Nothing but the Night

by John Williams

  ‘Well, I see I got back home at just the right time of year—the beginning of summer. It certainly feels good.

  ‘I expect to remain in America for about two months, then I will be off again, to Bombay this time. Our Indian branch isn’t working out as well as might be expected, and I might be able to straighten things out. I rather dread going back, but I suppose it is necessary.

  ‘I will be here for several days more. I am staying at the Regency. If you would care to have dinner with me some afternoon this week, call me there. I would like very much to see and talk to you again.’

  And it was signed, ‘Your father, Hollis Maxley.’

  For a long time after he finished reading the letter, he sat motionless in his chair, the typewritten sheets dangling loosely from his fingers.

  Why must he bring it all back again? he thought. It has been so long since I have remembered.

  He got up suddenly and shook his head as if to clear away the threatening clouds of dark, unwelcome thought. Without willing it, he visualized his father as he had seen him last, almost three years before. But it was a partial visualization; his image did not completely materialize. A neat gray suit and a wide expanse of pale forehead: that was as much as he could see in his remembering. The rest of it was dim and, if not forgotten, at least was obscured by the habitual force of conscious will. He shrunk from thinking too intently on the memory of his father, for there began to creep into that memory another vision, a familiar nightmare, his mother in that room, her face which . . .

  He walked restlessly about the floor. He refolded the letter and tapped its bulk on his open palm. He wondered for a moment why his father had not telephoned instead of sending this letter. Then he remembered.

  He remembered and he smiled grimly, remembering the winter he had spent in Boston. That had been a good year, as years went: college, the distraction necessitated by the adjustment to a new way of life, new faces, new things to learn. Even now and here, in this distant apartment on this warm summer morning, he could recall that winter in Boston quite vividly, could recall the fine-flavored dignity of the college grounds, the old, old trees and the stern implacability of the buildings on the Yard. Up through the funnel of his memory there whirled a holocaust of faces which had no names, unknown, forgotten, yet familiar.

  He had liked it in Boston because the bleak days had succeeded each other with such slow and unexciting regularity, each much the same as the preceding one, with no presentiment of change in a pleasant, thoughtless monotony. It was an unreal sort of life in which he had been neither happy nor unhappy, in which he had neither thought nor had felt the need to think. Often, he had consciously wished that that life might never change, that he might end the days of his living in that unvarying pattern.

  But there had come a day when it had ended; when it had ended abruptly, painfully, sickeningly, as all things ended for him.

  That day, it had been raining. He could remember it quite definitely, could almost hear again the encompassing slap of the rain as it descended in light, wet thongs, inexorably graying and immobilizing the city which huddled patiently beneath its gentle lash. He, himself, was safe and quiet in his single room: a cheerful fire warmed his body as he sat, as he had been sitting for hours, inertly in the huge horsehair club chair, staring into, yet not really seeing, the quivering flames, unthinking and at peace in his warm, airless little world.

  Then the telephone had rung, and its jangle had jarred him so that he had sprung out of his chair in surprise and fright. He had stood for a moment, not wanting to answer it, wanting only to return to the warm chair and the fire and the mindless contemplation from which he had been so rudely torn. But the telephone had continued its insistently shrill ringing, and he had known that he would not be able to ignore it. He had walked across the room, picked up the receiver, and said:

  ‘Maxley speaking.’

  Of course, it had been his father. Now, without shame or regret, as if it had happened to someone else, he could remember his shock upon hearing that familiar, hated voice. For somehow the tone, or the timbre—he did not know exactly what it was—had struck a chord of his memory; and, without warning, there had leaped upon him, like a beast from a dark jungle, a violent image of that violent scene. In his anonymous little room, he had seen his mother and his father facing each other, he had seen the reenactment of that terrible thing which he could never purge from the darkest reaches of his mind; and it was so real and so near that his throat had contracted suddenly and he had screamed.

  He remembered throwing the telephone from him in horror, he dimly remembered clapping his hands over his eyes, screaming again and again that one word Mother Mother Mother until he was in a hoarse stupor, huddled and gasping on the floor. Much later, they had discovered him like that, and they had been very frightened, not knowing what to do with him. Then his father had been called and he had come to Boston, and then there were the doctors and the long hours of waiting (which he learned afterwards were not hours but days) until the crawling darkness began to lift and he was thrown again into consciousness, into awareness. Since then he had not seen his father; and he knew without being told that the doctors had warned his father against seeing him or upsetting him again. Only the weekly checks, mailed by his father’s lawyer, reminded him of his existence. Until this letter. Until today.

  Now, sitting in his apartment, on this warm summer morning, three years later, he smiled a knowing smile, understanding why his father had not called him on the telephone.

  He looked at the letter again. Then he crumpled it, dropped it to the floor.

  He went into his bedroom and, fully clothed, stretched out on the bed. But the rest, the oblivion he sought, would not attend him. The softness of the bed relaxed his body, but the relaxation was only stimulus to his mind, to his remembering. He lost consciousness of his body. He was thought and consideration, a disembodied energy that floated through a sightless space.

  He lay there on the bed, wondering, as if from another world, what it would be like, hearing again the husky voice speaking the careful words; he wondered what memories, what submerged images the seeing and the hearing might evoke. Shrouded in a tacit secrecy, in his dark forgetfulness— would it all come back again? The pinpoint of light, the prick of repulsed remembering—would the obscuring shades of darkness fall away, would the pinpoint increase into a blinding spear of light to tear and rip the flesh of his remembering?

  Slowly, from the dim trauma of thinking, there emerged a surprising sharp image of his father. A few moments before, he had been unable to conjure up out of his imposed aura of concealing memory a concise picture, but now the shadowy outline began to fill, to assume shape and vigor, and degree by small degree, he was able to discern the almost forgotten form and bearing of his father. Little things came back: the quick, wincing way he had of smiling, the small trick of biting his upper lip, the broad and strangely unwrinkled spread of forehead. A warm wave of feeling permeated his removed trance: a warmth which was strange to him, something he had not felt toward his father for a very long time.

  With that warmth flowing inside him, loosening the taut muscles of his mind, he got up from the bed and walked across the room. Suddenly, he was very certain of what he was going to do, of what he must do. Yet it was as if it were another person performing this act, not himself at all.

  The space between his bed and the telephone was a limitless stretch, and he floated—slowly and helplessly— across it, without weight, outside of space and time.

  For a moment he hovered above the telephone, savoring the exquisite moment before action. When he picked up that instrument, he noticed with some wonder that it, too, was weightless. He licked his lips; he put the receiver up to his ear and, after asking the local operator for his number, waited for the voice.

  ‘The Regency? I should like to speak to Mr Hollis Maxley.’ A pause. ‘Yes, I’ll wait.’

  A click. Silence. Now was the moment. Now. But no—it was the silken voice again
, the stranger voice, saying:

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Maxley isn’t in at the moment. Will you leave a message?’

  Momentarily, he was at a loss. He had been so sure that his father would be there; he had not even considered the possibility of his absence. He could find no words.

  ‘Are you still there, sir?’

  Oh. Yes, he was still there. Yes. Could he leave a message?

  ‘Tell Mr Maxley that—that his son called. And would Mr Maxley care to dine with him this evening? Yes. At the Regency, seven o’clock. I’ll meet him in the dining room. Yes, that’s all. Thank you.’

  He replaced the telephone on its cradle, aware of a keen disappointment. He had been dreading the sound of his father’s voice, but when it did not come, he was disappointed. And in the wake of disappointment, there came fear; now that he had taken the step, he was once more afraid. Now he could only allow himself to be borne along in the swift rushing of the still water he had put into motion.

  He sat for a long while without moving. He furrowed his brow, he squinted blindly at the floor. Then he arose and paced nervously about the room, clasping and unclasping his hands, wiping the damp palms of his hands on the seat of his trousers. He shrugged. He went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet above the washbasin. He pulled out a pint whiskey bottle, less than half-filled. He closed the doors of the cabinet and regarded himself for a moment in the mirror. He uncorked the bottle and started to put the neck to his lips, but he paused. He fumbled about the shelf below the cabinet and found a glass, peered into it. It was cloudy, a trifle dusty. He hit the water tap and listened to the sudden slap against the white basin. He waited for it to warm, then he thrust the glass beneath the stream, rinsed it thoroughly, first in the hot water, then in the cold. He turned both taps off and let the whiskey gurgle from the bottle into the sparkling glass. He corked the whiskey bottle, put it back in the cabinet. He looked at the liquid he held. He shuddered. He caught one more glimpse of himself in the mirror before he shut his eyes and gulped the liquor down. It racked and choked him and for a moment he supported himself on the basin, afraid he was going to be sick. Then, with a final spasm, he opened his eyes and looked again into the mirror, looked at an image suddenly strange and new, a face for an instant unconscious of itself, the remnants of a grimace still graven about the mouth, eyes blinking, watery, and slightly red. He turned away. He walked back into his bedroom and sank on his bed. He looked at his hands folded laxly in the angle of his legs and body, looked, and waited for the pleasant buzzing to start in his ears.

  Gathering at the edges of his consciousness, the image assumed shape and form, as a mass of clouds gather and twist in a clear sky to remind one of a familiar visage once known and never forgotten.

  He must have been nearly asleep, for the thought of the picture struck him suddenly with an almost physical blow and he got up from the bed with a start and walked to the center of the room before he was fully aware that he moved.

  Then he realized that he must have been dreaming. He had not actually thought of the picture for many months; he had been most successful in avoiding the smallest reminder. But now the remembering rushed down upon him as if it were a flood that had been damned and held back for too long while it gained a terrible force and momentum. Now this letter from his father, like a giant key, had unlocked the dam and he was engulfed in a furious swirling.

  He stumbled into the bathroom. He threw handful after handful of cold water on his face, thinking that perhaps the familiar totem might dash away the disturbance of his half- dreaming recollection.

  When he reentered his bedroom, he took great care to prevent his gaze from falling on the chest of drawers where he knew the picture was, wrapped in silk, secure from eyes, in the bottom drawer. It was a conscious ignoring, this not looking at the chest, and much more difficult than he would have believed before. As he stood in one corner, it seemed that the chest grew and grew until it threatened to push him from the room. Even if he walked the length of the floor, his gaze cast directly on the rug, he could still see out of the corner of his eye the rectangular shape of that oaken demon.

  He dragged a chair from the center of the room and sat in it before the window, but even that was useless; for if he stared long at a shrub outside, that shrub would swell up and change color, would assume the form and substance of the very image that he sought to ignore. And if he closed his eyes on the deceptive scene, into that induced darkness would creep small vestiges of formless light and those vestiges would drift into a mass and the mass would become a shape sharply defined and he would recognize, unwillingly, the form of the chest of drawers.

  At last, he sighed. He got up from the chair and defeat propelled him across the room. As if in consecration before a shrine, he knelt on the floor and pulled open the bottom drawer. He reached in, pushed aside the piled clothing, reached down until his fingers encountered the round hardness of the silk-wrapped portrait. Gently he disengaged it from the surrounding articles and brought it out into the light. He stumbled across the room until his knees found the chair. Hesitantly, as if he were afraid of what he might find, he removed the silken wrapper. The picture lay face down on his knee. He folded the scarf with great care and put it on the table beside him.

  The frame’s ivory back was beginning to show spidery lines of cracking, he noticed. With trembling hands, he lifted the picture and turned it over; and the represented face met his own.

  Starting in his fingertips, the familiar tingling sensation ran up from his arms and to every part of his body, going and coming in swift irregular waves. He realized that he had been holding his breath. He let the pent up air out of his lungs and breathed slowly, deliberately, as quietly as he was able.

  It was the face of a woman that he held in his hand. A mist of hair was piled in a calm halo about her head. It was an altogether beautiful countenance and the photographer (perhaps without intending it) had captured a rare, elusive thing on that face that was difficult to name. The haunted eyes stared out at him from the brittle paper; eyes intense, yet gentle, looking steadily and incommunicably at him. The nose was aquiline and sensitive, the nostrils flared slightly above a generous upper lip. The corners of the wide mouth curled subtly up in a mocking, tender half-smile.

  For a long while he could only stare at the picture, feeling nothing, remembering nothing.

  Then, much later, when thought returned to him, he raised his eyes and gazed out the window. As he looked, the brutal glare of the pavement disappeared. There was no ugly row of houses before him, no distracting protrusions of city landscape. His eyes were focussed beyond the sight of these things into the blue haze of lost time. As he sat motionless, his supple fingers continued another existence, curling about, exploring the minute delicacy, softly caressing the picture.

  With mind and memory, he could go back in time: where lost time was, there could he dwell, now, if but for an instant, but a split-instant miraculously snatched from the present. Where in time? There was a moment he could remember. Sometimes in sleep it would come to him, softly, stealing on silent steps of darkness, would come to him and obscure the part of him that dwelt in now. There would enter into that sleeping part of him, his other part, a golden warmth of power that transported him back into a dream which was more actual than the unreality of his present existence.

  That is the very best time of life, he thought: lost time. The time of summer when the leaves of the trees are tangled in iridescent sunlight. He thought always of his childhood as an uninterrupted summertime when lazy happiness dulled and delighted his brain and limb. To remember the summer and the run through tall grasses. The sun bathed his arms and legs an earthy brown and he was perfect and unaware and this is how it was in the afternoon: the house was white and high and remote upon the hill and the graveled drive was like a pebbly ribbon that had been dropped carelessly on the lawn, the drive upon which he had run and the garden beside it where he had lain to crush the fragrant flowers. And far away, y
et not too far, the cool sound of the running stream. Grasses grew beside the stream and at a certain spot, a certain secret hidden spot, the foliage was pushed away, pressed into a narrow length, not so narrow as a grave, not so narrow that one should lie alone. And together on the general summer day that was his childhood, awed and silent, they had listened to the whisper of the cool water, they had basked in the sunlight, his tousled head upon her breast, his eager small body in the crook of her moist arm. They had breathed together quietly, reverently, both aware of the earth’s breathing. And turning sleepily, warmly on the earth, his lost voice asking, ‘Mother, where does the water run?’ and the answering miracle, ‘To the sea, down to the sea . . .’

  Even now and here, in the stultifying present, he heard again that voice, its lissome cadence a ghost which bridged the gulf of years. The sound was dim and far away, but for all the faintness it was as eager, as vibrant, as clear as it had been on that summer afternoon so long ago.

  He remembered the cool friendship of the white house after a gambol in the afternoon heat. He could almost feel again the rich caress of the couch where he had rested, pleasantly exhausted, he could almost see and hear his mother as she sat at the piano and sang to him, as she had sung each night just before he went to bed.

  He remembered the sultry nights when he had lain in bed, looking out of his star-spattered window, waiting and counting those moments, the wholly ecstatic moments of his waiting. He had heard the thin chimes of the clock downstairs, heard them echoing through the vault of darkness, and had known with some childish feeling of wonder that they came from the brightly lighted, inaccessible room below where he slept. And with the sounding of the chimes there had come the exquisite beginnings of pain.