All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  After that the discarded masks were taken out of the pine boxes and thrown out on the dustheap, and with time they became extremely rare, like authentic Chippendale and Chinese Export and gold coins from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. They were studied by the historian and the moral philosopher. As for people in general, they seemed to grow old much faster than formerly, because having no mask they had to create one with the play of facial muscles, and this gave rise to crow’s-feet, and wrinkles across the forehead, and deep lines etched from the corners of the nose to the corners of the mouth, and sagging flesh, which fooled nobody, of course, because the heart of the person underneath this simulated mask was either always young or never had been.

  13. The man who lost his father

  ONCE upon a time there was a man who lost his father.

  His father died of natural causes — that is to say, illness and old age — and it was time for him to go, but nevertheless the man was affected by it, more than he had expected. He misplaced things: his keys, his reading glasses, a communication from the bank. And he imagined things. He imagined that his father’s spirit walked the streets of the city where he lived, was within touching distance of him, could not for a certain time leave this world for the world of spirits, and was trying to communicate with him. When he picked up the mail that was lying on the marble floor outside the door of his apartment, he expected to find a letter from his father telling him … telling him what?

  The secret of the afterlife is nothing at all — or rather, it is only one secret, compared to the infinite number of secrets having to do with this life that the dead take with them when they go.

  “Why didn’t I ask him when I had a chance?” the man said, addressing the troubled face in the bathroom mirror, a face made prematurely old by a white beard of shaving lather. And from that other mirror, his mind, the answer came: Because you thought there was still time. You expected him to live forever … because you expect to live forever yourself. The razor stopped in mid-stroke. This time what came was a question. Do you or don’t you? You do expect to live forever? You don’t expect to live forever? The man plunged his hands in soapy water and rinsed the lather from his face. And as he was drying his hands on a towel, he glanced down four stories at the empty street corner and for a split second he thought he saw his father, standing in front of the drugstore window.

  His father’s body was in a coffin, and the coffin was in the ground, in a cemetery, but that he never thought about. Authority is not buried in a wooden box. Nor safety (mixed with the smell of cigar smoke). Nor the firm handwriting. Nor the sound of his voice. Nor the right to ask questions that are painful to answer.

  So long as his father was alive, he figured persistently in the man’s conversation. Almost any remark was likely to evoke him. Although the point of the remark was mildly amusing and the tone intended to be affectionate, there was something about it that was not amusing and not entirely affectionate — as if an old grievance was still being nourished, a deep disagreement, a deprivation, something raked up out of the past that should have been allowed to lie forgotten. It was, actually, rather tiresome, but even after he perceived what he was doing the man could not stop. It made no difference whether he was with friends or with people he had never seen before. In the space of five minutes, his father would pop up in the conversation. And you didn’t have to be very acute to understand that what he was really saying was “Though I am a grown man and not a little boy, I still feel the weight of my father’s hand on me, and I tell this story to lighten the weight.…”

  Now that his father was gone, he almost never spoke of him, but he thought about him. At my age was his hair this thin, the man wondered, holding his comb under the bathroom faucet.

  Why, when he never went to church, did he change, the man wondered, dropping a letter in the corner mailbox. Why, when he had been an atheist, or if not an atheist then an agnostic, all his life, was he so pleased to see the Episcopal minister during his last illness?

  Hanging in the hall closet was his father’s overcoat, which by a curious accident now fit him. Authority had shrunk. And safety? There was no such thing as safety. It was only an idea that children have. As they think that with the help of an umbrella they can fly, so they feel that their parents stand between them and all that is dangerous. Meanwhile, the cleaning establishment had disposed of the smell of cigar smoke; the overcoat smelled like any overcoat. The handwriting on the envelopes he picked up in the morning outside his door was never that handwriting. And along with certain stock certificates that had been turned over to him when his father’s estate was settled, he had received the right to ask questions that are painful to answer, such as “Why did you not value your youth?”

  He wore the overcoat, which was of the very best quality but double-breasted and long and a dark charcoal grey — an old man’s coat — only in very cold weather, and it kept him warm.… From the funeral home they went to the cemetery, and the coffin was already there, in a tent, suspended above the open grave. After the minister had spoken the last words, it still was not lowered. Instead, the mourners raised their heads, got up from their folding chairs, and went out into the icy wind of a January day. And to the man’s surprise, the outlines of the bare trees were blurred. He had not expected tears, and neither had he expected to see, in a small group of people waiting some distance from the tent, a man and a woman, not related to each other and not married to each other, but both related to him: his first playmates. They stepped forward and took his hand and spoke to him, looking deeply into his eyes. The only possible conclusion was that they were there waiting for him, in the cold, because they were worried about him.… In his father’s end was his own beginning, the mirror in his mind pointed out. And it was true, in more ways than one. But it took time.

  HE let go of the ghost in front of the corner drugstore.

  The questions grew less and less painful to have to answer. The stories he told his children about their grandfather did not have to do with a disagreement, a deprivation, or something raked up out of the distant past that might better have been forgotten. When he was abrupt with them and they ran crying from the room, he thought, But my voice wasn’t all that harsh. Then he thought, To them it must have been. And he got up from his chair and went after them, to lighten the weight of his father’s irritability, making itself felt in some mysterious way through him. They forgave him, and he forgave his father, who surely hadn’t meant to sound severe and unloving. And when he took his wife and children home — to the place that in his childhood was home — on a family visit, one of his cousins, smiling, said, “How much like your father you are.”

  “That’s because I am wearing his overcoat,” the man said — or rather, the child that survived in the man. The man himself was pleased, accepted the compliment (surprising though it was), and at the first opportunity looked in the mirror to see if it was true.

  14. The old woman whose house was beside a running stream

  THERE was an old woman whose house was beside a bend in a running stream. Sometimes the eddying current sounded almost like words, like a message: Rill, you will, you will, sill, rillable, syllable, billable.… Sometimes when she woke in the night it was to the sound of a fountain plashing, though there wasn’t, of course, any fountain. Or sometimes it sounded like rain, though the sky was clear and full of stars.

  Around her cottage Canada lilies grew, and wild peppermint, and lupins, Queen Anne’s lace taller than her head, and wild roses that were half the ordinary size, and the wind brought with it across somebody else’s pasture the smell of pine trees, which she could see from her kitchen window. Here she lived, all by herself, and since she had no one to cook and care for but herself, you might think that time was heavy on her hands. It was just the contrary. The light woke her in the morning, and the first thing she heard was the sound of the running stream. It was the sound of hurry, and she said to herself, “I must get up and get breakfast and make the bed and sweep, or I’ll be la
te setting the bread to rise.” And when the bread was out of the way, there was the laundry. And when the laundry was hanging on the line, there was something else that urgently needed doing. The stream also never stopped hurrying and worrying on to some place she had never thought about and did not try to imagine. So great was its eagerness that it cut away at its banks until every so often it broke through to some bend farther on, leaving a winding bog that soon filled up with wild flowers. But this the old woman had no way of knowing, for when she left the house it was to buy groceries in the store at the crossroads, or call on a sick friend. She was not much of a walker. She suffered from shortness of breath, and her knees bothered her a good deal. “The truth is,” she kept telling herself, as if it was an idea she had not yet completely accepted, “I am an old woman, and I don’t have forever to do the things that need to be done.” Looking in the mirror, she could not help seeing the wrinkles. And her hair, which had once been thick and shining, was not only grey but so thin she could see her scalp. Even the texture of her hair had changed. It was frizzy, and the hair of a stranger. “So long ago,” she said to herself as she read through old letters before destroying them. “And it seems like yesterday.” And as she wrote out labels, which she pasted on the undersides of tables and chairs, telling whom they were to go to after her death, she said, “I don’t see how I could have accumulated so much. Where did it all come from?” And one morning she woke up with the realization that if she died that day, she would have done all she could do. Her dresser drawers were tidied, the cupboards in order. It was a Tuesday, and she did not bake until Thursday, and the marketing she had done the day before. The house was clean, the ironing put away, and if she threw the covers off and hurried into her clothes, it would be to do something that didn’t really need doing. So she lay there thinking, and gradually the thoughts in her mind, which were threadbare with repetition, were replaced by the sound of conversation that came to her from outside — rill, you will? You will, still. But fill, but fill — and the chittering conversation of the birds. Suddenly she knew what she was going to do, though there was no hurry about it. She was going to follow the stream and see what happened to it after it passed her house.

  She ate a leisurely breakfast, washed the dishes, and put a sugar sandwich and an orange in a brown paper bag. Then, wearing a black straw hat in case it should turn warm and an old grey sweater in case it should turn cold, she locked the house up, and put the key to the front door under the mat, and started off.

  THE first thing she came to was a rustic footbridge, which seemed to lead to an island, but the island turned out to be merely the other side of the stream. Here there were paths everywhere, made by the horses in the pasture coming down to drink. She followed now one, now another, stepping over fallen tree trunks, and pausing when her dress caught on a briar. Sometimes the path led her to the brink of the stream at a place where there was no way to cross, and she had to retrace her steps and choose some other path. Sometimes it led her through a cool glade, or a meadow where the grass grew up to her knees. When she came to a barbed-wire fence with a stile over it, she knew she was following a path made by human beings.

  First she was on one side of the stream and then, when a big log or a bridge invited her to cross over, she was on the other. She saw a house, but it was closed and shuttered, and so, though she knew she was trespassing, she felt no alarm. When the path left the stream, she decided to continue on it, assuming that the stream would quickly wind back upon itself and rejoin her. The path led her to a road, and the road led her to a gate with a sign on it: KEEP THIS GATE CLOSED. It was standing open. She went on, following the road as before, and came to another gate, with a padlock and chain on it, but right beside the gate was an opening in the fence just large enough for her to crawl through. The road was deep in dust and lined with tall trees that cast a dense shade. She saw a deer, which stopped grazing and raised its head to look at her, and then went bounding off. The road brought her to more houses — summer cottages, not places where people lived the year round. To avoid them she cut through the trees, in the direction that she assumed the running stream must be, and saw still another house. Here, for the first time, there was somebody — a man who did not immediately see her, for he was bent over, sharpening a scythe.

  “I’m looking for the little running stream,” she said to him.

  “You left that a long way back,” the man said. “The river is just on the other side of those big pine trees.”

  “Is there a bridge?”

  “Half a mile upstream.”

  “What happens if I follow the river downstream on this side?”

  “You can’t,” the man said. “There’s no way. You have to go upstream to the bridge.”

  Should she turn around and go home, she wondered. The sun was not yet overhead, so she walked on, toward the trees the man had pointed to, thinking that he might be mistaken and that it might be the running stream that went past her house, but it wasn’t. It was three times as broad, and clearly a little river. It too was lined with wild flowers, and in places they had leaped over the flowing water and were growing out of a log in midstream. The river was almost as clear as the air, and she could see the bottom, and schools of fish darting this way and that. Rainbow trout, they were. Half a mile upstream and half a mile down made a mile, and she thought of her poor knees. The water, though swift, was apparently quite shallow. She could take off her shoes and stockings and wade across.

  Holding her skirts up, she went slowly out into the river. The bottom was all smooth, rounded stones, precarious to walk on, and she was careful to place her feet firmly. When she was halfway across she stepped into a deep hole, lost her balance, and fell. She tried to stand up, but the current was too swift, and she was hampered by her wet clothing. Gasping and swallowing water, she was tumbled over and over as things are that float downstream in a rushing current. “I did not think my life would end like this,” she said to herself, and gave up and let the current take her.

  When she opened her eyes, she was lying on the farther bank of the river. She must have been lying there for hours, because her hair and her clothing were dry. In the middle of the river there was a young man, who turned his head and smiled at her. He had blond hair and he was not more than twenty, and he had waders on which came up to his waist, and his chest and shoulders were bare, and she could see right through him; she could see the river and the wild flowers on the other bank. Had he pulled her out? You can’t see through living people. He must be dead. But he was not a corpse, he was the most angelic young man she had ever seen, and radiantly happy as he whipped his line back and forth over the shining water. And so, for that matter, was she. She tried to speak to him but could not. It was too strange.

  He waded downstream slowly, casting as he went, and she watched him until he was out of sight. She saw that there was a path that followed the river downstream. I’ll just go a little farther, she thought, and started on. She wanted to have another look at: the beautiful young man, who must be just around the next bend of the river. Instead, when she got there, she saw a heavy, middle-aged man with a bald head. He also was standing in the middle of the river, casting, and a shaft of sunlight passed right through him. She went on. The path was only a few feet from the water, and it curved around the roots of old trees to avoid a clump of bushes. She saw two horses standing by the mouth of a little stream that might be the stream that went past her house — there was no way of telling — and she could see right through them, too, as if they were made of glass. Soon after this she began to overtake people on the path — for her knees no longer bothered her, and she walked quite fast, for the pleasure of it, and because she had such a feeling of lightness. She saw, sitting on the bank, a boy with a great many freckles, who caught a good-sized trout while she stood watching him. He smiled at her and she smiled back at him, and went on. She met a very friendly dog, who stayed with her, and a young woman with a baby carriage, and an old man. They both smiled at her,
the way the young man and the boy had, but said nothing. The feeling of lightness persisted, as if a burden larger than she had realized had been taken off her shoulders. If I keep on much farther, I’ll never find my way home, she thought. But nevertheless she went on, as if she had no choice, meeting more people, and suddenly she looked down at her hands and saw that they too were transparent. Then she knew. But without any fear or regret. So it was there all the time, an hour’s walk from the house, she thought. And with a light heart she walked on, enjoying the day and the sunlight on the river, which seemed almost alive, and from time to time meeting more people all going the same way she was, all going the same way as the river.