All the Days and Nights (61 page)

One day she put her head in the door and said, “There’s somebody to see you.”

It was the grey-haired woman. “I heard you were not feeling up to par,” she said, and when the old man didn’t say anything, she went on, “I made this soup for my family, and I thought you might like some. It’s very nourishing.” She looked around and saw that the old man’s daughter had left them, so she sat down on the edge of the bed and fed the soup to him. She could tell by the way he ate it, and the way the color came into his face, that he was hungry. The dark little room looked as if it hadn’t been swept in a month of Sundays, but she knew better than to start cleaning another woman’s house. She contented herself with tucking the sheets in properly and straightening the covers and adjusting the pillow behind the old man’s head — for which he seemed grateful, though he didn’t say anything.

“Now I must go,” she said. But she didn’t go. Instead she looked at him and said, “Things aren’t any better, they’re worse. Much worse. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.” And when he didn’t say what she expected him to say, she stopped thinking about herself and thought about him. “I don’t care for the new watchman at the crossing,” she said. “He stands talking to the girls when he ought to be letting the gates down, and I’m afraid some child will be run over.”

But this seemed to be of no interest to him, and she quickly saw why. Death was what was on his mind, not the railroad crossing. His own death, and how to meet it. And she saw that he was feeling terribly alone.

She took his frail old hand in hers and said, “If I can just get through this day, maybe things will be better tomorrow, but in any case, I’ll come to see you, to see how you are.” And then, without knowing that she was going to say it but only thinking that he didn’t have much longer to wait, she said what he used to say at the railroad crossing, to every person who came that way.

A
TOAD
sat under a dead leaf that was the same color it was. Most toads are nice harmless creatures, full of fears, and with good reason, but this toad was mean and spiteful. For no reason. It was born that way. One day a little girl on her way home from school saw him and nudged him gently with the sole of her shoe to see him hop. Which he did, helplessly. But the bile churned in his ice-cold veins and he said — though not so she could hear it —
You will turn against the people who love you the most
. And for the whole rest of the day, under the leaf that was the same color he was, he was pleased. Of all the curses he had ever put on people and other toads, this struck him as the most original.

When the little girl got home, her father was sitting in the big chair that was sacred to him, reading the Sports section of the evening paper. He lowered his newspaper and said, “Did you have a nice time in school today?”

No answer.

“I see,” he said, and went on reading the paper. He was an even-tempered man, and it is a fact widely acknowledged that little girls sometimes get up on the wrong side of the bed.

At bedtime, as she was having her bath, her mother started to go in and inquire whether she had taken a washcloth to her ears, and found that the door was locked. She started to call out and then thought better of it. “A new stage,” she said to herself and went into the little girl’s room and picked up her clothes and opened the window and turned the covers down. She had only this one child and her heart was wholly wrapped up in her.

This made it not exactly easy for the little girl to turn against her, but she knew all about Cinderella and the other little girls whose mother died
and whose father presented them with a wicked stepmother, so by a careful reinterpretation and rearrangement of whatever was said at the family dinner table and at other times, she convinced herself that
they
were not her true mother and father but just some people who were taking care of her until her rightful parents came to get her. When her father picked her up and sat her on his lap, as he was given to doing, she squirmed and got down. He waited for her to come and kiss him good night and she didn’t.

Later, he said to his wife, “What’s with Alice?”

“She’s going through a stage. I think it makes her uncomfortable if we show any affection.”

Once in a while she would lean against her father, but when he responded by putting his arm around her she was gone. It was all the work of the toad.

“What did I do?” the woman asked over and over again.

And over and over and over again the man responded, “Nothing.”

The other toads in the neighborhood knew, of course, about the toad who was mean and spiteful, and they were careful not to sit under or on the leaf he considered his property. Their lives were full of dangers. People sometimes stepped on them without meaning to. Bad boys pulled their legs off. Cars ran over them and left them flat as a pancake in the middle of the highway. In the place where everything is known and recorded, there is a list of the human beings who have been kind to toads, and left a saucer of milk where they could find it, and carefully avoided stepping on them, and been distressed at the sound of the toads’ cry as they were about to be hurt. It is not a very long list.

Sometimes the little girl broke down and allowed herself to treat her mother and father as she had before the mean and spiteful toad put a curse on her, but these periods were brief. There was hardly time for her mother to remark to her father, “Have you noticed how happy Alice is these days?” before they saw once more the closed look that meant
Don’t touch me
.

One day the woman was on her hands and knees in the garden weeding a flower bed when a tiny voice said, “It isn’t any of your doing. It’s the mean and spiteful toad who sits under a leaf that is the same color he is.”

At first the woman thought she had imagined this, but on reflection she realized that she couldn’t have, and looked around to see where the voice had come from, and spotted a toad sitting under a big foxglove. “I didn’t know toads could talk,” she said.

“Oh yes,” the toad said. “But they don’t talk to people. At least not very often. It’s just that we — the toads who live in this part of the world — have noticed how much you and your husband love that child and we can’t bear the way you are being treated.”

“It’s true that she isn’t very affectionate these days,” the woman said. “It seems to be a stage she’s going through.”

“She hates you,” the toad said.

“Really?” the woman said, trying not to show how the words had struck her to the heart.

“Both of you,” the toad said. “She nudged the mean and spiteful toad with her shoe and he put a curse on her.”

If I tell George, the woman thought, he will never believe me. He will think I have gone crazy.…

“What’s to be done?” she asked.

“By you, nothing,” the toad said. “Something has to happen.”

“To Alice?”

“No. To the spiteful toad. Wait. Be patient. Hope for the best.”

So the woman did. And in the place where each thing that happens to every form of animal, vegetable, and mineral life is recorded, it was recorded that a mean and spiteful toad, with only a small provocation, had made a little girl turn against her mother and father who loved her. Immediately afterward, into the atmosphere was released a small drop of mystery, which during a heavy downpour was absorbed into a drop of rainwater that by a — you might say — miracle fell on the mean and spiteful toad. Feeling a pang of remorse he said to himself,
It’s only what they deserve
, and tried to put the matter out of his mind. And couldn’t.
If I remove the curse
, he said to himself,
I will be just like every other toad and somebody will step on me. Or my leaf will blow away. Or something. So I won’t. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. I just won’t
.…

Ordinarily the woman was careful not to touch the little girl but this day the little girl looked so strange and lost that she put her hand on her forehead, thinking she must have a fever. The little girl closed her eyes and shuddered, and then she burst into a storm of tears and threw her arms around her mother and said, “Oh, Mama, I really do love you!”

All the kindhearted toads sitting under leaves here and there in the garden set up a humming in their throats. “Watch out,” they said to each other. “I never thought he would do it, but now that he has, he’s bound to do something especially mean and spiteful to make up for it.”

The leaf that the mean and spiteful toad was hiding under gave forth a faint glow, but that was because of the mystery.

O
NCE
upon a time there was a man who asked himself, “Where have all the days and nights of my life gone?” He was not a young man, or the thought would never have crossed his mind, but neither was he white-haired and bent and dependent on a walker or a cane, and by any reasonable standards one would have to say that his life had been more fortunate than most. He was in excellent health, he had a loving wife, and children and friends, and no financial worries, and an old dog who never failed to welcome him when he came home. But something had taken him by surprise, and it was this: Without actually thinking about it, he had meant to live each day to the full — as he had — and still not let go of it. This was not as foolish as it sounds, because he didn’t feel his age. Or rather, he felt seventeen sometimes, and sometimes seven or eight, and sometimes sixty-four, which is what he actually was, and sometimes forty, and sometimes a hundred, depending on whether he was tired or had had enough sleep or on the company he was in or if the place he was in was a place he had been in before, and so on. He could think about the past, and did, more than most people, through much of his adult life, and until recently this had sufficed. But now he had a sense of the departure from him not merely of the major events of his life, his marriage, the birth of his children, the death of his mother and father, but of an endless succession of days that were only different from one another insofar as they were subject to accident or chance. And what it felt like was that he had overdrawn his account at the bank or been spending his capital, instead of living comfortably on the income from it.

He found himself doing things that, if he hadn’t had the excuse of absentmindedness, would have been simply without rational explanation: for example, he would stand and look around at the clutter in the attic,
not with any idea of introducing order but merely taking in what was there; or opening closet doors in rooms that he himself did not ordinarily ever go into. Finally he spoke to his wife about it, for he wondered if she felt the same way.

“No,” she said.

“When you go to sleep at night you let go of the day completely?”

“Yes.”

As a rule, he fell asleep immediately and she had to read a while, and even after the light was out she turned and turned and sometimes he knew, even though she didn’t move, that she was not asleep yet. If he had taken longer to fall asleep would he also have been able to let go of the — but he knew in his heart that the answer was no, he wouldn’t. And even now when he felt that he was about to leave a large part of his life (and therefore a large part of himself) behind, he couldn’t accept it as inevitable and a part of growing old. What you do not accept you do not allow to happen, even if you have to have recourse to magic. And so one afternoon he set out, without a word to anybody, to find all the days and nights of his life. When he did not come home by dinnertime, his wife grew worried, telephoned to friends, and finally to the police, who referred her to the Missing Persons Bureau. A description of him — height, color of eyes, color of hair, clothing, scar on the back of his right hand, etc. — was broadcast on the local radio station and the state police were alerted. What began as a counting of days became a counting of weeks. Six months passed, and the family lawyer urged that, because of one financial problem and another, the man’s wife consider taking steps to have him pronounced legally dead. This she refused to do, and a year from the day he disappeared, he walked into the house, looking much older, and his first words were “I’m too tired to talk about it.” He made them a drink, and ate a good dinner, and went to bed at the usual time, without having asked a single question about her, about how she had managed without him, or offering a word of apology to her for the suffering he had caused her. He fell asleep immediately, as usual, and she put the light out.

I will never forgive him
, she said to herself,
as long as I live
. And when he curled around her, she moved away from him without waking him and lay on the far side of the bed. And tried to go to sleep and couldn’t, and so when he spoke, even though it was hardly louder than a whisper, she heard what he said. What he said was “They’re all there. All the days and all the nights of our life. I don’t expect you to believe me,” he went on, “but —”

To his surprise she turned over and said, “I do believe you,” and so he was able to tell her about it.

“Think of it as being like a starry night, where every single star is itself a night with its own stars. Or like a book with pages you can turn, and that you can go back and read over again, and also skip ahead to see what’s coming. Only it isn’t a book. Or a starry night. Think of it as a house with an infinite number of rooms that you can wander through, one after another after another. And each room is a whole day from morning till evening, with everything that happened, and each day is connected to the one before and the one that comes after, like bars of music. Think of it as a string quartet. And as none of those things. And as nowhere. And right here. And right now.”

A tear ran down the side of her face and he knew it, in the dark, and took her in his arms. “The reason I didn’t miss you,” he said, “is that we were never separated. You were there. And the children. And this house. And the dog and the cats and the neighbors, and all our friends, and even what was happening yesterday when I wasn’t here. What I can’t describe is how it happened. I went out for a walk and left the road and cut across Ned Blackburn’s field, and suddenly the light seemed strange — and when I looked up, the sky wasn’t just air, it was of a brilliance that seemed to come from thousands and thousands of little mirrors and I felt lightheaded and my heart began to pound and —”