All the Days and Nights (20 page)

“If you please,” Miss Avery said.

Annie brought her tea and the plate of sandwiches, the plate of hot cross buns. When Francis also had been taken care of, Annie waited to see whether Mrs. Whitehead wanted anything else of her and then withdrew from the room. Francis went on lacing his boots. After he had finished, he adjusted his trousers so that they hung over like ski pants. Then, quite by accident, he discovered his cup of tea. Nobody spoke. The dog returned, making soft, padded noises on the hardwood floor. Miss Avery thought that Mrs. Whitehead would probably object and that Francis would have to take hold of Red and drag him out again, but it was not that way at all. The dog came and put his head on Mrs. Whitehead’s lap and she began to stroke his long, red ears.

“If you’re not coming here, Francis,” she said suddenly, “where
do
you intend to go?”

“New York.”

“Why New York?” Mrs. Whitehead asked.

“I want to get a job,” Francis said, and pulled a hot cross bun to pieces and ate it.

Mrs. Whitehead watched him as if it were an altogether new sight. When he had finished, she said, “You can get a job right here. There are plenty of jobs. Your Uncle Frank will probably make a place for you.”

“I don’t wan’t a job in the mill,” Francis said.

In a spasm of exasperation, Mrs. Whitehead turned away from him and poured herself a second cup of tea. “Really, Francis,” she said, “I don’t know what’s come over you.”

Miss Avery was ready to get up as soon as she caught Mrs. Whitehead’s eye, and go home. But when Mrs. Whitehead did glance in her direction, Miss Avery saw that she was more than exasperated — that she was frightened also. Her look said that, for a few minutes at least, Miss Avery was not to go; that she was to relax and sit back in her chair.

“You do what
you
want, Mother,” Francis said reasonably. “You like to have breakfast in bed, so Annie brings it up to you. I want to do the things I like. I’ve had enough school. I want to begin living, like other people.”

Mrs. Whitehead pushed the dog’s head out of her lap. “Being grown up isn’t as interesting as you think. Your father and I always hoped that you would study medicine. He talked so much about it during his last illness. But you don’t seem to care for that sort of thing and I suppose
there’s no reason why you should be made to go on with your studies if you don’t want to. There are other things to think of, however. I can’t rent this house overnight. People don’t want so large a place, you know. It may take all summer. And you may not like it in New York after you get there. You’ll miss the country and you’ll miss your home and your friends. You may not even be able to keep your car. Had you thought of that?” She waited for him to say something, but he went on intently balancing the heel of one boot on the toe of the other. “We’ll have to take a little apartment somewhere,” she said, “and it’ll be cramped and uncomfortable —”

“I’m sorry, Moth!” He stood up suddenly, and his voice was strained and uncertain. “When I go to New York I’m going alone,” he said. “I want to lead my own life.” Then he turned and went out of the room, with the dog racing after him.

W
HEN
Mrs. Whitehead started talking again, it was not about Francis but something else entirely — a book she had read once long ago. The book was about New Orleans after the Civil War. She had forgotten the tide of it, and she didn’t suppose Miss Avery would remember it either, but it was about a little girl named Dea, who used to carry wax figurines around on a tray in the marketplace and sell them to people from the North.

Annie came in and carried the tea tray out to the kitchen. When they were alone again, Mrs. Whitehead seemed to have forgotten the book, or else she had said all there was to say about it. The moment had come for Miss Avery to bring forth her handiwork. She went and got the brown-paper parcel and sat down with it on her lap. Her fingers trembled slightly as she pulled the knot apart, and when the wrapping fell open she expected exclamations of approval. There were none. Mrs. Whitehead did not even see the mending. She was sitting straight up in her chair, and her eyes were quite blind and overflowing with tears.

“Francis is so young,” she said. “Just twenty, you know. Just a boy. And there’s really no reason why he should be in such a rush. Most people live a long time. Longer than they need to.”

Miss Avery nodded. There was nothing that she could think of to say. She wanted to go home, but she waited until Mrs. Whitehead had found her handkerchief and wiped her eyes and given her nose a little blow and glanced surreptitiously at the clock.

I
N
the matter of the estate of Pearl M. Donald, deceased
, who carried me on a pillow when I was a sickly baby, a little over fifty years ago,
Probate No. 2762
, for many years my mother’s best friend and our next-door neighbor, a beautiful woman with a knife-edge to her voice and a grievance against her husband (What? What on earth could it have been? Everybody loved him):
Final report to the Honorable Frank Mattein, Judge of the County Court of Latham County, Illinois: The undersigned, Margaret Wilson, Executor of the Last Will of Pearl M. Donald, deceased, respectfully states: 1. That on or about the 17th day of June, 1961, Pearl M. Donald departed this life …
though it was far from easy. It took her almost twenty years of not wanting to live anymore. And if she had been left in her own house, in all that frightful squalor and filth and no air and the odor of cats’ defecation, she might have needed still more time. But when she was carrying me on a pillow it was not a question of when she would die but of whether I would live.

It is safe to assume that she shared my mother’s fears, comforted her, lied to her — comforting lies, about the way I looked today as compared with the way I looked yesterday; and that at some point she took my mother in her arms and let her cry. Though Aunty Donald lived to be so old, there was no question of her mental competence. She left a will, which was duly approved and admitted to probate. Letters testamentary were duly issued; the executor was duly qualified; an inventory of all estate assets, both real and personal, was filed and approved by the court; notices for the filing of claims were published, as provided by law; and proof of heirship was made, from which it appears
that the decedent left her surviving no husband
(there is nothing like the law for pointing out what everybody knows)
and the following named person as her only heir at law: Agnes Jones
, an adult cousin, whom I have never heard of.

I don’t, of course, remember being carried on the pillow, but I remember the playhouse in Aunty Donald’s back yard. It was made of two upright-piano boxes put together, in the fashion of that period, with windows and a door, and real shingles on the roof. It had belonged to a little girl named Mary King. The Donalds’ house used to be the Kings’. And when I got to be five or six years old, my mother, seeing that I loved the playhouse, which was locked, which I never went in, and which I shouldn’t have loved, since I was a little boy and playhouses are for little girls — my mother asked if she could buy the playhouse for me and Aunty Donald said no, she was keeping it for Bun. Bun was her dog — a bulldog. I don’t know whether it was at that point that she stopped being my mother’s best friend (my mother seldom took offense, but when she did it was usually permanent) or whether Aunty Donald said that because she had already stopped being my mother’s best friend. There is so much that children are not told and that it never occurs to them to ask. Anyway, I went on peering through the windows of the locked playhouse at the things Mary King had left behind when the Kings moved away, and hoping that someday the playhouse would be unlocked and I could go inside. Once I heard my mother mention it to my Aunt Annette, and I realized from the tone of her voice that it was a mildly sore subject with her but not taken so seriously that — that what? That I didn’t spend a great many hours in Aunty Donald’s kitchen with the hired girl while my mother and Aunty Donald were talking in the front part of the house. I don’t remember what they talked about. It didn’t interest me, and so I went out to the kitchen, where I could do some of the talking. And in return I even listened. The hired girl’s name was Mae, and she had a child in the state institution for the feeble-minded, on the outskirts of town. She was not feeble-minded herself, but neither was she terribly bright, I suppose. The men joked about her. My father had seen her leaving the Donalds’ house all dressed up, on her afternoon off, and he had not recognized her. From the rear, the men agreed, she was some chicken. When you saw her face, it was a different story. She was about as homely as it is possible to be. Scraggly teeth, a complexion the color of putty, kinky hair, and a slight aura of silliness. What I talked to her about I don’t know. Children never seem to suffer from a lack of things to say. What she talked to me about was the fact that Aunty Donald wouldn’t let her have cream in her coffee. This was half a century ago, when hired girls got four or five dollars a week. At our house nobody ever told the hired girl she couldn’t have what we had. So far as I know.
And I seem to remember telling my mother that Aunty wouldn’t let Mae have cream in her coffee, but whether I remember or only think I remember, I undoubtedly did tell my mother this, because I told her everything. It was my way of dealing with facts and with life. The act of telling her made them manageable. I don’t suppose I told her anything about Aunty Donald that she didn’t know already. And she was a very good and loving mother, and didn’t tell me everything by way of making her facts and her life manageable. She just shone on me like the sun, and in spite of my uncertain beginning I grew. I was not as strong as other children, but I came along. I stayed out of the cemetery.

O
F
all those times next door during my childhood, there are only four distinct memories. Two of them take place on the Donalds’ front porch, in the summertime. It is almost dark, and my father is smoking a cigar, and the women are fanning themselves, and suddenly all this serenity vanishes because of a change in the color of the sky. The sunset is long past, and yet the sky above the houses on the other side of the street is growing pink. There is only one thing it could be. Aunty goes indoors and finds out from the telephone operator where the fire is, but they do not jump in the car, because there is no car, and if you are in your right mind you don’t drive to a fire in a horse and buggy. Instead, my mother and Aunty Donald sit taking the catastrophe in from the porch swing. The whole sky is a frightening red now, and in their voices I hear something I have never heard before. It occurs to me that we might be witnessing The End of the World, so often mentioned in the Presbyterian Sunday school. In simple fact, it is the Orphans’ Home burning down.

No. 2: One of the things that Aunty Donald held against her husband was that he spoke with a Scottish accent. He had every right to. (He always referred to Scotland as “the old country,” and I thought as a child that it was the only place so called.) In the dusk, sitting on the porch steps, he suddenly exclaimed, “Pe’ll, Pe’ll, there’s a speeder on you!” And though she had been married to him for I don’t know how long — ten or fifteen years, I would guess — she affected not to understand that a “speeder” was a spider. She was from a little town nearby — Dover, Illinois — and according to the executor’s report owned property there at the time of her death, a house that was sold for $1,600, for which somebody had been paying $22 a month rent.

The two other set pieces both happen upstairs. We — my mother and
I — are in Aunty’s bedroom, and on the big brass double bed there are a great many Christmas presents, wrapped either in white paper with red ribbon or red paper with white ribbon. They are of all shapes and sizes, and interest me very much. Aunty is showing my mother something that still has to be wrapped — a bottle of cologne or some crocheted doilies, that sort of thing — and my mother is admiring whatever it is, and as I stand there, it is borne in on me, by intuition, that in all this collection of presents there is nothing for me.

The final memory is of a nightmare that I had when I was wide awake. I am in bed, in the Donalds’ spare room, and the door is open, and I can see out into the hall. At the head of the stairs there is a large picture of a man in a nightshirt on a tumbled bed, by a brook, over which red-coated huntsmen are jumping their horses. The man is asleep and doesn’t know the danger he is in. The horses’ hoofs are going to come down on him and kill him, and there is nothing I can do to save him. Though it does not take very much to make me cry, this time I do not. I know that Aunty is just down the hall and would hear me and get up out of bed and come to me, and still I do not make a sound. I stare at the picture until I fall asleep and dream about it. What I was doing there I do not know. I had been left with Aunty for the night. My mother and father must have been away, and perhaps they took my brother with them.

Twenty-five or thirty years later, I spoke of the picture to Aunty Donald, and asked if I could see it. By that time, my mother was dead and we had moved away, like the Kings, and there was a layer of dust over everything. She was no longer the housekeeper that she used to be, but apart from this there was no change in her house, which pleased me, because there was nothing but change everywhere else. Our house, next door, had been sold to strangers and the furniture scattered. The house is still standing, but I have never been inside it since the day the moving men emptied it room by room. To come to see Dr. and Aunty Donald was to walk straight into the past. Ninth Street was lined with handsome shade trees that kept the houses from seeming ordinary, which they were, Aunty Donald’s house no less than the others. But the inside of her house was not ordinary, it was amazing. When she was a young woman nobody thought her taste peculiar, for the simple reason that everyone else’s taste was peculiar, too. It was an age that admired individuality, and in most cases individuality was arrived at through the marriage of Grand Rapids and
art nouveau
. Accident and sentiment also played a part. The total effect was usually homelike and comfortable, once the eye got over the
shock. But a whole generation after all the other beaded portieres in Lincoln had been taken down, Aunty Donald’s continued to divide the sitting room from the dark, gloomy dining room, and when you pushed your way through, it made an agreeable rattle. Along with the portiere, all sorts of things survived their period. For example, two long peacock feathers in a hand-painted vase on the upright piano that was never tuned and never played on. In an old snapshot that I came upon recently, I saw, to my surprise and pleasure, that most of my mother’s friends were, as young women, beautiful. Some of them went on being beautiful, but Aunty Donald did not. The Donalds had no children. She lost both her parents. And Dr. Donald lost a good deal of money in a business venture that I never understood. Add to this those grotesque but common deprivations that people don’t like to talk about, such as false teeth and bifocals and the fear of falling. Aunty Donald was sufficiently aware of all that she had lost, and did not want to add to it by throwing things away — even such things as the evening paper and second-class mail. Also clothes that were worn out or long out of fashion. Cups that had lost their handle, saucers that had no cup. The wallpaper had not even been changed, but was allowed to go on fading. In the sitting room, up next to the ceiling, at repeated intervals the same three knights rode up to the same castle that they used to ride up to when I was a small child. So it was reasonable to assume that the picture of the man sprawled out on the tumbled bed by a brook was still hanging at the head of the stairs, but it turned out that the picture was not there. Dr. Donald had taken it to Chicago, and it was hanging in a club near the stockyards. He had loaned it to them, Aunty said, but she would get it back. From that time on, she nagged him to bring the picture home so I could have it, and he promised to. Each time I went to see them he would say, “Billie, I haven’t forgotten about your picture.” And one night the club burned down, and then she had something else to blame him for. One more thing. The truth is, he — The truth is I have no idea what the truth is. Perhaps he gave the picture to the club, and would have been embarrassed to ask for it back, and so pretended that he kept forgetting to ask for it. Anyway, it is preserved forever, the way all lost things are. It is quite safe, from mildew and from the burning pile (
Nov. 19 Virgil Edmonds, George Colby, Roy Miller, Clarence Sylvester, labor for cleaning decedent’s residence, $12, $16, $16
, and what a bonfire it must have been).