Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates

walked with one hand conspicuously locked and swinging in Greg Atwood’s, until he detached his hand and put his arm around her.
    “What does the name of the place mean?” Michael asked her.
    “ ‘Donarann?’ Oh, that was my husband’s idea. His name was Donald, you see –
is
Donald, I mean – and mine’s Ann, so that was his silly way of putting them together. I must always remember to say his name
is
Donald, because he’s very much alive and well. He lives four and a half miles north of here on a place about twice this size that he bought for the twitchy little airline stewardess he made off with, seven years ago. Nothing ever stays the same, you see. Well. It’s been so nice. See you again soon.”
    “I don’t think we made a mistake,” Michael said as they began the long drive back to Larchmont. “It’s not perfect, but then nothing ever is, right? And I think Laura’s going to like the hell out of it, don’t you?”
    “Oh, I hope so,” Lucy said. “I do hope so.”
    After a while he said “Know something, though? It’s a good thing you knew who the old wheelbarrow guy is, because I would’ve flubbed it.”
    “Well, actually,” she said, “what I’d mainly heard about him is that he’s sort of the queen of the road. There was a girl at college who came from Westport, and she said Ben Duane bought a house there during the run of his Abraham Lincoln play. Only she said he didn’t stay there very long because the Westport police gave him a choice: either to get out of town or to stand trial for showing dirty movies to little boys.”
    “Oh,” Michael said. “Well; too bad. And I guess young Greg the dancer is a little on the queer side, too.”
    “I’d say that’s a fairly safe assumption, yes.”
    “Well, but if he and old Ann are shacked up together, how do you suppose they work it out?”
    “It’s called being ambidextrous, I think,” she said. “It’s called being able to swing from both sides of the plate.”
    Five or six more miles went by before Lucy began, in a gentler voice, to elaborate on her hope that their daughter would like the new place. “That’s really all I was doing this afternoon,” she said, “trying to see everything through Laura’s eyes, wondering what she’d make of it. I felt pretty sure she’d like the house – she might even think it’s sort of ‘cozy’ – and when we started up the hill I kept looking around at all that open countryside and thinking Oh, here’s the part she’s
really
going to like.
    “Then when we saw the brain-damaged boy in the playpen I thought No, wait: this isn’t right; this won’t do. But then I thought Well, why not? Isn’t something like this a little closer to the real world than anything she’s likely to see in Larchmont – or anything I saw when I was growing up?”
    He was nettled by her saying “the real world” – only the rich and their children ever talked that way, and it always implied alifelong wish to go slumming – but he didn’t call her on it: he understood what she meant, and he agreed with her.
    “I think you have to sort of balance everything out on the scales,” she said, “when you’re trying to decide what’s best for a child.”
    “Exactly,” he told her.
    Laura was six and a half and tall for her age – a shy, nervous girl with slightly protruding upper teeth and remarkably big blue eyes. Her father had recently taught her to snap her fingers, and now she would often snap the fingers of both hands in unison, without being aware she was doing it, as if to punctuate her thoughts.
    She hadn’t liked the first grade and was afraid of facing the second – afraid even to contemplate the all-but-endless train of other long, aching grades that would have to be endured until, like her mother, she would someday be grown up. But she loved the house in Larchmont: her bedroom there was the only truly private, secret place in the world, and her backyard offered daily excursions into