All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  15. The pessimistic fortune-teller

  ONCE upon a time there was a girl who told fortunes by the roadside. She did not need to do this for a living. Her father was an entrepreneur who had made a great deal of money and was on the board of directors of so many companies and charities that only his secretary knew the full extent of them, but one day when he came home from his office there his daughter was, with a silk scarf tied around her head, and large earrings, and a long skirt, and looking in every way like a gypsy except her pale, pinched face.

  At first people thought it was a game, and were suspicious, and either hurried past her or crossed to the other side of the street, but women cannot resist lifting the curtain of the future just a tiny bit, and so, pretending not to take it seriously, but actually with an open mind, somebody sat down at the card table and offered her open palm. Not for long, though. What she heard was nothing she wanted to hear, and nothing like so comforting as the prognostications of ordinary gypsy fortunetellers: no tall dark handsome man, no sea voyage, no business ventures that must not be acted upon in the early part of the month, but instead a threat to the thing she held nearest and dearest. With a pale, pinched face she hurried home and shut herself in her room and began restlessly to clean out her bureau drawers in an effort to get what she had been told out of her mind.

  Many combinations of circumstances can be reasonably dismissed as the result of coincidence, but not all. At some point the combination is so remarkable that it could not occur except by design, by some ultimate cause or Prime Mover. Though the woman made every effort to forestall the thing that the girl told her might happen, the events unrolled exactly as she had predicted, and the steps that were taken to prevent the calamity seemed, in the end, to have actually helped to bring it about.

  Meanwhile other women stopped on their way home from the market or from the church or a call on a sick friend — never with their husbands, because they did not care to waste the energy it would require to defend their action, and because, also, a woman who has no secrets from her husband is not a woman but a child.

  And what did they hear, sitting at the card table in front of the rich merchant’s house, with their hand lying palm upward in the hand of the merchant’s thin-faced daughter? Miscarriages, misfortunes, death in the family, financial reverses, ill health, ill will on the part of those who were nearest and dearest to them. One would have thought that one experience with so pessimistic a fortune-teller would have been enough, and perhaps it would have been if the miscarriage had not actually occurred, and the misfortune, and the death in the family, and all the rest, exactly as predicted. And thinking always that if they knew what was going to happen they could do something to forestall it, the women went back. They told their friends, in strictest confidence, and the friends came, looking woebegone even as they sat down and before they had heard a word of the fate that was in store for them.

  The girl’s father was not able to stop her from putting a scarf on her head and dressing up in earrings and a long Roman-striped skirt and sitting at the card table on the front lawn with a pack of cards ready to be turned up one at a time, in a sequence that was never meaningless and never optimistic. She was of age, and had an inheritance from her grandmother, and was sufficiently strong-minded, as he had every reason to know, that she would simply have set up her fortune-telling in some other place where he wouldn’t even be in a position to know what was going on, or to help her if she needed help. And of course before very long she did. No one can consistently and successfully foretell disaster without being held in some way responsible for it, no matter how much reason argues that it is not the case. The feelings know better. And in time the women who sat down at the card table pressed their lips in a thin line, clutched their purses tightly to their stomachs, and the hand that they extended was not relaxed but tense and in some cases trembled. Or the eyes beseeched a softer, kinder interpretation of what was to come, and when the women did not get it, they fished through their purse for a handkerchief, wiped the tears away furtively, and blew their nose, and heaved a sigh as if their misfortune, the death in the family, the financial reverse had already taken place. As indeed it might just as well have, because take place it did, exactly as foretold, and whether you shed tears before or after an event in no way changes the event or how it affects you.

  It speaks a great deal for the superior rationality of men over women that no husband succumbed to the temptation to have his fortune told, but if the entrepreneur’s daughter had had any understanding whatever of business affairs, or of the stock market, or of real-estate values, who knows what might have happened? But she didn’t. The only losses she understood were emotional. So the men were free to consider what to do about her. Social ostracism was considered and rejected. She had never been popular at parties and had reached the point where she refused all social invitations. They could have ruined her father financially, and seriously considered doing this, and decided against it, on the ground that it would not get at the root of the matter, or affect the income from the trust that had been set up for her by her grandmother. Clearly she had powers that people ought not to have, and clearly in earlier times she would have been regarded as a witch and burned. They got to her through her mother, with the help of their wives. And the girl, turning the cards over, foresaw what would happen as a result of her visit to the famous psychiatrist, and what the psychological tests would show, and kept the appointment and took the tests and allowed herself to be shut up in a hospital and treated with drugs that temporarily invoked such complete confusion of mind that for days she lost sight of even her own identity, let alone what was going to happen to the doctors and nurses who, with the best intentions, were doing this to her. Before being led away for her first shock treatment she asked to be allowed to use a deck of cards, but that was the last time. When she came home, cured of her melancholy and also of her talent for divining the future, there was a general feeling of relief, as if they had, by taking appropriate measures, indeed got at the root of the trouble and they could expect a long happy prosperous life, without a single serious misfortune or so much as a cloud in the sky. The young married couple who lost their first child did not know that it was going to happen, and so in the suddenness of their grief did not think to blame anybody except themselves, and since this was not reasonable, and similar sorrows could be pointed out to them and are clearly part of the pattern of human life, they came in time to accept the disaster, and were not surprised it did not repeat itself, but merely bent over their newborn child with loving and thankful hearts. Men suffered financial reverses and either shot themselves or went off to South America, depending on their temperament. The ill will of those who were close, people learned to live with, recognizing that an element of this could be found in a remote corner of their own hearts, and when a gypsy fortune-teller set up shop in an empty building on a back street at the edge of the business district, the women — in pairs, clutching their purses, and with an eye for roaches and bedbugs — sat down to have the curtain of the future lifted a tiny bit. The gypsy was a professional and knew her trade, and the fact that no tall dark handsome man came along and swept the stout middle-aged woman off her feet, that a business venture acted upon in the beginning of the month was as fortunate or as unfortunate as one postponed till the end of the month, that they did not go on a long sea voyage — all this didn’t matter in the least. They paid what they were asked and went off in pleased expectation of good luck they were too old or too ill or too set: in their ways ever to have.

  16. The printing office

  IN a certain large city, on a side street that was only two blocks long, there was a two-story building with a neon sign that read R. H. GILROY PRINTING. This sign, which was strongly colored with orchid and blue and flickered anxiously, was the crowning achievement of thirty years of night work and staying open on Saturdays and Sundays. R. H. Gilroy was a short, irascible man with a green eyeshade, a pencil behind his ear, and a cigar butt in the corn
er of his mouth. The sign didn’t mention the printer’s wife, though it should have. She answered the telephone and did the bookkeeping and wrote out bills in a large, placid, motherly handwriting, and knew where everything was and how to pacify her husband when he got excited.

  From her desk by the radiator, Maria Gilroy looked out on the Apex Party Favors Company and A. & J. Kertock Plumbing and Heating, directly across the street. She could also see the upper stories of the Universal Moving and Storage Company, two blocks north. At odd times of the day, birds swooped down out of the air and settled on the iron ladder that led from the roof of the storage company to the cone-shaped roof of a water tank. The people of the neighborhood — boys lolling on the steps of the vocational high school, the policeman who stood under the marquee of Number 210 when it was raining, and others — took these birds to be pigeons. The printer’s wife, who was born and brought up in Italy, knew they were not pigeons but doves. When her eyes demanded some relief from the strain of balancing figures that were, at the same time, too close to her face and too far from her heart, she would get up from her desk by the radiator, and go outdoors and stand looking up, shielding her eyes with her hand and straining for the sound that she remembered from her far-off childhood, and that she could sometimes almost hear, and might indeed have heard if a truck hadn’t shifted into low gear or a bus hadn’t backfired or if the children who lived over the Apex Party Favors Company and whose only place to play was the street had ever stopped yelling at each other. The silence that was always on the point of settling down on that not very busy street never actually did, and the birds circling through the silence of the upper air never settled on any perch lower than the iron ladder of the water tank of the Universal Moving and Storage Company.

  The printer’s wife tried various ways of coaxing them down. She bought a china dove in Woolworth’s and set it in her window. She tried thought transference. She bought breadcrumbs at the delicatessen and scattered them on the sidewalk. But pigeons flying to and from the marble eaves of the post office saw the breadcrumbs and swooped down and strutted about on the sidewalk, picking and choosing and making sounds that were egotistical and monotonous, and of course they kept the doves away. When it rained, the breadcrumbs made a soggy mess on the sidewalk and the policeman left the shelter of the marquee and crossed the street and told the printer he was violating a city ordinance, which made him terribly excited. So she gave up trying to lure the birds closer and merely watched them. There was sometimes only one on the ladder, and there were never more than three. The business was open on Christmas Day, as usual, and on New Year’s, and the birds were either on the ladder or in the air above it, but on the second of January she didn’t see them all day, and when they weren’t there the next morning, she said, “I wonder if something has happened to my birds.”

  The printer, who was reading proof for the sixth edition of a third-rate dictionary, bit into his damp, defeated cigar and reached for the pencil behind his ear. “Eeyah!” he exclaimed bitterly, and restored a missing cedilla. On the margin of the proof he wrote a sarcastic note for the typesetter, who was quick as lightning but not, unfortunately, a perfectionist. The printer’s wife glanced over her shoulder and saw that the page he was correcting began with the word “doubt” and ended with “downfall.” Her eyes traveled down the column of type until they stopped at “dove (duv).” In mounting excitement — for it must be a sign, it couldn’t be just an accident — she read on hastily, through the derivation [ME. dūba, D. duif, OHG. túba, G. taube, ON. dūfa, Sw. dufva, Dan. due, Goth, dūbo black. See DEAF] and the first and second meanings, and arrived at the third. The words “emblem of the Holy Spirit” flickered on the page, though the harsh white fluorescent light did not alter, and she felt a moment of fright. Turning her eyes to the window, she saw the orchid faces of A. and J. Kertock, who had just padlocked the door of their shop and were about to go home to their dinner, content and happy with using brass fitting when solid copper was specified and the thousand and one opportunities for padding a plumbing and heating bill. She nodded, and they — quite ready to admit that it takes all kinds to make a world and even though honesty is not the best policy there was no reason why the printer and his wife shouldn’t pursue it if it gave them any pleasure — nodded in return. She wanted to throw open the window and ask them if they had seen the doves, but it wasn’t that kind of a window.

  The next morning, while she was tearing January 3 off her desk calendar, the doves settled down on their perch. It was a very cold day, and she was concerned for them. If they only had a little house they could go into, out of the wind, she kept thinking, and she was tempted to pick up the phone and call the Universal Moving and Storage Company. By the next morning, the wind had dropped and the air was milder, and that evening orchid-and-blue snow drifted gently down on the sidewalk and on the stone window ledge, and on the tarred rooftops across the street. By eleven o’clock, when the neon sign was turned off, the street was like a stage setting.

  AT noon on the sixth of January, the printer’s wife put on her coat and her plastic boots and trudged through the snow to the delicatessen and came back with three chicken sandwiches on white, three dill pickles, and a paper container of cranberries. Leaning against the garbage cans of Number 210, where it certainly hadn’t been a few minutes before, was a Christmas tree with some of the tinsel still on it. It had seen better days, but even so, in a landscape made up entirely of brick, stone, concrete, and plate glass, it was a pleasure to look at, and all afternoon the printer’s wife kept getting up from her chair and glancing up the street to see if the tree was still there. At four o’clock she put on her coat and her plastic boots and went out into the street. The policeman saw her pick up the Christmas tree and carry it into the fish market, but he took no notice. When she walked into the printing shop a few minutes later with her arms full of green branches which the fishman had kindly chopped off for her, the printer saw her and didn’t see her. Words and printer’s symbols were the only things he ever saw and saw. She took the container of cranberries from the top drawer of the filing cabinet and then picked up the branches and went to the back of the shop and climbed the stairway to the second floor, where the back files and the office supplies were kept and where there was an iron stairs leading to a trapdoor that opened onto the roof. The roof of R. H. Gilroy Printing was flat and tarred, and it had a false front with an ornamental coping. In a corner where the wind would not reach it, the printer’s wife made a shelter and sprinkled crumbs (she had eaten the slice of chicken but not the bread) and cranberries in among the green, forest-smelling boughs. The wind whipped at her coat, but she did not feel the cold. And all around her the rooftops were unfamiliar because of the snow, with here a pavilion and there an archway or a garden house or a grotto. The falling snow softened the sound of the trucks in the street, and the children who lived over the Apex Party Favors Company were indoors at that moment, playing under their Christmas tree, which sometimes stayed up until Easter, and was decorated with soiled paper hats, serpentines, crackers without any fortune in them, and papier-mâché champagne bottles. The street grew quieter and quieter and quieter and quieter, and at last, out of a sky as soft and as silent as the snow, three doves descended. They alighted on the ornamental coping and from the ornamental coping they flew to the chimney pots, and from there straight into the corner where the pine boughs had been prepared for them.

  Aware that his wife had been standing behind his chair for some time, the printer looked up impatiently. Something in her face, an expression that he recognized as related in some remote way to printer’s signs and symbols, made him take off his green eyeshade and place his cigar stub on the edge of the desk and follow her. As they passed the typesetter, she motioned to him, and he stopped his frantic machine and came too. At the top of the iron stair she turned and warned them not to speak. Then she pushed the trap door open slowly. The silence that had been coming and coming had arrived while she was downstairs, and as the two m
en stepped out onto the roof, bareheaded and surprised by the snow alighting on their faces, they heard first the silence and then the sound that came from the pine boughs.

  “Zenadoura macroura carolinensis, the mourning dove,” the printer whispered, quoting from the great unabridged dictionary that it was his life’s dream to set up in type and print. His ink-stained, highly skilled, nervous hand sought and found his wife’s soft hand. The typesetter crossed himself. The doves, aware of their presence but not frightened by it, moved among the boughs, seeking out the breadcrumbs, and with a slight movement of their feathered throats making sounds softer than snow, making signs and symbols of sounds, softer and more caressing than lǔv and dǔv, kinder than good, deeper than pē.

  17. The lamplighter

  JUST before dark, when it was already dark inside the cottages and barns and outbuildings, the lamplighter came riding up one street and down the next, on his bicycle, with his igniting rod. He did not answer when people called a greeting to him, and so, long ago, they had stopped doing this — not, however, out of any feeling of unfriendliness. “There goes the lamplighter,” they said, in exactly the same tone of voice that they said, “Why, there’s the moon.” Through the dusk he went, leaving a trail of lighted lamps behind him. And as if he had given them the idea, one by one the houses began to show a light in the kitchen, or the parlor, or upstairs in some low-ceilinged bedroom. Men coming home from the fields with their team and their dog, children coming home from their play, were so used to the sight of the lamplighter’s bicycle spinning off into the dusk that it never occurred to them to wonder how the lamps he was now lighting got put out.