The story concerns a childhood incident that drives home the brutal reality that Billy's mother is a bungler: Helen is given the chance to sculpt the head of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it brings her not celebrity but mortification. (The connection is made through a neighbor, a man who'd "just lost his job as a reporter on the New York Post" -- Yates' stories are filled with men who've just been fired, or are about to be.) By the end of that first paragraph he has diagnosed his mother's personality problems with a pitiless accuracy: "She was confident about everything she did in those days," he says of her plan to achieve national notoriety through her sculpture of Roosevelt, "but it never quite disguised a terrible need for support and approval on every side." Like many if not most of Yates' characters, her heavy drinking is hard to separate from the rest of what's off-kilter in her life; one night she passes out on 7-year-old Billy's bed and leaves "a slick mouthful of puke" on his pillow.

Her sculpture of FDR turns out to be "too small. It didn't look heroic. If you could have hollowed it out it would have made a serviceable bank for loose change." Her long-anticipated presentation of the statue to the president at the White House is perfunctory: "It didn't take long. There were no reporters and no photographers." Then the kicker: At lunch with a friend of a friend she inadvertently learns that back home she is a laughingstock: "Last time I saw Bart," her companion tells her of her children's tutor, "he said 'Charlie, the Depression's over for me,' and he told me he'd found some rich, dumb, crazy woman who's paying him to tutor her kids."

Helen's tireless quest to shore up the image of herself as a sculptor is still going on in "Regards at Home," but now Billy is 23; he's called Bill and is an aspiring writer. This time Yates has not sculptorly but writerly self-deceptions in his cross hairs. When Bill's girlfriend, Eileen, pegs his mother as an "art bum" -- one of those people "on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it" until they "come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work" -- he tries to defend her, but it comes out "weak and lame and overstated." As much as he has begun to despise his mother's refusal to "come to terms with reality," her need to "make a romance out of" every failure and unnecessary hardship, he's begun to exhibit some of the same traits. He finds himself making excuses to a work friend, "I held forth at some length, then, on how hard it was to get any real writing done when you were stuck in a full-time job. We'd been trying to save a little money so we could go live in Europe ... but now, with the baby coming, there wasn't much chance of that."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"