All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  It occurs to the landlord that the tenants could carry their garbage down to the street and then he wouldn’t have to. I prepare for a scene, compose angry speeches in the bath. Everybody knows what landlords are like — only he isn’t like that. He isn’t even a landlord, strictly speaking. He has a good job with an actuarial firm. The building is a hobby. It was very run down when he bought it, and he has had the pleasure of fixing it up. We meet on the front sidewalk as I am on my way to work. Looking up at him — he is a very tall man — I announce that I will not carry our garbage down. Looking down at me, he says that if we don’t feel like carrying our garbage down he will go on doing it. What an unsatisfactory man to quarrel with.

  I come home from the office and find that Margaret has spent the afternoon drawing: a pewter coffeepot (Nantucket), a Venetian-glass goblet, a white china serving dish with a handle and a cover, two eggs, a lemon, apples, a rumpled napkin with a blue border. Or the view from the living room all the way into the bedroom, through three doorways, involving the kind of foreshortened perspective Italian Renaissance artists were so fond of. Or the view from the bedroom windows (the apartment house on Thirty-fifth Street that I have so often taken down I now see is all right; it belongs there) in sepia wash. Or her own head and shoulders reflected in the dressing-table mirror. Or the goblet, the coffeepot, the lemon, a green pepper, and a brown luster bowl. The luster bowl has a chip in it, and so the old woman in the antique shop in Putnam Valley gave it to us for a dollar, after the table was safely stowed away in the backseat of the car. And some years later, her daughter, sitting next to me at a formal dinner party, said, “You’re mistaken. Mother was absolutely fearless.” She said it again, perceiving that I did not believe her. Somebody is mistaken, and it could just as well as not be me. Even though I looked quite carefully at the old woman’s expression. In any case, there is something I didn’t see. Her husband — the man whose books the old woman was unwilling to sell — committed suicide. “I was their only child, and had to deal with sadness all my life — sadness from within as well as from without.” If the expression in the old woman’s eyes was not terror, what was it?

  FLORIBUNDA misses the country, and sits at the top of the living-room stairs, clawing at the trapdoor. She refuses to eat, is shedding. Her hairs are on everything. One night we take her across Park Avenue to the Morgan Library and push the big iron gate open like conspirators about to steal the forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible or the three folios of Redouté’s roses. Floribunda leaps from Margaret’s arms and runs across the sickly grass and climbs a small tree. Ecstatically she sharpens her claws on the bark. I know that we will be arrested, but it is worth it.

  NEITHER the landlord and his wife, nor the artist and her husband, who is Dutch, nor Mrs. Pickering, nor the Venables ever entertain in their apartments, but we have a season of being sociable. We have the Fitzgeralds and Eileen Fitzgerald’s father from Dublin for dinner. We celebrate Bastille Day with the Potters. We have Elinor Hinkley’s mother to tea. She arrives at the head of the stairs, where she can see into the living room, and exclaims — before she has even caught her breath — “What beautiful horizontal surfaces!” She is incapable of small talk. Instead, she describes the spiritual emanations of a row of huge granite boulders lining the driveway of her house on Martha’s Vineyard. And other phenomena that cannot be described very easily, or that, when described, cannot be appreciated by someone who isn’t half mad or a Theosophist.

  Dean Wilson brings one intelligent, pretty girl after another to meet us. Like the woman in Isak Dinesen’s story who sailed the seas looking for the perfect blue, he is looking for a flawless girl. Flawless in whose eyes is the question. And isn’t flawlessness itself a serious flaw? “What a charming girl,” we say afterward, and he looks in our faces and is not satisfied, and brings still another girl, including, finally, Ivy Sérurier, who is half English and half French. When she was seven years old her nurse took her every day to the Jardin du Luxembourg and there she ran after a hoop. She is attracted to all forms of occult knowledge, and things happen to her that do not happen to anyone who does not have a destiny. The light bulbs respond to her amazing stories by giving off a higher voltage. The expression on our faces is satisfactory. Dean brings her again, and again. He asks Margaret if she thinks they should get married, but he cannot quite bring himself to ask Ivy this question.

  On a night when we are expecting Henry Coddington to dinner, Hester and Nick Gale come up the stairs blithely at seven o’clock, having got the invitation wrong. Or perhaps it is our fault. There is plenty of food, and it turns out to be a pleasant evening. The guests get on well, but Henry must have thought we did not want to know why Louise left him and took their little girl, whom he idolizes — that we have insulated ourselves from his catastrophe by asking this couple from the country. Anyway, he never comes or calls again. But other people come. Melissa Lovejoy, from Montgomery, Alabama, comes for Sunday lunch, and her hilarious account of her skirmishes with her mother-in-law make the tears run down my cheeks. Melissa, who loves beautiful china, looks around the living room and sees what no one else has ever seen or commented on — a Meissen plate on the other end of the mantelpiece from the Egyptian cat. It is white, with very small green grape leaves and a wide filigree border. Margaret’s brother John had it in his rucksack when he made his way from Geneva to Bordeaux in May 1940. As easily as the plate could have got broken, so he could have ended up in a detention camp and then what? But they are both safe, intact, here in New York. He has his own place, on Lexington Avenue in the Fifties. On Christmas Eve he bends down and selects a present for Margaret and another for me from the pile under the tree at the foot of the stair.

  On New Year’s Eve, John and Dean and Ivy and Margaret and I sit down to dinner. The champagne cork hits the ceiling. Between courses we take turns getting up and going into the bedroom and waiting behind a closed door until a voice calls “Ready!” If you were a school of Italian painting or a color of the spectrum or a character from fiction, what school of Italian painting or color or character would you be? John is Dostoevski’s Idiot, Margaret is lavender blue. Elinor Hinkley joins us for dessert. Just before midnight a couple from the U.N., whom Dean has invited, come up the stairs and an hour later on the dot they leave for another party. It is daylight when we push our chairs back. We have not left the table (except to go into the front room while the questions are being framed) all night long. With our heads out of the window, Margaret and I wait for them to emerge from the building and then we call down to them, “Happy New Year!” But softly, so as not to wake up the neighbors.

  Margaret’s Uncle James, who is not her uncle but her mother’s first cousin, comes to dinner, bringing long-stemmed red roses. He confesses that he has been waiting for this invitation ever since we were married — eight or nine years — and he thoroughly enjoys himself, though he is dying of cancer of the throat. Faced with extinction, you can’t just stand and scream; it isn’t good manners. And men and women of that generation do not discuss their feelings. Anyway he doesn’t. Instead he says, “I like your curtains, Margaret,” and we are filled with remorse that we didn’t ask him sooner. But still, he did come to dinner. And satisfied his curiosity about the way we live. And we were surprised to discover that we were fond of him — as the rabbit is surprised to discover that he is what was concealed in the magician’s hat. I am not the person you thought I was, Uncle James as much as says, sitting back in the easy chair but not using the ottoman lest he look ill.

  I realize that the air is full of cigarette smoke, and prop the trapdoor open with a couple of books — but only a crack. At eleven-thirty Uncle James rises and puts his coat on and says good night, and tromps down the stairs, waking the Venables, and Mrs. Pickering, and the artist and her husband, and Mr. and Mrs. Holmes. And we lock the doors and say what a nice evening it was, and empty the ashtrays, and carry the liquor glasses out to the kitchen, and suddenly perceive an emptiness, an absence. “Floribunda?… Pussy?�
� She is nowhere. She has slipped through the crack that I thought was too small for her to get through. Fur is deceptive, her bone structure is not what I thought it was, and perhaps cats have something in common with cigarette smoke. I have often seen her attenuate herself alarmingly. Outside, on the roof, I call softly, but no little black cat comes. In the night we both wake and talk about her. The bottom of the bed feels strange when we put our feet out and there is nothing there, no weight. When morning comes I dress and go up to the roof again, and make my way toward Park Avenue, stepping over two-foot-high tile walls and making my way around projections and feeling giddy when I peer down into back gardens.

  Margaret, meanwhile, has dressed and gone down the stairs. She rings the Delanos’ bell, and the Irish maid opens the door. “A little cat came in through my bedroom window last night and the mistress said to put her on the street, so I did.” On the street … when she could so easily have put her back on the roof she came from! “Here, Puss, Puss, Puss … here, Puss!” Up Thirty-sixth Street and down Thirty-fifth. All her life she has known nothing but love, and she is so timid. How will she survive with no home? What will the poor creature do? We meet Rose Bernstein, who has just moved into town from our country road, and just as I am saying “On the street. Did you ever hear of anything so heartless?” there is a faint miaow. Floribunda heard us calling and was too frightened to answer. I find her hiding in an areaway. Margaret gathers her up in her arms and we say good-bye to Rose Bernstein, and, unable to believe our good fortune, take her home. Our love and joy.

  IN Chicago there is an adoption agency whose policy with respect to age is not so rigid as Spence-Chapin’s. We pull strings. (Dean Wilson has a friend whose wife’s mother is on the board.) Letters pass back and forth, and finally there we are, in Chicago, nervously waiting in the reception room. Miss Mattie Gessner is susceptible (or so I feel) to the masculine approach. It turns out that she voted for Truman too; and she doesn’t reach across the desk and take the application from my hands. Instead she promises to help us. But it isn’t as simple as the old song my mother used to sing: Today is not the day they give babies away with a half a pound of tay. The baby that is given to us for adoption must be the child of a couple reasonably like us — that is to say, a man and woman who, in the year 1952, would have a record player that plays only 78s and that you wind by hand; who draw seashells on their bedroom curtains and are made happy by a blocked-up fireplace and a stairway that leads nowhere. And this means we must wait God knows how long.

  So we do wait, sometimes in rather odd places for a couple with no children. For example, by the carousel in Central Park. The plunging horses slowly come to a halt with their hoofs in midair. The children get off and more children climb up, take a firm grip on the pole, and look around for their mother or their nurse or their father, in the crowd standing in the open doorway. Slowly the cavalcade begins to move again, and I take the little boy in the plaid snowsuit, with half a pound of English Breakfast, and Margaret takes half a pound of Lipton’s and the little girl with blue ribbons in her hair.

  WE start going to the country weekends. And then we go for the summer, taking suitcases full of clothes, boxes of unread books, drawing materials, the sewing machine, the typewriter. And in September all this is carried up four flights of stairs. And more: flowers, vegetables from the garden, plants we could not bear to have the frost put an end to, even though we know they will not live long in town. And one by one we take up our winter habits. When Saturday night comes around we put on our coats at ten o’clock and go out to buy the Sunday Times at the newspaper stand under the El. We rattle the door of the antique shop on Third Avenue that always has something interesting in the window but has never been known to be open at any hour of any day of the week. On three successive nights we go to Ring Round the Moon, King Lear, and An Enemy of the People, after which it seems strange to sit home reading a book. I am so in love with Adlai Stevenson’s speeches that, though I am afraid of driving in ordinary traffic in New York City, I get the car out of the garage and we drive right down the center of 125th Street, in a torchlight parade, hemmed in by a flowing river of people, all of whom feel the way we do.

  HOW many years did we live in that apartment on Thirty-sixth Street? From 1950 to — The mere dates are misleading, even if I could get them right, because time was not progressive or in sequence, it was one of Mrs. Hinkley’s horizontal surfaces divided into squares. On one square an old woman waters a houseplant in the window of an otherwise blank wall. On another, Albertha, who is black, comes to clean. When she leaves, the apartment looks as if an angel had walked through it. She is the oldest of eleven children. And what she and Margaret say, over a cup of coffee, makes Margaret more able to deal with her solitary life. On another square, we go to the Huguenot Church on Sunday morning, expecting something new and strange, and instead the hymns are perfectly familiar to us from our Presbyterian childhoods: In French they have become more elegant and rhetorical, and it occurs to me that they may not reach all the way to the ear of Heaven. But the old man who then mounts the stairs to the pulpit addresses Seigneur Dieu in a confident voice, as if they are extremely well acquainted, the two of them. On another square we go to Berlitz, and the instructor, a White Russian named Mikhael Miloradovitch, sits by blandly while Margaret and I say things to each other in French that we have managed not to say in English. I am upset when I discover that she prefers the country to the city. The discussion becomes heated, but because it is in French nothing comes of it. We go on living in the city. Until another summer comes and we fill the car, which is now nearly twenty years old, to the canvas top with our possessions; then, locking the doors of the apartment, we drive off to our other life. At which point the shine goes out of this one. The slipcovers fade and so do the seashells and thistles that are exposed to the direct light of the summer sun. Dust gathers on the books, the lampshades, the record player. In the middle of the night, a hand pries at the trapdoor and, finding it securely locked, tries somewhere else. The man out of Krafft-Ebing shows himself seductively to our blank windows. And the intense heat builds up to a violent thunderstorm. After which there is a spell of cooler weather. And a tragedy. For two days there has been no garbage outside Mrs. Pickering’s door in the morning. She does not answer her telephone or the landlord’s knocking, and she has not said she was going away. The first floor extends farther back than the rest of the house, and he is able to place a ladder on the roof of this extension. From the top of the ladder he stares into the third-floor bedroom at a terrible sight: Mrs. Pickering, sitting in a wing chair, naked. He thinks it is death he is staring at, but he is mistaken; she has had a stroke. He breaks the door down, and she is taken to the hospital in an ambulance. She does not die, but neither does she ever come back to this apartment. Passing her door on our way up the stairs, we are aware of the silence inside, and think uneasily of those two days and nights of helpless waiting. Along with the silence there is the sense of something malign, of trouble of a very serious kind that could spread all through the house. To ward it off, we draw closer to the other tenants, linger talking on the stairs, and speak to them in a more intimate tone of voice. We have the Holmeses and the Venables and the artist and her husband up for a drink. It doesn’t do the trick. There was something behind Mrs. Pickering’s door. My sister’s only son turns up and, since we are in the country, we offer him the apartment to live in until he finds a job. He leads a life there that the books and furniture do not approve of. He brings girls home and makes love to them in our bed, under the very eyes of the children flying kites. He borrows fifty bucks from me, to eat on, and to get some shirts, so he won’t look like a bum when he goes job hunting. He has a check coming from his previous job, in Florida, and will pay me back next week. The check doesn’t come, and he borrows some more money, and then some more, and it begins to mount up. Jobs that were as good as promised to him vanish into thin air, and meanwhile we are his sole means of support. I listen attentively to what I more
and more suspect are inventions, but his footwork is fast, and what he says could be true; it just isn’t what he said before, quite. My bones inform me that I am not the first person these excuses and appeals have been tried out on. He comes to my office to tell me that he has given up the idea of staying in New York and can I let him have the fare home, and I dial my sister’s number in Evansville, Indiana, and hand the receiver to him and leave the room.

  I give up smoking on one square, and on another I go through all the variant pages of a book I have been writing for four and a half years and reduce it to a single pile of manuscript. This I put in a blue canvas duffel bag that can absentmindedly be left behind on the curbing when we drive off to the country at eleven o’clock of a spring night. At midnight, driving up the Taconic Parkway, I suddenly see in my mind’s eye the backseat of the car: The blue duffel bag is not there. Nor, when we come to a stop in front of our house on Thirty-sixth Street at one o’clock in the morning, is it on the sidewalk where I left it. With a dry mouth I describe it to the desk sergeant in the police station, and he gets up and goes into the back room. “No, nothing,” he calls. And then, as we are almost at the door, “Wait a minute.”

  On another square Margaret starts behaving in a way that is not at all like her. Sleepy at ten o’clock in the evening, and when I open my eyes in the morning she is already awake and looking at me. Her face is somehow different. Can it be that she is … that we are going to … that … I study her when she is not aware that I am looking at her, and find in her behavior the answer to that riddle: If we are so longing for a child that we are willing to bring up somebody else’s child — anybody’s child whatever — then we may as well be allowed to have our own. Margaret comes home from the doctor bringing the news to me that I have not dared break to her.