Free Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates

crudely fanciful look, like something drawn by a child with an uncertain sense of the way a house ought to be.
    “I designed it myself,” Ann Blake told them as she sorted out her keys. “Actually, I designed all the buildings on this property many years ago, when my husband and I first bought the land.”
    But they were surprised to find that the brown-and-gray interior of the house was much more promising: it had, as Lucy pointed out, a lot of nooks and crannies. There was a nice fireplace, there were fake but attractive beams across the living-room ceiling, there were built-in cabinets and bookshelves; and the larger of the two upstairs bedrooms – the one that opened onto the balcony and the spiral staircase, the one both Davenports assumed would be their own – was bright and spacious enough for Lucy to describe it as “sort of elegant in a way, don’t you think?”
    Oh, it might be a funny little house, but who cared? It was basically okay; it wouldn’t cost them much; it would be good enough, at least, to live in for the next year or two.
    “So,” Ann Blake said. “Are you ready for the grand tour?”
    And they followed her out across the grass past a giant weeping-willow tree – “Isn’t that a spectacular tree?” she asked them – and on to a place where broad stone steps began to take them up a hill.
    “I wish you could’ve seen these terraces a month or two ago,” she said as they climbed. “Each terrace was ablaze with the most brilliant, heavenly colors: asters, peonies, marigolds, and I don’t know what else; and then here on the other side, all over this latticework, there were masses and masses of rambling roses. Of course we’ve been extremely fortunate in our gardener.” And she looked briefly at both their faces to make sure they’d beimpressed by the name she was about to pronounce. “Our gardener is Mr. Ben Duane.”
    Beyond the top of the steps and well back from the highest of the flower-garden terraces, Michael discovered a wooden shed that was more than tall enough to stand in and probably measured five by eight feet square. It struck him at once as a good place for working, and he lifted the rusty hasp of its door to peer inside. There were two windows; there was room enough for a table and chair and a kerosene stove, and he could sense the sweet labor of writing here in total solitude all day, through all seasons, bringing a pencil across the page time and again until the words and lines began to come out right as if of their own accord.
    “Oh, that’s just the little pump shed,” Ann Blake said. “You won’t have any need to bother with it; there’s a very reliable man in the village who keeps the pump in good repair. If you’ll step over this way, though, I’ll show you the dormitory.”
    Years ago, she told them, and she was getting a little winded from walking and talking at the same time; years ago, she and her husband had founded the Tonapac Playhouse. “Did you happen to notice the sign for it as you were driving up? Just across the road from here?” In its time it had been one of the most celebrated summer-stock theaters in the state, though of course no reputation was easy to sustain nowadays. For the past five or six summers she had rented out the Playhouse to one sort of scruffy little free-lance production company after another, and it
was
a relief to be rid of the responsibility; still, she did miss the way things used to be.
    “Now you’ll see the dormitory,” she said as a very long wood-and-stucco building emerged through the trees. “We built it to house and feed the theater people every summer, you see. We hired a wonderful chef from New York, and a goodhousemaid, or housekeeper as she preferred to be called, and we – Ben!”
    A tall old man with a wheelbarrow full of bricks came slowly around the side of the building. He stopped, set the heels of the wheelbarrow down, and shaded his eyes from the sun with one forearm. He was stripped to the