Astute readers will immediately be struck by how many of the stories collected here are about dreamers, and it is perhaps for this reason that it’s hard to read them outside the context of that most famous American Dream story, The Great Gatsby. Yates admired no author more than Fitzgerald, as the writer-dreamer Jack Fields, the protagonist of Yates’s autobiographical story “Saying Goodbye to Sally” suggests. Comparing Yates’s dreamers to Fitzgerald’s is immediately instructive. Gatsby, of course, is not so much the story of a great man as of an ordinary man with a great dream. Jimmy Gatz is determined not just to become rich and win Daisy Buchanan but, more audaciously, to negate the past and reinvent himself, even reshape the world, if need be. Fitzgerald set his novel in a world that is superficially similar to that of Yates’s stories. In both cases, a world war had just concluded and America was victorious. Everything seemed possible except failure. But there were significant differences too. Perhaps because they have vivid memories not just of the war but also the Great Depression that preceded it, Yates’s dreamers are less audacious, more cautious. They want things as badly as Jimmy Gatz, but they have less in the way of expectation. Living all but invisible lives, they’re wary, unsure how much they have a right to hope for. Betty Meyers, a young mother and Navy wife with three kids, “trapped” on the Côte d’Azur, wants desperately to return home to Bayonne, New Jersey, a heartbreakingly modest and totally unironic ambition. In “A Wrestler with Sharks,” Leon Sobel, who’s written (but not published) nine books, wants a column and byline in a tiny trade union newspaper. Indeed, Yates wants us to understand, it may be the very modesty of such desires (for the little house, not the big one) that disguises their potential for life’s most demoralizing failures. Yates understood that while we risk disappointment when we set for ourselves an ambitious goal and fail to achieve it, the challenge, in a sense, insulates us from the worst humiliation. Dream big and we’re expected to fail. About the worst that can happen (Gatsby to the contrary notwithstanding) is that we’ll be applauded for our pluck. Dream small, Yates seems to suggest, and we’re expected to succeed. As a result, failure ensures not just disappointment, but humiliation, anguish, and, most dangerous of all, the impulse to dream smaller next time, thereby risking even greater failure. The characters we meet in Yates’s stories are often already the victims of diminished expectation. Ken Platt, in “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” assumes that when he and his best pal, Carson Wyler, meet two girls on the beach, he’ll get the less attractive one, the “cute, freckled good-sport of a girl whose every cheerful glance and gesture showed she was used to taking second best.”

This time they all swung around to stare at once, which caused him to duck his head slightly and shift his weight from one buttock to the other. Ordinarily, the fact of someone’s coming from New York might have held a certain prestige, for to most of the children the city was an awesome, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day, and which they themselves were permitted to visit only rarely, in their best clothes, as a treat. But anyone could see at a glance that Vincent Sabella had nothing whatever to do with skyscrapers. Even if you could ignore his tangled black hair and gray skin, his clothes would have given him away: absurdly new corduroys, absurdly old sneakers and a yellow sweatshirt, much too small, with the shredded remains of a Mickey Mouse design stamped on its chest. Clearly, he was from the part of New York that you had to pass through on the train to Grand Central—the part where people hung bedding over their windowsills and leaned out on it all day in a trance of boredom, and where you got vistas of straight, deep streets, one after another, all alike in the clutter of their sidewalks and all swarming with gray boys at play in some desperate kind of ball game.

When the reports were over, everyone settled down for school. It was recess time before any of the children thought much about Vincent Sabella again, and then they thought of him only to make sure he was left out of everything. He wasn’t in the group of boys that clustered around the horizontal bar to take turns at skinning-the-cat, or the group that whispered in a far corner of the playground, hatching a plot to push Nancy Parker in the mud. Nor was he in the larger group, of which even Arthur Cross was a member, that chased itself in circles in a frantic variation of the game of tag. He couldn’t join the girls, of course, or the boys from other classes, and so he joined nobody. He stayed on the apron of the playground, close to school, and for the first part of the recess he pretended to be very busy with the laces of his sneakers. He would squat to undo and retie them, straighten up and take a few experimental steps in a springy, athletic way, and then get down and go to work on them again. After five minutes of this he gave it up, picked up a handful of pebbles and began shying them at an invisible target several yards away. That was good for another five minutes, but then there were still five minutes left, and he could think of nothing to do but stand there, first with his hands in his pockets, then with his hands on his hips, and then with his arms folded in a manly way across his chest.

“I can only stay a minute, Gracie,” Ralph said at last. “I promised ’em I’d be back.”

Her heart thumped under the nylon. “Ralph, do you—do you like this?”

“What, honey?”

“My negligee. You weren’t supposed to see it until—after the wedding, but I thought I’d—”

“Nice,” he said, feeling the flimsy material between thumb and index finger, like a merchant. “Very nice. Wudga pay fa this, honey?”

Then in a burst of action he set off again, squaring his hat and setting his jaw, bringing his heels down hard on the pavement, trying to look hurried and impatient and impelled by business. A man could drive himself crazy trying to psychoanalyze himself in the middle of Lexington Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon. The thing to do was get busy now, and start looking for a job.

When he was fairly certain she could see him coming he looked up at her again, and she smiled. It wasn’t the first time he had seen her smile that way, but it was the first time he could be sure it was intended wholly for him, and it caused warm tremors of pleasure in his chest. He couldn’t remember the words of their greeting, but he remembered being quite sure that they were all right, that it was starting off well—that her wide shining eyes were seeing him exactly as he most wanted to be seen. The things he said, whatever they were, struck her as witty, and the things she said, or the sound of her voice when she said them, made him feel taller and stronger and broader of shoulder than ever before in his life. When they turned and started down the steps together he took hold of her upper arm, claiming her, and felt the light jounce of her breast on the backs of his fingers with each step. And the evening before them, spread out and waiting at their feet, seemed miraculously long and miraculously rich with promise.

Starting down alone, now, he found it strengthening to have one clear triumph to look back on—one time in his life, at least, when he had denied the possibility of failure, and won. Other memories came into focus when he crossed the avenue and started back down the gentle slope of Forty-second Street: they had come this way that evening too, and walked to the Biltmore for a drink, and he remembered how she had looked sitting beside him in the semidarkness of the cocktail lounge, squirming forward from the hips while he helped her out of the sleeves of her coat and then settling back, giving her long hair a toss and looking at him in a provocative sidelong way as she raised the glass to her lips. A little later she had said, “Oh, let’s go down to the river—I love the river at this time of day,” and they had left the hotel and walked there. He walked there now, down through the clangor of Third Avenue and up toward Tudor City—it seemed a much longer walk alone—until he was standing at the little balustrade, looking down over the swarm of sleek cars on the East River Drive and at the slow, gray water moving beyond it. It was on this very spot, while a tugboat moaned somewhere under the darkening skyline of Queens, that he had drawn her close and kissed her for the first time. Now he turned away, a new man, and set out to walk all the way home.

NOBODY HAD MUCH respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year—even they could take little pride in the thing. At least, that’s what I used to suspect from the way they’d hump grudgingly around the office, shivering the bile-green partitions with their thumps and shouts, grabbing and tearing at galley proofs, breaking pencil points, dropping wet cigar butts on the floor and slamming telephones contemptuously into their cradles. The Labor Leader was all either of them would ever have for a life’s work, and they seemed to hate it.

You couldn’t blame them: the thing was a monster. In format it was a fat biweekly tabloid, badly printed, that spilled easily out of your hands and was very hard to put together again in the right order; in policy it called itself “An Independent Newspaper Pledged to the Spirit of the Trade Union Movement,” but its real pitch was to be a kind of trade journal for union officials, who subscribed to it out of union funds and who must surely have been inclined to tolerate, rather than to want or need, whatever thin sustenance it gave to them. The Leader’s coverage of national events “from the labor angle” was certain to be stale, likely to be muddled, and often opaque with typographical errors; most of its dense columns were filled with flattering reports on the doings of the unions whose leaders were on the subscription list, often to the exclusion of much bigger news about those whose leaders weren’t. And every issue carried scores of simpleminded ads urging “Harmony” in the names of various small industrial firms that Finkel and Kramm had been able to beg or browbeat into buying space—a compromise that would almost certainly have hobbled a real labor paper but that didn’t, typically enough, seem to cramp the Leader’s style at all.

But Leon Sobel joined the staff about a month after I did, and from the moment Kramm led him into the editorial room we all knew he was going to be different. He stood among the messy desks with the look of a man surveying new fields to conquer, and when Kramm introduced him around (forgetting half our names) he made a theatrically solemn business out of shaking hands. He was about thirty-five, older than most of us, a very small, tense man with black hair that seemed to explode from his skull and a humorless thin-lipped face that was blotched with the scars of acne. His eyebrows were always in motion when he talked, and his eyes, not so much piercing as anxious to pierce, never left the eyes of his listener.

The first thing I learned about him was that he’d never held an office job before: he had been a sheet-metal worker all his adult life. What’s more, he hadn’t come to the Leader out of need, like the rest of us, but, as he put it, out of principle. To do so, in fact, he had given up a factory job paying nearly twice the money.

“Okay, so you’re a hero,” Kopeck said lightly. “You’re a fighting man. Tell me one thing, though, John. Did you personally shoot this gun in combat?”

“Whadda you think?” Fallon said through thin, unmoving lips.

“How many times?”

The fact of the matter was that Fallon, as a husky and competent soldier of nineteen, many times pronounced “a damn good B.A.R. man” by the others in his squad, had carried his weapon on blistered feet over miles of road and field and forest in the last two months of the war, had lain with it under many artillery and mortar barrages and jabbed it at the chests of many freshly taken German prisoners; but he’d had occasion to fire it only twice, at vague areas rather than men, had brought down nothing either time, and had been mildly reprimanded the second time for wasting ammunition.

“Nunnya goddamn business how many!” he said, and the others looked down at their plates with ill-concealed smiles. He glared at them, defying anyone to make a crack, but the worst part of it was that none of them said anything. They ate or drank their beer in silence, and after a while they changed the subject.

She took a bath before fixing the dinner, and then ate with a bulky housecoat roped around her in her usual state of post-bath dishevelment: hair damp, skin dry and porous, no lipstick and a smiling spoor of milk around the upper borders of her unsmiling mouth. “Where do you think you’re going?” she said, when he had pushed his plate away and stood up. “Look at that—a full glass of milk on the table. Honestly, John, you’re the one that makes me buy milk and then when I buy it you go and leave a full glass on the table. Now come back here and drink that up.”

He went back and gulped the milk, which made him feel ill.