All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  “You’d think that by having people at the house where they could see you that that ought to satisfy them, but it doesn’t. They all want to have you for cocktails or something, and the result is that I don’t get any time with you — which I don’t like. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “This evening we’ll have some time,” Edward said.

  “Three days is not enough.”

  “I know it isn’t.”

  Once they had left the business district there was no traffic whatever. As Edward drove, he continued to look both at the quiet empty street ahead of them and in the little oblong, bluish rearview mirror, at his father. Mr. Ferrers was aware that he was being studied, but what reasonable man is afraid of the scrutiny of his own child? Before he retired and moved back to Draperville, Illinois, Mr. Ferrers had been the vice-president in charge of the Chicago office of a large public-utility company. He was accustomed to speak with authority, and with confidence that his opinion, which had been arrived at cautiously and with due regard for the opinions of others, was the right one. He also came from a long line of positive people. Introspection was as foreign to his nature as dishonesty. Right was right and wrong was wrong, and to tell one from the other you had only to examine your own conscience. In general, Mr. Ferrers was on the side of the golden mean, or, as he would have put it, the middle of the road. When it came to politics, he threw moderation to the winds and was a fanatical Republican. Though he could not swallow the Book of Genesis, he believed every word that was printed in the Chicago Tribune. Also that Franklin Roosevelt had committed suicide. Fishing and golf were his two great pleasures. At the bridge table he deliberated, strumming his fingers, without realizing that he was holding up the game, and drove his wife, Edward’s stepmother, to make remarks that she had meant to keep to herself. Now that his eyesight had begun to fail, he had trouble recognizing people at any distance, and so he spoke courteously to everyone he met on the street. He had no enemies. The younger men, Edward’s contemporaries, looked up to him and came to him for advice. The older men, Mr. Ferrers’s lifelong friends, considered it a privilege to be allowed to fasten the fly on the end of his fishing line, and loved him for his forthrightness, and saw to it that he did not lack company at five o’clock in the afternoon, when he got out the ice trays and the glasses and a bottle of very good Scotch.

  “This part of town hasn’t changed at all,” Edward remarked.

  He meant the houses. The look of things had changed drastically. The trees were gone. In a nightmare of three or four years’ duration, the elm blight had put an end to the shade — to all those long, graceful, leafy branches that used to hang down over roofs and porches and reach out over the brick pavement toward the branches on the other side. Now everything looked uncomfortably exposed, as if standing on the sidewalk you could tell how much people owed at the bank. Not that there had ever been much privacy in Draperville, Edward thought; but now there was not even the appearance of privacy.… In the dark, cold, hungry, anxious to get home to his supper, he used to ride over these very lawns on his bicycle, and when he was close enough to the front porch he would reach backward into his canvas bag, take out a folded copy of the Draperville Evening Star, and let fly with it. That dead self, the boy he used to be. The one you used to have such trouble with, he wanted to say to his father, but Mr. Ferrers did not like talking about the past. “That’s all water over the dam,” he said once when Edward asked him a question about his mother. On the other hand, he did sometimes like to talk about local history — what the business district was like when he was a boy, where some long defunct dry goods store or shoe store or law office or livery stable used to be, and who the old families were. And gossip said that when he went to see old Dr. McBride, he talked about Edward’s mother. So perhaps it’s only that he doesn’t like to talk about the past with me, Edward thought. Aloud, he said, “This car drives very easily, after our 1936 Ford.”

  “You ought to get a new car,” Mr. Ferrers said.

  “The old one runs. It runs very well.”

  “I know, but so does a new car. And Janet might enjoy having a car that isn’t sixteen years old, did you ever stop to think of that?”

  Edward smiled, without taking his eyes from the street, and did not commit himself. This was not the first time that his father had brought up the subject of their car, which had stopped being a joke and was now an affront to the whole family. Except possibly his Aunt Alice, who didn’t have a car, because she had very little money — barely enough to live on. What she did have slipped through her fingers. This was equally true of Edward. When he was a little boy, his father made him lie stretched out on his hand in shallow water. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t take my hand away,” he said, and when Edward stopped thrashing and looked back, his father was ten feet away from him and he had learned to swim. But learning the value of money was something else again.

  On Edward’s sixth birthday, Mr. Ferrers started his son off with a weekly allowance of ten cents — a sum so large in Edward’s eyes that when Mrs. McBride gave him another dime for ice-cream cones, he wasn’t sure whether it was morally right for him to take it. With advancing age, the ten cents became a quarter, all his own, to spend when and on what he pleased, and of course once it was spent there was no possibility of more until another week rolled around. In first-year high school, the quarter became fifty cents, and then, in Chicago, where he had lunch at school and carfare to consider, it jumped suddenly to three dollars. By walking to school, and a good deal of the time not eating any lunch, he could buy books, and did. Sometimes quite expensive ones. And in college he had sixty, then seventy-five, and then ninety dollars a month, with no questions asked, out of which he fed himself and paid for the roof over his head and bought still more books. If he ran short toward the end of the month, he lived on milk and graham crackers — which was not what his father had intended. And once when he ran out of money early in the month because he had shared what he had with a roommate whose check from home didn’t come, he got a job waiting tables at a sorority house. What it amounted to was that he had learned when the money ran out not to ask for more.

  When he finished college, he thought he wanted to teach English, but after three years of graduate work he threw up his part-time appointment with the university where he had been an undergraduate, took the hundred dollars that he had in a savings account, borrowed another hundred from his father, and went to New York on a Greyhound bus and got a job. After working three weeks, he paid his father back. A great load fell from Mr. Ferrers’s shoulders with this act. He sat with Edward’s letter and the check for a hundred dollars in his hand and wept. The only one of his three children who had ever given him cause for worry had demonstrated that he was responsible where money was concerned, and Mr. Ferrers felt that his work had been accomplished. It appeared to be so well accomplished that Edward, receiving raise after raise, in four years reached a point at which he must be making about as much income as his father. Since his father never revealed how much money he earned, this had to be concluded by inference, from his scale of living and his remarks about other people. Edward decided on ten thousand dollars a year as his mark, and when he reached it he rested there a few months, during the summer of 1939. His father and stepmother came East for the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow. Sitting in the Belgian Pavilion, with a clear view of the French Pavilion, where the food was better but notoriously expensive, Edward announced that he had resigned from his job in order to get a Ph.D. and go back to teaching. Mr. Ferrers took this decision calmly. Edward was a grown man now, he said, and he would not presume to tell him how to lead his life.

  As Edward drove up in front of the place where his aunt lived, Mr. Ferrers said, “Don’t get too close to the curbing — you’ll scrape the whitewalls.”

  “How is that?” Edward asked.

  Mr. Ferrers opened the door on his side and looked. “You’re all right,” he said.

  Though now and then some old house
would be divided into apartments, this was the only building in Draperville that had been originally designed for that purpose. It was two stories high, frame, with small porches both upstairs and down. It was painted a dreary shade of brown, and it backed on the railroad tracks. Mr. Ferrers’s sister lived on the second floor, at the top of a rather steep flight of stairs.

  “You go ahead, son,” he said. “I have to take my time.”

  There were two doors at the top of the stairs. The one on the right opened and Edward’s Aunt Alice said, “I’ve been watching for you. Come in, come in,” and put her arms around him and gave him a hearty smack. Looking past her into the apartment, he saw that his stepmother had already come.

  “What a pretty dress,” he said.

  “I put it on for you,” his Aunt Alice said, and her face lit up with pleasure.

  Edward loved her because his mother had loved her, and because she had been very good to him after his mother died — the one person who brought cheerfulness and jokes into a house where life had come to a standstill and people sat down to meals and went upstairs to bed and practiced the piano and read the evening paper and answered the telephone only because they didn’t know what else to do. He always thought of her as she was then, and so it was a shock to find her with white hair, false teeth, wrinkles, rimless bifocals, and hands twisted out of shape by arthritis. And living alone for so many years had made her melancholy. Only her voice was not changed. Unlike most people of her generation, she could speak about her feelings. The night before, sitting off in a corner with him where nobody could hear what they were saying, she said, “I know I’m old, but my heart is young.” During a long life, very little happiness had come her way and she had taken every bit of it, without a moment’s fear or hesitation. And would again.

  “Well, Alice,” Mr. Ferrers said as he kissed her, “how are all your aches and pains today?”

  “They’re not imaginary, as you seem to think.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Edward said.

  “I know he just likes to get my goat,” she said. “But even so.”

  “If you can’t stand a little teasing,” Mr. Ferrers said.

  “I don’t mind teasing, but sometimes your teasing hurts.”

  When they were children and he got into a fight on the way home from school, she dropped her books and sailed in and pulled his tormentors off him. Mr. Ferrers had had asthma as a boy and was not strong, but he outgrew it; the time came when he didn’t need anybody to protect him. From the way she spoke his name, it was perfectly clear to Edward how much his aunt loved his father still.

  The living room of the apartment was robbed of light by the porch. The deep shade that was lacking everywhere outside was here, softening the colors of Oriental rugs that were familiar to him from his childhood; like books that he had read over and over. His childhood was separated sharply from his adolescence by his mother’s death, which occurred when he was ten. He was thirteen when his father remarried, and when he was fifteen they moved from Draperville to Chicago. He had known his stepmother since he was four years old. She had been his kindergarten teacher, and so it was not as if his father had married a stranger.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Ferrers came East for a visit with Edward and his wife, the two couples played gin rummy with a good deal of gaiety and went for long drives. Edward’s wife and his stepmother were comfortable together. If there was ever any strain, it was between father and son — because Edward had miscalculated the length of time it took to drive from the handsome street of old houses in Litchfield, Connecticut, to the inn where Mr. Ferrers could sit down to his evening drink; or because Mr. Ferrers could not keep off the subject of politics even though he knew what Edward thought of Senator McCarthy. But when Edward was going to high school in Chicago, it was different. He did not like to think of all that his stepmother had put up with — the sullenness; the refusal to admit her completely into his affections lest he be disloyal to his mother; the harsh judgments of adolescence; sand in the bathroom, tears at the dinner table, and implacable hostility toward his father. As if to make belated amends, he sat now holding her hand in his and reminding her of things that had happened when they were living in Chicago.

  “Do you remember what a time you had teaching me to drive?” he said, and they both laughed. Streetcars had exerted a fatal attraction for him. He killed the engine on Sheridan Road. Returning to the garage where the car was kept, he couldn’t decide between the entrance and the exit and almost drove up on a concrete post.

  “I used to hear you coming home,” Helen Ferrers said, “when we lived on Greenleaf Avenue, and your walk sounded so like your dad’s that I couldn’t tell which of you it was.”

  Edward also had put up with something. For the first few years, she suffered from homesickness and she and his father went home to Draperville as often as they could, and they had a good deal of company — mostly Helen’s friends, who came up to Chicago for a few days to do some shopping. There was no guest room in the apartment, and when they had company Edward slept in the dining room, on a daybed that opened out. In his room there were twin beds with satin spreads on them, and before he got into bed at night, he folded the one on his bed carefully and put it on the other, but sometimes forgot to pin back the glass curtains so they wouldn’t be rained on during the night. He studied at a card table, and in his closet, in a muslin bag, were Helen’s evening dresses. The two pictures on the wall were colored French prints, from a series entitled Les Confiances d’Amour. By the light switch there was a small framed motto:

  Hello, guest, and Howdy-do.

  This small room belongs to you.

  And our house and all that’s in it.

  Make yourself at home each minute.

  Helen let go of his hand in order to go out to the kitchen and help put lunch on the table. Edward heard his Aunt Alice say, “I’m all ready. As soon as the ice tea is poured, we can sit down. I know Ed likes to have his meals on time.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,” Helen said — meaning sweet corn and garden tomatoes and fried chicken and a huge strawberry shortcake.

  “It wasn’t any trouble,” his aunt said, which was of course untrue; at her age everything was hard for her, and usually she was perfectly willing to admit it. When they pushed their chairs back from the table, an hour later, she said, “No, you can’t help me, any of you. I won’t hear of it. I don’t have Ned with me very often, and we’re going to talk, we’re not going to stand around in the kitchen doing dishes. I don’t mind doing them if I can take my time.”

  What they talked about, sitting in a circle in her small, dark living room, was her health. The doctor was trying cortisone, and she thought it had helped her. She had more movement in her fingers, and could put her hair up without feeling so much pain in her shoulder.

  THEY were late getting away — it was after three-thirty when they said good-bye and got in the car and drove off to call on Dr. McBride, whom they found sitting up in bed in the downstairs room that used to be his den. “Sit right here on the bed where I can see you,” he said.

  “He won’t be comfortable,” Mrs. McBride objected.

  “How do you know?” Dr. McBride said. He was born in Scotland and spoke with a noticeable burr. “Sit down, my boy. Don’t pay any attention to your auntie. I’ve been expecting you. You have your mother’s eyes. You remember her?”

  Edward nodded.

  “And you like living in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re teaching. That’s a fine profession for a man to be in. Very fine. You’ll never have to worry for fear your life is being wasted. And how old are you now?”

  Edward told him.

  “I can recall very well the day you were born. Would you like to hear about it?”

  “Yes, I would,” Edward said.

  “It was an extremely hot day, in the middle of August.…”

  Looking into the old man’s faded blue eyes, Edward thought, This is
the first real conversation that we have ever had.

  While Mrs. McBride and his father talked about the new road to Peoria and what a difference it would make, Dr. McBride held Edward’s hand and told him things he had done and said when he was a little boy, and then he began to tell Edward about his own boyhood in Scotland. “My father was very strict,” he said, “and by the time I was eleven years old I’d had enough of his heavy hand and I made up my mind to run away to America. I told my mother, because I couldn’t bear not to, and because I knew she’d feel worse if I’d kept it from her. She gave me all the money there was in the teapot, and told me I mustn’t leave without saying good-bye to my father. So I did. I edged my way all around the room until I arrived at the door, and then I said, ‘Good-bye, Father, I’m leaving home,’ and started running as fast as my legs would carry me.…”

  He got a job on a tramp schooner that landed him eventually on the coast of California. He was homesick and couldn’t find work, slept in doorways, and was half starved when he met up with a man whose name was also McBride, a well-to-do rancher who had recently lost his only son.

  Somewhere, possibly during that far-off boyhood in Scotland, Dr. McBride had been exposed to the storyteller’s art. He understood the use of the surprising juxtaposition, the impact of things left unsaid. Again and again there was a detail that couldn’t not be true. He never relapsed into the pointless, never said “to make a long story short,” and seemed not even to be aware that he was telling stories, and yet there was not one unnecessary word.

  “Oh, but did that really happen?” Edward exclaimed. “How marvellous.”

  “It was marvellous,” Dr. McBride agreed.

  And a minute later Edward said, “But weren’t you afraid of him?” He said, “He was still waiting, after all that time?” And “It’s so beautiful — that it worked out that way.” Looking altogether a different person — as if the essential part of him, his true self that could never show its face in Draperville because no child after he grows up can ever be wholly natural with his parents, had come and joined them on the bed — he asked, “And then what happened?” The old man’s eyes lit up. He had found the perfect audience.