Free Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates

God, had it ever been worth the army’s while to take responsibility? What about a boy who couldn’t believe the First World War was over? What about a girl who couldn’t sleep in Fort Devens or Fort Dix, Fort Benning or Fort Meade?
    Oh, Jesus, the army was a bitch and a slut and a whore. The army didn’t care whether you loved it or not.
    Charles was obliged to put the phone down for a minute—he had to turn over two sizzling pork chops on the grill and then to lower the heat under a frothing pan of peeled, boiling potatoes—and by the time he picked it up again he found he’d thought of a few encouraging things to say.
    “Well, but look, Evan,” he began. “There’s a brighter side to all this. All the colleges are going to be a lot more accessible to you now, and for as long as the war goes on. They’ll have to worry about keeping their enrollments up, you see, and I imagine they’ll be very liberal with their scholarship programs and so on. If I were you I’d set my sights on engineering school right now, and I wouldn’t let anything else interfere.”
    He’d gotten that far before remembering that Rachel was pregnant—maybe the news of pregnancy would always have to break over a man in wave after wave until it finally sank in—and so he had to wonder if all this college talk might now be pointless. A student with a crisp little workingwife was one thing; what about a student with a wife and child?
    But he took up the broken thread of his argument anyway, because he wasn’t yet ready to let it go. “It seems to me the first thing you and Rachel ought to do is find a cheaper place to live; get out from under all that rent; then open a savings account and put away as much as you can every month, on a regular basis. I think you’ll find it isn’t really very hard to carry out a plan like this, Evan, if you’re careful and if you never lose sight of your goal …”
    Long before he’d finished talking, though, Charles had lost confidence in his own voice. He didn’t like the bogus athletic-coach quality of it; he wasn’t sure if a line like “Never lose sight of your goal” should be allowed to stand except as a ludicrous admonition in some comedy for children; he resented Rachel’s pregnancy; and he was bitterly disappointed, in ways that got worse and worse the more he thought about it, by the perforated eardrums. Sometimes the world was just too fucking much.
    He had washed the kitchen windows only yesterday, long and hard, and tonight one of their big black panes gave back a merciless reflection of himself: surprisingly old, surprisingly gaunt, looking forever as bewildered as he’d been in boyhood. He might have lingered at the window in a little ceremony of self-regard and self-loathing, but there were other things to be done. He had to mash the potatoes, drain the string beans, serve up the pork chops, and go tell Grace that dinner was ready.
    He was almost as far as the sun porch when it occurred to him that Grace would probably say “Oh, God, how wonderful” or “Oh, that’s marvelous” on hearing of Evan’s draft classification, and he was right about that. She said both of those things.
    Rachel’s favorite radio program was a weekly series of half-hour Western dramas called
Death Valley Days
.
    “Because I mean it really isn’t just a bunch of cowboy stuff,” she would explain. “They’re very good, well-written little radio plays, and the acting’s always very good too. I don’t know how they can sustain such a high level of quality every week.”
    But
Death Valley Days
came on at seven o’clock, dinnertime for the young Shepards of Amityville, and that meant there could be no talk at all at their table as the two of them soberly fed themselves and listened to the little plastic Philco her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday.
    It sounded like just a bunch of cowboy stuff to Evan, every time; still, it hadn’t taken him very many weeks to decide he didn’t