So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

  Once the dog thought she saw Wayne from a distance, but it turned out to be only another little boy who looked like him. People tried to catch her but she didn't let them get that near. Her coat was dry and her eyes were lackluster and she was skin and bones. She lived on rabbits and other small animals and an occasional chicken that got loose from the run. Finally she ended up in town, where some children chased her and threw sticks at her but she managed to get away from them. At night she foraged in garbage cans.

  In the end she found them. Clarence Smith's mother looked out of the window at the side yard and exclaimed, "I declare, it looks like we've got company."

  From the way the man made over her, the dog thought she was going to be allowed to stay. And that he would take her to where the boy was. She smiled ingratiatingly at the old woman, who said, "It's all right with me if you want to keep her here," but that wasn't what happened.

  In the condition she was in, Clarence couldn't bring himself to give her a beating. He took her back to the farm and said, "I guess you'll have to keep her tied up for a little while. I don't know what's got into her. She's always been a good dog, and never given me any trouble."

  Then he went around the place, looking in all the sheds and in the cow barn and the horse barn, for something he'd forgotten or lost somewhere. And a few days later he came back and did the same thing.

  The new man's woman came, and more snow fell, and the ground was white, and the snow turned to ice, and the dog slipped and slid when she tried to go anywhere, so she stayed in her house and slept. Sometimes she dreamed she was waiting at the mailbox for the boy to come riding up the road on his bicycle.

  Awake she wasn't anybody's dog. When she felt like wandering she waited until the new man wasn't looking and then slipped away.

  "The new tenant couldn't get Trixie to stay on the place," Fern said to Cletus. "So your father took her to the vet's and had her put out. With chloroform. You must forgive him. He isn't himself."

  She wasn't herself either, or she would have kept this information from him, or at least broken it to him more gently.

  Her letters to Lloyd Wilson were now almost entirely taken up with her fears about Clarence.

  The lawyer who had successfully steered Fern through the divorce proceedings twiddled his thumbs thoughtfully. Then, leaning back in his chair, he said, "Did Smith actually say in so many words that he was going to shoot you?"

  "No," Lloyd Wilson said. "But I know that he has a gun. And from the way he is acting—"

  The lawyer glanced at his desk calendar to see what his next appointment was. "I dare say you have every reason to be alarmed, but unless you can provide a witness who is ready to swear that Smith threatened to take your life, I doubt if the sheriff's office will consider that there are sufficient grounds to issue a warrant for his arrest. Suppose you keep in touch with me, and if there is any change in the situation..."

  IX

  THE GRADUATING CLASS

  When I go home, usually because of a funeral, I always end up walking down Ninth Street. I give way to it as if it was a sexual temptation. The house we lived in has changed hands several times, and some fairly recent owner sheared off the whole back part—the pantry, the back stairs, the kitchen, the laundry where the cookstove was, and that upstairs bedroom where the Halloween party took place. Why? To save fuel? The porch railings and the trellises are gone, and so is the low iron fence that separated the front yard from the sidewalk. The high curbing and the two cement hitching posts are still there, having outlived their purpose by half a century. The elm blight killed off the two big trees I played under, and in their place are some storm-damaged maples, so oddly placed that they must have been planted by the birds. In the back yard, where the flower garden used to be, there is a structure about the size and shape of a garage, but with a curtained picture window. Somebody must live in it.

  The house next door went up in smoke and flames one night ten or fifteen years ago—defective wiring—and where it stood there is a two-story apartment house that covers half of what used to be our side yard. Here and there all over town big old houses are missing, or between two old houses that have survived somebody has inserted a new house, spoiling my recollection of things. When I come upon the new hospital I totally lose my bearings. Where exactly was the little grocery store my mother used to send me to when she discovered she was out of rice or butter or baking soda? And which wing of the hospital has obliterated the huge bed of violets in the back yard of the house where old Mrs. Harts lived with her son Dave, who never married? And was the bed of violets huge only because the child who once a year knocked on the back door and asked for permission to pick them was so small?

  When I dream about Lincoln it is always the way it was in my childhood. Or rather, I dream that it is that way—for the geography has been tampered with and is half real, half a rearrangement of my sleeping mind. For example, the small red-brick house where Miss Lena Moose and Miss Lucy Sheffield lived. It was probably built during the administration of General Ulysses S. Grant, and must have had dark woodwork and heavy curtains shutting out the light. When I dream about it, the proportions are so satisfying to the eye and the rooms so bright, so charming and full of character that I feel I must somehow give up my present life and go live in that house: that nothing else will make me happy. Or I dream that I am standing in front of a house on Eighth Street—a big white house with a corner bay window and carpenter's lace and scalloped siding. I have been brought to a stop there on the sidewalk by the realization that my mother is inside. If I ring the doorbell, she will come and let me in. Or somebody will. And I will go through the house until I find her. But what is she doing there when it is not our house? It doesn't even look like our house. It was built in the eighteen-nineties, and our house is much older than that, and anyway, it's on Ninth Street. In order to deal with this riddle I let my mind wander up Eighth Street, beginning at the corner where the streetcars turn and go downtown, and before I get to the house I was dreaming about I realize there is no such house, and I am, abruptly, awake.

  After six months of lying on an analyst's couch—this, too, was a long time ago—I relived that nightly pacing, with my arm around my father's waist. From the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather's clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. From the library into the dining room, where my mother lay in her coffin. Together we stood looking down at her. I meant to say to the fatherly man who was not my father, the elderly Viennese, another exile, with thick glasses and a Germanic accent, I meant to say 1 couldn't bear it, but what came out of my mouth was "I can't bear it." This statement was followed by a flood of tears such as I hadn't ever known before, not even in my childhood. I got up from the leather couch and, I somehow knew, with his permission left his office and the building and walked down Sixth Avenue to my office. New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.

  Other children could have borne it, have borne it. My older brother did, somehow. / couldn't.

  In the Palace at 4 a.m. you walk from one room to the next by going through the walls. You don't need to use the doorways. There is a door, but it is standing open, permanently. If you were to walk through it and didn't like what was on the other side you could turn and come back to the place you started from. What is done can be undone. It is there that I find Cletus Smith.

  The little house opposite the fairgrounds looks as if there is nobody there. As if they have gone away on a trip somewhere. Aunt Jenny has pulled the shades to the sill. That way, people won't peer in and see what she sees whenever she closes her eyes, and sometimes when they are wide open. The double bed in the front room is made up and Cletus is lying on it, with his shoes extending over the side so they won't dirty the spread. He is lying on his left side, in the fetal position, as if he is trying to get out of this world by the way he came into it.

  The house smells of coffee percolating and then of bacon frying.
He does not answer when she tells him breakfast is ready. And neither does he come. Sitting at the kitchen table she blows on her coffee but it is still too hot to drink, so she pours some of it into her saucer. ... (It is time to let go of all these people and yet I find it difficult. It almost seems that the witness cannot be excused until they are through testifying.)

  Aunt Jenny gets up suddenly and goes into the next room and puts her hand on Cletus's forehead. He has no fever but his skin feels clammy and he is very pale. His eyes are open but he doesn't look at her. As she takes her hand away he says, "Would you be afraid if he came here?"

  "If who came here?"

  He doesn't enlighten her and after a moment she says yes, she would.

  "Where do you think he is?"

  "I haven't the least iota."

  Her hand is not steady enough to drink from the saucer and so she pours the coffee back into the cup and forgets to drink it. The clock ticks louder at some times than at others. She stops hearing it entirely and hears, instead, the sound of her own heavy breathing. Quarter of nine comes and she clears her throat and says, "Time you left for school. You'll be late." He is already late. The clock is five minutes slow, which she knows but has for the moment forgotten. His books are on a chair by the door, but he knows, even if she doesn't, that he can never go to that school again. He walks in the Palace at 4 a.m. In that strange blue light. With his arms outstretched, like an acrobat on the high wire. And with no net to catch him if he falls.

  The meeting in the school corridor, a year and a half later, I keep reliving in my mind, as if I were going through a series of reincarnations that end up each time in the same failure. I saw that he recognized me, and there was no use in my hoping that I would seem not to have recognized him, because I could feel the expression of surprise on my face. He didn't speak. I didn't speak. We just kept on walking.

  I remember thinking afterward, When enough time has passed he will know that 1 haven't told anybody. . . . But I still went on worrying for fear he would think that the reason I didn't speak to him was that I didn't want to know him, after what happened. Which is, I'm afraid, what he did think. What else?

  Did he go home and tell his mother? And did they then pack up and move to another part of Chicago to get away from me?

  If I'd had the presence of mind to say, "You don't have to worry, I won't tell anybody," would they have been able to stay where they were? Would his mother have trusted a fifteen-year-old boy to keep such a promise, even if I had made it?

  Sometimes I almost remember passing him in the school corridors afterward. And I think, though I am not at all sure of this, that I can remember being happy that I was keeping his secret. Which must mean that he was there, that we continued to pass each other in the halls, that he didn't move away. But if he had stayed on at that school, sooner or later we would have been in the same classroom, and I know that we weren't.

  Five or ten years have gone by without my thinking of Cletus at all, and then something reminds me of him—of how we played together on the scaffolding of that half-finished house. And suddenly there he is, coming toward me in the corridor of that enormous high school, and I wince at the memory of how I didn't speak to him. And try to put it out of my mind.

  One day last winter, plagued by guilt, I brought down from the attic a grocery carton stuffed with old papers, diplomas, newspaper clippings, letters from college friends I haven't seen for thirty or forty years, and so on, and went through it until I found my high-school yearbook. The photographs of the graduating class are arranged in vertical panels, fifteen oval likenesses to a page. Cletus ought to have been between Beulah Grace Smith and Sophie Sopkin and he isn't. If he had been, I would, I think, have been able to put him out of my mind forever. I went through the yearbook carefully from cover to cover looking for him. He isn't in any group picture or on any list of names.

  There is a limit, surely, to what one can demand of one's adolescent self. And to go on feeling guilty about something that happened so long ago is hardly reasonable. I do feel guilty, even so. A little. And always will, perhaps, whenever I think about him. But it isn't only my failure that I think about. I also wonder about him, about what happened to him. Whether he was spared the sight of his father's drowned body. Whether after a while he and his mother were able to look at each other without embarrassment. Whether he had as lonely a time as I did when he first moved to Chicago. And whether the series of events that started with the murder of Lloyd Wilson—whether all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.