All the Days and Nights (15 page)

Amos glanced at the light over the elevator doors, and then said to Laura, “Dad did the worst thing anybody can do.”

Hugh waited for him to finish. Being older, Amos knew things — family history, old stories, old scandals — that he didn’t. You never knew when something of this kind would burst out of him.

“He put water on his hair,” Amos said. “And he still has some hair at seventy. I didn’t used to have a stomach. I’ve put on twenty pounds since I stopped smoking. Hugh carries his weight well.” And then Laura, whose brothers let each other alone, saw with astonishment that Amos was feeling Hugh’s upper arm, the muscles of which Hugh obediently flexed. “Not bad,” Amos said, and made Hugh feel how much bigger his own biceps were.

As they stepped into the elevator, Amos’s attack shifted. “I was afraid you were going to marry a Jew,” he said.

This was the fuse that had set off the fireworks the last time they saw each other, four years ago in Chicago. The argument, though bitter, got nowhere. Hugh grew red in the face, and then very pale. Amos dodged easily and expertly from one form of bigotry to the next, and brushed logic aside, cheerfully refusing to identify himself with anyone not in his rather pleasant economic circumstances.

“If he had,” he said now, to Laura, “I’d never have had anything more to do with him.”

Since childhood, Hugh reflected, looking at the floor of the ascending elevator, Amos had been threatening, continually threatening, to disown him.

S
EATED
at a big round table under the blue artificial stars, Barbara Cahill asked her New York (and therefore cosmopolitan, worldly) uncle to translate the French words on the menu.

“ ‘
Escargots
’ is snails,” he said.

“Oh, I know I wouldn’t like snails!” she exclaimed.

As she grew older, she would look like her mother, Hugh thought. She was sweet and young and unspoiled, and beyond that he had no idea what she was like. In the last ten years he hadn’t stayed long enough in Illinois to find out.

“You ought to try them. They’re very good. They’re cooked in white wine and parsley,” he said, and was aware of an unreasonable surprise as he heard Amos and Laura, side by side across the table, both order roast beef well done. At home it had always been rare, and he had assumed that Amos would go on to the end of his life ordering roast beef and steak rare, as he himself did. “I’ll have eels,” he said, daring Amos to appropriate that, as he had so many other things that didn’t belong to him. Amos ordered a salad and then said, “I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m ready for another drink.”

During the long wait, Hugh talked first to Barbara and then, while she was telling Laura about going to Mass at St. Patrick’s with her mother, he turned to Louis Murphy’s wife, who was on his left. Louis had held her chair out for her as she sat down, and Hugh had caught a certain protective concern in his manner. It was none of his business, but now, having had three drinks — one in the cocktail lounge and two very much stronger ones upstairs — and being slightly drunk (otherwise he would never have ordered eels), he leaned toward her and said, “Your husband is still in love with you.”

“Why shouldn’t he be?” she said, smiling. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”

“Did you grow up in Winnetka?”

“I was Ruth Hayes,” she said, nodding.

“You know how it is when you’re growing up,” he said. “Somebody four years older is in another world.” He hesitated, wondering if he had been impolite — if he should have said “one or two years older.”

“I know,” she said. “Louis was in love with various girls while I watched him from afar.”

“Did you really?” he asked, in all seriousness.

“No.” She smiled again at him, this time as if she were talking to a child. “I was in love with Bruce Coddington.” Then, extricating them both from the past: “I saw one of your pictures at the Whitney Museum.”

Hugh nodded. He was trying to follow the conversation between Amos and Laura, across the table. He heard Amos say, “You must come out to Chicago. We’ve got a housing project with niggers and white people living together.”

This remark, intended to beat Laura out of the bushes and perhaps test the timbre of her rising voice, she allowed to pass unchallenged. She was there to defend Hugh, not to argue.

A moment later, Hugh heard Amos say, “You must see that Hugh makes a lot of money.”

“I’d rather he painted better and made less,” Laura said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amos told her indignantly. “Wait till you have children and the doctors’ bills start coming in. If I hadn’t had Pete for a friend, I’d have been ruined.”

Louis Murphy’s wife was searching through her purse for a blank piece of paper. In the end she gave Hugh a credit slip from Lord & Taylor, so that he could write down for her the name and address of the gallery that handled his paintings. Ellen supplied him with a pencil, from her beaded evening purse.

“Deborah’s more like you every day,” she said, speaking of her youngest daughter. “She’s even pigeon-toed — which is all right in a boy,” she added hastily, lest this remark cause offense. “She even walks like you. I sometimes say to Amos, ‘There goes Hughie across the lawn.’ ”

“Debbie’s always the leader,” Barbara said admiringly.

“She’s in sixth grade,” Ellen Cahill said, “believe it or not. They gave
Peter Pan
at school this year, and Debbie was Peter.”

I was in a school play once, Hugh thought, and nobody came to see me.…

“Have you any children?” he asked, turning to Louis Murphy’s wife.

“One. A girl seventeen.”

Suddenly nervous lest she should ask him the same question, with Laura sitting directly across the table, he looked away and was grateful for the arrival of the waiter. Ellen Cahill offered her rare roast beef around the table to anyone who wanted it, just as an hour or two before she had offered Pete Murphy and his wife Barbara’s spacious room. Her last anxious “Are you sure you wanted eels?” Hugh answered with “Yes. I’ve never had eels before,” but he didn’t want them and he wished he
could put the queer white slices in his coat pocket. He looked up when Aileen Murphy was served a roast squab, and wondered, Should I have had that?

Amos passed his plate across to Ellen, so that she could cut his meat for him, and Hugh, noticing how quiet Barbara was, the only unmarried person at the table, said to her, “Just you wait. Your time is coming.”

“But I’m enjoying myself, Uncle Hugh,” she said earnestly.

And perhaps she is, he thought. Or perhaps she had not yet realized that she had a right to be bored in the company of older people.

The conversation took on an antiphonal quality. The remarks Amos made to Laura, a moment later Ellen made to Hugh. With his roast beef half eaten, Amos asked his wife to dance with him. At the age of ten, Hugh thought, he would not have done this. Nothing could have induced him to stop eating until his plate was empty, and then it would have been passed up the table for a second helping. Hugh looked at Ruth Murphy questioningly, and then they pushed their chairs back and went out on the dance floor, which was so crowded that dancing was impossible.

S
TANDING
in front of a urinal in the men’s room half an hour later, Hugh was startled by a hearty slap on the back. “I’m going to buy you a drink,” Amos said. “You’ve been refusing drinks all evening, and now I’m going to buy you a drink you can’t refuse.”

They found a cocktail room, around the corner from the elevators, and Amos wanted to stand at the bar, but the bartender wouldn’t serve them until they sat down at one of the tables.

“I want to talk to you, Hugh,” Amos said. “I want to talk to you about your work. The time has come for you to take the bull by the horns.” Hugh sat stiffly, unable to answer. He and Laura had got up from the table together and parted in the foyer with the understanding that he would wait there for her. He stood up, with his eyes on the people passing the door, and said, “I want to talk to you, too,” and went outside. Laura was not there, so he went on into the dining room, intending to bend down and say to Barbara, “Will you come with me? I want you to wait for Laura outside.” But to his surprise Laura was at the table with the others. She had not waited for him.

When he went back to the cocktail room, he found Amos sitting just as he had left him, heavy and solemn and larger than life-size — an epic figure waiting to give advice that was not asked for.

“What bull by what horns?” Hugh said as he sat down.

“I mean you’ve got to decide once and for all whether you’re going to hold down a job or be an artist.”

“But I have decided. I quit my job with Blake & Seymour last fall. I’m devoting all my time to painting.”

“You’ve got to make up your mind,” Amos said solemnly. “You can’t work both sides of the street, no matter how smart you are.”

He expatiated at some length on this dilemma that no longer existed. He questioned the wisdom of Hugh’s living in the country. He insisted that Hugh needed more experience of the world. “You’re leading too sheltered a life. You’ve always been on the defensive. At least you are with me, so I figure you are with other people.”

“I know,” Hugh said. “But now I want to be friends.”

Amos’s face was contorted by a look of disgust. This wasn’t at all what he had meant; it was another instance of cheering when the other side scored a gain, of the joke with the painfully wrong inflection. “No … None of that. I’m hard,” he said, and allowed Hugh to see, from the look in his eyes, just how hard he was. But there was something histrionic about that look, something that suggested that it had been practiced before a bathroom mirror while Amos was shaving. “I don’t care about anybody but my family. They can hurt me, but nobody else.”

“
I
can hurt you,” Hugh said.

Amos shook his head. “No. Neither you or Dad.”

The knight takes the pawn
.

Hugh’s expression was a mixture of bewilderment, hurt feelings, and the sense of loss. His offer had been sincere; he had been ready — at least he hoped he was ready — to be friends with Amos, and he had not counted on the possibility that this offer would not be acceptable. So he’s done it at last, he thought; he’s washed his hands of me.

Though Amos had never supported him in a moment of need, there had always been some slight comfort in the idea that Amos was there, loyal to his friends, and powerful; that his help, never asked for, would even so have been forthcoming at a word from Hugh, the word he had so far been too proud to speak. “If you don’t care about anybody,” he said, accepting his casting out, “why are you telling me what to do? And what do you mean ‘hard’?”

Before Amos could explain, Pete Murphy appeared, out of nowhere.

“Sit down,” Amos said. And then to Hugh, “
Pete
is my friend.”

Pete refused the offer of a drink. Amos didn’t resume. The three of
them sat, silent. Realizing that the conversation could not proceed in the presence of an interested observer, Pete got up and left. It turned out then that Hugh was not rejected after all; the word “friends” was rejected. They were to be “brothers.”

“Downstairs,” Amos said, “you said Rick never tells you anything. Well, you never tell me anything.”

“I’m ready now,” Hugh said. “What do you want to know?”

Amos did not commit himself. It was still Hugh’s move. There was one thing he could say that would make all the rest clear, but something warned him not to say it. Instead, he asked, “Do you remember a letter you wrote me after I got in a fight with the Chi Psis in my sophomore year and moved out of the fraternity house? It was a beautiful letter, and I’m sorry I never answered it.”

The word “beautiful” made Amos wince. As for the letter, apparently he didn’t remember ever having written it. Or
does
he remember, Hugh wondered. It was the only time that Amos had ever offered to help him or tried to understand him, and he could not imagine now why he hadn’t answered it.

Amos wanted to know why Hugh didn’t have a show every year, and Hugh explained that he worked slowly, that he didn’t have that many canvases he was willing to have people see, that he had been, in effect, holding down two jobs.

“Don’t give me that,” Amos said. “I’m a salesman and a farmer.” This meant that Amos managed Ellen’s four hundred acres of farmland in central Illinois, not that he ever rode a tractor. “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a girl with money,” Amos used to say when he was twenty, but actually he had married for love, like everybody else.

Again Hugh felt the pull of the unsaid thing. To hold back something as important as that, he decided, was to be afraid. “A minute ago you were complaining that I never tell you anything. Do you understand the word ‘neurotic’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I was.”

“Are you still?” Amos demanded.

“I don’t know,” Hugh said, confused. This was not the question Amos should have asked. It was the last question he would have asked Amos, if the shoe had been on the other foot.

“What made you that way?”

“The usual reasons — what makes other people like that.” Now that it
was too late, he was cautious. “Their childhood, the past, something.” His heart sank. All evening long he had been conscious of the approval of the figure in the chair at the head of the couch, the shadowy presence who listened, the patient, kind, supporting, encouraging, faceless father-substitute, whom he had found his way to when things finally came to a standstill and he was no longer able to work or to love any human being.… But he shouldn’t have told Amos. In telling Amos he had behaved incorrectly; he had rejected the inner warning and failed to remember that confession can be a form of self-injury. And now he would have to go on without any encouragement and support.

“I have the same background as you,” Amos was saying, “and I’m not neurotic.”

What was so hard, Hugh thought was just to believe it — to believe that anything as terrible as that could happen: that she had died and left them. “You may have been stronger,” he said.

This explanation Amos was willing to accept, in the literal as well as in the psychological sense.