All the Days and Nights (30 page)
“But all that changed,” Mr. Ferrers said. “Toward the end of his life we got to know each other.”
Edward heard his stepmother moving about upstairs, and then without warning his mind darkened. When he came to, after he had no idea how long, Mr. Ferrers was discussing his will. Though Edward could hardly believe that this conversation was taking place at all, what made it seem even stranger was the fact that his father spoke without excitement of any kind, as if all his life he had been in the habit of discussing his financial arrangements with his children. The will was what Edward had assumed it would be. There was nothing that he could object to, nothing that was not usual. Everything was to go to his stepmother during her lifetime, and then the estate would be divided among Mr. Ferrers’s three sons.
“I wanted very much to be able to leave you boys something at the time of my death,” Mr. Ferrers said. “About fifteen thousand dollars is what I had planned. I wanted you to have a little present to remember me by. But with the state and federal inheritance tax, I don’t see how this can be managed.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Edward said.
“It matters to me,” Mr. Ferrers said, and there they were, right back where they started.
Mr. Ferrers drew on his cigar and the porch was illuminated by a soft red glow. “When I was a young man,” he said, “and just trying to get my feet on the ground, my father said to me, ‘If you can just manage to save a thousand dollars, you’ll never be in want, the whole rest of your life.…’ ” Though Edward had never heard Dr. McBride’s stories, this story he knew by heart. His father had done it, had managed to save a thousand dollars, and his grandfather’s words had proved true. As a young man, having been told the same thing by his father, Edward had put this theory to the test; he also had saved a thousand dollars, and then, gradually, unlike his father and his grandfather, he had spent it. Little by little, it went. But strangely enough, so far at least, the theory still held. He had never been in actual want, though the balance in their — his and Janet’s — joint checking account at this moment his father would not have considered cause for congratulations.
It was an amusing thought that the same reticence that prevented his father from telling him just how much money he had would prevent him also from inquiring into Edward’s financial circumstances. But it would not prevent him from asking if Edward was saving money. The conversation was clearly heading for this point, and so Edward braced himself and was ready when it arrived.
Mr. Ferrers said, “I assume you have managed to put something aside?”
Edward neither confirmed nor denied this.
“If you haven’t, you should have,” Mr. Ferrers said sternly. Then a long circuitous return to the same subject, this time in the guise of whether or not Edward had enough insurance, so that if anything happened to him Janet was taken care of.
Janet was taken care of. But not through Edward’s foresight. She had money of her own, left her by her grandmother. They did not touch the principal but used the income.
“If anything happens to me, Janet is taken care of,” Edward said. And it was all he said.
“That’s fine,” Mr. Ferrers said. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
He passed on to the subject of Edward’s two brothers, who were in business together, and, though very different, were adjusting to each other’s personalities. His older brother had already done extremely well; his younger brother, just starting out after a two-year period in the Army, when his schooling was interrupted, had, of course, a long way to go, but he was showing such a determination to succeed that Mr. Ferrers could find nothing but satisfaction in contemplating his son’s efforts.
“I know,” Edward said, and “That’s true,” and “He certainly does,” and his answers sounded so drowsy that at last Mr. Ferrers said with exasperation, “If you’re so sleepy, why don’t you go to bed?”
“Because I don’t feel like it,” Edward said. “I’m fine here on the sofa.” Leaving the riverboat with nobody at the wheel, he began to talk about himself — a thing he did easily with other people but not with his father. He talked about his teaching — what he tried to put into it, and what he got from it. And about a very talented pupil, who showed signs of becoming a writer. And then about the book that he himself had been occupied with for the past five years — a study of changing social life in nineteenth-century England as reflected in the diaries of the Reverend John Skinner.
His older brother, it appeared, considered that Edward was a failure — not only financially but as a teacher. If he were a successful teacher he would be called to Harvard or Princeton or Yale.
“I don’t know that I’d be happy teaching at Harvard or Princeton or Yale,” Edward said. “And I am happy where I am. And valued.”
“He doesn’t understand,” Mr. Ferrers said. “He lives very extravagantly — too much so, I think. They’re flying very high these days. But he judges people by how much money they make. I explained to him
when he was here that you care about money, too, but that you also care about other things, and that you are content to have a little less money and do the kind of work that interests you.… But, of course, you two boys have always been very different. And I don’t interfere in your lives. I’ve given each of you a good education, the best I could manage, and from that time on you have been on your own. And you all made good. I’m proud of each of you. I have three fine boys.”
Edward, floating, suspended, not quite anywhere, felt the safety in his father’s voice, and a freedom in talking to him that he had never had before, not merely with his father but perhaps not even with anybody. In an unsafe world, he was safe only with one person. Which was so strange a thought — that his father, whom he had consistently opposed and resisted his whole life, and at one time even hated, should turn out to be the one person he felt utterly safe with — that he sat up and rearranged the pillows.
He would have gone on talking, half awake, drowsy but happy, for hours, and when Mr. Ferrers said, “Well, son, it’s almost midnight, you’d better get some sleep,” he got up from the sofa reluctantly. They went back through the sun parlor into the living room, and Edward blinked his eyes at the light, having been accustomed to darkness. He sat down at his stepmother’s desk, took her pen, and wrote out a check for twenty dollars, and handed it to his father, who, smiling, tore the check up and dropped it in the wastebasket and went on talking about how much it meant to him to have Edward home.
T
HE
brownstone is on Murray Hill, facing south. The year is 1950. We have the top floor-through, and our windows are not as tall as the windows on the lower floors. They are deeply recessed, and almost square, and have divided panes. I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but even so, these windows are romantic. The apartment could be in Leningrad or Innsbruck or Dresden (before the bombs fell on it) or Parma or any place we have never been to. When I come home at night, I look forward to the moment when I turn the corner and raise my eyes to those three lighted windows. Since I was a child, no place has been quite so much home to me. The front windows look out on Thirty-sixth Street, the back windows on an unpainted brick wall (the side of a house on Lexington Avenue) with no break in it on our floor, but on the floor below there is a single window with a potted plant, and when we raise our eyes we see the sky, so the room is neither dark nor prisonlike.
Since we are bothered by street noises, the sensible thing would be to use this room to sleep in, but it seems to want to be our living room, and offers two irresistible arguments: (1) a Victorian white marble fireplace and (2) a stairway. If we have a fireplace it should be in the living room, even though the chimney is blocked up, so we can’t have a fire in it. (I spend a good deal of time unblocking it, in my mind.) The stairs are the only access to the roof for the whole building. There is, of course, nothing up there, but it looks as if we are in a house and you can go upstairs to bed, and this is very cozy: a house on the top floor of a brownstone walk-up. I draw the bolt and push the trapdoor up with my shoulder, and Margaret and I stand together, holding the cat, Floribunda, in our arms so she will not escape, and see the stars (when there are any) or the winking lights of an airplane, or sometimes a hallucinatory effect brought
about by fog or very fine rain and mist — the lighted windows of midtown skyscrapers set in space, without any surrounding masonry. The living room and the bedroom both have a door opening onto the outer hall, which, since we are on the top floor and nobody else in the building uses it, we regard as part of the apartment. We leave these doors open when we are at home, and the stair railing and the head of the stairs are blocked off with huge pieces of cardboard. The landlord says that this is a violation of the fire laws, but we cannot think of any other way to keep Floribunda from escaping down the stairs, and neither can he.
The living-room curtains are of heavy Swedish linen: life-sized thistles, printed in light blue and charcoal grey, on a white background. They are very beautiful (and so must the thistles in Sweden be) and they also have an emotional context; Margaret made them, and, when they did not hang properly, wept, and ripped them apart and remade them, and now they do hang properly. The bedroom curtains are of a soft ivory material, with seashells — cowries, scallops, sea urchins and sand dollars, turbinates, auriculae — drawn on them in brown indelible ink, with a flowpen. The bedroom floor is black, the walls are sandalwood, the woodwork is white. On the wall above the double bed is a mural in two sections — a hexagonal tower in an imaginary kingdom that resembles Persia. Children are flying kites from the roof. Inside the tower, another child is playing on a musical instrument that is cousin to the lute. The paperhanger hung the panels the wrong way, so the tower is even stranger architecturally than the artist intended. The parapet encloses outer instead of inner space — like a man talking to somebody who is standing behind him, facing the other way. And the fish-shaped kite, where is that being flown from? And by whom? Some other children are flying kites from the roof of the tower next to this one, perhaps, only there wasn’t room to show it. (Lying in bed I often, in my mind, correct the paperhanger’s mistake.) Next to the mural there is a projection made by a chimney that conducts sounds from the house next door. Or rather, a single sound: a baby crying in the night. The brownstone next door is not divided into apartments, and so much money has been spent on the outside (blue shutters, fresh paint, stucco, polished brass, etc.) that, for this neighborhood, the effect of chic is overdone. We assume there is a nurse, but nobody ever does anything when the baby cries, and the sound that comes through the wall is unbearably sad. (Unable to stand it any longer, Margaret gets up and goes through the brick chimney and picks the baby up and brings it back into our bedroom and rocks it.)
The double chest of drawers came from Macy’s unfinished-furniture department, and Margaret gave it nine coats of enamel before she was satisfied with the way it looked. The black lacquered dining table (we have two dining tables and no dining room) is used as a desk. Over it hangs a large engraving of the Spanish Steps, which, two years ago, in the summer of 1948, for a brief time belonged to us — flower stands, big umbrellas, Bernini fountain, English Tea Room, Keats museum, children with no conception of bedtime, everything. At night we drape our clothes over two cheap rush-bottom chairs, from Italy. The mahogany dressing table, with an oval mirror in a lyre-shaped frame and turned legs such as one sees in English furniture of the late seventeenth century, came by express from the West Coast. The express company delivered it to the sidewalk in front of the building, and, notified by telephone that this was about to happen, I rushed home from the office to supervise the uncrating. As I stepped from the taxi, I saw the expressman with the mirror and half the lyre in his huge hands. He was looking at it thoughtfully. The rest of the dressing table was ten feet away, by the entrance to the building. The break does not show unless you look closely. And most old furniture has been mended at one time or another.
When we were shown the apartment for the first time, the outgoing tenant let us in and stood by pleasantly while we tried to imagine what the place would look like if it were not so crowded with his furniture. It was hardly possible to take a step for oak tables and chests and sofas and armoires and armchairs. Those ancestral portraits and Italian landscapes in heavy gilt frames that there was no room for on the walls were leaning against the furniture. To get from one room to the next we had to step over pyramids of books and scientific journals. An inventory of the miscellaneous objects and musical instruments in the living room would have taken days and been full of surprises. (Why did he keep that large soup tureen on the floor?) We thought at first he was packing, but he was not; this was the way he lived. If we had asked him to make a place in his life for us too, he would have. He was a very nice man. The disorder was dignified and somehow enviable, and the overfurnished apartment so remote from what went on clown below in the street that it was like a cave deep in the forest.
Now it is underfurnished (we have just barely enough money to manage a small one-story house in the country and this apartment in town), instead, and all light and air. The living-room walls are a pale blue that changes according to the light and the time of day and the season of the
year and the color of the sky. The walls are hardly there. The furniture is half old and half new, and there isn’t much of it, considering the size of the room: a box couch, a cabinet with sliding doors, a small painted bookcase, an easy chair with its ottoman, a round fruitwood side table with long, thin, spidery legs and a glass tray that fits over the top, the table and chairs we eat on, a lowboy that serves as a sideboard, another chair, a wobbly tea cart, and a canvas stool. The couch has a high wooden back, L-shaped, painted black, with a thin gold line. It was made for an old house in Dover, New Hampshire, and after I don’t know how many generations found itself in Minneapolis. I first saw it in Margaret’s mother’s bedroom in Seattle, and now it: is here. It took two big men and a lot of patient maneuvering to get it four times past the turning of the stairs. The shawl that is draped over the back and the large tin tray that serves as a coffee table both came from Mexico — a country I do not regard as romantic, even though we have never been there. The lowboy made the trip from the West Coast with the dressing table, and one of its Chippendale legs got broken in transit, or by that same impetuous expressman. I suppose it is a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old. The man in the furniture-repair shop, after considering the broken leg, asked if we wanted the lowboy refinished. I asked why, and he said, “Because it’s been painted.” We looked, and sure enough it had. “They did that sometimes,” he said. “It’s painted to simulate mahogany.” I asked what was under the paint, and he picked up a chisel and took a delicate gouge out of the underside. This time it was his turn to be surprised. “It’s mahogany,” he announced. The lowboy was painted to simulate what it actually was, it looks like what it is, so we let it be.
