All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  He shook his head. “I’m not looking forward to the evening. Probably Ellen also had misgivings when she called us, but in the Middle West blood is thicker than water.”

  “Your trousers,” Laura said.

  “I know.” He glanced down at the smudges. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have cared, but it was the kind of thing Amos noticed, and Amos would much rather believe that Hugh had turned up at the Waldorf-Astoria with spots on his clothes than the truth, which was that his suit had just come back from the cleaner’s. Aware that he would be made to feel the impassable gulf that exists between art and the automobile business, he had deliberately tried to avoid looking like a painter — or rather, like the popular conception of a painter. He was wearing a sober foulard tie, with a white shirt. His shoes were shined. He had just had a haircut. But of course he had overlooked something; his grey felt hat had seen better days.

  Sitting in front of a mirror in the ladies’ room of the Biltmore, Laura Cahill pinned the gardenia among the dark-brown curls on top of her head, was dissatisfied with the effect, took the bobby pin out and tried again, sighed over the impossibility of doing anything with her hair — which had no body to it — and would have walked off and left the gardenia on the dressing table except that Hugh had given it to her and wanted her to wear it. They had been married a little over two years, and she was considerably younger than he, and even less confident, but whereas his face announced with an almost comic facility any uncertainty or self-doubt, any unmanageable feeling, she was perfectly able to keep her feelings to herself. She had never met Amos and Ellen.

  When she rejoined Hugh, it was six-forty-five. He gave up looking for a vacant taxi and they took the Madison Avenue bus as far as Fiftieth Street, walked east to the Waldorf, went through the lobby, and found the house phones.

  “He says to tell you he’s shaving for Laura, not you,” Ellen Cahill said cheerfully. “You know your brother.”

  “How are you?” Hugh asked.

  “Fine. The Murphys are with us. They came along to keep us company.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ll be down in a minute.”

  Rather than wait for what (since he did know his brother) was going to be more than a minute, he took Laura’s arm and guided her into the tropical cocktail lounge. Sitting at a little table in this almost empty room, with their drinks in front of them, they killed a quarter of an hour.

  “You’ll like the Murphys,” Hugh said. “Pete’s a doctor, and very easygoing and unworried and kind. He and Amos are inseparable. And I think you’ll like his wife. She’s thin and melancholy and intelligent. I liked her the best of any of their friends in Winnetka. I stopped in to see them once, on a Sunday morning, and Pete was out playing golf, and they’d had a party the night before, and she was tired and very funny. She kept finding pieces of spaghetti behind the sofa cushions and everywhere.”

  “Will Barbara be with them?” Laura asked.

  “Probably. Unless she’s tied up with commencement,” he said, feeling a twinge of guilt. His niece had been here, in a convent school, since last fall, and they hadn’t done anything about her. He worked at home, and the house was small, and company of any kind was a serious interruption. It affected his work. Ideas got away from him. Canvases that had started out well went bad or were only partly good. But they should have had her for a meal, or something. It was inexcusable. Tilting his glass this way and that, observing how the ice cubes remained serenely horizontal floating in Scotch and water, he said thoughtfully, “I love Amos, but I can’t bear him.… Don’t mind anything he says to you.”

  “I won’t,” Laura said.

  “This time it’s going to be different.” He emptied his glass and picked up the check. “I have you. Always before, I’ve been outnumbered.”

  He didn’t say, and was hardly aware that he thought, that it would have to be different, because whatever happened between Amos and him would take place in front of Laura.

  They started through the lobby once more and discovered that, at the far end of a brown marble vista, they were being watched; they were the subject of a benign amusement. Even if Hugh hadn’t stiffened, Laura would have known by the marked family resemblance that they were face-to-face with his older brother. Amos was broader in the shoulders, heavier, and older-looking, chiefly because he had less hair. His left arm, ending in a gloved hand, hung motionless at his side. He had lost his arm as the result of an accident with a shotgun; Amos and another boy were shooting at crows, and the gun (which they had been forbidden to touch) went off unexpectedly in the other boy’s hands. The large woman with ash-blond hair and a black hat with pink roses on it — nothing to fear, nothing unfriendly in that direction.

  Amos’s greeting “Well, kid, it certainly is nice to see you,” Hugh countered with a smile and an expression that was both alert and wary. You’re not going to fool me again? he asked, with his eyes. No monkey business, like the last time we met?… Amos turned, his glance quickly took Laura in, and when his eyes met Hugh’s again, he too was smiling. Amos approved. Amos had better approve, Hugh said to himself grimly.

  An elevator took them all back upstairs to the fourteenth floor. They found the Murphys’ room and knocked, and Pete came out carrying a bottle of whiskey. His hair was now partly grey, Hugh noticed, his face fuller than it had been thirty years ago when he wheeled his bicycle up the front walk and inquired, “Where’s that Amos?” Aileen Murphy was still dressing, and so, instead of going in, they separated, the men taking the fire stairs, the two women the elevator, down to the thirteenth floor, to Barbara’s room, which was much larger than her mother and father’s and had a balcony and a view north over the city.

  There was a profane squabble between Amos and Pete over whose liquor they were going to use, and Pete informed Amos that there was a men’s bar in the hotel, very nice, where they put the whiskey bottle on the bar beside you.

  “I’ve found it,” Amos said.

  Aileen Murphy came in and was introduced to Laura. Amos, offering Hugh a drink, said, “Hugh, do you count?” in the same stern tone of voice he had used long ago, checking up on whether Hugh had known enough to kiss the girl he took to the high-school fraternity dance when he said good night to her. He hadn’t, but he did the next time, and she said, “Why did you do that?” and after that they didn’t see each other except when they passed in the school corridors.

  He stared at Amos now and said, “What do you mean?”

  “One is not enough, two is plenty, three is you’re drunk, and four there’s no reason not to keep on going,” Amos said, and burst out laughing.

  Why make up jokes of your own was Amos’s basic social principle, the idea that had always carried him along safely anywhere, in any company that he had ever wanted to find himself. Why avoid making the remarks that other people make, when the remarks are all there, ready to be used, and it’s the surest way to make everybody like you? At thirteen, out of slavish admiration, Hugh had done his best to imitate Amos’s jokes, his laugh, and never managed this successfully. On a raw November day, in the college stadium, he had humiliated Amos by cheering when there was nothing to cheer at. He saw Amos putting this new joke into his suitcase when he packed to come East.

  They had a conversation about their younger brother, who had just finished college, after a period in the Army. “Rick never tells me anything,” Hugh said. “Does he tell you?”

  Amos shook his head solemnly. “No, Hugh, he doesn’t.”

  When they couldn’t get together on their own grounds, they could reach each other momentarily by talking about their younger brother.

  “He’s too anxious to prove that he’s capable,” Amos said, “and instead of asking for advice, he rushes in and announces how everything is going to be, and then it’s too late to do anything. But he’ll learn. I took him horseback riding and I told him off, right down the line, all the things that are wrong with him. He took it and went straight to work on them.”

  There was a knoc
k on the door and Pete Murphy’s brother Louis came in, with his wife. He and Pete met in the center of the room, after not seeing each other for two years. They shook hands, smiled, and turned away, leaving unfinished business (if there was any unfinished business between them) to be settled at some other time. With a fresh drink in his hand Hugh looked around the room and saw that there were no empty chairs. Laura had settled herself on one of the twin beds, with her back against the headboard, and was talking to Barbara, who, nearly Laura’s age, was stretched out, leaning on her elbow, on the other bed, and telling her about her experiences as a practice teacher in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. “A friend of mine was teaching in the same school,” she said, “and she got a letter from a little boy. ‘Dear Teacher,’ it said. ‘You are very pretty, your friend is very pretty. I love you but you do not love me. I do not like Miss Worthing.’ ” Hugh sat down on the foot of Laura’s bed, and then, aware that his back was turned to her and that the evening would probably seem interminable to her, among all these people she wasn’t related to and didn’t know, he reached behind him and took her high-heeled shoe in his hand.

  THEY left the room finally, all nine of them. The Murphys went on up in the elevator to the Starlight Roof while Hugh was leaving his hat with the woman at the desk on the thirteenth floor. Amos, who had had four drinks, said, “Where did you get that hat? I’ll give you five bucks so you can go and get yourself a good felt hat.”

  “That’s a fine hat,” Hugh said, his voice rising a little too sharp for banter — an effect that Amos never tired of producing. “It came from Tripler’s. What more do you want?”

  Amos was not impressed with Tripler’s. His comment on Hugh’s growing baldness, the circle on the crown of his head where the white scalp showed through his dark hair, Hugh was expecting. It was customary, both with Amos and with his father. He said, “I’ve got lots more hair than you had in 1960.”

  This counterattack Amos did not bother to understand, let alone guard against. It was too complicated to do any harm. It involved the recognition of the immutable difference between being six years old and being eleven, between being ten and being fifteen, between fourteen and nineteen, between thirty-eight and just arriving and forty-three arrived. Fairness compelled Hugh to compare not the present states of their respective baldnesses but his hair now with Amos’s hair four years ago in Chicago. Fairness was a quality that Amos seemed to recognize and in general abide by, but somebody or something way back somewhere in the past had excused him from ever having to be fair with Hugh. As far as Hugh could make out, for Amos to be fair toward him would have been to say, All right, I give up. I don’t understand you and never will. If all you want is for me to treat you decently, I can easily enough. I can stop taking any interest in you — and will, from now on.

  Amos glanced at the light over the elevator doors, and then said to Laura, “Dad did the worst thing anybody can do.”

  Hugh waited for him to finish. Being older, Amos knew things — family history, old stories, old scandals — that he didn’t. You never knew when something of this kind would burst out of him.

  “He put water on his hair,” Amos said. “And he still has some hair at seventy. I didn’t used to have a stomach. I’ve put on twenty pounds since I stopped smoking. Hugh carries his weight well.” And then Laura, whose brothers let each other alone, saw with astonishment that Amos was feeling Hugh’s upper arm, the muscles of which Hugh obediently flexed. “Not bad,” Amos said, and made Hugh feel how much bigger his own biceps were.

  As they stepped into the elevator, Amos’s attack shifted. “I was afraid you were going to marry a Jew,” he said.

  This was the fuse that had set off the fireworks the last time they saw each other, four years ago in Chicago. The argument, though bitter, got nowhere. Hugh grew red in the face, and then very pale. Amos dodged easily and expertly from one form of bigotry to the next, and brushed logic aside, cheerfully refusing to identify himself with anyone not in his rather pleasant economic circumstances.

  “If he had,” he said now, to Laura, “I’d never have had anything more to do with him.”

  Since childhood, Hugh reflected, looking at the floor of the ascending elevator, Amos had been threatening, continually threatening, to disown him.

  SEATED at a big round table under the blue artificial stars, Barbara Cahill asked her New York (and therefore cosmopolitan, worldly) uncle to translate the French words on the menu.

  “ ‘Escargots’ is snails,” he said.

  “Oh, I know I wouldn’t like snails!” she exclaimed.

  As she grew older, she would look like her mother, Hugh thought. She was sweet and young and unspoiled, and beyond that he had no idea what she was like. In the last ten years he hadn’t stayed long enough in Illinois to find out.

  “You ought to try them. They’re very good. They’re cooked in white wine and parsley,” he said, and was aware of an unreasonable surprise as he heard Amos and Laura, side by side across the table, both order roast beef well done. At home it had always been rare, and he had assumed that Amos would go on to the end of his life ordering roast beef and steak rare, as he himself did. “I’ll have eels,” he said, daring Amos to appropriate that, as he had so many other things that didn’t belong to him. Amos ordered a salad and then said, “I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m ready for another drink.”

  During the long wait, Hugh talked first to Barbara and then, while she was telling Laura about going to Mass at St. Patrick’s with her mother, he turned to Louis Murphy’s wife, who was on his left. Louis had held her chair out for her as she sat down, and Hugh had caught a certain protective concern in his manner. It was none of his business, but now, having had three drinks — one in the cocktail lounge and two very much stronger ones upstairs — and being slightly drunk (otherwise he would never have ordered eels), he leaned toward her and said, “Your husband is still in love with you.”

  “Why shouldn’t he be?” she said, smiling. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”

  “Did you grow up in Winnetka?”

  “I was Ruth Hayes,” she said, nodding.

  “You know how it is when you’re growing up,” he said. “Somebody four years older is in another world.” He hesitated, wondering if he had been impolite — if he should have said “one or two years older.”

  “I know,” she said. “Louis was in love with various girls while I watched him from afar.”

  “Did you really?” he asked, in all seriousness.

  “No.” She smiled again at him, this time as if she were talking to a child. “I was in love with Bruce Coddington.” Then, extricating them both from the past: “I saw one of your pictures at the Whitney Museum.”

  Hugh nodded. He was trying to follow the conversation between Amos and Laura, across the table. He heard Amos say, “You must come out to Chicago. We’ve got a housing project with niggers and white people living together.”

  This remark, intended to beat Laura out of the bushes and perhaps test the timbre of her rising voice, she allowed to pass unchallenged. She was there to defend Hugh, not to argue.

  A moment later, Hugh heard Amos say, “You must see that Hugh makes a lot of money.”

  “I’d rather he painted better and made less,” Laura said.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amos told her indignantly. “Wait till you have children and the doctors’ bills start coming in. If I hadn’t had Pete for a friend, I’d have been ruined.”

  Louis Murphy’s wife was searching through her purse for a blank piece of paper. In the end she gave Hugh a credit slip from Lord & Taylor, so that he could write down for her the name and address of the gallery that handled his paintings. Ellen supplied him with a pencil, from her beaded evening purse.

  “Deborah’s more like you every day,” she said, speaking of her youngest daughter. “She’s even pigeon-toed — which is all right in a boy,” she added hastily, lest this remark cause offense. “She even
walks like you. I sometimes say to Amos, ‘There goes Hughie across the lawn.’ ”

  “Debbie’s always the leader,” Barbara said admiringly.

  “She’s in sixth grade,” Ellen Cahill said, “believe it or not. They gave Peter Pan at school this year, and Debbie was Peter.”

  I was in a school play once, Hugh thought, and nobody came to see me.…

  “Have you any children?” he asked, turning to Louis Murphy’s wife.

  “One. A girl seventeen.”

  Suddenly nervous lest she should ask him the same question, with Laura sitting directly across the table, he looked away and was grateful for the arrival of the waiter. Ellen Cahill offered her rare roast beef around the table to anyone who wanted it, just as an hour or two before she had offered Pete Murphy and his wife Barbara’s spacious room. Her last anxious “Are you sure you wanted eels?” Hugh answered with “Yes. I’ve never had eels before,” but he didn’t want them and he wished he could put the queer white slices in his coat pocket. He looked up when Aileen Murphy was served a roast squab, and wondered, Should I have had that?

  Amos passed his plate across to Ellen, so that she could cut his meat for him, and Hugh, noticing how quiet Barbara was, the only unmarried person at the table, said to her, “Just you wait. Your time is coming.”

  “But I’m enjoying myself, Uncle Hugh,” she said earnestly.

  And perhaps she is, he thought. Or perhaps she had not yet realized that she had a right to be bored in the company of older people.

  The conversation took on an antiphonal quality. The remarks Amos made to Laura, a moment later Ellen made to Hugh. With his roast beef half eaten, Amos asked his wife to dance with him. At the age of ten, Hugh thought, he would not have done this. Nothing could have induced him to stop eating until his plate was empty, and then it would have been passed up the table for a second helping. Hugh looked at Ruth Murphy questioningly, and then they pushed their chairs back and went out on the dance floor, which was so crowded that dancing was impossible.