All the Days and Nights (48 page)

B
EFORE
I was old enough to have any recollection of it, my Aunt Edith worked for a time as a nurse in a state asylum for the feeble-minded, out past the edge of town. She met there and eventually married a resident physician named William Young, who soon struck out on his own. As a child I loved to sit on one of his size 12 shoes while he walked back and forth talking to my mother about grown-up matters. A deep attachment existed between our whole family and this big, easygoing, humorous man, whose hands smelled of carbolic acid and who never said “Not now” to anything any child wanted him to do.

It was he who told me the truth about Hap’s accident. I was in my late twenties when this happened. One day when we were alone together he spoke in passing of my brother’s “affliction” — of what a pity it was. Out of a desire to make the unacceptable appear less so, I mentioned something I had been given to understand — that the leg had been broken in so many places they had no choice but to cut if off. My uncle looked at me a moment and then said, “It was a simple fracture, of a kind that not once in a hundred times would have required an amputation.” After which, he went on to tell me what Hap didn’t, and mustn’t ever, know.

In those days, their fees being small, doctors commonly eked out their income by dispensing medicine themselves instead of writing out prescriptions. The family doctor in Lincoln, with easy access to morphine, had become addicted to it and should have been prevented from practicing. Uncle Doc, not liking the sound of what he was told over the telephone day after day about Hap’s condition, got on a train and came to Lincoln. He saw immediately that the broken bone was not set. He also saw the unmistakable signs of gangrene. And taking my father aside, he told him that the leg would have to be cut off to save my brother’s life.

“Your Grandfather Blinn called that doctor in and cursed him all the way back to the day he was born,” Uncle Doc said to me. “In my whole life I have never witnessed anything like it.”

This may have a little relieved my grandfather’s feelings but it did not undo what had happened. My Aunt Edith, more sensibly, went to Chicago and came home with the finest set of lead soldiers money could buy. Cavalry officers wearing bearskin busbies and scarlet jackets. On black or white horses. For many years my brother played with them with passionate pleasure. Nothing could really make up for the fact that he was doomed to spend the rest of his life putting on and taking off that artificial limb, and could never again run when he felt like it, as fast as his two legs would carry him.

S
INCE
I was not a natural athlete like my brother, or an athlete at all, it crossed my mind more than once that having an artificial leg would not have been such a great inconvenience to me, because what I liked to do best was to retire to some out-of-the-way corner of the house and read. I even entertained the fantasy of an exchange with Hap. Along with this idea and rather at odds with it was a superstitious fear that came over me
from time to time when I remembered that my mother’s only brother lost an arm in an automobile accident when he was in his early twenties. Was there a kind of family destiny that would one day overtake me as well?

There was a period in my life when I lay down on a psychoanalyst’s couch four times a week and relived the past. Eventually we arrived at my brother’s lead soldiers. I begged to be allowed to play with them and my brother invariably said no. He kept them out of my reach, on top of a high bookcase. One day when Hap was out of the house I put a stool on the seat of a straight chair and climbed up on it. I had just got my hands on the box when I heard the front door burst open and my brother called out, “Anybody home?” In my guilty fright I tried to put the box back, lost my balance, and fell. If my mother had not appeared from the back part of the house at that moment, I don’t know what my brother would have done to me. Not one horseman survived intact. I see Hap now, sitting on the floor in the living room, gluing a head back on one of them. The horse already had a matchstick for one of its hind legs, so it would stand up. He never forgave me for what I had done. I didn’t expect him to.

The Germanic voice coming from a few feet beyond the crown of my head suggested that my brother’s accident had been a great misfortune not only for him but for me also; because I saw what happens to little boys who are incorrigible, I became a more tractable, more even-tempered, milder person than it was my true nature to be. About these thoughts that one is told on good authority one thinks without their ever crossing the threshold of consciousness, what is there to say except “Possibly”? In support of the psychoanalytic conjecture, a submerged memory rose to the surface of my mind. At that Scout camp where Hap won the singles tennis championship I was awarded a baseball glove for Good Conduct.

W
HO
has that picture of Hap sitting on Granny Blinn’s shoulders, I wonder. Or the one of him driving a pony cart. It was a postcard — which means that it was taken by a professional photographer. On the reverse someone had written “Edward, aged seven, at the Asylum.” It was an odd choice. Uncle Doc was practicing in Bloomington by that time. Did the family, even so, regard the asylum grounds as home territory? The road to the Lincoln Chautauqua ran alongside them, and driving by with my
father and mother I used to stare at the inmates standing with their hands and faces pressed against the high wire netting, their mouths permanently slack and sometimes drooling. Perhaps the photographer wanted the institutional flower beds as a background. In the photograph my brother is wearing a small round cap. The pony and cart were not borrowed for the occasion but his own. He is holding the reins, and the pony is, of course, standing still. My brother’s chin is raised and he is facing the camera, and the expression on his face is of a heartbreaking uncertainty.

Most children appear to be born with a feeling that life is fair, that it must be. And only with difficulty accommodate themselves to the fact that it isn’t. That look on my brother’s face — was it because of his sense of the disproportion between the offenses he had committed and the terrible punishment for them? Was he perhaps bracing himself for a second blow, worse than the first one? Or was it because of what happened to him when he left our front yard to play with other children? A little boy who couldn’t run away from his tormentors or use his fists to defend himself because they were needed for his crutches, and who could easily be tripped and toppled, was irresistible. Since Hap refused, even so, to give up playing with them, my father paid a colored boy named Dewey Cecil to be his bodyguard.

I
ASSUMED
, irrationally, that Hap would die before I did; he was older and when we were growing up together he always did everything first, while I came along after him and tried to imitate him when it was at all possible. During the past few years I have often thought, When he is gone there will be no one who remembers the things I remember. Meaning the conversations that took place in the morning when he and I were dressing for school. The time we had chicken pox together. The way the light from the low-hanging red-and-green glass shade fell on all our faces as we sat around the dining-room table. The grape arbor by the kitchen door. The closet under the stairs. The hole in the living-room carpet made by the rifle he said wasn’t loaded. The time I tried to murder him with a golf club.

We were waiting for my father to finish his foursome, and for lack of anything better to do Hap threw my cap up in a tree, higher than I could reach. I picked up a midiron and started after him. With a double hop, a quick swing with his bum leg, and another double hop he could cover the
ground quite fast, but not as fast as I could. I meant to lay him out flat, as he so richly deserved. Walter Kennett, the golf coach, grabbed me and held me until I cooled down.

My brother didn’t mind that I had tried to kill him. He always liked it when I showed signs of life.

H
E
kept a diary, for his own pleasure. Because the days passed by so rapidly, and he found it interesting to go back and see how he had occupied his time, and with whom. He was aware that his remarks were sometimes far from kind, but the person they were about was never going to read them, so what difference did it make? The current diary was usually on his desk, the previous ones on a shelf in his clothes closet, where they were beginning to take up room.

His wife’s uncle, in the bar of the Yale Club, said, “I am at the age of funerals.” Now, thirty-five years later, it was his turn. In his address book the names of his three oldest friends had lines drawn through them. “Jack is dead,” he wrote in his diary. “I didn’t think that would happen. I thought he was immortal.… Louise is dead. In her sleep.… Richard has been dead for over a year and I still do not believe it. So impoverishing.”

He himself got older. His wife got older. They advanced deeper into their seventies without any sense of large changes but only of one day’s following another, and of the days being full, and pleasant, and worth recording. So he went on doing it. They all got put down in his diary, along with his feelings about old age, his fear of dying, his declining sexual powers, his envy of the children that he saw running down the street. To be able to run like that! He had to restrain himself from saying to young men in their thirties and forties, “You do appreciate, don’t you, what you have?” In his diary he wrote, “If I had my life to live over again — but one doesn’t. One goes forward instead, dragging a cart piled high with lost opportunities.”

Though his wife had never felt the slightest desire to read his diary, she knew when he stopped leaving it around as carelessly as he did his
opened mail. Moving the papers on his desk in order to dust it she saw where he had hidden the current volume, was tempted to open it and see what it was he didn’t want her to know, and then thought better of it and replaced the papers, exactly as they were before.

“To be able to do in your mind,” he wrote, “what it is probably not a good idea to do in actuality is a convenience not always sufficiently appreciated.” Though in his daily life he was as cheerful as a cricket, the diaries were more and more given over to dark thoughts, anger, resentment, indecencies, regrets, remorse. And now and then the simple joy in being alive. “If I stopped recognizing that I want things that it is not appropriate for me to want,” he wrote, “wouldn’t this inevitably lead to my not wanting anything at all — which as people get older is a risk that must be avoided at all costs?” He wrote, “Human beings are not like a clock that is wound up at birth and runs until the mainspring is fully unwound. They live because they want to. And when they stop wanting to, the first thing they know they are in a doctor’s office being shown an X ray that puts a different face on everything.”

A
FTER
he died, when the funeral had been got through, and after the number of telephone calls had diminished to a point where it was possible to attend to other things, his wife and and daughter together disposed of the clothes in his closet. His daughter folded and put in a suit box an old, worn corduroy coat that she remembered the feel of when her father had rocked her as a child. His wife kept a blue-green sweater that she was used to seeing him in. As for the rest, he was a common size, and so his shirts and suits were easily disposed of to people who were in straitened circumstances and grateful for a warm overcoat, a dark suit, a pair of pigskin gloves. His shoes were something else again, and his wife dropped them into the Goodwill box, hoping that somebody would turn up who wore size-9A shoes, though it didn’t seem very likely. Then the two women were faced with the locked filing cabinet in his study, which contained business papers that they turned over to the executor, and most of the twenty-seven volumes of his diary.

“Those I don’t know what to do with, exactly,” his wife said. “They’re private and he didn’t mean anybody to read them.”

“Did he say so?” his daughter said.

“No.”

“Then how do you know he didn’t want anybody to read them?”

“I just know.”

“You’re not curious?”

“I was married to your father for forty-six years and I know what he was like.”

Which could only mean, the younger woman decided, that her mother had, at some time or other, looked into them. But she loved her father, and felt a very real desire to know what he was like as a person and not just as a father. So she put one of the diaries aside and took it home with her.

When her husband got home from his office that night, her eyes were red from weeping. First he made her tell him what the trouble was, and then he went out to the kitchen and made a drink for each of them, and then he sat down beside her on the sofa. Holding his free hand, she began to tell him about the shock of reading the diary.

“He wasn’t the person I thought he was. He had all sorts of secret desires. A lot of it is very dirty. And some of it is more unkind than I would have believed possible. And just not like him — except that it
was
him. It makes me feel I can never trust anybody ever again.”

“Not even me?” her husband said soberly.

“Least of all, you.”

They sat in silence for a while. And then he said, “I was more comfortable with him than I was with my own father. And I think, though I could be mistaken, that he liked me.”

“Of course he liked you. He often said so.”

“So far as his life is concerned, if you were looking for a model to —”

“I don’t see how you can say that.”

“I do, actually. In his place, though, I think I would have left instructions that the diaries were to be disposed of unread.… We could burn it. Burn all twenty-seven volumes.”

“No.”

“Then put it back in the locked file where your mother found it,” he said.

“And leave it there forever?”

“For a good long while. He may have been looking past our shoulders. It would be like him. If we have a son who doesn’t seem to be very much like you or me, or like anybody in your family or mine, we can give him the key to the file —”