All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  STANDING in front of a urinal in the men’s room half an hour later, Hugh was startled by a hearty slap on the back. “I’m going to buy you a drink,” Amos said. “You’ve been refusing drinks all evening, and now I’m going to buy you a drink you can’t refuse.”

  They found a cocktail room, around the corner from the elevators, and Amos wanted to stand at the bar, but the bartender wouldn’t serve them until they sat down at one of the tables.

  “I want to talk to you, Hugh,” Amos said. “I want to talk to you about your work. The time has come for you to take the bull by the horns.” Hugh sat stiffly, unable to answer. He and Laura had got up from the table together and parted in the foyer with the understanding that he would wait there for her. He stood up, with his eyes on the people passing the door, and said, “I want to talk to you, too,” and went outside. Laura was not there, so he went on into the dining room, intending to bend down and say to Barbara, “Will you come with me? I want you to wait for Laura outside.” But to his surprise Laura was at the table with the others. She had not waited for him.

  When he went back to the cocktail room, he found Amos sitting just as he had left him, heavy and solemn and larger than life-size — an epic figure waiting to give advice that was not asked for.

  “What bull by what horns?” Hugh said as he sat down.

  “I mean you’ve got to decide once and for all whether you’re going to hold down a job or be an artist.”

  “But I have decided. I quit my job with Blake & Seymour last fall. I’m devoting all my time to painting.”

  “You’ve got to make up your mind,” Amos said solemnly. “You can’t work both sides of the street, no matter how smart you are.”

  He expatiated at some length on this dilemma that no longer existed. He questioned the wisdom of Hugh’s living in the country. He insisted that Hugh needed more experience of the world. “You’re leading too sheltered a life. You’ve always been on the defensive. At least you are with me, so I figure you are with other people.”

  “I know,” Hugh said. “But now I want to be friends.”

  Amos’s face was contorted by a look of disgust. This wasn’t at all what he had meant; it was another instance of cheering when the other side scored a gain, of the joke with the painfully wrong inflection. “No … None of that. I’m hard,” he said, and allowed Hugh to see, from the look in his eyes, just how hard he was. But there was something histrionic about that look, something that suggested that it had been practiced before a bathroom mirror while Amos was shaving. “I don’t care about anybody but my family. They can hurt me, but nobody else.”

  “I can hurt you,” Hugh said.

  Amos shook his head. “No. Neither you or Dad.”

  The knight takes the pawn.

  Hugh’s expression was a mixture of bewilderment, hurt feelings, and the sense of loss. His offer had been sincere; he had been ready — at least he hoped he was ready — to be friends with Amos, and he had not counted on the possibility that this offer would not be acceptable. So he’s done it at last, he thought; he’s washed his hands of me.

  Though Amos had never supported him in a moment of need, there had always been some slight comfort in the idea that Amos was there, loyal to his friends, and powerful; that his help, never asked for, would even so have been forthcoming at a word from Hugh, the word he had so far been too proud to speak. “If you don’t care about anybody,” he said, accepting his casting out, “why are you telling me what to do? And what do you mean ‘hard’?”

  Before Amos could explain, Pete Murphy appeared, out of nowhere.

  “Sit down,” Amos said. And then to Hugh, “Pete is my friend.”

  Pete refused the offer of a drink. Amos didn’t resume. The three of them sat, silent. Realizing that the conversation could not proceed in the presence of an interested observer, Pete got up and left. It turned out then that Hugh was not rejected after all; the word “friends” was rejected. They were to be “brothers.”

  “Downstairs,” Amos said, “you said Rick never tells you anything. Well, you never tell me anything.”

  “I’m ready now,” Hugh said. “What do you want to know?”

  Amos did not commit himself. It was still Hugh’s move. There was one thing he could say that would make all the rest clear, but something warned him not to say it. Instead, he asked, “Do you remember a letter you wrote me after I got in a fight with the Chi Psis in my sophomore year and moved out of the fraternity house? It was a beautiful letter, and I’m sorry I never answered it.”

  The word “beautiful” made Amos wince. As for the letter, apparently he didn’t remember ever having written it. Or does he remember, Hugh wondered. It was the only time that Amos had ever offered to help him or tried to understand him, and he could not imagine now why he hadn’t answered it.

  Amos wanted to know why Hugh didn’t have a show every year, and Hugh explained that he worked slowly, that he didn’t have that many canvases he was willing to have people see, that he had been, in effect, holding down two jobs.

  “Don’t give me that,” Amos said. “I’m a salesman and a farmer.” This meant that Amos managed Ellen’s four hundred acres of farmland in central Illinois, not that he ever rode a tractor. “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a girl with money,” Amos used to say when he was twenty, but actually he had married for love, like everybody else.

  Again Hugh felt the pull of the unsaid thing. To hold back something as important as that, he decided, was to be afraid. “A minute ago you were complaining that I never tell you anything. Do you understand the word ‘neurotic’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was.”

  “Are you still?” Amos demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Hugh said, confused. This was not the question Amos should have asked. It was the last question he would have asked Amos, if the shoe had been on the other foot.

  “What made you that way?”

  “The usual reasons — what makes other people like that.” Now that it was too late, he was cautious. “Their childhood, the past, something.” His heart sank. All evening long he had been conscious of the approval of the figure in the chair at the head of the couch, the shadowy presence who listened, the patient, kind, supporting, encouraging, faceless father-substitute, whom he had found his way to when things finally came to a standstill and he was no longer able to work or to love any human being.… But he shouldn’t have told Amos. In telling Amos he had behaved incorrectly; he had rejected the inner warning and failed to remember that confession can be a form of self-injury. And now he would have to go on without any encouragement and support.

  “I have the same background as you,” Amos was saying, “and I’m not neurotic.”

  What was so hard, Hugh thought was just to believe it — to believe that anything as terrible as that could happen: that she had died and left them. “You may have been stronger,” he said.

  This explanation Amos was willing to accept, in the literal as well as in the psychological sense.

  “Sometimes I think Mother’s death had a good deal to do with it,” Hugh said.

  “It was hard on me, too,” Amos said.

  The house was like a shell, and the food tasted of tears. And he and Amos undressed in the same room and got into their beds, and he never spoke to Amos under the cover of the dark about the terror that gripped him, and Amos never spoke to him. Neither of them tried to comfort the other.

  “But I was all right,” Hugh continued, “until I was twenty-five.”

  “You were nineteen when you tried to commit suicide.”

  “That was part of it,” Hugh admitted. Without realizing it, he jerked his head up. His eyes went all around the room searching for help.

  “That was something you had no right to do,” Amos said sternly.

  “No right to cut my wrists?”

  “No right to disgrace your family. You didn’t think of anybody but yourself. You’re selfish, Hugh.”

  Again P
ete Murphy appeared, though he didn’t sit down this time; and again they waited until he went away.

  “Barbie and I have been feuding,” Amos said. “She almost flunked out of school last year. She didn’t apply herself. That’s why we sent her East to school.”

  “She thinks the world of you,” Hugh said, by way of pouring oil on troubled waters. “I had such a nice conversation with her during dinner.… She says you never write to her; that she hasn’t had a single letter from you since she’s been here.”

  “I haven’t written to her purposely. I don’t want her to think she can get away with anything.”

  “She must have been pleased that you came to see her graduate.”

  Amos didn’t answer. He was trying to get the attention of the bartender.

  Hugh waited until Amos turned around, and then, leaning forward intently, with his elbows on the table, he said, “You said I was selfish. I want to know why.”

  “Also,” Amos said, “she was running around with this guy twenty-eight years old. She’s no judge of people, Hugh. She always picks out a lame duck. It’s all right to be tenderhearted, but this guy had a nervous breakdown while he was in the Army — at least that’s what he calls it. There’s something creepy about him. I can’t stay in the same room with him. I had to get out of the house when he was there. Ellen’s forbidden her to see him or write to him, but she does anyway.” His eyes filled with tears, which slowly overflowed the lids. “She wants to be a nun, Hugh, and I just don’t know what to do.”

  There was nothing theatrical or rehearsed about this performance, and Hugh was moved by the tears, and by what Amos said, and by the fact that Amos was exposing his feelings to him. He waited while Amos unfolded a clean white handkerchief and blew his nose and regained his composure.

  The bartender brought another round of drinks, and Amos took up finally the matter of Hugh’s selfishness, which turned out to be nothing more (nor less) than the fact that they hadn’t done anything about Barbara.

  “Laura called her, but she —”

  “You didn’t ask her for Thanksgiving or Christmas,” Amos said.

  If they’d had Barbara for Thanksgiving and Christmas, they couldn’t have had Laura’s brother; the house was too small. But how to explain this to Amos, whose house was large, and whose hospitality was always being taken advantage of. They could have asked her out to the country some other time, and should have. But he’d been having difficulties with his work all through the fall and early winter. Lots of labor went into canvases which were eventually discarded. That seemed to have stopped, thank God.

  “When I first came to New York,” Hugh said. “I was always having to go someplace I didn’t feel like going to, on holidays. Some family or business connection of Dad’s trying to be kind. I used to dread it. From what Barbara told Laura over the phone, I gathered she had friends. In school, I mean. And some boy had been taking her to all the shows, she said. We just assumed she’d rather spend Christmas with Ellen’s cousins on Long Island.”

  Amos was not interested in Hugh’s excuses. Having made his accusation, though, he put it aside and began to talk about his younger daughter. “Debbie’s got the same cockeyed brain you have,” he said.

  Hugh resented this at first, before he understood that it was half a criticism, half a grudging compliment. On the other hand, to have a brain at all, to be in any way brighter than or different from the average person was, so far as Amos was concerned, cockeyed. “You have a photographic mind,” he said accusingly.

  Hugh denied this.

  “All you have to do is look at a book and get A,” Amos said. “I never could do that.… Don’t look at me like that. I’m not running you down. I think you’re quite a classy guy. I’m trying to build you up.”

  “I don’t need building up,” Hugh said. As evidence that he was doing all right, he offered the recognition that, during the past five years, his work had received from various critics and museum curators. “It’s quite an honor,” he said, “to be in the annual show at the Whitney Museum. They don’t bother with anybody who isn’t good.”

  “I’m a big duck in a little pond; you’re a little duck in a big pond,” Amos said serenely. “Ellen knows a woman who studied at the Art Institute. She knows a lot about art. I mentioned that I had a brother who is a painter, and drew a blank.… You’ve got to keep your name before the public, Hugh.”

  “I’m after bigger game,” Hugh said. “I’m competing with Eakins.”

  “How much does he make a year?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Well, then,” Amos said agreeably, “maybe you’ve got to die to be great. But you have to turn out more paintings than you have been doing these last few years.” He went on to tell Hugh about Grandma Moses: “She did what was expected of her; she raised her family and didn’t even begin to paint till she was past seventy — with barn paint. Maybe you take it a little too seriously, Hugh.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Another instance of your selfishness,” Amos said, “is your unwillingness to have children.”

  “But I’m not unwilling!” Hugh exclaimed.

  Amos pounced. “Is there something wrong with you?”

  Hugh shook his head.

  Pete Murphy was standing in the doorway, with Laura and Barbara. He borrowed a chair from a nearby table, and they all three sat down.

  The oblique approach, Hugh thought. Why was it he could never remember to protect himself against the double move, in which his castle took Amos’s castle and Amos’s bishop then took his queen.

  “Doc,” Amos said loudly, “I want you to give Hugh the name of a good gynecologist. You must know one.”

  WHEN they were seated once more at the table in the dining room, Amos turned to Louis Murphy’s wife and said belligerently, “What you need is a drink. You look too healthy.”

  “Oh, Amos!” Ellen Cahill exclaimed. “I hoped you’d criticize me!”

  “There’s nothing the matter with you,” Amos said. “You’re perfect.” Then, to the table in general: “That’s my wife. Beautiful woman.”

  I don’t understand it, Hugh said to himself wearily. I don’t understand why I didn’t kill him.… And Laura had not blamed him with so much as a look for discussing the subject there was no reason or need to discuss, in such a place, and with Amos, of all people. Instead, she had turned to Pete, as if he were an old and trusted friend. No, he had told her, he didn’t know any doctors in New York. But two years was not an extraordinary time to wait. He had friends who had waited seven years and then had three children in a row. Matter-of-factly, but with the most glowing kindness in his blue eyes, he had answered her questions and described his own treatment, while Amos and Hugh had an argument about the check and Amos won.

  The waiter arrived with the dessert course. Hugh thought of asking Laura to dance with him, and then, seeing that she and Amos had met head-on in serious conversation, he decided that she would prefer not to be interrupted. He glanced around the table. No one was loud, no one was drunk, but Amos. Was he drunk because this evening was dedicated, whether the others enjoyed it or not, to his meeting with Hugh? Was Amos’s loud voice a mark of his respect?

  Louis Murphy and his wife got up to dance, and Hugh moved around the table and sat beside Aileen Murphy, his friend, whom he had had no chance to talk to. She touched his forehead with her fingers.

  “Furrows,” she said. “You’re having a serious time.”

  “It is serious,” Hugh admitted. “And when you get home, you’d better defend me, after the way I feel about you.”

  “Ellen defends you,” Aileen Murphy said. “She takes your side against Amos — and besides, you don’t need anybody to defend you.”

  Across the table, Amos said to Laura, “Take a look at him and decide what you want him to be. Hugh doesn’t have much ability to get on with people. You have to be the one to do it — meet people and make contacts and smooth the way for him. I wouldn’t be what I am if she” — hi
s eyes found Ellen — “hadn’t made me that.”

  “Amos is sensitive,” Aileen Murphy said in a low voice to Hugh. “You get under his skin more than you realize.”

  “I don’t mean to,” Hugh said.

  “Possibly not, but you do. You and Amos are both extremes. So is Rick. You’re a family of individualists. I don’t know anybody like you.” She shook her head mournfully.

  Hugh heard Amos say, “When are you coming out to the Middle West?”

  “Our car is so old it would never stand the trip,” Laura said.

  “Get him to buy you a new one,” Amos said.

  Laura laughed.

  “He can afford it,” Amos said. “Or if he can’t, he’s a damn fool to have left his job.”

  Barbara leaned across her mother and said to Laura, “Dad isn’t like this. You mustn’t pay any attention to him. He’s really very kind. And he and Uncle Hugh only seem different on the surface. Underneath, they’re quite a lot alike.”

  “Tell me about your children,” Hugh said, remembering suddenly a boy and a girl, three and four — somewhere about that age — tracking mud in and out of the Murphys’ house in Winnetka. “Are they remarkable?”

  “They’re not handsome,” Aileen Murphy said.

  “I don’t mean handsome. Are they intelligent?”

  “No,” she said, reflecting. “I wouldn’t say they were.”

  “But I don’t mean that kind of intelligent,” Hugh persisted. He was dead tired, he realized, and his brain was befuddled. “I mean are they wise in a certain way, about the world?”

  “You’ve got to come West and see us,” she said.

  “Do you have Russian blood in you?”

  “A little Jewish.” She pointed to her thin Roman nose. Actually, he knew, she was Irish on both sides of the family.

  “I asked if you had Russian blood in you,” he said, “because you like to talk about life. You have a feeling for — You’re realistic about people.” Then watching Pete and Laura leave the table and go toward the dance floor: “What about Pete? Is he realistic?”

  “Doc loves everybody.”