All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  IN my Aunt Annette’s sun parlor there was a wicker porch swing that hung on chains from the ceiling. Creak … creak … Just as if you were outdoors, only you weren’t. It was a good place from which to survey what went on in Lincoln Avenue. Sitting with her arm resting on the back of the swing, my aunt was alternately there and not there, like cloud shadows. Now her attention would be focused on me (for I was twelve years old and I had lost my mother a couple of years before and my father had sold our house and was on the point of remarrying and I needed her), now on a past that stretched well beyond the confines of my remembering. I didn’t mind when she withdrew into her own thoughts; her physical presence was enough. One day I saw, on the sidewalk in front of the house, a very small woman in a big black hat. Not just the brim, the whole hat was big, an elaborate structure of ribbon and straw and jet hatpins that she moved under without disturbing.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  Turning her head, my aunt said, “Old Mrs. Mclvor. Aaron’s mother. She was born in England.”

  “Some hat,” I said.

  “She’s been going by the house for many years and I have never seen her without it.”

  The things I am curious about now I was not curious about then. Where, in that small town of twelve thousand people, did Aaron Mclvor’s mother live? Did she live by herself? And if so, on what? And what brought her all the way across the Atlantic? And what happened to his father? And how on earth did she come by that hat? None of these questions will I ever know the answer to.

  Pre-adolescent boys, at a certain point, become limp, pale, undemanding, unable to think of anything to do, so saturated with protective coloration that they are hardly distinguishable from the furniture, and not much more aware of what is going on around them. I’m not quite sure when Aunt Beth and Mr. Mclvor adopted a baby, but it didn’t occur to me that any disappointment or heartache had preceded this decision. If I ever saw the baby, lack of interest prevented me from remembering it.

  I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I heard that Aunt Beth had cancer and was in the hospital. I felt I ought to go see her. I thought my mother would want me to. My Aunt Annette was in Florida and there was no one to enlighten me about what to expect. I went from room to room of the hospital, reading the cards on the doors and peering past the white cloth screens, and on the second floor, in the corridor, I ran into her. She was wearing a hospital gown and her hair was in two braids down her back. Her color was ashen. She saw me, but it was as if she were looking at somebody she had never seen before. Since then, I have watched beloved animals dying. The withdrawal, into some part of themselves that only they know about. It is, I think, not unknown to any kind of living creature. A doctor passed, in a white coat, and she turned and called after him urgently. I skittered down the stairs and got on my bicycle and rode away from the hospital feeling I had made a mistake. I had and I hadn’t. She was in no condition to receive visitors, but I had acquired an important item of knowledge — dying is something people have to live through, and while they are doing it, unless you are much closer to them than I was to her, you have little or no claim on them.

  After she was gone, when I rode past her house, I always thought of her. The house had a flat roof and the living-room windows came almost to the floor of the front porch. The fact that there were so few lights burning on winter evenings may have accounted for the look of sadness. Or it could have been my imagination.

  FOR years after we moved to Chicago my stepmother was homesick and we always went down to Lincoln for the holidays so that she could be with her family. One evening, a couple of days after Christmas, I happened to be walking down Keokuk Street, and when I came to the Mclvors’ house I turned in at the front walk. I don’t know what made me do it. Recollection of those Sunday-night suppers when my mother was alive, perhaps, or of my father and Mr. Mclvor retiring to my father’s den, where he kept the whiskey bottle, for a nightcap. The housekeeper let me in. The little boy — I had almost forgotten about him — who peered at me from behind her skirt must have been six or seven. Mr. Mclvor hadn’t come home from his office yet, she said, and retired to the kitchen.

  I couldn’t remember ever having been inside the house before, and I looked around the living room: dark varnished woodwork, Mission furniture, brown wallpaper, brown lampshades. It didn’t seem at all likely that after Aunt Beth died Mr. Mclvor destroyed all traces of her, but neither did it seem possible that she would have chosen to live with this disheartening furniture. There were brass andirons in the fireplace but no logs on them and no indication that the fireplace was ever used. No books or magazines lying around, not even the Saturday Evening Post. The little boy wanted to show me the Christmas tree, in the front window. The tree lights were not on, and he explained that they were broken. The opened presents under the tree — a cowboy suit, a puzzle, a Parcheesi board, and so on — were still in the boxes they had come in. With a screwdriver that the housekeeper produced for me I located the defective bulb, and the colored lights shone on the child’s pleased face. The stillness I heard as I stood looking at the lighted tree was beyond my power to do anything about. I said good-bye to the little boy and picked up my hat and coat and left, without waiting for Mr. Mclvor to come home.

  WHEN I married I took my wife to Lincoln. She was introduced to all the friends of the family, including Aaron Mclvor, whom she was charmed by. She told me afterward that at one point in their conversation he turned and looked at me and then said, “He’s a nice boy but queer — very queer.”

  WHEN I went to see Mr. Mclvor on the day after my father’s funeral, his criticism boiled down to the fact that my father liked women too much, and let them twist him around their little finger.

  My father was an indulgent husband, but he hated change and was devoted to his habits, and it took a prolonged campaign and all sorts of stratagems on my stepmother’s part to get him to agree to enclose the screened porch or buy a new car. In any case, he was not a skirt chaser. So what did all this mean?

  I think even more than by what he said I was upset by his matter-of-fact tone of voice — as if my father’s death had aroused no feelings in him whatever. There was no question that my father considered Aaron Mclvor his friend. Could it be that he disliked my father, and perhaps always had? Or did he dislike everybody, pretty much?

  As I listened to him, I wondered if he had been envious of my father — of his success in business, and of the fact that he was, many people would have said, as fortunate in his second marriage as he was in his first. Because Aaron Mclvor had made a decision and stuck to it didn’t mean that he never considered the alternative. And even a so-so marriage might have been better than the unshared bed and the unending solitude he came home to day after day for something like forty years.

  “I don’t agree with you,” I said, and “I don’t think that’s right.” And he said with a sniff, “I knew him better than you did.”

  It crossed my mind, after I had left the house, that he might have been playing with me the game he used to play with my mother. But on those far-off Sunday evenings he had a look of glee in his eyes, where now there was simply animosity. From which it did not appear that I was excluded.

  I always assumed he was fond of my mother or he wouldn’t have enjoyed teasing her. Was it on her account that he resented the fact that my father had remarried — if he did resent it? If I had had my wits about me, I would have retraced my steps and asked Dean Hill what he thought. He and Aaron Mclvor were not, so far as I know, friends, but they had spent a lifetime in the same small town, where everything is known, about everybody. Also, they were direct opposites — the one so even-tempered and observant and responsive to any kind of cordiality, the other so abrasive. And opposites often instinctively understand each other. Whether Dean Hill came up with a believable explanation or not, ambiguity was meat and drink to him, and he would probably have considered the conversation in that bleak upstairs bedroom from angles I hadn’t thought of. He might even have sug
gested, tactfully, that in my being so hot under the collar there just could be something worth looking into. My father and I were of very different temperaments, and he didn’t know anything about the kind of life I was blindly feeling my way toward. He had only my best interests at heart, but as an adolescent and in my early twenties I had resented his advice and sometimes taken pleasure in doing the opposite of what he urged me to do.

  Instead, I stopped off at my Aunt Annette’s. She listened to my account of the visit to Aaron Mclvor and did not attempt to explain his behavior, beyond saying he had always been that way. She then told me something I didn’t know: “As Beth lay dying, she said to Aaron, ‘You are the dearest husband any woman ever had.’ ”

  In the face of that, nothing I had been thinking seemed worth giving serious consideration to. She was his life. There wasn’t the faintest chance of his finding another woman like her, and it was not in his nature to make concessions. So he made do with housekeepers, and brought up his son. When he was stumped by something he went to see the old woman with the big black hat, who knew a thing or two about bringing up children (or so I like to think) and who was not put off by anything he said, being of the opinion that his bark was worse than his bite.

  The Front and the Back Parts of the House

  THOUGH it took me a while to realize it, I had a good father. He left the house early Tuesday morning carrying his leather grip, which was heavy with printed forms, and walked downtown to the railroad station. As the Illinois state agent for a small fire and windstorm insurance company he was expected to make his underwriting experience available to local agents in Freeport, Carbondale, Alton, Carthage, Dixon, Quincy, and so on, and to cultivate their friendship in the hope that they would give more business to his company. I believe he was well liked. Three nights out of every week he slept in godforsaken commercial hotels that overlooked the railroad tracks and when he turned over in the dark he heard the sound of the ceiling fan and railway cars being shunted. He knew the state of Illinois the way I knew our house and yard.

  He could have had a much better job in the Chicago office but my mother said Chicago was no place to raise children. When the offer came a second time, ten years later, my father accepted it. He was forty-four and ready to give up the hard life of a traveling man. My stepmother wept at the thought of leaving her family and Lincoln but came to like living in Chicago. They lived there for twenty years. With my future in mind — he wasn’t just talking — my father assured me solemnly that you get out of life exactly what you put into it. I took this with a grain of salt; a teacher in my high school in Chicago, a woman given to reading Mencken and The American Mercury, had explained to me that there are people who have always drawn the short end of the stick and will continue to. But for my father the maxim was true. He reserved a reasonable part of his life for his responsibilities to his family and his golf game, and everything else he put into the fire-insurance business. He ended up Vice-President in Charge of the Western Department, which satisfied his aspirations. When the presidency was offered to him he turned it down. It would have meant moving East, and he foresaw that in the New York office he would be confronted with problems he might not be able to deal with confidently.

  A detached retina brought his career to a premature end. They moved back to Lincoln, to the same street, Park Place, but a different house. I was in my early forties and living in the country, just beyond the northern suburbs of New York City, and trying to make a living by writing fiction, when my father wrote me that it was about time I paid them a visit. He met me at the station, and as we drove into Park Place I saw that time is more than an abstract idea: Maple and elm saplings that were staked against the wind when we moved away had become shade trees. I spent the first evening with my father and my stepmother, and next morning after breakfast I walked over to my Aunt Annette’s. She was my mother’s younger sister, and they were very close. I loved going to her house because nothing ever changed there. When she sold it many years later because the stairs got to be too much for her, I felt the loss, I think, more than she did.

  In that house the present had very little resonance. The things my aunt really cared about had all happened in the early years of her life. My Great-Grandfather Youtsey’s farm on the Licking River in Kentucky, where she spent every summer of her childhood, had passed out of the family. The Kentucky aunts and uncles she was so fond of she was not free to visit anymore. Her father and mother and my mother were all lying side by side in the cemetery.

  In the front hall, under the stairs, there was a large framed engraving of the Colosseum, bought in Rome the year I was born. In the living room there were further reminders: Michelangelo’s Holy Family, the Bridge of Sighs, and a Louis XV glass cabinet full of curios. Lots of Lincoln people had been to Chicago, and some even to New York, but very few had any firsthand knowledge of what Europe was like — except the coal miners, and they didn’t count. The sublime souvenirs kept their importance down through time.

  Over the high living-room mantelpiece was a portrait-size tinted photograph of my Grandfather Blinn. I could almost but not quite remember him. When I stood and contemplated it I was defeated by the unseeing look that likenesses of dead people always seem to have. My Aunt Annette was his favorite child. To his boyhood on his father’s cattle farm near St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and to the obstacles he surmounted in order to become a lawyer, the photograph offered no clue whatever. Nor did it convey what a warmhearted man he was. What it did suggest, if anybody wanted to look at it that way, was that in my uncle’s house a dead man was held in greater esteem than he was.

  My aunt had made what other members of the family considered a mistaken marriage, which she had long ago stopped discussing with anyone. If she had really wanted to she could have extricated herself from it. It was as if she believed in the irrevocability of choices, and was simply living with the one she had made as a young woman.

  My Uncle Will had graduated from Yale with an engineering degree, and held a license to practice surveying, but he also had inherited several farms, and he was gone from six-thirty in the morning until late afternoon, making sure that his tenant farmers didn’t do something that might be to their advantage but not his. I guess he was an intelligent man, but if one of the main elements in your character is suspicion, intelligence is more often than not misused. My aunt was a very beautiful woman and he loved her but her beauty was a torment to him. He did not want her to accept invitations of any kind and they never entertained. It upset him if she even went to the Friday-afternoon bridge club, because what if the hostess’s husband were to leave his office early and come home?

  Annette was alone in the house all day, with no one to talk to but the colored woman in the kitchen. Lula had a great many children and from time to time she quit in order to have another. Sometimes she just quit. Or my aunt fired her because she had failed to show up for too many mornings in a row. She was always eventually asked to come back, because my aunt needed her in the skirmishing that took place with my Uncle Will. The indignant things Annette didn’t feel it was safe to say to him Lula, looking him straight in the eye, said. My uncle seldom took offense, perhaps because she was colored and his servant and not to be taken seriously, or perhaps because she was not afraid of him and so had his grudging respect. When my aunt couldn’t find her glasses she borrowed Lula’s, which, even though there was only one lens and that had a crack in it, worked well enough. And when she felt like crying, Lula let her cry.

  Like the house, my aunt changed very little over the years. Her hair turned grey, and she was heavier than she was when I was a child, but her clear blue eyes were still the eyes of a young woman.

  I opened the front door and called out and she answered from the sun porch. My feelings poured out of me, as always when I was with her. Suddenly she interrupted what I was telling her to say, “I have a surprise for you. Hattie Dyer is in the kitchen.”

  I got up from my chair and for the length of time it took me to go through t
he house blindly like a sleepwalker I had the beautiful past in my hand. When I walked into the kitchen I saw a grey-haired colored woman standing at the sink and I said “Hattie!” and went and put my arms around her.

  I don’t know what I expected. I hadn’t thought that far. Or imagined what her response might be.