So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

  After a short while, all this I now think rather jolly behavior had stopped. It was merely a manifestation of the times and did not reflect their true personalities. They settled down into something like the ordinary quiet life of most married couples.

  Grace could whistle like nobody's business, and I have a vivid memory of her rendition of "Here's to the heart that beats for me, true as the stars above. Here's to the day when mine she'll be. Here's to the girl I love," as she made her way backwards down the stairs with a dust mop. It is like a still from an old movie. She never gets to the bottom of the stairs. In the remaining ten years before I took off for good, she was never impatient with me and I don't think I was ever rude to her. There was enough self-control in that household for six families. Unlike the wicked stepmother in the fairy tales, she had a gentle nature and could not bear any kind of altercation. And it was not in her to wrestle, like Jacob with the angel, until I stopped being faithful to a dead woman and accepted her as my mother. Instead she chose the role of the go-between. When my older brother had a Saturday-night date and wanted my father to let him have the car, he enlisted her aid and went off with the car keys in his pocket.

  Grace's mother lived directly across the street from us with her son Ted, who was at that time a bachelor. Mrs. McGrath was a stately, warm-hearted old woman, much looked up to by her children. Grace's brothers were jovial, exceedingly kind men who, together, on next to nothing, had started a sand and gravel business and been successful. They loved to tell funny stories and whenever they were gathered together there was the sound of laughter. They also confused me by treating me as if I were a genuine relation. I didn't so much hold out against them as proceed with caution.

  In that insufficiently heated bedroom on the northwest corner of the house in Park Place I was taken by surprise by the first intimations of a pleasure that I did not at first know how to elicit from or return to the body that gave rise to it, which was my own. It had no images connected with it, and no object but pure physical sensation. It was as if I had found a way of singing that did not come from the throat. I stumbled upon it by accident and it did not cross my mind that anybody might ever have had this experience except me. Therefore I did not connect these piercing exquisite sensations with the act of murder that removed Cletus Smith from Lincoln, or with what other men and women did that was all right for them to do provided they were married. Or even with what older boys talked about in the locker room at school. It was an all but passive, wholly private passion that turned me into two boys, one of whom went to high school and was conscientious about handing in his homework and tried out for the glee club and the debating society and lingered after school talking to his algebra teacher. The other boy was moody and guilt-ridden and desired nothing from other people but their absence.

  When I was in bed, with the light out, the two boys became one, and I thought about the aerial on the roof, and how the cold air above our house was full of unknown voices and dance music, from a radio station downtown and from stations in Springfield and Peoria and Bloomington and Danville and Chicago and Kansas City. In college I read Shakespeare's The Tempest for the first time and was reminded immediately of what went on over the house in Park Place.

  My father was offered a promotion that meant he would work in the Chicago office of the fire insurance company and be home every night like other men. At his age he didn't want to travel from one small town to another and be at the mercy of railroad timetables any more. Also, he was ambitious and gratified that they wanted him. My stepmother could not bear the thought of leaving Lincoln and her family and her friends. Night after night she wept while she and my father talked behind the closed door of their room. After a few years she could say that she preferred living in Chicago, but she was never again as lighthearted as she was before they left Lincoln.

  The move to Chicago came in March but I stayed behind to finish the school year. I was taken in by old Mrs. McGrath. Her house had only two bedrooms, and for three months Grace's brother Ted and I slept in his room, in twin four- poster beds. One would have thought that having the company of a schoolboy was the one thing hitherto lacking in his very agreeable life. At night he took off his toupee and hung it on a bedpost, and as we were undressing he imparted his favorite words of wisdom to me, such as "Marriage is what takes the giggles out of the girls," or "You can't make a man mad by giving him money," or "All little things are nice." In the morning before school we all three crowded into the breakfast nook off the kitchen and ate buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. I persisted in feeling that I was putting them to a great deal of trouble when I don't suppose I was, actually.

  When it was time for me to go to Chicago, Ted and another of Grace's brothers drove me there, stopping on the way to inspect a gravel pit in Joliet. They checked in at the La Salle Hotel, in Chicago, and we had dinner. As I stood gaping at the coffered ceiling, the like of which I had never seen before, they stuffed ten-dollar bills in my pockets. I didn't know whether it was right for me to take the money or not, and tried not to, but they assured me that it was perfectly all right, my father wouldn't mind, and in the end I took half of it. Instead of using the elevated railway, as I expected, we drove all the way from the Loop to Rogers Park in a taxi so I could see the city. As I looked out of the window at Sheridan Road they looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.

  Home was now an apartment on the second floor of a three-story brick building. The apartment house was a block west of Sheridan Road, in a quiet neighborhood, and Lake Michigan was only a short walk from where we lived. There were still lots of big old-fashioned single-family houses with front porches and trees and some sort of lawn and a homelike look to them. My father found a job for me in his office as a filing clerk, and he and I went to work together on the EI. In the evening the boys used to cluster on the sidewalk with their bicycles and I would walk by them with a dry mouth and my eyes focused on something farther down the street. I usually ended up at the Lake, where I sat on a rock pile looking out over the water. This went on for most of the summer, until one evening I found my way blocked by a bicycle wheel. The boy who was astride the bicycle asked if I was Jewish. It was not anti-Semitism, he was just curious. The circle opened and took me in. I mean, I could stand around with them and nobody objected to my being there.

  After Labor Day I started to school. In a city high school of three thousand students, where there was so much going on after school—band practice, fencing, the Stamp Collectors Club, the History Club, the French Club, the Players, the Orchestra, the Camera Club, the Chess and Chequer Club, the Architectural Society, and so on—the failure to do well in sports didn't make you an object of derision. Once in an outdoor gym class a football came through the air and I managed to hang on to it. This was long after the class had stopped expecting me to catch anything and there was general rejoicing and disbelief. But they never rode me. I was accepted for what I was. It was, after all, not a small town but a big city, and in that school there was no one who was not accepted.

  The school building was of grey stone and enormous. It was ten times as big as the old, overcrowded, yellow-brick high school in Lincoln, and the classrooms I had to go to were sometimes far apart. One day during the first week or so of school as I was hurrying along a corridor that was lined with metal lockers I saw Cletus Smith coming toward me. It was as if he had risen from the dead. He didn't speak. I didn't speak. We just kept on walking until we had passed each other. And after that, there was no way that I could not have done it.

  Why didn't I speak to him? I guess because I was so surprised. And because I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what was polite in the circumstances. I couldn't say I’m sorry about the murder and all that, could I? In Greek tragedies, the Chorus never attempts to console the innocent bystander but instead, stickin
g to broad generalities, grieves over the fate of mankind, whose mistake was to have been born in the first place.

  If I had been the elderly man I am now I might have simply said his name. Or shaken my head sadly and said, "I know, I know. . . ." But would that have been any better? I wasn't an elderly man, the bloodhounds had never been after my father, and I didn't know (how could anybody know, how many times has such a thing happened to a thirteen- year-old boy?) what he had been through. Any more than a person who hasn't had a car door slammed on his fingers knows what that is like.

  Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.

  I think now—I think if I had turned and walked along beside him and not said anything, it might have been the right thing to do. But that's what I think now. It has taken me all these years even to imagine doing that, and I had a math class on the second floor, clear at the other end of the building, and there was just barely time to get there before the bell rang.

  V

  THE EMOTION OF OWNERSHIP

  Until I was six years old, my father kept a carriage horse, and on hot July evenings we would leave the house on Ninth Street and go driving to cool off. Sometimes the couple who lived next door would be invited to go with us. My brother sat in the front seat, between my father and Dr. Donald, and I sat in back, between Mrs. Donald and my mother. The dog—though we all shouted "Go home!" at him—went too, trotting between the wheels of the carriage with his tongue lolling out.

  No matter what street my father chose to drive out of town by, the landscape was much the same once we got out in the country. Plowed fields or pasture, all the way to the horizon. There were trees for the cattle to stand under in the heat of the day, and the fields were separated from each other by Osage-orange hedgerows that were full of nesting birds.

  The conversation in the front seat of the carriage was about what was growing on both sides of the road: corn, wheat, rye, oats, alfalfa. The women, blind to this green wealth, talked about sewing and "receipts"—the word they used for recipes. I was of an age to appreciate anything that looked like something it wasn't, and when we passed a cluster of mailboxes I would turn and look back. Long-legged wading birds is what they put me in the mind of, though we were a considerable distance from anything that could be called a body of water.

  Dr. Donald owned land near Mason City. The eighty- acre farm that my father might have inherited had, to his undying regret, been sold by my grandparents. Living carefully and putting aside half his salary, he had managed to buy a farm, but it was a little too far away to drive to in a horse and carriage, and since he couldn't look at his own land, as he would undoubtedly have liked to do, he enjoyed looking at other people's. With a gesture of the whip he would direct Dr. Donald's attention to a large and well-built barn and they would be moved to admiration. By nature home- loving, I looked at the houses instead. How bleak they were, compared to our house in town. No big shade trees, no wide front porch to sit on, no neighbors all up and down the street. If there were flowers they didn't amount to more than a few dusty hollyhocks or some nasturtiums growing in a tin basin on a stump.

  Suppose Cletus had come to spend the day with me when we were small children. There would have been a dog following us around. And in the barn a horse, a high carriage with red wheels, hay, bags of oats, etc. But then he would have discovered that I had never harnessed the horse to the carriage, and that we couldn't ride him bareback to round up the cows because there weren't any. The house was a lot larger and more comfortable than his, and there was a sand- pile in the back yard, but what was a sandpile compared to the horse barn, the cow barn, sheds, corncribs, the chicken house, the root cellar, the well, the windmill, the horse trough, and a swimming hole? In town there were cardinals and bluebirds and tanagers and Baltimore orioles, but he had the mourning dove, the forever inquiring bob-white?, the hoot owl, and the whippoorwill.

  My father sold the horse and carriage and tore down the barn and built a garage to put the new seven-passenger Chalmers in, and after that we could drive to Mt. Pulaski, where his farm was. Tagging around after him then, I became aware of a richness that wasn't visual but came from the way the smells were laid on: dried-out wood, rusting farm machinery, the manure pile, the pigpen, yarrow, and onion grass, quicklime from the outhouse, in spring the frost leaving the ground, in summer the hay lying cut in the fields. All things considered, I doubt very much if Cletus would have been eager to change places with me.

  The black fertile soil of Logan County was, and so far as I know still is, owned by people whose ancestors came from Kentucky or Indiana or Ohio, bringing with them no more than they could fit into a lurching covered wagon. They staked out as much land as they had a fancy to and cleared it slowly, putting a few more acres under cultivation each year. Their children and grandchildren, born on this land, felt they belonged there. Their great-grandchildren either sold their patrimony or got someone else to farm it for them. Living in town quite comfortably in big old houses set well back from the street, they kept an eye on what was going on out in the country, and when the crops were delivered at the grain elevator they took, as was customary, half the profits. They did not consider a tenant farmer their social equal, any more than a carpenter or a stonemason or a bricklayer. The farmer who owned the land he farmed they could and did accept. When Cletus and I were playing together the question of social position didn't come up. And neither did it come up on the school playground. It was something that descended upon people when they were older. The names on the mailboxes that claimed my attention when I was a small child were proof enough that the tenant farmers were of the same stock as the townspeople who looked down on them socially. Their forebears had perhaps come on a later wave of European migration and found that land was no longer plentiful at a dollar and a quarter an acre. Or they could have been hamstrung by some family misfortune. Or simply lacked the talent for rising in the world.

  Roaming the courthouse square on a Saturday night, the tenant farmers and their families were unmistakable. You could see that they were not at ease in town and that they clung together for support. The women's clothes were not meant to be becoming but to wear well, to last them out. The back of the men's necks was a mahogany color, and deeply wrinkled. Their hands were large and looked swollen or misshapen and sometimes they were short a finger or two. The discontented hang of their shoulders is possibly something I imagined because I would not have liked not owning the land I farmed. Very likely they didn't either, but farming was in their blood and they wouldn't have cared to be selling real estate or adding up columns of figures in a bank.

  On the seventh day they rested; that is to say, they put on their good clothes and hitched up the horse again and drove to some country church, where, sitting in straight- backed cushionless pews, they stared passively at the preacher, who paced up and down in front of them, thinking up new ways to convince them that they were steeped in sin.

  If I knew where Cletus Smith is right this minute, I would go and explain. Or try to. It is not only possible but more than likely that I would also have to explain who I am. And that he would have no recollection of the moment that has troubled me all these years. He lived through things that were a good deal worse. It might turn out that I had made the effort for my sake, not his.

  I don't know where he is. It isn't at all likely that we will run into each other somewhere or that we would recognize each other if we did. He could even be dead.

  Except through the intervention of chance, the one possibility of my making some connection with him seems to lie not in the present but in the past—in my trying to reconstruct the testimony that he was never called upon to give. The unsupported word of a witness who was not present except in imagination would not be acceptable in a court of law, but, as it has been demonstrated over and over, the sworn testimony of the witness who was present is not trustworthy either. If any part of the following
mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.

  The reader will also have to do a certain amount of imagining. He must imagine a deck of cards spread out face down on a table, and then he must turn one over, only it is not the eight of hearts or the jack of diamonds but a perfectly ordinary quarter of an hour out of Cletus's past life. But first I need to invent a dog, which doesn't take very much in the way of prestidigitation; if there were cattle there had to be a dog to help round them up. In that period—I don't know how it is now—farm dogs were usually a mixture of collie and English shepherd. The attraction between dogs and adolescent boys can, I think, be taken for granted. There is no outward sign of trouble in the family. The two farms are both on the right-hand side of the new hard road and have a common boundary line. The Wilson house, with its barns and sheds, is next to the road and an eighth of a mile closer to town. To get to where Cletus lives you have to drive up a narrow lane that has a gate at either end of it.