All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  But the strangest thing was the continual pairing off, all day long — on the train, at the induction center, at the camp, where, long after midnight, you found yourself still instinctively looking around for somebody to cling to, and look after. Somebody you’d never laid eyes on before that day became, for two hours, closer than any friend you’d ever had. When you were separated, your whole concern was for him — for what might be happening to him. While you had one person to look after, among the crowd, you were not totally lost yourself. When the two of you were separated for good, you looked around and there was someone in obvious desperation, and so the whole thing happened all over again.

  When they arrived in camp, somebody talked back to a sergeant who was not Irish, and he said, “All right, you sons of bitches, you can just wait.” And they did, from midnight until one-thirty, when they were marched two miles in what proved to be the wrong direction and three miles back, before they sat down, at 2.15 a.m., in a mess hall, before a plate of food they couldn’t look at, let alone eat. All through the next day it continued — the feeling that each thing was a little more than you could stand. And the pairing off. But the next day was better. And the third day they began to relax and settle into their ordinary selves.…

  Of the three boys sitting on the floor in front of Francis Whitehead, listening to him gravely, Leo was still too young for military service, Nathan had drawn a high number and didn’t expect to be called before September or October, and Haller was 4-F because of his bad eyes. Most of the things Francis told them they knew already, from what they had read in newspapers and magazines. It was his voice that made the experience real to them. The voice of the survivor. And here and there a detail that they couldn’t have imagined. And because it happened to Francis, whom all three of them loved.

  When Haller went home, Nathan and Leo put up the overflow cot in their room, and Abbie brought sheets from the linen closet, and a blanket and pillow from the other bed in her room. The boys knocked on the wall when they were in bed, and she came back to say good night. Nathan was sleeping on the cot, Francis was in Nathan’s bed, and Leo in his own. After she had turned out the light and gone back to her own room she could hear them talking together, through the wall. The talking stopped while she was brushing her hair, and then there was no sound but Francis’s coughing.

  She was almost asleep when the kitten commenced complaining from the box on the floor. She had entirely forgotten about it in the excitement of Francis’s homecoming. “A little chloroform for you, my pet,” she said, “first thing in the morning,” and rolled over on her back. I’m twenty-five, she thought. Finally. Thanks to one thing and another, including Haller and his “Oceanides.”

  Then she thought about Haller — about her grievance against him, which was that he went on courting her year after year, as if faithfulness, the idea of love, was the answer to everything, and had no instinct that told him when she was willing and when she couldn’t bear to have him touch her. Why, when he was so intelligent, was he also so stupid — for she did like him, and sometimes even felt that she could love him.

  As for Francis, it was as Haller had said. Nothing that happens over and over is pure accident; and what they (and God knows how many other people) were faced with, at the critical moment, was his empty chair.

  Out of habit, her mother referred to them as “the children,” and it was only too true. She and Nathan and Leo. And Haller. And Francis. They were all five aiming the croquet ball anywhere but at the wicket, and playing the darling game of being not quite old enough to button their overcoats and find their mittens. But for how long? For ever, the curtain said, blowing in from the open window. But what did the curtain know about it?

  The kitten was quiet, but the coughing continued on the other side of the wall. Listening in the dark, she decided that Francis didn’t have enough covers on. If he had another blanket, he’d stop coughing and go to sleep. She could not get to the extra covers without disturbing her mother and father, and so she took the blanket from her own bed, slipped a wrapper on, and went into the boys’ room. All three of them were asleep, but Francis woke up when she put the blanket over him. He didn’t seem to know where he was at first, and then she gathered from his sleepy mumbling that he didn’t want her to go away. When she sat down, he wormed around in the bed until his thighs were against her back and his forehead touched her knee. There he stayed, without moving, without any pressure coming from his body at all. This time it was not the empty chair but a drowned man washed up against a rock in the sea.

  The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel

  THE elephantine Volkswagen bus didn’t belong to the French landscape. Compared to the Peugeots and Renaults and Citroëns that overtook it so casually, it seemed an oddity. So was the family riding in it. When they went through towns people turned and stared, but nothing smaller would have held the five of them and their luggage, and the middle-aged American who was driving was not happy at the wheel of any automobile. This particular automobile he loathed. There was no room beyond the clutch pedal. To push it down to the floor he had to turn his foot sidewise, and his knee ached all day long from this unnatural position. “Have I got enough room on my right?” he asked continually, though he had been driving the Volkswagen for two weeks now. “Oh God!” he would exclaim. “There’s a man on a bicycle.” For he was suffering from a recurring premonition: In the narrow street of some village, though he was taking every human precaution, suddenly he heard a hideous crunch under the right rear wheel. He stopped the car and with a sinking heart got out and made himself look at the twisted bicycle frame and the body lying on the cobblestones.… A dozen times a day John Reynolds could feel his face responding to the emotions of this disaster, which he was convinced was actually going to happen. It was only a matter of when. And where. Sometimes the gendarmes came and took him away, and at other times he managed to extricate himself by thinking of something else. At odds with all this, making his life bearable, was another scene — the moment in the airport at Dinard when he would turn the keys over to the man from the car-rental agency and be free of this particular nightmare forever.

  Dorothy Reynolds, sitting on the front seat beside her husband, loved the car because she could see out of it in all directions. Right this minute she asked for nothing more than to be driving through the French countryside. Her worries, which were real and not, like his, imaginary, had been left behind, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. She could only vaguely remember what they were.

  “In France,” she said, “nothing is really ugly, because everything is so bare.”

  “In some ways I like England better,” he said.

  “It’s more picturesque, but it isn’t as beautiful. Look at that grey hill town with those dark clouds towering above it,” she said, turning around to the two older girls in the seat directly behind her. And then silently scolded herself, because she was resolved not to say “Look!” all the time but to let the children use their own eyes to find what pleased them. The trouble was, their eyes did not see what hers did, or, it often seemed, anything at all.

  This was not, strictly speaking, true. Reynolds’s niece, Linda Porter, had 20/20 vision, but instead of scattering her attention on the landscape she saved it for what she had heard about — the Eiffel Tower, for example — and for the mirror when she was dressing. She was not vain, and neither was she interested in arousing the interest of any actual boy, though boys and men looked at her wherever she went. Her ash-blond hair had been washed and set the night before, her cuticles were flawless, her rose-pink nail polish was without a scratch, her skirt was arranged under her delightful young bottom in such a way that it would not wrinkle, her hand satchel was crammed with indispensable cosmetics, her charm bracelet was the equal of that of any of her contemporaries, but she was feeling forlorn. She had not wanted to leave the hotel in Concarneau, which was right on the water, and she could swim and then lie in the sun, when there was any, and she had considered the possibility of g
etting a job as a waitress so she could spend the rest of her life there, only her father would never let her do it. She had also considered whether or not she was in love with the waiter in charge of their table in the dining room, who was young and good-looking and from Marseilles; when a leaf of lettuce leaped out of the salad bowl, he said “Zut!” and kicked it under the table. He asked her to play tennis with him, but unfortunately she hadn’t brought her own racquet and he didn’t have an extra one. Also, it turned out he was married.

  How strange that she should be sitting side by side with someone for whom mirrors did not reflect anything whatever. Alison Reynolds, who was eleven and a half, considered the hours when she was not reading largely wasted. “If Dantès has had lunch,” she once confided to her father, “then I have had lunch. Otherwise I don’t know whether I’ve eaten or not.” With a note of sadness in her voice, because no matter how vivid and all-consuming the book was, or how long, sooner or later she finished it, and was stranded once more in ordinariness until she had started another. She couldn’t read in the car because it made her feel queer. She was very nearsighted, and by the time she had found her glasses and put them on, the blur her mother and father wanted her to look at had been left behind. All châteaux interested her, and anything that had anything to do with Jeanne d’Arc, or with Marie Antoinette. Or Marguerite de Valois. Or Louise de La Vallière.

  Because her mind and her cousin’s were so differently occupied, they were able to let one another alone, except for some mild offensive and defensive belittling now and then, but Alison and her younger sister had to ride in separate seats or they quarreled. Trip was lying stretched out, unable to see anything but the car roof and hating every minute of the drive from Fougères, where they had spent the night. It didn’t take much to make her happy — a stray dog or a cat, or a monkey chained to a post in a farmyard, or an old white horse in a pasture — but while they were driving she existed in a vacuum and exerted a monumental patience. At any moment she might have to sit up and put her head out of the car window and be sick.

  They passed through Antrain without running over anybody on a bicycle, and shortly afterward something happened that made them all more cheerful. Another salmon-and-cream-colored Volkswagen bus, the first they had seen, drew up behind them and started to pass. In it were a man and a woman and two children and a great deal of luggage. The children waved to them from the rear window as the other Volkswagen sped on.

  “Americans,” Dorothy Reynolds said.

  “And probably on their way to Mont-Saint-Michel,” Reynolds said. “Wouldn’t you know.” They were no longer unique.

  He saw a sign on their side of the road. She also noticed it, and they smiled at each other with their eyes, in the rearview mirror.

  Eighteen years ago, they had arrived in Pontorson from Cherbourg, by train, by a series of trains, at five o’clock in the afternoon. They had a reservation at a hotel in Mont-Saint-Michel, but they had got up at daybreak and were too tired to go on, so they spent the night here in what the Michelin described as an “hôtel simple, mais confortable,” with “une bonne table dans la localité.” It was simple and bare and rather dark inside, and it smelled of roasting coffee beans. It was also very old; their guidebook said it had been the manor of the counts of Montgomery, though there was nothing about it now to indicate this. Their room was on the second floor and it was enormous. So was the bathroom. There was hot water. They had a bath, and then they came downstairs and had an apéritif sitting under a striped umbrella in front of the hotel. He remembered that there was a freshly painted wooden fence with flower boxes on it that separated the table from the street. What was in the flower boxes? Striped petunias? Geraniums? He did not remember, but there were heavenly blue morning glories climbing on strings beside the front door. Their dinner was too good to be true, and they drank a bottle of wine with it, and stumbled up the stairs to their room, and in the profound quiet got into the big double bed and slept like children. So long ago. And so uncritical they were. All open to delight.

  In the morning they both woke at the same instant and sat up and looked out of the window. It was market day and the street in front of the hotel was full of people. The women wore long shapeless black cotton dresses and no makeup on their plain country faces. The men wore blue smocks, like the illustrations of Boutet de Monvel. And everybody was carrying long thin loaves of fresh bread. A man with a vegetable stand was yelling at the top of his lungs about his green beans. They saw an old woman leading a cow. And chickens and geese, and little black-and-white goats, and lots of bicycles, but no cars. It was right after the war, and gasoline was rationed, but it seemed more as if the automobile hadn’t yet been heard of in this part of France.

  They were the only guests at the hotel, the only tourists as far as the eye could see. It was the earthly paradise, and they had it all to themselves. When they came in from cashing a traveler’s check or reading the inscriptions on the tombstones in the cemetery, a sliding panel opened in the wall at the foot of the stairs and the cook asked how they enjoyed their walk. The waitress helped them make up their minds what they wanted to eat, and if they had any other problems they went to the concierge with them. The happier they became the happier he was for them, so how could they not love him, or he them? The same with the waitress and the chambermaid and the cook. They went right on drinking too much wine and eating seven-course meals for two more days, and if it hadn’t been that they had not seen anything whatever of the rest of France, they might have stayed there, deep in the nineteenth century, forever.

  REYNOLDS thought he remembered Pontorson perfectly, but something peculiar goes on in the memory. This experience is lovingly remembered and that one is, to one’s everlasting shame, forgotten. Of the remembered experience a very great deal drops out, drops away, leaving only what is convenient, or what is emotionally useful, and this simplified version takes up much more room than it has any right to. The village of Pontorson in 1948 was larger than John Reynolds remembered it as being, but after eighteen years it was not even a village any longer; it was now a small town, thriving and prosperous, and one street looked so much like another that he had to stop in the middle of a busy intersection and ask a traffic policeman the way to the hotel they had been so happy in.

  It was still there, but he wouldn’t have recognized it without the sign. The fence was gone, and so were the morning glories twisting around their white strings, and the striped umbrellas. The sidewalk came right up to the door of the hotel, and it would not have been safe to drive a cow down the street it was situated on.

  “It’s all so changed,” he said. “But flourishing, wouldn’t you say? Would you like to go in and have a look around?”

  “No,” Dorothy said.

  “They might remember us.”

  “It isn’t likely the staff would be the same after all this time.”

  Somewhere deep inside he was surprised. He had expected everybody in France to stand right where they were (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, stillpost) until he got back.

  “I never thought about it before,” he said, “but except for the cook there was nobody who was much older than we were.… So kind they all were. But there was also something sad about them. The war, I guess. Also, there’s no place to park. Too bad.” He drove on slowly, still looking.

  “What’s too bad?” Alison asked.

  “Nothing,” Dorothy said. “Your father doesn’t like change.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not particularly. But if you are going to live in the modern world —”

  Alison stopped listening. Her mother could live in the modern world if she wanted to, but she had no intention of joining her there.

  They circled around, and found the sign that said MONT-SAINT-MICHEL, and headed due north. In 1948 their friend the concierge, having found an aged taxi for them, stood in the doorway waving good-bye. Nine kilometers and not another car on the road the whole ride. Ancient farmhouses such as
they had seen from the train window they could observe from close up: the weathered tile roofs, the pink rose cascading from its trellis, the stone watering trough for the animals; the beautiful man-made, almost mathematical orderliness of the woodpile, the vegetable garden, and the orchard. Suddenly they saw, glimmering in the distance, the abbey on its rock, with the pointed spire indicating the precise direction of a heaven nobody believed in anymore. The taxi driver said, “Le Mont-Saint-Michel,” and they looked at each other and shook their heads. For reading about it was one thing and seeing it with their own eyes was another. The airiness, the visionary quality, the way it kept changing right in front of their eyes, as if it were some kind of heavenly vaudeville act.

  After the fifth brand-new house, Reynolds said, massaging his knee, “Where are all the old farmhouses?”

  “We must have come by a different road,” Dorothy said.

  “It has to be the same road,” he said, and seeing how intently he peered ahead through the windshield she didn’t argue. But surely if there were new houses there could be new roads.

  Once more the abbey took them by surprise. This time the surprise was due to the fact they were already close upon it. There had been no distant view. New buildings, taller trees, something, had prevented their seeing it until now. The light was of the seacoast, dazzling and severe. Clouds funneled the radiance upward. It seemed that flocks of angels might be released into the sky at any moment.