All the Days and Nights (28 page)

They got in the front seat of the car and Mr. Ferrers rolled the window up on his side, though it was a warm day. He was past seventy, and the gradual refining and shrinking process of old age had begun, and with it had come a susceptibility to drafts.

“I can raise my window, too,” Edward said.

Mr. Ferrers shook his head. “I’ll tell you if I feel it.”

The car was a Cadillac, five years old but without a scratch. It had been washed in honor of Edward’s visit and looked brand-new.

“We ought to leave Alice’s around three, if you want to see Dr. McBride,” Mr. Ferrers said.

“I thought he was dead.”

“Not at all. Old Doc goes his merry way at eighty-eight, spending his capital and thinking he can cure his ills and pains, which at his age is impossible. And Ruth hasn’t had a new dress in many years. But he knows you’re here, and he’ll be hurt if you don’t come to see him.… I tried to head your Aunt Alice off, but she wanted to do something for you.”

“I know,” Edward said.

“You’d think that by having people at the house where they could see you that that ought to satisfy them, but it doesn’t. They all want to have you for cocktails or something, and the result is that I don’t get any time with you — which I don’t like. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“This evening we’ll have some time,” Edward said.

“Three days is not enough.”

“I know it isn’t.”

Once they had left the business district there was no traffic whatever. As Edward drove, he continued to look both at the quiet empty street ahead of them and in the little oblong, bluish rearview mirror, at his father. Mr. Ferrers was aware that he was being studied, but what reasonable man is afraid of the scrutiny of his own child? Before he retired and moved back to Draperville, Illinois, Mr. Ferrers had been the vice-president in charge of the Chicago office of a large public-utility company. He was accustomed to speak with authority, and with confidence that his opinion, which had been arrived at cautiously and with due regard for the opinions of others, was the right one. He also came from a long line of positive people. Introspection was as foreign to his nature as dishonesty. Right was right and wrong was wrong, and to tell one from the other you had only to examine your own conscience. In general, Mr. Ferrers was on the side of the golden mean, or, as he would have put it, the middle of the road. When it came to politics, he threw moderation to the winds and was a fanatical Republican. Though he could not swallow the Book of Genesis, he believed every word that was printed in the Chicago
Tribune
. Also that Franklin Roosevelt had committed suicide. Fishing and golf were his two great pleasures. At the bridge table he deliberated, strumming his fingers, without realizing that he was holding up the game, and drove his wife, Edward’s stepmother, to make remarks that she had meant to keep to herself. Now that his eyesight had begun to fail, he had trouble recognizing people at any distance, and so he spoke courteously to everyone he met on the street. He had no enemies. The
younger men, Edward’s contemporaries, looked up to him and came to him for advice. The older men, Mr. Ferrers’s lifelong friends, considered it a privilege to be allowed to fasten the fly on the end of his fishing line, and loved him for his forthrightness, and saw to it that he did not lack company at five o’clock in the afternoon, when he got out the ice trays and the glasses and a bottle of very good Scotch.

“This part of town hasn’t changed at all,” Edward remarked.

He meant the houses. The look of things had changed drastically. The trees were gone. In a nightmare of three or four years’ duration, the elm blight had put an end to the shade — to all those long, graceful, leafy branches that used to hang down over roofs and porches and reach out over the brick pavement toward the branches on the other side. Now everything looked uncomfortably exposed, as if standing on the sidewalk you could tell how much people owed at the bank. Not that there had ever been much privacy in Draperville, Edward thought; but now there was not even the appearance of privacy.… In the dark, cold, hungry, anxious to get home to his supper, he used to ride over these very lawns on his bicycle, and when he was close enough to the front porch he would reach backward into his canvas bag, take out a folded copy of the Draperville
Evening Star
, and let fly with it. That dead self, the boy he used to be.
The one you used to have such trouble with
, he wanted to say to his father, but Mr. Ferrers did not like talking about the past. “That’s all water over the dam,” he said once when Edward asked him a question about his mother. On the other hand, he did sometimes like to talk about local history — what the business district was like when he was a boy, where some long defunct dry goods store or shoe store or law office or livery stable used to be, and who the old families were. And gossip said that when he went to see old Dr. McBride, he talked about Edward’s mother. So perhaps it’s only that he doesn’t like to talk about the past with me, Edward thought. Aloud, he said, “This car drives very easily, after our 1936 Ford.”

“You ought to get a new car,” Mr. Ferrers said.

“The old one runs. It runs very well.”

“I know, but so does a new car. And Janet might enjoy having a car that isn’t sixteen years old, did you ever stop to think of that?”

Edward smiled, without taking his eyes from the street, and did not commit himself. This was not the first time that his father had brought up the subject of their car, which had stopped being a joke and was now an affront to the whole family. Except possibly his Aunt Alice, who didn’t
have a car, because she had very little money — barely enough to live on. What she did have slipped through her fingers. This was equally true of Edward. When he was a little boy, his father made him lie stretched out on his hand in shallow water. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t take my hand away,” he said, and when Edward stopped thrashing and looked back, his father was ten feet away from him and he had learned to swim. But learning the value of money was something else again.

On Edward’s sixth birthday, Mr. Ferrers started his son off with a weekly allowance of ten cents — a sum so large in Edward’s eyes that when Mrs. McBride gave him another dime for ice-cream cones, he wasn’t sure whether it was morally right for him to take it. With advancing age, the ten cents became a quarter, all his own, to spend when and on what he pleased, and of course once it was spent there was no possibility of more until another week rolled around. In first-year high school, the quarter became fifty cents, and then, in Chicago, where he had lunch at school and carfare to consider, it jumped suddenly to three dollars. By walking to school, and a good deal of the time not eating any lunch, he could buy books, and did. Sometimes quite expensive ones. And in college he had sixty, then seventy-five, and then ninety dollars a month, with no questions asked, out of which he fed himself and paid for the roof over his head and bought still more books. If he ran short toward the end of the month, he lived on milk and graham crackers — which was not what his father had intended. And once when he ran out of money early in the month because he had shared what he had with a roommate whose check from home didn’t come, he got a job waiting tables at a sorority house. What it amounted to was that he had learned when the money ran out not to ask for more.

When he finished college, he thought he wanted to teach English, but after three years of graduate work he threw up his part-time appointment with the university where he had been an undergraduate, took the hundred dollars that he had in a savings account, borrowed another hundred from his father, and went to New York on a Greyhound bus and got a job. After working three weeks, he paid his father back. A great load fell from Mr. Ferrers’s shoulders with this act. He sat with Edward’s letter and the check for a hundred dollars in his hand and wept. The only one of his three children who had ever given him cause for worry had demonstrated that he was responsible where money was concerned, and Mr. Ferrers felt that his work had been accomplished. It appeared to be so well accomplished that Edward, receiving raise after raise, in four years
reached a point at which he must be making about as much income as his father. Since his father never revealed how much money he earned, this had to be concluded by inference, from his scale of living and his remarks about other people. Edward decided on ten thousand dollars a year as his mark, and when he reached it he rested there a few months, during the summer of 1939. His father and stepmother came East for the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow. Sitting in the Belgian Pavilion, with a clear view of the French Pavilion, where the food was better but notoriously expensive, Edward announced that he had resigned from his job in order to get a Ph.D. and go back to teaching. Mr. Ferrers took this decision calmly. Edward was a grown man now, he said, and he would not presume to tell him how to lead his life.

As Edward drove up in front of the place where his aunt lived, Mr. Ferrers said, “Don’t get too close to the curbing — you’ll scrape the whitewalls.”

“How is that?” Edward asked.

Mr. Ferrers opened the door on his side and looked. “You’re all right,” he said.

Though now and then some old house would be divided into apartments, this was the only building in Draperville that had been originally designed for that purpose. It was two stories high, frame, with small porches both upstairs and down. It was painted a dreary shade of brown, and it backed on the railroad tracks. Mr. Ferrers’s sister lived on the second floor, at the top of a rather steep flight of stairs.

“You go ahead, son,” he said. “I have to take my time.”

There were two doors at the top of the stairs. The one on the right opened and Edward’s Aunt Alice said, “I’ve been watching for you. Come in, come in,” and put her arms around him and gave him a hearty smack. Looking past her into the apartment, he saw that his stepmother had already come.

“What a pretty dress,” he said.

“I put it on for you,” his Aunt Alice said, and her face lit up with pleasure.

Edward loved her because his mother had loved her, and because she had been very good to him after his mother died — the one person who brought cheerfulness and jokes into a house where life had come to a standstill and people sat down to meals and went upstairs to bed and
practiced the piano and read the evening paper and answered the telephone only because they didn’t know what else to do. He always thought of her as she was then, and so it was a shock to find her with white hair, false teeth, wrinkles, rimless bifocals, and hands twisted out of shape by arthritis. And living alone for so many years had made her melancholy. Only her voice was not changed. Unlike most people of her generation, she could speak about her feelings. The night before, sitting off in a corner with him where nobody could hear what they were saying, she said, “I know I’m old, but my heart is young.” During a long life, very little happiness had come her way and she had taken every bit of it, without a moment’s fear or hesitation. And would again.

“Well, Alice,” Mr. Ferrers said as he kissed her, “how are all your aches and pains today?”

“They’re not imaginary, as you seem to think.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Edward said.

“I know he just likes to get my goat,” she said. “But even so.”

“If you can’t stand a little teasing,” Mr. Ferrers said.

“I don’t mind teasing, but sometimes your teasing hurts.”

When they were children and he got into a fight on the way home from school, she dropped her books and sailed in and pulled his tormentors off him. Mr. Ferrers had had asthma as a boy and was not strong, but he outgrew it; the time came when he didn’t need anybody to protect him. From the way she spoke his name, it was perfectly clear to Edward how much his aunt loved his father still.

The living room of the apartment was robbed of light by the porch. The deep shade that was lacking everywhere outside was here, softening the colors of Oriental rugs that were familiar to him from his childhood; like books that he had read over and over. His childhood was separated sharply from his adolescence by his mother’s death, which occurred when he was ten. He was thirteen when his father remarried, and when he was fifteen they moved from Draperville to Chicago. He had known his stepmother since he was four years old. She had been his kindergarten teacher, and so it was not as if his father had married a stranger.

When Mr. and Mrs. Ferrers came East for a visit with Edward and his wife, the two couples played gin rummy with a good deal of gaiety and went for long drives. Edward’s wife and his stepmother were comfortable together. If there was ever any strain, it was between father and son — because Edward had miscalculated the length of time it took to drive from the handsome street of old houses in Litchfield, Connecticut, to the
inn where Mr. Ferrers could sit down to his evening drink; or because Mr. Ferrers could not keep off the subject of politics even though he knew what Edward thought of Senator McCarthy. But when Edward was going to high school in Chicago, it was different. He did not like to think of all that his stepmother had put up with — the sullenness; the refusal to admit her completely into his affections lest he be disloyal to his mother; the harsh judgments of adolescence; sand in the bathroom, tears at the dinner table, and implacable hostility toward his father. As if to make belated amends, he sat now holding her hand in his and reminding her of things that had happened when they were living in Chicago.

“Do you remember what a time you had teaching me to drive?” he said, and they both laughed. Streetcars had exerted a fatal attraction for him. He killed the engine on Sheridan Road. Returning to the garage where the car was kept, he couldn’t decide between the entrance and the exit and almost drove up on a concrete post.

“I used to hear you coming home,” Helen Ferrers said, “when we lived on Greenleaf Avenue, and your walk sounded so like your dad’s that I couldn’t tell which of you it was.”

Edward also had put up with something. For the first few years, she suffered from homesickness and she and his father went home to Draperville as often as they could, and they had a good deal of company — mostly Helen’s friends, who came up to Chicago for a few days to do some shopping. There was no guest room in the apartment, and when they had company Edward slept in the dining room, on a daybed that opened out. In his room there were twin beds with satin spreads on them, and before he got into bed at night, he folded the one on his bed carefully and put it on the other, but sometimes forgot to pin back the glass curtains so they wouldn’t be rained on during the night. He studied at a card table, and in his closet, in a muslin bag, were Helen’s evening dresses. The two pictures on the wall were colored French prints, from a series entitled
Les Confiances d’Amour
. By the light switch there was a small framed motto: