Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t leave until after lunch the next day. “Have you ever noticed,” she asked when they were alone again, “how your sympathy for someone’s story – anyone’s story – tends to evaporate when they get to the part about how long and hard they cried?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, at least he’s gone for now,” she said. “But he’ll be back, soon and often; you can count on that. And do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is we’ll probably never see Diana again.”
    Michael felt his heart contract. He hadn’t even thought of that, but from the moment Lucy said it he knew it was true.
    “You’re
always
expected to take one side or the other when a couple breaks up,” she went on, “and isn’t it funny how that can seem to work out almost entirely by accident? Because I mean if it had been Diana who called us – and it might just as easily have been – then
she’d
be our friend, and it wouldn’t’ve been much trouble to sort of drop Bill Brock out of our lives.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it, dear,” Michael said. “Maybe she’ll call us anyway. She might call anytime.”
    “No. I think I know her well enough not to expect that.”
    “Well, hell, we’ll call her, then.”
    “How? We don’t even know where she is. Oh, I suppose we could find out, but even so I don’t think she’d be very happy to hear from us. We’re all stuck with the way things are.”
    After a while, when she’d finished with the lunch dishes, she stood sadly drying her hands in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, and I did have such high hopes of being friends with her,” she said, “and with Paul Maitland, too. Didn’t you? They’ve both always seemed to be such good – such good people to know.”
    “Mike Davenport?” said a shy, light-textured voice on the phone a few nights later. “Tom Nelson. Listen, my wife and I were wondering if you folks might come over Friday night. Can you come for supper?”
    And so it came to seem, for both the Davenports, that they hadn’t lost out forever in their need for good people to know.

Chapter Four
    “Place isn’t much, as you’ll see,” Tom Nelson warned them after he’d come hurrying down from his upstairs apartment to let them in at the glass-paned front door. “Hard to keep things nice when you’ve got four kids.” And at the top of the stairs his wife stood smiling in welcome, the girl whose once-stubborn Catholicism might almost have jeopardized her husband’s career.
    Her name was Pat. There were remnants in her face of a devout and fearful child of Cincinnati as she bent in the steam to pierce the boiling vegetables, or as she crouched and squinted at the oven door to withdraw and baste the roast, but when she sat laughing with her guests in the small living room, with a drink in her hand, it was clear that the Museum of Modern Art had had its way with her. She held herself very straight but without tension, wearing a fashionably simple dress, and her large, attractive eyes and mouth were able, as if by nature, to look merry and responsible at the same time.
    The three younger boys had been put to bed, but the oldest, a pudgy six-year-old named Philip whose round face looked nothing like either of his parents, had been allowed to stay up and peer suspiciously at the visitors. At his mother’s urging he passed around a plate of salted crackers spread with liver paste;then, after depositing the plate on the coffee table, he went back to stand beside his mother’s knee.
    “We’d begun to think there wasn’t anybody in Larchmont,” Pat Nelson was saying, “who wasn’t just – you know – who wasn’t just sort of all Larchmont, inside and out.”
    And Lucy Davenport assured her, eagerly, that she and Michael had begun to think the same thing.
    They didn’t talk of painting or of poetry, as the Davenports had thought they might, but it didn’t take the Davenports long to see how foolish that expectation had been: professionalism could