Free Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates Page B

doing in a thing like that?”
    “He has to stay in there,” Anita explained. “He’s got cerebral palsy.”
    “Oh.”
    And as they walked on, Ann Blake seemed to feel that some explanation was required. “Well, when I described the Smiths as ‘salt of the earth,’ ” she said, “I suppose I really meant to imply that they’re very, very simple people. Harold Smith is a clerk of some sort in the city – he wears half a dozen ballpoint pens clipped into his shirt pocket, and that kind of thing. He works for the New York Central, and you see one of the ways that dreadful old railroad manages to keep its employees is by offering them free commutation fares from any point along the tracks. So Harold took advantage of that and moved his family out here from Queens. His wife’s rather a sweet, pretty girl, but I scarcely know her because whenever I’ve seen her she’s at the ironing board – ironing and watching television at the same time, morning, noon, and night.
    “No, but here’s a curious thing: Harold once told me very shyly that he’d done some acting in high school and wondered if he could try out for a part. So to make a long story short he played the policeman in
The Gramercy Ghost,
and he was wonderfully good. You’d never guess it, but he has a natural giftfor comedy. I said ‘Harold, have you ever considered doing this professionally?’ He said ‘Whaddya – crazy? With a wife and four kids?’ So that was that. Still, I’m afraid I really didn’t – didn’t know about the cerebral palsy. Or the playpen.”
    Then she fell silent at last and walked well ahead of the Davenports, giving them time to stroll and think it all over. The gravel road had brought them back around to where they could see the guest house again, far away on its shallow rise of grass in the fading afternoon, a house that might have been drawn by a child, and Michael squeezed his wife’s hand.
    “Want to take it?” he asked. “Or think about it some more?”
    “Oh, no, let’s take it,” she said. “We aren’t going to find anything better, at a rent like this.”
    And when they’d told her of their decision, Ann Blake said “Wonderful. I love to see that: I love to see people who know themselves well enough to make up their minds. Will you come into my house for just a minute or two, then, so we can get the paperwork taken care of?” And she led them in through the door of her cluttered kitchen, turning back to say “I’ll have to ask you to excuse all the debris.”
    “I am not debris,” said a young man who sat on a tall stool at the kitchen counter, hunched over a plate of poached eggs on toast.
    “Oh, yes, you are,” she told him, sidling past him and pausing to tousle his hair, “because you’re always, always in the way when I have business to attend to.” Then she turned back again to her smiling visitors and said “This is my friend the handsome young dancer, Greg Atwood. These are the Davenports, Greg. They’re going to be our neighbors in the guest house –
if
I can find the papers, that is.”
    “Oh, nice,” he said, wiping his mouth, and he got languorously down off the stool. He was barefoot, wearing skin-tight“wheat” jeans and a dark-blue shirt that he’d left unbuttoned to the waist in the style newly popularized by Harry Belafonte.
    “Do you – dance professionally?” Lucy asked him.
    “Well, I’ve done some of that, in a small way,” he said, “and I’ve taught, too, but now I work mostly for my own pleasure, trying new things.”
    “It’s like practicing a musical instrument,” Ann Blake explained as she closed a drawer, opened another, and went on rummaging. “Some artists practice for years between performances. And personally, I don’t care what he does as long as he stays right here where I can keep an eye on him. Ah,
here
we are.” And she laid two copies of the lease on the counter in readiness for signing.
    On their way out to the Davenports’ car she