Cold Spring Harbor

Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates

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Authors: Richard Yates
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more.”
    “Well sure, Evan, if you’re not too—you know—not too tired or anything.”
    “Nah, nah, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Evan drank off the last of his bourbon and put his glass on the coffeetable. “So. If you can pack up a couple of beers for us, dear, we’ll be on our way. Or make it four beers, okay? Or make it six.”
    “Coming right up, sir,” Rachel said as she hurried away to the kitchen; and Phil was glad to see her so pleased but wished she could have veiled it just a little. A subtler display of happiness might have been less embarrassing.
    He and Evan were waiting at the front door, slumped in identical postures with their thumbs in their belts, when she came back with a heavy paper bag that clinked with bottles.
    “Here you go, gentlemen,” she said. “Have a good time.”
    But Gloria trailed her into the living room, looking even more bewildered than usual, and said “What’s this?”
    “A driving lesson,” Rachel told her.
    “Oh!” Holding her drink in one hand, she used the other to make a gesture of fear: the back of the wrist pressed to her brow, with the limp fingers splayed and hanging like a broken wing. “Oh, but you
will
be careful, Evan, won’t you?”
    “Careful of what?”
    “Oh, well, I know I’m a foolish woman, but I’m terrified of cars. I’ve always been terrified of cars.”
    Phil was almost too ashamed to see what her gesturing hand was up to now, but he could predict it, and he looked anyway: she was cupping her left breast.
    And it might have been nothing more than that—the mortification of his mother’s carrying on—but from the moment he climbed into the passenger’s side of Evan’s car he was afraid he might fail at whatever test would have to be passed this afternoon. He felt a little better once they were out on the road; he’d found he could keep his spirits up by taking one greedy swig of beer after another, and Evan’s agreeably calm demeanor at the wheel was reassuring too.
    There was, Evan said, an almost deserted stretch of macadamsome four or five miles from here; that would give them a good place to start. Then, opening a new topic, he asked how Phil felt about the way the war was going.
    “Well, I haven’t really kept up with the papers or anything,” Phil said, “but I guess it’s not so good, is it. Looks like it’ll take a long time to win.”
    And Evan gave him a slightly mocking glance. “What makes you so sure we’re going to win?”
    “Oh, I didn’t say I’m
sure
, Evan; I mean I guess it could go the other way; all I meant was—”
    “Fucking right. Fucking right it could go the other way. And wouldn’t that be something?”
    This was the first time Phil had ever heard him say “fucking,” though he probably said it often at work every day. Maybe he even said it to Rachel when they were alone, or maybe not; but then, what the hell did he say to Rachel when they were alone? And what, apart from “darling,” did she say to him?
    “Wouldn’t that be something? Having Hitler in charge of everything? We’d be taking orders from the German army around the clock, and probably from the Japs as well. Can you imagine that?”
    No, he couldn’t. Phil Drake hadn’t yet been able to imagine very much about the war; he couldn’t even picture himself in the army, despite all the talk at school about an imminent lowering of the draft age to eighteen. It wouldn’t happen to him for two more years, and nothing that far in the future was worth imagining now. Still, Evan Shepard’s bleak vision of national defeat was disturbing—or would have been, if it hadn’t prompted Phil to remember Evan Shepard’s perforated eardrums; then he let himself relax a little in the car upholstery.
    “Well, anyway,” he said, “I guess I’ll be lucky even to finish school before I’m taken in.”
    Phil Drake might not be much bigger or heavier at eighteen,but he’d be stronger and smarter and hardly ever silly any

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