All the Days and Nights (21 page)

Whatever the picture was like, it wasn’t the picture I remember; I know this much about pictures looked at in childhood. It was in
color, perhaps hand-colored but more likely a lithograph. The man on the bed was not being trampled to death but dreaming of the hunt or steeplechase or whatever it was that was going on in the air above his bed. And I am glad I do not have it, because I cannot throw things away, either, and the attic is full of souvenirs of the past from which the magic has long since evaporated. The playhouse, strangely, I still regret. I find myself wondering if it is still there. The executor’s report does not list it.

I
ASSUMED
that Aunty loved me, because of the way her face would light up when she opened the front door and saw me standing there. I know she loved my mother and father. And everybody loved my brother Edward, who was called “Happy.” They loved him with a special love because when he was five years old he got his left leg caught in the wheel of a buggy and it had to be cut off above the knee. But they loved him before that, because he was a beautiful little boy, and because he was a handful. Being good, being well-behaved, simply didn’t interest him. He did what he felt like doing, and spankings had no effect. Anything you didn’t want him to investigate you had to keep locked up or on a shelf too high for him to reach. He gave up cigars when he was five. In the space of five minutes one afternoon, he turned the hose on my mother and my Aunt Edith and my father. The women retired shrieking into the house but my father walked right through the stream of water to the outside faucet and cut it off at the source. My Aunt Annette and Dr. Donald both worshiped the ground my brother walked on. The look in their eyes when they spoke to him or about him, the pleasure they took in telling stories about things he did when he was little, the way they said his name made this quite plain. As it happened, they were also devoted to each other. From the beginning of Time all these friendships were; from before I was born. And they lasted out the lifetime of all the people involved, and most of them lived to be very old. Dr. Donald was a small, compact man, in appearance and in character totally unlike anyone else in Lincoln. He was a horse dealer as well as a veterinary, and at one time he had a livery stable on the east side of the courthouse square. During the First World War, he supplied horses to the American Expeditionary Force. There is a picture of my brother in a pony cart alone and holding the reins. My father was earning a modest salary, and he was not extravagant by nature, and I rather think that the pony cart and the succession of ponies must have come from Dr. Donald’s stable and were eventually
returned to it. I was under the impression that I, too, would have a pony, when I was old enough. Perhaps I would have, except for the fact that the world was changing. My father sold the carriage horse when I was six years old, and bought a seven-passenger Chalmers. Where the barn had stood there was now a garage. The change from horses to cars cannot have made Dr. Donald any happier than it made me. It didn’t affect Aunty Donald one way or the other, because she never went anywhere except to our house, and she didn’t come there often. If you wanted to see her, you had to go to her house. She went to my mother’s funeral, I have no doubt. And then, just before her own, she went to the hospital and to a nursing home. In between, for forty-one years, she never went out of her front door except to sweep the leaves off the front porch or to open the mailbox, or to pick up the
Evening Star
. The reason she gave for not going anywhere was that it was not suitable for the wife of a horse doctor to accept invitations. The horse doctor was universally loved and admired. People went to him for advice about financial matters and they also went to him when the time had come for them to open their hearts to somebody. In short, it was all in her head.

He lived to be almost ninety, and during his last illness, which went on for months, she took care of him herself. Often she was up all night with him. After he died, the change set in. She looked older, of course, but then she
was
old. In order to sit down, when you went to see her, you had to remove a pile of newspapers or a party hat with tired-looking cloth roses on it or a box of old letters or, sometimes, it was hard to say exactly what — an object. She would be pleased to see you, but you had the feeling as you were leaving that when the front door closed she would pick up the conversation with herself where it had left off and forget that you’d been there until she got a card from you at Christmastime. A cousin of mine who took care of her legal affairs for a time found that if he wanted to get her signature on a paper it was a good idea to telephone first, because she had stopped answering the door. She was deaf, but not that deaf; she just let the doorbell ring. I have tried this myself. In a little while, sometimes in a surprisingly little while, it stops ringing, leaving instead a silence that is full of obscure satisfaction. The same thing was true for the man who came to read the gas and electric-light meter, and for the salesman who was trying to interest her in a life-insurance policy, and for the minister who was concerned about her soul, and for the neighbors who wanted to bring some warm food over to her in a covered dish — they all took to telephoning first. Sometimes she let the telephone ring and ring.

A young woman turned up who had known Dr. Donald. I don’t know her name or where she came from, but she was a businesswoman, energetic and capable, and with an understanding of financial affairs that most women did not have, and the patience to explain them. Her first visit was followed by others. It is easy to deduce from what happened what must have led up to it. The pleasure of finding a letter in the mailbox instead of the usual circulars, and of putting fresh sheets on the bed in the spare room because someone was coming on the six-fifteen train. What could it have been like except having the child, the affectionate daughter, that she had wanted and been denied? At last, someone was concerned about her. All sorts of people who actually were concerned about her — her husband’s friends, the men at the bank, and the neighbors on Ninth Street — were satisfied that she was being taken care of and that they needn’t worry about her anymore. So they weren’t worried about her, until somebody gossiping over the back fence said that Mrs. Donald had said that the young woman wanted her to sign over to her everything she owned, with the understanding that she would take care of Mrs. Donald as long as she lived. In a small place, word always gets around — rather quickly, in fact. And small-town people are not in the habit of shrugging off responsibility. Two of Dr. Donald’s friends — much younger men than he was, but he had a gift for friendship and it was not limited to his contemporaries — went to see Aunty Donald, and shortly afterward the young woman retired from the field.

Unfortunately, though they could protect her from being taken advantage of, they could not protect her from loneliness. She started feeding a stray cat, and then she let the cat into the house one cold night, and the cat had kittens. The dilemma is classical, and how you solve it depends on what kind of person you are. Between five-fifteen and five-thirty every morning, the back door opened and out came the cats. The smell of coffee drifted through the house, and another day was added to the long chain that went back, past the First World War and the Spanish-American War and the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, to the eighteen-seventies, when things were so much pleasanter and quieter than they are now. The chain is not as strong as it seems: The beaded portiere fell down. All by itself. For no reason. In the middle of the night, she told me. It couldn’t have been caused by a sudden stirring of air, because the windows were closed. When she came downstairs in the morning, the first thing she saw was the empty doorway, and then she saw the glass beads all over the sitting-room floor.

T
HE
rest I know only from hearsay. I never saw her again after this visit. She fell and broke her hip. Out of the kindness of her heart, the woman who lived next door put food out for the cats, but no one expected Aunty Donald to come home from the hospital. She did come home, looking a lot thinner and older, and she went on as before, except that the experience had taught her something. If an accident could befall her, it could befall her cats. She found it harder and harder to let them out into a world full of vicious dogs, poisoned meat, boys with slingshots and BB guns, and people who don’t like cats. She put down some shredded newspaper in a roasting pan in the back hall and showed it to the cats, and they quickly got the idea, and after that she didn’t have to let them out of the house at all. At her age one doesn’t go around opening windows recklessly in all kinds of weather, and so the house — to put it bluntly — smelled. Since she never went out of it, she had no idea how strong the smell really was. Sometimes when she had neglected to put down fresh paper, the cats retired to a corner somewhere, and this added to the unpleasantness. For she was half blind and could not be expected to go around on her hands and knees searching for the source of the smell. And if she had someone in to clean, as people often urged her to do, what was to prevent the cleaning woman from lifting the piano scarf or the corner of the bedroom rug and finding who knows how much money and putting it quietly in her apron pocket? No thank you.

One day she heard the doorbell ring, and this time it didn’t stop ringing. It went on and on until finally, against her better judgment, she opened the door. The caller was not Death, but it might just as well have been. My brother is a forceful, decisive man, with a big heart and a loud, cheerful voice and enough courage for three people, but he had to excuse himself after five minutes and go to the front door for a breath of fresh air. By nightfall she was in bed in a nursing home. She lived on a few weeks, expecting that this time, too, she would go home, and instead she died in her sleep.

T
HE
Donalds’ house had too many trees around it, and so the grass was thin. The house was heated by hot-air registers, and had its own smell, as all houses did in those days. I don’t remember ever having a meal in the dark dining room, though I must have, and I don’t remember any
flowers, inside or out, unless possibly iris around the foundations. No, I’m sure there weren’t any. The flowers were on our side of the fence. Flower beds around a birdbath in the backyard, flower beds all along one side of the house, and vines on trellises — a trumpet vine, clematis, a grape arbor. What I remember cannot be true, if only because the climate of Illinois is not right for it, but the effect is of a full-blown lushness that I associate with Lake Como, which I have never seen, and old-fashioned vaudeville curtains. What can my mother and Aunty Donald have seen in each other? Something; otherwise the names of my older and younger brothers and my name would not have appeared in her will as beneficiaries — one-seventeenth of the estate each: $1,182.55, less Illinois inheritance tax amounting to $108.72. Or about twice her annual income. How did she live in the nineteen-fifties on $55 a month? On air; she must have subsisted on air and old memories and fear — the fear of something happening to her cats.

She did not ever say that she preferred me to my older brother, but when I was a child and cared one way or the other, I used to think that she would not have said so often that she carried me on a pillow if she hadn’t meant that my brother was Dr. Donald’s favorite and I was hers. I understood the principle of equity, even though I had not yet encountered the word. I know now that she loved my brother the way everyone else did — because of the terrible thing that had happened to him, and because of his pride, which kept him from feeling sorry for himself. And because he was so wicked when he was little, and so bold. How their faces shone with amusement when someone told the story of the hose, or how, totally unafraid, he said to the gypsy, “Mr. Gypsy, what have you got in your
bag
?”

Aunty Donald would not have let anyone but my brother remove her from her house to that nursing home, or have believed anyone else who told her, as he did, that it was only for a week or so. She believed him because he had had his leg cut off when he was five years old and still did everything that other boys could do. To see Dr. Donald with him when my brother was a grown man was to see, unforgettably, the image of love. We — my brother and his wife and I — went to the races with him in Chicago. Dr. Donald didn’t touch my brother, but his hands fluttered around him. The expression on the old man’s face was of someone looking into the sun.

• • •

T
HE
balance transferred from the conservator’s account to the executor’s account was $2,073.04. In Aunty’s bank account: $82.55. Half a year’s interest on government bonds: $300. The rent from the house in Dover. On October 24th, the executor deposited the first collection of money found in the house: $293 in bills and $51.40 in coins. On November 3rd: $325 in gold pieces, which should have been turned in thirty years before. Thirty years before, Aunty was in her late fifties, and voted the straight Republican ticket, if she voted at all. She was, in any case, strong-minded. She did as she pleased, without regard for fiscal policies. On May 4th, these items: Proceeds from the sale of old car: $25, the standard price for junk. (I didn’t know they had a car. I thought of Dr. Donald as loyal exclusively to horses.) A flower urn brought $15, which means that some woman in Lincoln had had her eye on it. $18 in gold, and $12.45 in cash. On June 29th, somebody made a down payment of $500 on the house on Ninth Street, the total sale price being $7,000. A big house for that, but it undoubtedly was run down. On August 7th:
liquidating dividend from German-American National Bank Stock owned by T. A. Donald
, but no mention of the stock, and the bank hasn’t been called that since shortly after the sinking of the
Lusitania
. An uncashed dividend check turned up somewhere, in a book or in a box of old letters or God knows where. And then, oddly, jewelry not bequeathed in her will. A diamond ring: $175. An amethyst ring with a small pearl: $20. A small pocket watch: $5 (meaning it wouldn’t run). A pearl and rhinestone (!) ring: $3. A small locket on a chain (which I have a feeling I remember, the only jewelry I remember her wearing, but perhaps this is imagination). A diamond ring: $150, and a dinner ring with small diamonds: $200. A down payment of $250 on the house in Dover. Proceeds from the sale of cufflinks, tiepins, collar buttons, etc.: $10. An imitation ruby ring: $7. All this in January and February. In March, a pin, another watch, and a ring: $25. They must have turned up in some hiding place, though the house had been cleaned, by four men, several months before. And probably these items were not mentioned in the will because Aunty had forgotten she had them.