All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  In the small towns of the Middle West at that time — I am speaking of, roughly, the year 1900 — it was unusual for boys to be sent away to school. My uncle was enrolled in a military academy in Gambier, Ohio, and flunked out. How much education he had of a kind that would prepare him for doing well in one occupation or another I have no idea. I would think not much. Like many young men born into a family in comfortable circumstances, he felt that the advantages he enjoyed were part of the natural order of things. What the older generation admired and aspired to was dignity, resting on a firm basis of accomplishment. I think what my uncle had in mind for himself was the life of a classy gent, a spender — someone who gives off the glitter of privilege. And he behaved as if this kind of life was within his reach. Which it wasn’t. There was a period — I don’t know how long it was, perhaps a few months, perhaps a year or so — when if he was strapped and couldn’t think of anybody to put the bite on, he would write out a check to himself and sign it with the name of one of his sisters or of a friend.

  I don’t think anything on earth would have induced my father to pass a bad check, but then his family was poor when he was a child, and lived on the street directly behind the jail. Under everything he did, and his opinions about human behavior, was the pride of the self-made man. He blamed my uncle’s shameless dodges on his upbringing. When my Grandfather Blinn would try to be strict with his son, my father said, my grandmother would go behind his back and give Teddy the money. My grandmother’s indulgence, though it may have contributed to my uncle’s lapses from financial probity, surely wasn’t the only cause of them. In any case, the check forging didn’t begin until both my grandparents were dead.

  My grandfather was brought up on a cattle farm in Vermont not far from the Canadian border. He left home at sixteen to work as a bookkeeper in a pump factory in Cincinnati. Then he began to read law in a law office there. More often than not, he read on an empty stomach, but he mastered Blackstone’s Commentaries and Chitty’s Pleadings, and shortly before his twenty-first birthday (nobody thinking to inquire into his age, which would have prevented it) he was admitted to the bar. What made him decide to move farther west to Illinois I don’t know. Probably there were already too many lawyers in Ohio. When he was still in his early thirties he tried to run for Congress on the Republican ticket and was nosed out by another candidate. Some years later the nomination was offered to my grandfather at a moment when there was no serious Democratic opposition, and he chose not to run because it would have taken him away from the practice of law. By the time he was forty he had a considerable reputation as a trial lawyer, and eventually he argued cases before the Supreme Court. Lawyers admired him for his ability in the courtroom, and for his powers of close reasoning. People in general saw in him a certain largeness of mind that other men didn’t have. From the way my mother spoke of him, it was clear that — to her — there never had been and never could be again a man quite so worthy of veneration. My uncle must often have felt that there was no way for him to stand clear of his father’s shadow.

  Because my grandfather had served a term on the bench of the Court of Claims, he was mostly spoken of as Judge Blinn. His fees were large but he was not interested in accumulating money and did not own any land except the lot his house stood on. He was not at all pompous, but when he left his office and came home to his family he did not entirely divest himself of the majesty of the law, about which he felt so deeply. From a large tinted photograph that used to hang over the mantelpiece in my Aunt Annette’s living room, I know that he had a fine forehead, calm grey eyes, and a drooping mustache that partly concealed the shape of his mouth.

  There were half a dozen imposing houses in Lincoln but my grandfather’s house wasn’t one of them. It stood on a quiet elm-shaded street, and was a two-story flat-roofed house with a wide porch extending all across the front and around the sides. It was built in the eighteen-seventies and is still there, if I were to drive down Ninth Street. It is well over a hundred years old — what passes for an old house in the Middle West. My father worked for a fire-insurance company and was gone three days out of the middle of the week, drumming up business in small-town agencies all over the state. We lived across the street from my grandfather’s house. Though I haven’t been in it for sixty years, I can still move around in it in my mind. Sliding doors — which I liked to ease in and out of their recesses — separated the back parlor, where the family tended to congregate around my grandmother’s chair, from the front parlor, where nobody ever sat. There it was always twilight because the velvet curtains shut out the sun. If I stood looking into the pier glass between the two front windows I saw the same heavy walnut and mahogany furniture in an even dimmer light. Whether this is an actual memory or an attempt on the part of my mind to adjust the past to my feelings about it I am not altogether sure. The very words “the past” suggest lowered window shades and a withdrawal from brightness of any kind. Orpheus in the Underworld. The end of my grandfather’s life — he died horribly, of blood poisoning, from a ferret bite — cast a shadow backward over what had gone before, but in point of fact it was not a gloomy house, and the life that went on in it was not withdrawn or melancholy.

  My Aunt Edith was the oldest. Then came my mother. Then Annette. Between Annette and my uncle there was another child, who didn’t live very long. My grandmother was morbidly concerned for my uncle’s safety when he was little, and Annette was told that she must never let him out of her sight when they were playing together. She was not much older than he was, and used to have nightmares in which something happened to him. They remained more or less in this relationship to each other during the whole of their lives.

  My mother and her sisters had a certain pride of family, but it had nothing to do with a feeling of social superiority, and was, actually, so unexamined and metaphysical that I never understood the grounds for it. It may have been something my grandmother brought with her from Kentucky and passed on to her children. That branch of the family didn’t go in for genealogy, and the stories that have come down are vague and improbable.

  When I try the name Youtsey on a Southerner, all the response I ever get is a blank look. There appear to have been no statesmen in my grandmother’s family, no colonial governors, no men or women of even modest distinction. That leaves money and property. My grandmother’s father, John Youtsey, owned a hundred acres of land on the Licking River, where he raised strawberries for the markets of Cincinnati. He was also a United States marshal — that is to say, he had been appointed to carry out the wishes of the judicial district in which he lived, and had duties similar to those of a sheriff. Three of his sons fought in the Civil War, on the side of the North. Shortly before the war broke out, he began to build a new house with bricks fired on the place. I saw it once. I was taken there by one of my mother’s cousins. The farm had passed out of the family and was now owned by a German couple. My grandmother used to take her children to Kentucky every summer and when the July term of court was over, my grandfather joined them. My mother told me that the happiest days of her childhood were spent here, playing in the attic and the hayloft and the water meadows, with a multitude of her Kentucky cousins. But as I looked around I saw nothing that I could accept as a possible backdrop for all that excitement and mirth and teasing and tears. There wasn’t even a child’s swing. The farmer’s wife told us to look around as much as we liked, and went back to her canning. We paused in the doorway of a long empty room. I concluded from the parquet floors that it must have been the drawing room. Since my mother’s cousin had gone to some trouble to bring me here, I felt that I ought to say something polite, and remarked, “In my great-grandfather’s time this must have been a beautiful room,” and he said with a smile, “Grandfather kept his wheat in it.” My uncle may have inherited his folie des grandeurs from some improvident ancestor but it wasn’t, in any event, the bewhiskered old gentleman farmer who built and lived in this house.

  The lessons that hardship had taught my Grandfather
Blinn he was unable to pass on to his son. He must have had many talks with Ted about his future, and the need to apply himself, and what would happen to him if he didn’t. Hunger that is only heard about is not very real. My uncle had a perfect understanding of how one should conduct oneself after one has arrived; it was the getting there that didn’t much interest him. The most plausible explanation is that he was a changeling.

  FROM a history of Logan County published in 1911 I learned that Edward D. Blinn, Jr. — that is, my Uncle Ted — was the superintendent of the Lincoln Electric Street Railway. My grandfather must have put him there, since he was a director and one of the incorporators of this enterprise. One spur of the streetcar tracks went from the courthouse square to the Illinois Central Railroad depot, another to a new subdivision in the northwest part of town, and still another to the cemeteries. In the summertime the cars were open on the sides, and in warm weather pleasanter than walking. Except during the Chautauqua season, they were never crowded. The conductor stomped on a bell in the floor beside him to make pedestrians and farm wagons get out of the way, and from time to time showers of sparks would be emitted by the overhead wires. What did the superintendent have to do? Keep records, make bank deposits, be there if something went wrong, and in an emergency run one of the cars himself (with his mind on the things he would do and the way he would live when he had money). The job was only a stopgap, until something more appropriate offered itself. But what if nothing ever did?

  When my grandfather’s back was turned, Ted went to Chicago and made some arrangements that he hoped would change the course of his life; for a thousand dollars (which, of course, he did not have), a firm in Chicago agreed to supply him with an airplane and, in case my uncle didn’t choose to fly it, a pilot. It was to be part of the Fourth of July celebration. The town agreed to pay him two thousand dollars if the plane went up.

  Several years ago the contract was found tucked between the pages of a book that had been withdrawn from the Lincoln College library — God knows how it got there. It is dated June 27, 1911 — to my surprise; for it proves that I was a few weeks less than three years old at the time, and I had assumed that to be able to remember the occasion as vividly as I do I must have been at least a year older than that.

  The plane stood in a wheat field out beyond the edge of town. The wheat had been harvested and the stubble pricked my bare legs. My father held me by the hand so I would not get lost in the crowd. Very few people there had ever seen an airplane before, and all they asked was to see this one leave the ground and go up into the air like a bird. Several men in mechanic’s overalls were clustered around the plane. Now and then my uncle climbed into the cockpit and the place grew still with expectation. The afternoon wore on slowly. The sun beat down out of a brassy sky. Word must have passed through the crowd that the plane was not going to go up, for my father said suddenly, “We’re going home now.” Looking back over my shoulder I saw the men still tinkering with the airplane engine. My father told me a long time later that while all this was going on my grandfather was pacing the floor in his law office, thinking about the thousand dollars he would have to raise somehow if the plane failed to go up, and that if it did go up there was a very good chance Ms only son might be killed.

  Using what arguments I find it hard to imagine (except that a courtroom is one thing and home is another, and drops of water wear away stone), Ted persuaded my grandfather to buy a motorcar. The distance from my grandfather’s house to his law office was less than a mile, and the roads around Lincoln were unpaved, with deep ruts. Even four or five years later, when motorcars were beginning to be more common, an automobile could sink and sink into a mudhole until it was resting on its rear axle. But anyway, there it was, a Rambler, with leather straps holding the top down, brass carriage lamps, and the emergency brake, the gearshift, and the horn all on the outside above the right-hand running board. It stood in front of my grandfather’s house more like a monument than a means of locomotion. It is unlikely that anyone but Ted ever drove it, and it must have given a certain dash to his courtship of a charming red-headed girl named Alma Haller. I have pursued her and her family through three county histories and come up with nothing of any substance. Her father served several terms as a city alderman, he was a director of the streetcar company, and he owned a farm west of Lincoln, but there is no biography, presumably because he was not cooperative. Anyway, the soft brown eyes, the understanding of what is pleasing to women, assiduousness, persistence, something, did the trick. They were engaged to be married. And if either family was displeased by the engagement I never heard of it.

  My uncle had the reputation in Lincoln of being knowledgeable about motors, and a friend who had arranged to buy an automobile in Chicago asked Ted to go with him when he picked it up. On the way down to Lincoln the car skidded and went out of control and turned over. My uncle was in the seat beside the driver. His left arm was crushed and had to be amputated. My grandmother’s premonitions were at last accounted for. What I was kept from knowing about and seeing because I was a small child it does not take very much imagination to reconstruct. He is lying in a hospital bed with his upper chest heavily bandaged. There are bruises on his face. He is drowsy from morphine. Sometimes he complains to the nurse or to Annette, sitting in a chair beside his bed, about the pain he feels in the arm that he has lost. Sometimes he lies there rearranging the circumstances that led up to the accident so that he is at the wheel of the car. Or better still, not in the car at all. When the morphine wore off and his mind was clearer, what can he have thought except that it was somebody else’s misfortune that came to him by mistake?

  When he left the hospital, and forever afterward, he carried himself stiffly, as if he were corseted. He did not let anyone help him if he could forestall it, and was skillful at slipping his overcoat on in such a way that it did not call attention to the fact that his left arm was immovable and ended in a grey suède glove.

  A few years ago, one of Alma Haller’s contemporaries told me that she had realized she was not in love with Ted and was on the point of breaking off the engagement but after the accident felt she had to go through with it. They went through with it with style. All church weddings that I have attended since have seemed to me a pale imitation of this one. In a white corduroy suit that my mother had made for me, I walked down the aisle of the Episcopal church beside my Cousin Peg, who was a flower girl. I assume that I didn’t drop the ring and that the groom put it on the fourth finger of the bride’s left hand, but that part I have no memory of; though the movie camera kept on whirring there was no film in it. What was he thinking about as he watched the bridal procession coming toward him? That there would be no more sitting in the moon with girls who had no reason to expect anything more of him than a good time? That there, in satin and lace, was his heart’s desire? That people were surreptitiously deciding which was the real arm and which the artificial one? All these things, perhaps, or none of them. The next thing I remember (the camera now having film in it again) is my mother depositing me on a gilt chair, at the wedding reception, and saying that she would be right back. Her idea of time and mine were quite different. The bride’s mother, in a flame-colored velvet dress, interested me briefly; my grandmother always wore black. I had never before seen footmen in knee breeches and powdered wigs passing trays of champagne glasses. Or so many people in one house. And I was afraid I would never see my mother again. Just when I had given up all hope, my Aunt Edith appeared with a plate of ice cream for me.

  In the next reel, it is broad daylight and I am standing — again with my father holding my hand — on a curb on College Avenue. But this time it is so I will not step into the street and be run over by the fire engines. As before, there is a crowd. It is several months after the wedding. There is a crackling sound and yellow flames flow out of the upstairs windows and lick the air above the burning roof of the house where the wedding reception took place. The gilt furniture is all over the lawn, and there is talk about def
ective wiring. The big three-story house is as inflammable as a box of kitchen matches.

  In the hit-or-miss way of children’s memories, I recall being in a horse and buggy with my aunt and uncle, on a snowy night, as they drove around town delivering Christmas presents. And on my sixth birthday our yard is full of children. All the children I know have come bringing presents, and when London Bridge falls I am caught in the arms of my red-haired aunt, and pleased that this has happened. Then suddenly she was not there anymore. She divorced my uncle and I never saw her again. After a couple of years she remarried and moved away, and she didn’t return to Lincoln to live until she was an old woman.

  As often happened with elderly couples during that period, my grandmother’s funeral followed my grandfather’s within the year. In his will he named all four of his children as executors, and Ted quit his job with the streetcar company in order to devote himself to settling the estate. My grandfather did not leave anything like as much as people thought he would. He was in the habit of going on notes with young men who needed to borrow money and had no collateral. When the notes came due, more often than not my grandfather had to make good on them, the co-signer being unable to. He also made personal loans, which his family knew about but which he didn’t bother to keep any record of since they were to men he considered his friends, and after his death they denied that there was any such debt. Meanwhile, it became clear to anyone with eyes in his head that my uncle was spending a lot of money that could only have come from the estate. My mother and my aunts grew alarmed, and asked my father to step in and represent their interests. He found that Ted had already spent more than half of the money my grandfather left. Probably he didn’t mean to take more than his share. It just slipped through his fingers. He would no doubt have run through everything, and with nothing to show for it, if my father hadn’t stopped him. My father was capable of the sort of bluntness that makes people see themselves and their conduct in a light unsoftened by excuses of any kind. I would not have wanted to be my uncle when my father was inquiring into the details of my grandfather’s estate, or have had to face his contempt. There was nothing more coming to Ted when the estate was finally settled, and, finding himself backed into a corner, he began forging checks. The fact that it didn’t lead to his being arrested and sent to prison suggests that the sums involved were not large. I once heard my mother say to my Aunt Edith (who had stopped having anything to do with him) that when she wrote to Ted she was always careful not to sign her full name. The friends whose names he forged were young, in their twenties like my uncle, and poor as Job’s turkey. How he justified doing that to them it would be interesting to know. When it comes to self-deception we are all vaudeville magicians. In any case, forging checks for small amounts of money relieved his immediate embarrassment but did not alter his circumstances.