world, but neither of them gave that possibility a moment’s thought until after they were married. It was a marriage that might have occurred much later, when they were both a few years older, if Mary hadn’t found she was pregnant in the very early months of their romance. Then their parents had to be told, and plans had to be made in something of a hurry. A
modest wedding was arranged, a small two-room apartment was found and rented in the adjacent commercial town of Huntington, and a friend of Mary’s father was able to secure a job for Evan at a machine-tool factory twenty miles away. It was unskilled work, at apprentice wages, but there was reason to hope that Evan’s mechanical ability might soon be recognized there; and it was certainly better than no job at all.

The baby was a girl, named Kathleen after Mary’s grandmother. A conscientious number of family snapshots were taken, and in all but one the camera caught Evan and Mary wearing smiles of theatrical intensity. The single exception, soon thrown away, showed both of them looking as scared and desperate as if they’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else than having to pose for that photograph.

By now the adults of both families could subside into their own concerns again; but they must all have known, though nobody put it into words, that adolescent marriages aren’t likely to last.

Evan began taking long, aimless drives alone at night, so he could frown in the darkness and think. It was an excellent thing to have a pretty girl being crazy about you all the time—there was no denying that. Still, it could leave you wondering. Was this all there was ever going to be? And he would sock the steering wheel with the soft part of his fist, again and again, because he couldn’t believe his life had become so fixed and settled before he’d even turned nineteen.

Mary wasn’t happy either. There had to be high school, of course, so you could learn about boys and love and all that; but then there was supposed to be college too, for four years, and after college there was supposed to be a time of living in New York and having a job and buying nice clothes and going to parties and meeting a few—well, meeting
a few interesting people. Wasn’t that so? And didn’t everybody know it?

Oh, if it weren’t for the burden of knowing Evan adored her, that he’d be terribly lost without her—if it weren’t for that, she knew she would now be putting her mind to finding some way out of all this.

Sometimes, confronting her daughter’s round, lovely eyes while lifting her out of the crib, or out of the bath, Mary would find she had to will her own face into an expression of kindness because she was afraid even an infant might recognize the looks of resentment and blame.

When the quarrels began they were long and harsh and self-renewing.

“Are you ever going to let me be a person, Evan?”

“How do you mean, ‘a person?’ ”

“Oh, you know. Or if you don’t know there’s no point in my trying to explain it.”

“Well, but I mean how do you mean ‘let’ you? Seems to me you can be any kind of a person you want, any time.”

“Oh, God; never mind. You’d know perfectly well what I’m trying to say if you could ever picture me away from this stove, or away from this sink, or out of that bed.”

“Oh. So is this going to be the kind of talk where we stay up half the night until our lips are all dry and cracked and we can’t even get laid? Because if that’s the deal one more time you’d better count me out. I’m tired, is all. You can’t even imagine how tired I am.”

“
You’re
tired.
You’re
tired. Listen, mister factory apprentice, I’m so tired I could scream.”

“Well, but what the hell else do you
want
, Mary? You want to get out and meet other guys? Is that it? You want to open your
legs
for other guys? Because I’ve got news for you, sweetheart: I’m dumb; I’m dumb; but I’m not
that
fucking dumb.”

“Oh, if only you knew, Evan. If only you had an inkling of how dumb you really are.”

“Yeah? Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

But by the time they did break up, a year and a half after the wedding, there was no quarrelling at all. In the plainness of their need to get out of that Huntington apartment and away from each other, fast, they both seemed to know that any further quarrels would be as embarrassing as losing your temper at a stranger in a public place.

Mary enrolled as a freshman at Long Island University, after arranging for her parents to take care of the baby, and within six months she was said to be engaged to a predental student from Hempstead.

Evan moved back into his parents’ house and went on working at the machine-tool plant. He didn’t know what else to do, and nobody near him came up with any better ideas—though his father did try to offer encouraging advice of a general kind.

“Well, Evan, this is bound to be a difficult time for you,” he said one night as they lingered at the dinner table after Grace had gone upstairs. “But I think you’ll find that sometimes things do get better of their own accord. It may be that all you can do now, apart from trying to keep your spirits up, is wait and see what’s going to happen next.”

A celebrated clinic of optometry was opened for business in 1941, in lower Manhattan, where people suffering from very poor vision could be equipped with spectacles said to bring about remarkable improvements in their daily lives.

Charles Shepard made an appointment at the place as soon as he found out about it, in April of that year; then, rather than go into New York alone on the train, he asked his son to drive him there.

“Well, but I’ll lose a day’s pay,” Evan said, as Charles had expected he would, and Charles had just the right answer ready, for delivery in just the right kind of quiet voice.

“That doesn’t matter,” he told him, “and what’s more, you know it doesn’t matter.”

Evan looked briefly puzzled, but then he seemed to understand—or
seemed at least to see that this might be a trip worth taking if the old man had something on his mind.