All the Days and Nights (29 page)

Helen let go of his hand in order to go out to the kitchen and help put lunch on the table. Edward heard his Aunt Alice say, “I’m all ready. As
soon as the ice tea is poured, we can sit down. I know Ed likes to have his meals on time.”

“You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,” Helen said — meaning sweet corn and garden tomatoes and fried chicken and a huge strawberry shortcake.

“It wasn’t any trouble,” his aunt said, which was of course untrue; at her age everything was hard for her, and usually she was perfectly willing to admit it. When they pushed their chairs back from the table, an hour later, she said, “No, you can’t help me, any of you. I won’t hear of it. I don’t have Ned with me very often, and we’re going to talk, we’re not going to stand around in the kitchen doing dishes. I don’t mind doing them if I can take my time.”

What they talked about, sitting in a circle in her small, dark living room, was her health. The doctor was trying cortisone, and she thought it had helped her. She had more movement in her fingers, and could put her hair up without feeling so much pain in her shoulder.

T
HEY
were late getting away — it was after three-thirty when they said good-bye and got in the car and drove off to call on Dr. McBride, whom they found sitting up in bed in the downstairs room that used to be his den. “Sit right here on the bed where I can see you,” he said.

“He won’t be comfortable,” Mrs. McBride objected.

“How do you know?” Dr. McBride said. He was born in Scotland and spoke with a noticeable burr. “Sit down, my boy. Don’t pay any attention to your auntie. I’ve been expecting you. You have your mother’s eyes. You remember her?”

Edward nodded.

“And you like living in New York?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re teaching. That’s a fine profession for a man to be in. Very fine. You’ll never have to worry for fear your life is being wasted. And how old are you now?”

Edward told him.

“I can recall very well the day you were born. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Yes, I would,” Edward said.

“It was an extremely hot day, in the middle of August.…”

Looking into the old man’s faded blue eyes, Edward thought, This is the first real conversation that we have ever had.

While Mrs. McBride and his father talked about the new road to Peoria and what a difference it would make, Dr. McBride held Edward’s hand and told him things he had done and said when he was a little boy, and then he began to tell Edward about his own boyhood in Scotland. “My father was very strict,” he said, “and by the time I was eleven years old I’d had enough of his heavy hand and I made up my mind to run away to America. I told my mother, because I couldn’t bear not to, and because I knew she’d feel worse if I’d kept it from her. She gave me all the money there was in the teapot, and told me I mustn’t leave without saying good-bye to my father. So I did. I edged my way all around the room until I arrived at the door, and then I said, ‘Good-bye, Father, I’m leaving home,’ and started running as fast as my legs would carry me.…”

He got a job on a tramp schooner that landed him eventually on the coast of California. He was homesick and couldn’t find work, slept in doorways, and was half starved when he met up with a man whose name was also McBride, a well-to-do rancher who had recently lost his only son.

Somewhere, possibly during that far-off boyhood in Scotland, Dr. McBride had been exposed to the storyteller’s art. He understood the use of the surprising juxtaposition, the impact of things left unsaid. Again and again there was a detail that couldn’t not be true. He never relapsed into the pointless, never said “to make a long story short,” and seemed not even to be aware that he was telling stories, and yet there was not one unnecessary word.

“Oh, but did that really happen?” Edward exclaimed. “How marvellous.”

“It
was
marvellous,” Dr. McBride agreed.

And a minute later Edward said, “But weren’t you afraid of him?” He said, “He was still waiting, after all that time?” And “It’s so beautiful — that it worked out that way.” Looking altogether a different person — as if the essential part of him, his true self that could never show its face in Draperville because no child after he grows up can ever be wholly natural with his parents, had come and joined them on the bed — he asked, “And then what happened?” The old man’s eyes lit up. He had found the perfect audience.

Mr. Ferrers consulted his wristwatch and then said, “Much as I hate to do this, Ruth, we’ve got to be moving on. We’re due at the Franklins’ at five.”

Dr. McBride winked at Edward and said, “Your father is the slave of time,” and went on telling the story of his life.

Edward got up from the bed only because it was the third time his father had spoken to him about leaving, and even then it was very hard to do. The stories he did not hear now he never would, and he had the feeling that he was depriving himself of his birthright.

“I thought you’d decided to spend the rest of your life there,” Mr. Ferrers said crossly when they were in the car. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“I know, Dad,” Edward said, “but I couldn’t bear to leave. He’s the most wonderful storyteller I ever heard, and I didn’t even know it.”

“I’ve heard Doc’s stories,” Mr. Ferrers said dryly. “He’s always the hero.”

What made Mr. Ferrers’s anger so impressive was that it was never unleashed. The change in him now was less than it was in Edward, whose voice rose in pitch, in spite of his efforts to control it. He stammered as he defended himself from his father’s remarks. The effect of this skirmish was to move them both back in time, to Edward’s fifteenth year and Mr. Ferrers’s forty-fifth — the difference being that Edward regarded it as a personal failure in steering the riverboat upstream, whereas Mr. Ferrers five minutes later had dismissed the incident from his mind.

A
T
the Franklins’, Edward threw himself into one conversation after another, enjoying himself thoroughly, and trying, as always, to make sure that no one was skimped — as if the amount of attention he paid to each person who had known him since he came into the world was something that he must try to apportion justly and fairly. Why this should be, he had never asked himself.

From the Franklins’ they drove downtown again, to join Helen’s family in the cafeteria of the New Draperville Hotel. With several drinks under his belt, Edward looked around the noisy dining room. The faces he saw were full of character, as small-town faces tend to be, he thought, and lined with humor, and time had dealt gently with them. By virtue of having been born in this totally unremarkable place and of having lived out their lives here, they had something people elsewhere did not have.… This opinion every person in the room agreed with, he knew, and no doubt it had been put into his mind when he was a child. For it was something that he never failed to be struck by — those sweeping statements in praise of Draperville that were almost an article of religious faith. They spoke about each other in much the same way. “There isn’t a finer man anywhere on this earth,” they would say, in a tone of absolute
conviction, sometimes about somebody who was indeed admirable, but just as often it would be some local skinflint, some banker or lawyer who made a specialty of robbing widows and orphans and was just barely a member of the human race. A moment later, opposed to this falsehood and in fact utterly contradicting it, there was a more realistic appraisal, which to his surprise they did not hesitate to express. But it would be wrong to say that the second statement represented their true opinion; it was just their other one.

He saw that somebody was smiling at him from a nearby table, a soft-faced woman with blond hair, and he put his napkin down and crossed the room to speak to her. He even knew her name. She lived down the street from him, and when he was six years old he was hopelessly in love with her and she liked Johnny Miller instead.

When they walked into the house at ten o’clock, he was talked out, dead-tired, and sleepy, and aware that the one person who had been skimped was the person he had come to see in the first place, his father, and that he couldn’t leave without a little time with his father, and that his father had no intention of permitting him to.

As they put their coats away in the hall closet, Helen said, ‘Ned, dear, you must be dead. I know I am. What time do you want breakfast?”

“Eight-thirty or nine o’clock will be all right,” Mr. Ferrers said. “His train doesn’t leave till eleven. You go on up. Ned and I want to have a little visit.”

“I think I will,” Mrs. Ferrers said. But first she went around the room emptying ashtrays and puffing up satin pillows, until the room looked as if there had never been anybody in it. The two men walked through the sun parlor and out onto the screened porch. Mr. Ferrers sat down in the chair that was always referred to as his, and lit a cigar. Edward sat on a bamboo sofa. They did not turn the light on but sat in the dim light that came from the living room. Mr. Ferrers began by remarking upon the many changes he had seen in his lifetime — the telephone, electric light, the automobile, the airplane — and how these changes had totally changed the way people lived. “It’s been a marvellous privilege,” he said, drawing on his cigar, “to have lived in a time when all this was happening.”

Edward managed not to say that he would gladly have dispensed with all of these inventions. He listened to his father’s denunciation of the New Deal as he would have to some overfamiliar piece of music — “Fingal’s Cave” or the overture to
Rosamunde
— aware that it was a necessary prelude to the more substantial part of the conversation, something uppermost
in his father’s mind that had to be said in order to get around to things that were deeper and more personal.

So long as Edward did not argue with his father or attempt to present the other side of the political picture, Mr. Ferrers did not investigate his son’s opinions. As for converting Mr. Ferrers to the liberal point of view, history — the Depression, in particular — had done more than Edward could possibly have hoped to accomplish with rational arguments. Mr. Ferrers was aware that there is such a thing as social responsibility, and he merely complained that it had now gone far enough and any further effort in that direction would weaken the financial structure of the country. So far as Edward could make out, his father’s financial structure had weathered the storm very well.

When Edward put his feet up and arranged the pillows comfortably behind his head, Mr. Ferrers said, “If you’re too tired, son, go to bed.” But kindly. There was no impatience in his voice.

“Oh, no,” Edward said. “I just felt like stretching out.”

“It’s too bad it has to be this way. When we lived in Chicago, there was no one to consider but ourselves, and we could talk to our hearts’ content.”

Actually, in those days it was Mr. Ferrers who talked. Edward was full of secrets and couldn’t have opened his mouth without putting his foot in it.

“Very nice,” he said, when his father asked what he thought of his Aunt Alice’s apartment. “She seemed very comfortable.”

“She keeps very peculiar hours. She likes to read till two in the morning. But you can’t tell other people how to lead their lives, and I guess she’s happy doing that. And she’s got all her things around her — all those old drop-leaf tables and china doodads she sets such store by and that no secondhand dealer would give you more than two dollars for, if that.”

“Aunt Alice’s things are better than you think,” Edward said.

“If you like antiques,” Mr. Ferrers said. “I used to argue with her, but I don’t anymore. I’ve given up. There’s a first-floor apartment coming vacant in the same building that she wants to move into. It’s more expensive, but she complains about the stairs, and at her age they are a consideration. I’ll probably have to help her with the rent.… She could have been in a very different situation today. I know of three very fine men who were crazy to marry her. She wouldn’t have them. They’ve all done well for themselves.”

They probably bored her, Edward said to himself in the dark.

“Father begged her with tears in his eyes not to marry Gene Hamilton,” Mr. Ferrers said. “But she wouldn’t listen to him.”

“She’s had lots of pleasure from her life, even so,” Edward remarked.

“Now she wants to sell all her securities — she hasn’t got very much: some Quaker Oats and some U.S. Gypsum and a few shares of General Motors — and buy an annuity, which at her age is the silliest thing you ever heard of.”

Silly or not, she had his father to fall back on, Edward reflected philosophically. And then, less philosophically, he wondered what would happen if his Aunt Alice outlived his father. Who would look after her? Her only son was dead and she had no grandchildren. The question contained its own answer: Edward and his brothers would take on the responsibility that until now his father had shouldered alone.

“What was he like?”

“What was who like?”

“Grandfather Ferrers.”

“He was as fine a man as you would ever want to know,” Mr. Ferrers said soberly, and then he added to a long finished picture a new detail that changed everything. He said, “Father never saw me until my brother Will died.”

Edward opened his eyes. His father very seldom ever said anything as revealing as this, and also it was in flat contradiction to the usual version, which was that his father and his grandfather had been extremely close.

The earliest surviving photographs of his father showed him playing the mandolin, with his cap on the back of his head and a big chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. His brother Will died at the age of twenty-five, leaving a wife and a child, and Grandfather Ferrers’s health was poor, and so Edward’s father, who had wanted to study medicine, dropped out of school instead and began to help support the family.

From where he lay stretched out on the sofa, Edward could see into the lighted living room of the house next door. The son-in-law sat reading a copy of
Life
under a bridge lamp. The two Scotties, whose barking Mr. Ferrers complained of, were quiet. There had been a divorce that had rocked the house next door to the foundations, but that, too, had quieted down. The whole neighborhood was still. Not even a television set. Just the insects of the summer night. His father would have been a good doctor, Edward thought, staring at the outlines of the house next door and the trees in the backyard, silhouetted against the night sky. He felt his eyelids growing heavier and heavier.