They Came Like Swallows

by William Maxwell

  James leaned against a tree. The snow was all about him like a curtain. And he could almost believe that they were still in that house across the street. Somebody made it—some power—according to laws that can’t be changed or added to…. The same now as they were thousands of years ago…. It’s got to be like that. Otherwise it wouldn’t work….

  When James put both hands behind him, he felt the rough bark of the tree through his leather gloves. His fingers were getting cold and stiff.

  “But to what purpose?” he said aloud, and hearing the words, he lost their meaning and all connection with what had gone before.

  He knew only that there was frozen ground under his feet, and that the trees he saw were real and he could by moving out of his path touch them. The snow dropping out of the sky did not turn when he turned or make any concession to his needs, but only to his existence. The snow fell on his shoulders and on the brim of his hat and it stayed there and melted. He was real. That was all he knew.

  He was here in this night, walking across the corner of a yard, over a sidewalk, down a vacant street. When he stopped to get his bearings, he saw that without knowing it he had turned up the alley. There were deep frozen ruts along each side of the road, and telephone poles one after another leaning against the sky. Ahead of him he heard wheels creaking and the placing (muffled and delicate) of hoofs. The placing of hoofs on snow. And knew suddenly that it was all a mistake … everything that he had thought and done this day.

  He was alive, that was the trouble. He was caught up in his own living and breathing and there was no way possible for him to get out. Elizabeth knew that, and she had come after him in the pony cart. She had come to take him home.

  He was glad. He was immensely excited. His hands shook and his knees. He began to run along the alley, stumbling and falling and picking himself up again. He ran until he was stopped by the lean shape of a horse, and a wagon with a lantern on it. The lantern shone upward into a man’s face that was thin and patient and crazy.

  With the last of his strength gone out of him, James leaned against the firm lattice-work of his own back fence.

  9

  James awoke late into a room that was bright with the morning sun. On the dresser were Elizabeth’s things lying in a heap as he had left them. When he looked outside the snow blinded him. He stretched his legs under the covers until they touched the foot of the bed, and wondered how many mornings of his life he had lain here—awake and watching the curtains blow in from the open window. And whether the lightness he felt inside him was grief. Or if he would ever be capable of any emotion again.

  Slowly and with care he bathed and shaved and dressed himself in clean clothes. He staggered slightly when he went from the closet to the dresser to comb his hair. But his head was clear, and when he put his hands to his eyelids, they no longer felt cracked and hard…. There were formalities and customs, there was the funeral to be got through with somehow this day.

  Ethel was in the guest-room, making her bed. He lingered at the door until she noticed him.

  “You look rested, James,” she said. “Did you sleep?”

  He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but kindness there—kindness and a veiled sympathy. It had never been easy for her to express her feelings.

  “Yes, I think I did.”

  “That’s what you needed more than anything else.”

  For the first time it occurred to him that Ethel might keep from Irene what Bunny said last night at the table—that she had, in fact, no intention of telling her.

  “Thank you,” he said, and hoped that she would understand what for.

  “Irene is off on some errand. With Boyd, I think. But your mother is here and Clara, too. You’ll find them in the sewing-room.”

  At the head of the stairs James listened and heard their voices. They were arguing over which card had come with which flowers.

  “I don’t care what you say, Clara, the yellow roses were from the men in James’s office. The carnations were from Bunny’s class at school.”

  “If you’d only waited, Mother, and let me open them. I’m trying to write them down in this little book as they come. Otherwise we’ll never know who sent what.”

  Though it was nearly ten o’clock, there was no one in the front hall or the living-room or the library. And James’s place was still set at the dining-room table. He went on to the kitchen, which was warm and bright. Karl sat with his overcoat on and the sweat running down his face. Bunny was beside him at the kitchen table. And Sophie, rattling the breakfast dishes, created such a cheerful noise that none of them heard James, or knew that he was there.

  Bunny was making a wreath of ferns. And it was hardly the thing, James thought. Bunny ought not to be making a game of flowers that had been sent to his mother’s funeral. As James started forward he could have sworn, almost, that he felt a slight restraining pressure on his arm. And he turned, in spite of himself—in spite of the fact that he knew positively no one was there.

  10

  With his coffee James smoked a cigarette—the first since he had been sick. Irene came in before he had finished.

  “I’ve been out driving,” she said, and sat down beside him at the dining-room table. “With Boyd?”

  “Yes. Did Ethel tell you?” Irene unbuttoned her left glove and then buttoned it again. “I’ve made up my mind, James—or rather I’ve had it made up for me. Boyd has to live in New York and I’d have to live there, too, it seems, if I went back to him.”

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  “Stay here and help you look after the children.”

  From her expression it was impossible to tell whether the choice had been easy.

  “Boyd is fonder of little Agnes than he is of me. I don’t think he knows that, but he is. After he carried her off that time, I knew it. And I was afraid to have him see her. But I don’t feel like that any more. He’s so frightfully lonely. And there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have her part of the year. If I could be sure that I might be a different person, or that he could—but what has happened once can happen again. No matter what it is or how hard you try to avoid it. And where the going hasn’t been too good it seems better not to double back on my own trail.”

  “No,” James said, “I suppose not.” But sooner or later she must do something. As it is, she has no life at all.

  He put out his right hand and produced a chord—G, D flat, and F—on the dining-room table. Then he took a final drag at his cigarette.

  “About the children, Irene—”

  “It won’t be easy, of course.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “At first I wasn’t at all sure that it could be done. Bunny was so close to his mother, you know. She seemed almost to be aware of every breath he took. And when they were in the same room together, he was always turning his face toward her. Last night when he came in and looked at me that way, I felt that there was nothing that you or I or anyone else could do for him. But this morning it’s entirely different The house is so bright, James, and so full of sunlight.”

  James leaned forward in his chair.

  “I came in through the kitchen just now,” Irene said, “and when I saw Bunny making wreaths, I knew somehow—”

  Don’t say it, James implored silently. Don’t say

  it!

  “I knew that there was a chance that things might work out all right. That we might be able to bring them up in the way she would have wanted.”

  11

  While the man from the undertaker’s went back for another load of chairs, there was time for James to walk—to make the circuit from the library out into the front hall, then through the living-room, which was filled with flowers, and into the library again.

  He would have preferred to walk alone, but Robert stood waiting at the foot of the stairs and James did not have the heart to refuse him. Robert was freed from his mistake. It was evident from the way he walked. Neither Robert nor anyone else was responsi
ble for Elizabeth’s death. And anyway, it was what people intended to do that counted—not what came about because of anything they did. James saw that, clearly. And he saw that his life was like all other lives. It had the same function. And it differed from them only in shape—as one salt-cellar is different from another. Or one knife-blade. What happened to him had happened before. And it would happen again, more than once. Probably some one would lie awake all night in that very same hospital feeling his lungs contract and expand, contract, expand—until the whole of him was limited to the one effort of breathing for somebody else … But it would not be Elizabeth who was dying of pneumonia two rooms down the hall.

  He would have liked to explain all this to Robert. And about the rectangle of light on the ceiling above his hospital bed. And also about the interurban, which no longer bothered him. It would be years probably before he could make Robert understand what happened when he met Crazy Jake collecting tin cans at midnight. But there was comfort at least in Robert’s company, and in resting his arm on Robert’s shoulders. Robert belonged to him. James could feel that in the way they walked together. They were of the same blood.

  When he was Robert’s age his father and mother went South and took him with them, for the winter. They rented a farmhouse on the side of a hill overlooking a Confederate cemetery. And he had no one to play with, being a Northerner, and he wanted to go home.

  James remembered that winter, though of all the rest of his boyhood there was almost nothing left to him. The remembrance of a cellar door that sloped and could be used for hiding. A mulberry tree and the smell of harness, and brown stain of walnuts on his hands…. Even these things could not be shared with Robert, who was growing up in a different world.

  Without their noticing it, they had changed the direction of their walking, and it now brought them straight toward the coffin. They stepped up to it, together, and it was not as James had expected. He did not break down, with Robert beside him. He stood looking at Elizabeth’s hands, which were folded irrevocably about a bunch of purple violets. He had not known that anything could be so white as they were—and so intensely quiet now with the life, with the identifying soul, gone out of them.

  They would not have been that way, he felt, if he had not been doing what she wanted him to do. For it was Elizabeth who had determined the shape that his life should take, from the very first moment he saw her. And she had altered that shape daily by the sound of her voice, and by her hair, and by her eyes which were so large and dark. And by her wisdom and by her love.

  “You won’t forget your mother, will you, Robert?” he said. And with wonder clinging to him (for it had been a revelation: neither he nor anyone else had known that his life was going to be like this) he moved away from the coffin.

  ALSO BY WILLIAM MAXWELL

  “Maxwell’s voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest.” —John Updike

  ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS

  The Collected Stories

  The twenty-one stories in All the Days and Nights take us from a small town in turn-of-the-century Illinois to a precariously balanced enclave of the good life in Manhattan; together they make up what William Maxwell calls “a Natural History of home,” a tour of the world that engages us entirely, and whose characters command our déepest loyalty and tenderness.

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-76102-0

  ANCESTORS

  A Family History

  Ancestors is the history of William Maxwell’s family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. Out of letters and journals, memory and speculation, Maxwell leads his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen and makes us understand the way they saw their world and imagined the world to come.

  Literature/Memoir/0-679-75929-8

  THE CHTEAU

  In 1948, two awestruck American tourists arrive at a stately chateau whose residents are just beginning to recover from the horrors and indignities of the war. Out of this tragicomic premise, William Maxwell creates the most astute and affectionate novel of cross-cultural incomprehension since the masterworks of Henry James.

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-76156-X

  THE FOLDER LEAF

  This classic novel is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s. In his portrait of the lasting friendship between the two, William Maxwell reveals the impossibility of their longings and the keenness of their losses with an eye that is as forgiving as it is omniscient.

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-77256-1

  TIME WILL DARKEN IT

  Time Will Darken It is a wryly funny and deeply compassionate novel of a small Midwestern town in the early years of the century. When Austin King befriends his young foster cousin, Nora, he unwittingly sets in motion a chain of events which could drastically alter every aspect of his life.

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-77258-8

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  Available at your local bookstore, or call to order toll-free:

  1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1997

  Copyright © 1937 by Harper & Brothers

  Copyright renewed 1964 by William Maxwell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maxwell, William, 1908–

  They came like swallows / William Maxwell.—1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49182-4

  1. Family—United States—Fiction. 2. Women—United States—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  [PS3525.A9464T44 1997]

  813′.54 dc21 96-46880

  CIP

  Author photograph © Dorothy Alexander

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

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