All the Days and Nights (16 page)

“Sometimes I think Mother’s death had a good deal to do with it,” Hugh said.

“It was hard on me, too,” Amos said.

The house was like a shell, and the food tasted of tears. And he and Amos undressed in the same room and got into their beds, and he never spoke to Amos under the cover of the dark about the terror that gripped him, and Amos never spoke to him. Neither of them tried to comfort the other.

“But I was all right,” Hugh continued, “until I was twenty-five.”

“You were nineteen when you tried to commit suicide.”

“That was part of it,” Hugh admitted. Without realizing it, he jerked his head up. His eyes went all around the room searching for help.

“That was something you had no right to do,” Amos said sternly.

“No right to cut my wrists?”

“No right to disgrace your family. You didn’t think of anybody but yourself. You’re selfish, Hugh.”

Again Pete Murphy appeared, though he didn’t sit down this time; and again they waited until he went away.

“Barbie and I have been feuding,” Amos said. “She almost flunked out of school last year. She didn’t apply herself. That’s why we sent her East to school.”

“She thinks the world of you,” Hugh said, by way of pouring oil on
troubled waters. “I had such a nice conversation with her during dinner.… She says you never write to her; that she hasn’t had a single letter from you since she’s been here.”

“I haven’t written to her purposely. I don’t want her to think she can get away with anything.”

“She must have been pleased that you came to see her graduate.”

Amos didn’t answer. He was trying to get the attention of the bartender.

Hugh waited until Amos turned around, and then, leaning forward intently, with his elbows on the table, he said, “You said I was selfish. I want to know why.”

“Also,” Amos said, “she was running around with this guy twenty-eight years old. She’s no judge of people, Hugh. She always picks out a lame duck. It’s all right to be tenderhearted, but this guy had a nervous breakdown while he was in the Army — at least that’s what
he
calls it. There’s something creepy about him. I can’t stay in the same room with him. I had to get out of the house when he was there. Ellen’s forbidden her to see him or write to him, but she does anyway.” His eyes filled with tears, which slowly overflowed the lids. “She wants to be a nun, Hugh, and I just don’t know what to do.”

There was nothing theatrical or rehearsed about this performance, and Hugh was moved by the tears, and by what Amos said, and by the fact that Amos was exposing his feelings to him. He waited while Amos unfolded a clean white handkerchief and blew his nose and regained his composure.

The bartender brought another round of drinks, and Amos took up finally the matter of Hugh’s selfishness, which turned out to be nothing more (nor less) than the fact that they hadn’t done anything about Barbara.

“Laura called her, but she —”

“You didn’t ask her for Thanksgiving or Christmas,” Amos said.

If they’d had Barbara for Thanksgiving and Christmas, they couldn’t have had Laura’s brother; the house was too small. But how to explain this to Amos, whose house was large, and whose hospitality was always being taken advantage of. They could have asked her out to the country some other time, and should have. But he’d been having difficulties with his work all through the fall and early winter. Lots of labor went into canvases which were eventually discarded. That seemed to have stopped, thank God.

“When I first came to New York,” Hugh said. “I was always having to
go someplace I didn’t feel like going to, on holidays. Some family or business connection of Dad’s trying to be kind. I used to dread it. From what Barbara told Laura over the phone, I gathered she had friends. In school, I mean. And some boy had been taking her to all the shows, she said. We just assumed she’d rather spend Christmas with Ellen’s cousins on Long Island.”

Amos was not interested in Hugh’s excuses. Having made his accusation, though, he put it aside and began to talk about his younger daughter. “Debbie’s got the same cockeyed brain you have,” he said.

Hugh resented this at first, before he understood that it was half a criticism, half a grudging compliment. On the other hand, to have a brain at all, to be in any way brighter than or different from the average person was, so far as Amos was concerned, cockeyed. “You have a photographic mind,” he said accusingly.

Hugh denied this.

“All you have to do is look at a book and get A,” Amos said. “I never could do that.… Don’t look at me like that. I’m not running you down. I think you’re quite a classy guy. I’m trying to build you up.”

“I don’t need building up,” Hugh said. As evidence that he was doing all right, he offered the recognition that, during the past five years, his work had received from various critics and museum curators. “It’s quite an honor,” he said, “to be in the annual show at the Whitney Museum. They don’t bother with anybody who isn’t good.”

“I’m a big duck in a little pond; you’re a little duck in a big pond,” Amos said serenely. “Ellen knows a woman who studied at the Art Institute. She knows a lot about art. I mentioned that I had a brother who is a painter, and drew a blank.… You’ve got to keep your name before the public, Hugh.”

“I’m after bigger game,” Hugh said. “I’m competing with Eakins.”

“How much does he make a year?”

“He’s dead.”

“Well, then,” Amos said agreeably, “maybe you’ve got to die to be great. But you have to turn out more paintings than you have been doing these last few years.” He went on to tell Hugh about Grandma Moses: “She did what was expected of her; she raised her family and didn’t even begin to paint till she was past seventy — with barn paint. Maybe you take it a little too seriously, Hugh.”

“Maybe.”

“Another instance of your selfishness,” Amos said, “is your unwillingness to have children.”

“But I’m not unwilling!” Hugh exclaimed.

Amos pounced. “Is there something wrong with you?”

Hugh shook his head.

Pete Murphy was standing in the doorway, with Laura and Barbara. He borrowed a chair from a nearby table, and they all three sat down.

The oblique approach, Hugh thought. Why was it he could never remember to protect himself against the double move, in which his castle took Amos’s castle and Amos’s bishop then took his queen.

“Doc,” Amos said loudly, “I want you to give Hugh the name of a good gynecologist. You must know one.”

W
HEN
they were seated once more at the table in the dining room, Amos turned to Louis Murphy’s wife and said belligerently, “What you need is a drink. You look too healthy.”

“Oh, Amos!” Ellen Cahill exclaimed. “I hoped you’d criticize
me
!”

“There’s nothing the matter with you,” Amos said. “You’re perfect.” Then, to the table in general: “That’s my wife. Beautiful woman.”

I don’t understand it, Hugh said to himself wearily. I don’t understand why I didn’t kill him.… And Laura had not blamed him with so much as a look for discussing the subject there was no reason or need to discuss, in such a place, and with Amos, of all people. Instead, she had turned to Pete, as if he were an old and trusted friend. No, he had told her, he didn’t know any doctors in New York. But two years was not an extraordinary time to wait. He had friends who had waited seven years and then had three children in a row. Matter-of-factly, but with the most glowing kindness in his blue eyes, he had answered her questions and described his own treatment, while Amos and Hugh had an argument about the check and Amos won.

The waiter arrived with the dessert course. Hugh thought of asking Laura to dance with him, and then, seeing that she and Amos had met head-on in serious conversation, he decided that she would prefer not to be interrupted. He glanced around the table. No one was loud, no one was drunk, but Amos. Was he drunk because this evening was dedicated, whether the others enjoyed it or not, to his meeting with Hugh? Was Amos’s loud voice a mark of his respect?

Louis Murphy and his wife got up to dance, and Hugh moved around the table and sat beside Aileen Murphy, his friend, whom he had had no chance to talk to. She touched his forehead with her fingers.

“Furrows,” she said. “You’re having a serious time.”

“It
is
serious,” Hugh admitted. “And when you get home, you’d better defend me, after the way I feel about you.”

“Ellen defends you,” Aileen Murphy said. “She takes your side against Amos — and besides, you don’t need anybody to defend you.”

Across the table, Amos said to Laura, “Take a look at him and decide what you want him to be. Hugh doesn’t have much ability to get on with people. You have to be the one to do it — meet people and make contacts and smooth the way for him. I wouldn’t be what I am if she” — his eyes found Ellen — “hadn’t made me that.”

“Amos is sensitive,” Aileen Murphy said in a low voice to Hugh. “You get under his skin more than you realize.”

“I don’t mean to,” Hugh said.

“Possibly not, but you do. You and Amos are both extremes. So is Rick. You’re a family of individualists. I don’t know anybody like you.” She shook her head mournfully.

Hugh heard Amos say, “When are you coming out to the Middle West?”

“Our car is so old it would never stand the trip,” Laura said.

“Get him to buy you a new one,” Amos said.

Laura laughed.

“He can afford it,” Amos said. “Or if he can’t, he’s a damn fool to have left his job.”

Barbara leaned across her mother and said to Laura, “Dad isn’t like this. You mustn’t pay any attention to him. He’s really very kind. And he and Uncle Hugh only seem different on the surface. Underneath, they’re quite a lot alike.”

“Tell me about your children,” Hugh said, remembering suddenly a boy and a girl, three and four — somewhere about that age — tracking mud in and out of the Murphys’ house in Winnetka. “Are they remarkable?”

“They’re not handsome,” Aileen Murphy said.

“I don’t mean handsome. Are they intelligent?”

“No,” she said, reflecting. “I wouldn’t say they were.”

“But I don’t mean that kind of intelligent,” Hugh persisted. He was dead tired, he realized, and his brain was befuddled. “I mean are they wise in a certain way, about the world?”

“You’ve got to come West and see us,” she said.

“Do you have Russian blood in you?”

“A little Jewish.” She pointed to her thin Roman nose. Actually, he knew, she was Irish on both sides of the family.

“I asked if you had Russian blood in you,” he said, “because you like to talk about life. You have a feeling for — You’re realistic about people.” Then watching Pete and Laura leave the table and go toward the dance floor: “What about Pete? Is he realistic?”

“Doc loves everybody.”

“You mean he has no shrewdness, where people are concerned.”

“That’s right.”

“Does he lose by it?”

“Not a thing,” Aileen Murphy said, smiling. And then, sadly: “He has fair-weather friends.”

Dancing with Laura, Pete Murphy said, “Don’t you pay any attention to Amos. Amos doesn’t know anything about painting.”

“I know that,” Laura said.

“I wouldn’t offer Hugh advice, any more than Hugh would try to tell Amos how to sell automobiles.… The thing is not to worry.”

“I don’t,” Laura said, “but we’re living on very little money. And Hugh likes to be extravagant.”

“My family is taken care of,” Pete said, “if anything happens to me. So what I make I spend — and a little more. It’s what I enjoy, and what makes
me
happy. And if I lose five hundred dollars on the races, I don’t tell Amos.”

T
HE
party broke up around a quarter of one. Hugh tried to pay for his share of the dinner check and Amos waved him aside indignantly. Barbara said good night and left them. There was talk of going on to someplace else — to the Copacabana. For Hugh the evening was finished; he was ready to go home. He invited Amos to come out to the country with Barbara and Ellen, any time during the remainder of their three-day visit. This invitation was left hanging. Amos wanted Pete to go with him to see the Mets play the Cardinals; Pete wanted to go to the races. They decided, while Amos was tipping the waiter, to go their own ways.

All eight of them crowded into one elevator, and the four Cahills got off at the thirteenth floor. Amos had decided that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. They wandered through the corridor, made a wrong turning, and retraced their steps. Amos, reverting to the age of eleven, began ringing the bells of all the doors that lined the corridor. Ellen tried to stop him. Loud, drunk, and not at all unpleasant, Amos was not to be stopped. “I’ll tell them Hugh did it,” he said.

They got Hugh’s hat. The two brothers, the two sisters-in-law said good-bye, and five minutes later, as Laura and Hugh were trying to find their way out of the lobby to the Park Avenue entrance of the hotel, they ran into Amos and Ellen, on their way to join the others at the Copacabana. At this final parting, the handshake of Hugh and Amos was prolonged, the expression in Amos’s eyes tender, misty, and only slightly histrionic.

“He’s got a handshake like a gorilla,” Amos said proudly, to Laura.

“I
HAD
a feeling he would notice,” Laura said, going home on the train. “And sure enough, he did. He said, ‘Where’d you get that ring?’ and I said, ‘Hugh gave it to me.’ ”

“That was smart of you,” Hugh said. “To realize, I mean, before you met him, that he’d look to see whether I’d given you an engagement ring.”

“I just had a feeling,” she said, and settled into the seat contentedly, with her head on his shoulder. They were taking the last train. The coach was almost full. The passengers were tired, and many of them sat and dozed, with their heads drooping, their necks bent to one side. Hugh looked down at the ring on the fourth finger of Laura’s left hand — the diamond between two smaller sapphires, in a gold setting. It had been her grandmother’s. Next to the false engagement ring was the plain gold wedding band Hugh had given her.

“Do you wish I’d given you an engagement ring?” he asked suddenly.