All the Days and Nights (44 page)

As I listened to him, I wondered if he had been envious of my father — of his success in business, and of the fact that he was, many people would have said, as fortunate in his second marriage as he was in his first. Because Aaron Mclvor had made a decision and stuck to it didn’t mean that he never considered the alternative. And even a so-so marriage might have been better than the unshared bed and the unending solitude he came home to day after day for something like forty years.

“I don’t agree with you,” I said, and “I don’t think that’s right.” And he said with a sniff, “I knew him better than you did.”

It crossed my mind, after I had left the house, that he might have been playing with me the game he used to play with my mother. But on those far-off Sunday evenings he had a look of glee in his eyes, where now there was simply animosity. From which it did not appear that I was excluded.

I always assumed he was fond of my mother or he wouldn’t have enjoyed teasing her. Was it on her account that he resented the fact that my father had remarried — if he did resent it? If I had had my wits about me, I would have retraced my steps and asked Dean Hill what he thought. He and Aaron Mclvor were not, so far as I know, friends, but they had spent a lifetime in the same small town, where everything is known, about everybody. Also, they were direct opposites — the one so even-tempered and observant and responsive to any kind of cordiality, the other so abrasive. And opposites often instinctively understand each other. Whether Dean Hill came up with a believable explanation or not, ambiguity was meat and drink to him, and he would probably have considered the conversation in that bleak upstairs bedroom from angles I hadn’t thought of. He might even have suggested, tactfully, that in my being so hot under the collar there just could be something worth looking into. My father and I were of very different temperaments, and he didn’t know anything about the kind of life I was blindly feeling my way toward. He had only my best interests at heart, but as an adolescent and in my early twenties I had resented his advice and sometimes taken pleasure in doing the opposite of what he urged me to do.

Instead, I stopped off at my Aunt Annette’s. She listened to my account of the visit to Aaron Mclvor and did not attempt to explain his behavior, beyond saying he had always been that way. She then told me something
I didn’t know: “As Beth lay dying, she said to Aaron, ‘You are the dearest husband any woman ever had.’ ”

In the face of that, nothing I had been thinking seemed worth giving serious consideration to. She was his life. There wasn’t the faintest chance of his finding another woman like her, and it was not in his nature to make concessions. So he made do with housekeepers, and brought up his son. When he was stumped by something he went to see the old woman with the big black hat, who knew a thing or two about bringing up children (or so I like to think) and who was not put off by anything he said, being of the opinion that his bark was worse than his bite.

T
HOUGH
it took me a while to realize it, I had a good father. He left the house early Tuesday morning carrying his leather grip, which was heavy with printed forms, and walked downtown to the railroad station. As the Illinois state agent for a small fire and windstorm insurance company he was expected to make his underwriting experience available to local agents in Freeport, Carbondale, Alton, Carthage, Dixon, Quincy, and so on, and to cultivate their friendship in the hope that they would give more business to his company. I believe he was well liked. Three nights out of every week he slept in godforsaken commercial hotels that overlooked the railroad tracks and when he turned over in the dark he heard the sound of the ceiling fan and railway cars being shunted. He knew the state of Illinois the way I knew our house and yard.

He could have had a much better job in the Chicago office but my mother said Chicago was no place to raise children. When the offer came a second time, ten years later, my father accepted it. He was forty-four and ready to give up the hard life of a traveling man. My stepmother wept at the thought of leaving her family and Lincoln but came to like living in Chicago. They lived there for twenty years. With my future in mind — he wasn’t just talking — my father assured me solemnly that you get out of life exactly what you put into it. I took this with a grain of salt; a teacher in my high school in Chicago, a woman given to reading Mencken and
The American Mercury
, had explained to me that there are people who have always drawn the short end of the stick and will continue to. But for my father the maxim was true. He reserved a reasonable part of his life for his responsibilities to his family and his golf game, and everything else he put into the fire-insurance business. He ended up Vice-President in Charge of the Western Department, which satisfied
his aspirations. When the presidency was offered to him he turned it down. It would have meant moving East, and he foresaw that in the New York office he would be confronted with problems he might not be able to deal with confidently.

A detached retina brought his career to a premature end. They moved back to Lincoln, to the same street, Park Place, but a different house. I was in my early forties and living in the country, just beyond the northern suburbs of New York City, and trying to make a living by writing fiction, when my father wrote me that it was about time I paid them a visit. He met me at the station, and as we drove into Park Place I saw that time is more than an abstract idea: Maple and elm saplings that were staked against the wind when we moved away had become shade trees. I spent the first evening with my father and my stepmother, and next morning after breakfast I walked over to my Aunt Annette’s. She was my mother’s younger sister, and they were very close. I loved going to her house because nothing ever changed there. When she sold it many years later because the stairs got to be too much for her, I felt the loss, I think, more than she did.

In that house the present had very little resonance. The things my aunt really cared about had all happened in the early years of her life. My Great-Grandfather Youtsey’s farm on the Licking River in Kentucky, where she spent every summer of her childhood, had passed out of the family. The Kentucky aunts and uncles she was so fond of she was not free to visit anymore. Her father and mother and my mother were all lying side by side in the cemetery.

In the front hall, under the stairs, there was a large framed engraving of the Colosseum, bought in Rome the year I was born. In the living room there were further reminders: Michelangelo’s
Holy Family
, the Bridge of Sighs, and a Louis XV glass cabinet full of curios. Lots of Lincoln people had been to Chicago, and some even to New York, but very few had any firsthand knowledge of what Europe was like — except the coal miners, and they didn’t count. The sublime souvenirs kept their importance down through time.

Over the high living-room mantelpiece was a portrait-size tinted photograph of my Grandfather Blinn. I could almost but not quite remember him. When I stood and contemplated it I was defeated by the unseeing look that likenesses of dead people always seem to have. My Aunt Annette was his favorite child. To his boyhood on his father’s cattle farm near St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and to the obstacles he surmounted in order to
become a lawyer, the photograph offered no clue whatever. Nor did it convey what a warmhearted man he was. What it did suggest, if anybody wanted to look at it that way, was that in my uncle’s house a dead man was held in greater esteem than he was.

My aunt had made what other members of the family considered a mistaken marriage, which she had long ago stopped discussing with anyone. If she had really wanted to she could have extricated herself from it. It was as if she believed in the irrevocability of choices, and was simply living with the one she had made as a young woman.

My Uncle Will had graduated from Yale with an engineering degree, and held a license to practice surveying, but he also had inherited several farms, and he was gone from six-thirty in the morning until late afternoon, making sure that his tenant farmers didn’t do something that might be to their advantage but not his. I guess he was an intelligent man, but if one of the main elements in your character is suspicion, intelligence is more often than not misused. My aunt was a very beautiful woman and he loved her but her beauty was a torment to him. He did not want her to accept invitations of any kind and they never entertained. It upset him if she even went to the Friday-afternoon bridge club, because what if the hostess’s husband were to leave his office early and come home?

Annette was alone in the house all day, with no one to talk to but the colored woman in the kitchen. Lula had a great many children and from time to time she quit in order to have another. Sometimes she just quit. Or my aunt fired her because she had failed to show up for too many mornings in a row. She was always eventually asked to come back, because my aunt needed her in the skirmishing that took place with my Uncle Will. The indignant things Annette didn’t feel it was safe to say to him Lula, looking him straight in the eye, said. My uncle seldom took offense, perhaps because she was colored and his servant and not to be taken seriously, or perhaps because she was not afraid of him and so had his grudging respect. When my aunt couldn’t find her glasses she borrowed Lula’s, which, even though there was only one lens and that had a crack in it, worked well enough. And when she felt like crying, Lula let her cry.

Like the house, my aunt changed very little over the years. Her hair turned grey, and she was heavier than she was when I was a child, but her clear blue eyes were still the eyes of a young woman.

I opened the front door and called out and she answered from the sun porch. My feelings poured out of me, as always when I was with her.
Suddenly she interrupted what I was telling her to say,
“I
have a surprise for you. Hattie Dyer is in the kitchen.”

I got up from my chair and for the length of time it took me to go through the house blindly like a sleepwalker I had the beautiful past in my hand. When I walked into the kitchen I saw a grey-haired colored woman standing at the sink and I said “Hattie!” and went and put my arms around her.

I don’t know what I expected. I hadn’t thought that far. Or imagined what her response might be.

There was no response. Any more than if I had hugged a wooden post. She did not even look at me. As I backed away from her in embarrassment at my mistake, she did not do or say anything that would make it easier for me to get from the kitchen to the front part of the house where I belonged.

I
F
I had acted differently, I asked myself later — if I had been less concerned with my own feelings and allowed room for hers, if I had put out my hand instead of trying to embrace her, would the truce between the front and the back parts of the house have held? Would she have wiped her hand on her apron and taken my hand? And said (whether it was true or not) that she remembered me? And listened politely to my recollections of the time when she worked in our kitchen? And then perhaps I would have perceived that her memories of that time were vague or nonexistent, so that we very soon ran out of things to say?

I didn’t tell my aunt what had happened. I was afraid she would say “Why did you put your arms around her?” and I didn’t know why. Also, I thought she might be provoked at Hattie, and I didn’t want to have to consider her feelings as well as my own.

The next time I was in Lincoln, a year or two later, Lula was back and saw me coming up the walk and opened the front door to me.

T
WICE
a day, with dragging footsteps — for he was an old man — Alfred Dyer came up the brick driveway of our house on Ninth Street to clean out the horse’s stall and feed and curry him, and shovel coal into the furnace. His daughter Hattie kept house for my Grandmother Blinn at the end of her life when, immobilized by dropsy, she sat beside the cannel-coal fire in the back parlor, unable to arrive at the name of one of
her children or grandchildren without running through the entire list of them. I don’t remember ever being alone with her, though I expect I was. Or anything she ever said to me. I was five years old when she died. The day after her funeral my mother sat down at the kitchen table with Hattie and when they had finished talking about the situation in that house my mother asked her if she would like to come across the street and work in ours.

Hattie was a good cook when she came to us and she learned effortlessly anything my mother chose to teach her. She was paid five dollars a week — two hundred and sixty dollars a year, the prevailing wage for domestic servants in the second decade of this century. If you take into consideration the fact that it was one-twelfth of my father’s annual salary, it doesn’t seem so shocking.

The week took its shape from my father’s going away and returning, but otherwise every day was a repetition of other days, with, occasionally, an event intruding upon the serenity of the expected. My older brother came down with chicken pox and I caught it from him. Or we had company. Or the sewing woman settled down in an empty bedroom and, with her mouth full of pins, arranged tissue-paper patterns and scraps of dress material on the headless dress form. Sometimes my mother’s friends came of an afternoon and the tea cart was wheeled into the living room and they sat drinking tea and talking as if their lives depended on it, and I would go off upstairs to play and come down an hour later to find them gone and Hattie washing the teacups.

Monday mornings two shy children that I knew were hers came to the back door with an express wagon and Hattie gave them our washing, tied up in a sheet, for her mother to do. I knew that old Mrs. Dyer’s house was on Elm Street, near the intersection at the foot of Ninth Street hill, and I assumed that when Hattie finished the supper dishes and closed the outside kitchen door behind her, that was where she went. It may or may not have been true. After three or four days Mrs. Dyer sent the washing back, white as snow and folded in such a way that it gave my mother pleasure as she put it away in the upstairs linen closet.