All the Days and Nights (14 page)

“But it isn’t right!” Edward burst out. “He ran over it. It’s his fault!”

“I know all that.”

“Then why doesn’t he have to pay for it?”

“If it was his fault, he
ought
to pay for having your bicycle repaired. But you can’t make him do it if he doesn’t want to.”

A year earlier, Edward would have cried out, “But
you
can!” He thought it now, but he didn’t say it.

“We’ll find out from Mr. Kohler how much it will cost to have your bicycle fixed, and I’ll go fifty-fifty with you, when it comes to paying for it.”

Edward thanked his father politely, but there was no use talking about having his bicycle fixed. It would never be the same. The frame was sprung, and you could always tell a repainted bike from one that was straight from the factory. His father could go to court if necessary, and the judge would make the man pay for ruining his bicycle, and maybe fine him besides.

“It may be cheaper in the end to get a secondhand bicycle,” Mr. Geliert said.

With an effort Edward kept the tears from spilling over. He didn’t want a secondhand bicycle. He wanted not to leave his new bicycle in front of the
Star
Building where it would be run over.

And Mr. Geliert wanted to say and didn’t say, “I hope this will be a lesson to you.”

It was a lesson, of course, in the sense that everything that happens, good or bad, is a lesson.

E
DWARD
Geliert was thirteen going on fourteen when the paper boys went on strike against the
Evening Star
, and he was fourteen going on fifteen when his bicycle was run over. One half the individual nature never seems any different, from the cradle to the grave; the other half is pathetically in step with the slightest physical change. Edward’s voice had
deepened, hairs had appeared on his body where Darwin said they should appear, his feet and hands were noticeably large for the rest of him, and something would not allow him to kneel in the dark beside his bed and ask God to give him back his new bicycle. People might be raised from the dead, as it said in the Bible, but a ruined bicycle could not by any power on earth or in heaven be made shining and whole again.

O
N
a mild evening in June, when the light in the sky, the softness of the air, the damp odors rising from the ground, and the roses everywhere all seemed to support the fiction that there is a natural harmony running through all natural things, Hugh and Laura Cahill came in from the country to have dinner with his older brother and sister-in-law, from Chicago. The train was crowded, and they had to sit across the aisle from each other. Hugh sat facing a little girl of two, who was dressed in white — starched white dress, white shoes and stockings, and a white piqué bonnet to show off her dark skin and immense dark Neapolitan eyes. She was restless. She bounced and jounced, she hung from her mother’s neck, she got up and she got down, she flirted with the conductor, and from time to time, in spite of her mother’s conscientious efforts to avoid this, the soles of her white kid shoes brushed against Hugh’s light gabardine trousers. The smiles of apology that her mother and grandmother directed at him also asked him to tell them truthfully if there was ever since the beginning of time a more marvellously beautiful child. As the train plunged into the tunnel at Ninety-eighth Street, he leaned across the aisle and said, “I can hear Ellen saying to Amos, ‘If we don’t call them, they may find out we were in New York and be hurt.’ ”

“Would you have been hurt?” Laura asked.

He shook his head. “I’m not looking forward to the evening. Probably Ellen also had misgivings when she called us, but in the Middle West blood is thicker than water.”

“Your trousers,” Laura said.

“I know.” He glanced down at the smudges. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have cared, but it was the kind of thing Amos noticed, and Amos would much rather believe that Hugh had turned up at the Waldorf-Astoria
with spots on his clothes than the truth, which was that his suit had just come back from the cleaner’s. Aware that he would be made to feel the impassable gulf that exists between art and the automobile business, he had deliberately tried to avoid looking like a painter — or rather, like the popular conception of a painter. He was wearing a sober foulard tie, with a white shirt. His shoes were shined. He had just had a haircut. But of course he had overlooked something; his grey felt hat had seen better days.

Sitting in front of a mirror in the ladies’ room of the Biltmore, Laura Cahill pinned the gardenia among the dark-brown curls on top of her head, was dissatisfied with the effect, took the bobby pin out and tried again, sighed over the impossibility of doing anything with her hair — which had no body to it — and would have walked off and left the gardenia on the dressing table except that Hugh had given it to her and wanted her to wear it. They had been married a little over two years, and she was considerably younger than he, and even less confident, but whereas his face announced with an almost comic facility any uncertainty or self-doubt, any unmanageable feeling, she was perfectly able to keep her feelings to herself. She had never met Amos and Ellen.

When she rejoined Hugh, it was six-forty-five. He gave up looking for a vacant taxi and they took the Madison Avenue bus as far as Fiftieth Street, walked east to the Waldorf, went through the lobby, and found the house phones.

“He says to tell you he’s shaving for Laura, not you,” Ellen Cahill said cheerfully. “You know your brother.”

“How are you?” Hugh asked.

“Fine. The Murphys are with us. They came along to keep us company.”

“Yes?”

“We’ll be down in a minute.”

Rather than wait for what (since he did know his brother) was going to be more than a minute, he took Laura’s arm and guided her into the tropical cocktail lounge. Sitting at a little table in this almost empty room, with their drinks in front of them, they killed a quarter of an hour.

“You’ll like the Murphys,” Hugh said. “Pete’s a doctor, and very easygoing and unworried and kind. He and Amos are inseparable. And I think you’ll like his wife. She’s thin and melancholy and intelligent. I liked her the best of any of their friends in Winnetka. I stopped in to see them once, on a Sunday morning, and Pete was out playing golf, and they’d had a party the night before, and she was tired and very funny. She
kept finding pieces of spaghetti behind the sofa cushions and everywhere.”

“Will Barbara be with them?” Laura asked.

“Probably. Unless she’s tied up with commencement,” he said, feeling a twinge of guilt. His niece had been here, in a convent school, since last fall, and they hadn’t done anything about her. He worked at home, and the house was small, and company of any kind was a serious interruption. It affected his work. Ideas got away from him. Canvases that had started out well went bad or were only partly good. But they should have had her for a meal, or something. It was inexcusable. Tilting his glass this way and that, observing how the ice cubes remained serenely horizontal floating in Scotch and water, he said thoughtfully, “I love Amos, but I can’t bear him.… Don’t mind anything he says to you.”

“I won’t,” Laura said.

“This time it’s going to be different.” He emptied his glass and picked up the check. “I have you. Always before, I’ve been outnumbered.”

He didn’t say, and was hardly aware that he thought, that it would
have
to be different, because whatever happened between Amos and him would take place in front of Laura.

They started through the lobby once more and discovered that, at the far end of a brown marble vista, they were being watched; they were the subject of a benign amusement. Even if Hugh hadn’t stiffened, Laura would have known by the marked family resemblance that they were face-to-face with his older brother. Amos was broader in the shoulders, heavier, and older-looking, chiefly because he had less hair. His left arm, ending in a gloved hand, hung motionless at his side. He had lost his arm as the result of an accident with a shotgun; Amos and another boy were shooting at crows, and the gun (which they had been forbidden to touch) went off unexpectedly in the other boy’s hands. The large woman with ash-blond hair and a black hat with pink roses on it — nothing to fear, nothing unfriendly in that direction.

Amos’s greeting “Well, kid, it certainly is nice to see you,” Hugh countered with a smile and an expression that was both alert and wary.
You’re not going to fool me again?
he asked, with his eyes.
No monkey business, like the last time we met?
… Amos turned, his glance quickly took Laura in, and when his eyes met Hugh’s again, he too was smiling. Amos approved. Amos had better approve, Hugh said to himself grimly.

An elevator took them all back upstairs to the fourteenth floor. They found the Murphys’ room and knocked, and Pete came out carrying a
bottle of whiskey. His hair was now partly grey, Hugh noticed, his face fuller than it had been thirty years ago when he wheeled his bicycle up the front walk and inquired, “Where’s that Amos?” Aileen Murphy was still dressing, and so, instead of going in, they separated, the men taking the fire stairs, the two women the elevator, down to the thirteenth floor, to Barbara’s room, which was much larger than her mother and father’s and had a balcony and a view north over the city.

There was a profane squabble between Amos and Pete over whose liquor they were going to use, and Pete informed Amos that there was a men’s bar in the hotel, very nice, where they put the whiskey bottle on the bar beside you.

“I’ve found it,” Amos said.

Aileen Murphy came in and was introduced to Laura. Amos, offering Hugh a drink, said, “Hugh, do you count?” in the same stern tone of voice he had used long ago, checking up on whether Hugh had known enough to kiss the girl he took to the high-school fraternity dance when he said good night to her. He hadn’t, but he did the next time, and she said, “Why did you do that?” and after that they didn’t see each other except when they passed in the school corridors.

He stared at Amos now and said, “What do you mean?”

“One is not enough, two is plenty, three is you’re drunk, and four there’s no reason not to keep on going,” Amos said, and burst out laughing.

Why make up jokes of your own was Amos’s basic social principle, the idea that had always carried him along safely anywhere, in any company that he had ever wanted to find himself. Why avoid making the remarks that other people make, when the remarks are all there, ready to be used, and it’s the surest way to make everybody like you? At thirteen, out of slavish admiration, Hugh had done his best to imitate Amos’s jokes, his laugh, and never managed this successfully. On a raw November day, in the college stadium, he had humiliated Amos by cheering when there was nothing to cheer at. He saw Amos putting this new joke into his suitcase when he packed to come East.

They had a conversation about their younger brother, who had just finished college, after a period in the Army. “Rick never tells me anything,” Hugh said. “Does he tell you?”

Amos shook his head solemnly. “No, Hugh, he doesn’t.”

When they couldn’t get together on their own grounds, they could reach each other momentarily by talking about their younger brother.

“He’s too anxious to prove that he’s capable,” Amos said, “and instead of asking for advice, he rushes in and announces how everything is going to be, and then it’s too late to do anything. But he’ll learn. I took him horseback riding and I told him off, right down the line, all the things that are wrong with him. He took it and went straight to work on them.”

There was a knock on the door and Pete Murphy’s brother Louis came in, with his wife. He and Pete met in the center of the room, after not seeing each other for two years. They shook hands, smiled, and turned away, leaving unfinished business (if there was any unfinished business between them) to be settled at some other time. With a fresh drink in his hand Hugh looked around the room and saw that there were no empty chairs. Laura had settled herself on one of the twin beds, with her back against the headboard, and was talking to Barbara, who, nearly Laura’s age, was stretched out, leaning on her elbow, on the other bed, and telling her about her experiences as a practice teacher in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. “A friend of mine was teaching in the same school,” she said, “and she got a letter from a little boy. ‘Dear Teacher,’ it said. ‘You are very pretty, your friend is very pretty. I love you but you do not love me. I do not like Miss Worthing.’ ” Hugh sat down on the foot of Laura’s bed, and then, aware that his back was turned to her and that the evening would probably seem interminable to her, among all these people she wasn’t related to and didn’t know, he reached behind him and took her high-heeled shoe in his hand.

T
HEY
left the room finally, all nine of them. The Murphys went on up in the elevator to the Starlight Roof while Hugh was leaving his hat with the woman at the desk on the thirteenth floor. Amos, who had had four drinks, said, “Where did you get that hat? I’ll give you five bucks so you can go and get yourself a good felt hat.”

“That’s a fine hat,” Hugh said, his voice rising a little too sharp for banter — an effect that Amos never tired of producing. “It came from Tripler’s. What more do you want?”

Amos was not impressed with Tripler’s. His comment on Hugh’s growing baldness, the circle on the crown of his head where the white scalp showed through his dark hair, Hugh was expecting. It was customary, both with Amos and with his father. He said, “I’ve got lots more hair than you had in 1960.”

This counterattack Amos did not bother to understand, let alone guard against. It was too complicated to do any harm. It involved the recognition of the immutable difference between being six years old and being eleven, between being ten and being fifteen, between fourteen and nineteen, between thirty-eight and just arriving and forty-three arrived. Fairness compelled Hugh to compare not the present states of their respective baldnesses but his hair now with Amos’s hair four years ago in Chicago. Fairness was a quality that Amos seemed to recognize and in general abide by, but somebody or something way back somewhere in the past had excused him from ever having to be fair with Hugh. As far as Hugh could make out, for Amos to be fair toward him would have been to say,
All right, I give up. I don’t understand you and never will. If all you want is for me to treat you decently, I can easily enough. I can stop taking any interest in you — and will, from now on
.