Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates Page B

is beginning to pick up already,” he said.
    “Oh, that’s nice,” Lucy said, “isn’t it.”
    They had previously agreed that it would only be a day or two more, as soon as they managed to make the house “presentable,” before they could begin to do something about their own social life.
    “…  Well, hey, this is great,” Tom Nelson said on the phone. “You find a decent place? Good. How about coming over some afternoon? How about tomorrow?”
    The town of Kingsley, where the Nelsons lived, would never have to be explained in terms of an almost-abandoned lakeside resort, a resultant blue-collar community, and a moribund summer-stock theater. It required no explanations, and it offered none.
    There wasn’t really any “town” to it at all, beyond a snug little lineup of post office, gas station, grocery and liquor store; all the rest of it was country. The residents of Kingsley were here because they had earned the right to be – had earned enough money in New York to put squalor and vulgarity behind them forever – and they valued their privacy. The few houses that could be glimpsed from the road were set well back among trees and shrubs, so that what may have been the most agreeable parts of them would never be known to strangers. Michael was reminded, in passing, of Lucy’s parents’ summer place on Martha’s Vineyard.
    The Nelsons’ big, white, well-remodeled farmhouse was an exception: you could see the whole of it, at the top of a long, broad hill of grass, as soon as the hill itself came into view around the curve of a slender subsidiary road. Even so, the very look of it let you know at once that it was invulnerable to intrusion and impervious to compromise. There would be no old homosexuals wheeling bricks along the crest of this hill, or any young homosexuals dawdling over poached eggs at the base of it. Thisplace belonged entirely to Thomas Nelson and his family. They owned it.
    “Well, hey,” Tom said in greeting at the top of the driveway, as his wife came smiling from the door behind him.
    Then there began a happy inspection of the house, with Lucy saying “marvelous” at each discovery. The sun-bright living room was too big to comprehend all at once, and its most remarkable feature, for Michael, was that one long wall of it was packed floor to ceiling with open shelves of books. There were at least two thousand books here, and probably more like twice that many.
    “Well, they’ve been accumulating for years,” Tom explained. “Been buying books all my life. Didn’t have room for ’em in Yonkers or Larchmont, so we had to keep ’em in storage. Nice to have ’em out again. Want to see the studio?”
    And the studio too was long and wide and flooded with light. The old piece of galvanized tin lay on the floor in one corner, looking very small now, and several new pictures were carelessly displayed on a thumbtack board just above it, leading Michael to suspect that this might be the only corner actually used for working.
    “First studio I ever had,” Tom said. “Feel a little lost in here sometimes.”
    But to ease the times when he felt a little lost there was a full set of trap drums at the far end of the room, along with an arrangement of stereo components and a great many shelved record albums. Tom Nelson’s collection of jazz recordings was almost as substantial as his library.
    On their way out to the kitchen, where the girls were talking, Michael noticed that a new place had been found for the soldiers: the parade figures stood apart from one another with their swords and wrinkled toothpaste-tube flags, and there wasenough deep drawer-space beneath them to accommodate the combat troops.
    “Oh, I’m so happy for you both,” Lucy said when the four of them were settled in the living room. “You’ve found the perfect place to live, and to raise your children. You’ll
never
have to think about moving again.”
    But then the Nelsons wanted to know what kind of place