All the Days and Nights (43 page)

I found myself telling him about my guilty feelings at accepting my father’s things, and he nodded and said, “Once when I was sitting in a jury box the judge said, ‘Will the defendant rise,’ and I caught myself just in time. If one isn’t guilty of one thing one is certainly guilty of another is perhaps the only explanation for this kind of irrational behavior.… I’m glad you have the coats and the suitcase, and I’m sure your father would be too. Enjoy them.” He then went on to speak affectionately of my father. “I have no other friend like him,” he said. “I am already beginning to feel the loss. Most people have a hidden side. Your father was exactly what he appeared to be. It is very rare.”

I left the house with a feeling of exhilaration. I couldn’t help feeling that my father’s part in this old friendship had somehow been handed on to me, like the overcoats and the suitcase. And in fact it had. When Dean Hill and his wife came to New York six months later, he invited me to lunch at the Plaza, and the conversation was easy and intimate. Everything that he had to say interested me because of its originality and wisdom. While living all his life in a very small Middle Western town and keeping his eye on his farms, he had managed to be aware of the world outside in a way that no one else there was. Or at least no one I knew. He was worried about my stepmother. It was a case of the oak and the ivy, he said, and he didn’t think she would manage very well without my father. (He was quite right. She was ten years younger than my father, and when he was alive she was
perky
and energetic and always talking about taking off for somewhere — except that they couldn’t, because of his emphysema. After he was gone, the tears she wiped away with her handkerchief were simply followed by more tears. She spent the remaining fifteen years of her life in nursing homes, unable to cope with her sadness.)

I wrote to Dean Hill, and he answered my letters. The last time I saw him, in Lincoln, twenty-eight years ago, I could talk to him but he couldn’t talk to me. He had had a stroke. His speech was garbled and unintelligible. He appeared to feel that it was his fault.

M
Y
second call, the day after the funeral, was on Aaron Mclvor, who for ten years was a golfing companion of my father’s. They also occasionally did some business together. Mr. Mclvor dabbled in a number of things, including local politics, and he must have made a living out of all this or he would have gone to work for somebody else. Now and then my father would be asked to handle an insurance policy personally, and in doing so he used the name of Maxwell, Mclvor & Company as agent.

Though it would be accurate to say that Aaron Mclvor was not like anybody else in Lincoln, it would also, in a way, be meaningless, since small-town people of that period were so differentiated that the same tiling could have been said of nearly everybody. He had sad eyes and a sallow complexion and two deep furrows running down his cheeks. The tips of his fingers were stained with nicotine and the whites of his eyes were yellowish also, in a way more often found in dogs than in human beings. Nothing that he said was ever calculated to make people feel better about themselves, but he could be very funny.

As I zigzagged the five or six blocks between Dean Hill’s house and the Mclvors’ that afternoon, I was struck by how little the older residential part of Lincoln had changed. A house here or there where no house was before. A huge old mansion gone.

Aaron Mclvor’s daughter-in-law directed me up the stairs to his bedroom. The ashtray on a chair beside his bed was full of cigarette butts. He looked the same, only old. I didn’t stay long and I wished I hadn’t gone to see him, because he had things to say against my father that, the day after his funeral, I didn’t feel like listening to.

“Mclvor is eccentric,” my father would say, when his name came up in conversation. It was not something my father would have wanted anybody to say about him. But he did not expect people to be perfect, and Mr. Mclvor’s eccentricities in no way interfered with the friendship. Because he said so many unflattering things, it was assumed that he was a truthful man. I don’t think this necessarily follows. But if you wanted him you had to take him as he was. The caustic remarks were brushed aside or forgiven. And people loved to tell how, when he was courting his wife, he never brought her candy or flowers but simply appeared, in the evening after supper, and stretched out in the porch swing with his head in her lap and went to sleep.

His wife, whom I called “Aunt” Beth, was my mother’s closest friend. When I shut my eyes now, I see her affectionate smile, and the way her
brown eyes lighted up. People loved her because she was so radiant. It cannot have been true that she was never tired or that there was nothing in her life to make her unhappy or depressed or complaining, but that is how I remember her.

When I was a little boy of six I met her on a cinder path at the Chautauqua grounds one day and she opened her purse and took out a dime and gave it to me. “I don’t think my father would want me to take it,” I said. My father knew a spendthrift when he saw one, and, hoping to teach me the value of money, he had put me on an allowance of ten cents a week, with the understanding that when the ten cents was gone I was not to ask for more. Also, if possible, I was to save part of the ten cents. “It’s perfectly all right,” Aunt Beth said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll explain it to him.” I took off for the place where they sold Cracker Jack. And she stands forever, on the cinder path at the Chautauqua grounds, smiling at the happiness she has just set free. I long to compare her with something appropriate, and nothing is, quite, except the goodness of being alive.

The tiling about my mother and Aunt Beth was that they were always so lighthearted when they were together. Sometimes I understood what they were laughing about, sometimes it would be over my head. My father and mother were both mad about golf. I used to caddie for my father, and if he made a bad approach shot he was inconsolable. He would pick his ball out of the cup and walk toward the next tee still analyzing what he had done that made the ball end up in a bunker instead of on the green near the flag. You felt he felt that if he could only have lived that moment over again and kept his shoulder down and followed through properly, the whole rest of his life might have been different. And that Aaron Mclvor mournfully agreed with him. The two women were unfazed by such disasters. My mother would send a fountain of sand into the air and go right on describing a dress pattern or some china she had seen in a house in Kentucky. When she and Aunt Beth had talked their way around nine holes — usually my father and Mr. Mclvor played in a foursome of men — they would add up their scores and sit down on the balcony of the clubhouse until their husbands joined them. Then, more often than not, they would come back to our house for Sunday-night supper. When my mother went out to the kitchen, Mr. Mclvor would get up from his chair and follow her with the intent to ruffle her feathers. My mother had no use for the family her younger sister had married into. Perched on the kitchen stool, Mr. Mclvor said admiring things about
them. How well educated they were. How good they were at hanging on to their money. How one of them found a mistake of twenty-seven cents in his monthly bank statement and raised such Cain about it that the president of the bank came to him finally in tears. How no tenant farmer of theirs ever drew a simple breath that they didn’t know about. And so on. My mother would emerge from the pantry with a plate of hot baking-powder biscuits in her hand and her face flushed with outrage, and we would sit down to scrambled eggs and bacon.

I
N
my Aunt Annette’s sun parlor there was a wicker porch swing that hung on chains from the ceiling.
Creak … creak
 … Just as if you were outdoors, only you weren’t. It was a good place from which to survey what went on in Lincoln Avenue. Sitting with her arm resting on the back of the swing, my aunt was alternately there and not there, like cloud shadows. Now her attention would be focused on me (for I was twelve years old and I had lost my mother a couple of years before and my father had sold our house and was on the point of remarrying and I needed her), now on a past that stretched well beyond the confines of my remembering. I didn’t mind when she withdrew into her own thoughts; her physical presence was enough. One day I saw, on the sidewalk in front of the house, a very small woman in a big black hat. Not just the brim, the whole hat was big, an elaborate structure of ribbon and straw and jet hatpins that she moved under without disturbing.

“Who is
that
?” I asked.

Turning her head, my aunt said, “Old Mrs. Mclvor. Aaron’s mother. She was born in England.”

“Some hat,” I said.

“She’s been going by the house for many years and I have never seen her without it.”

The things I am curious about now I was not curious about then. Where, in that small town of twelve thousand people, did Aaron Mclvor’s mother live? Did she live by herself? And if so, on what? And what brought her all the way across the Atlantic? And what happened to his father? And how on earth did she come by that hat? None of these questions will I ever know the answer to.

Pre-adolescent boys, at a certain point, become limp, pale, undemanding, unable to think of anything to do, so saturated with protective coloration that they are hardly distinguishable from the furniture, and
not much more aware of what is going on around them. I’m not quite sure when Aunt Beth and Mr. Mclvor adopted a baby, but it didn’t occur to me that any disappointment or heartache had preceded this decision. If I ever saw the baby, lack of interest prevented me from remembering it.

I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I heard that Aunt Beth had cancer and was in the hospital. I felt I ought to go see her. I thought my mother would want me to. My Aunt Annette was in Florida and there was no one to enlighten me about what to expect. I went from room to room of the hospital, reading the cards on the doors and peering past the white cloth screens, and on the second floor, in the corridor, I ran into her. She was wearing a hospital gown and her hair was in two braids down her back. Her color was ashen. She saw me, but it was as if she were looking at somebody she had never seen before. Since then, I have watched beloved animals dying. The withdrawal, into some part of themselves that only they know about. It is, I think, not unknown to any kind of living creature. A doctor passed, in a white coat, and she turned and called after him urgently. I skittered down the stairs and got on my bicycle and rode away from the hospital feeling I had made a mistake. I had and I hadn’t. She was in no condition to receive visitors, but I had acquired an important item of knowledge — dying is something people have to live through, and while they are doing it, unless you are much closer to them than I was to her, you have little or no claim on them.

After she was gone, when I rode past her house, I always thought of her. The house had a flat roof and the living-room windows came almost to the floor of the front porch. The fact that there were so few lights burning on winter evenings may have accounted for the look of sadness. Or it could have been my imagination.

F
OR
years after we moved to Chicago my stepmother was homesick and we always went down to Lincoln for the holidays so that she could be with her family. One evening, a couple of days after Christmas, I happened to be walking down Keokuk Street, and when I came to the Mclvors’ house I turned in at the front walk. I don’t know what made me do it. Recollection of those Sunday-night suppers when my mother was alive, perhaps, or of my father and Mr. Mclvor retiring to my father’s den, where he kept the whiskey bottle, for a nightcap. The housekeeper let me in. The little boy — I had almost forgotten about him — who peered at me from
behind her skirt must have been six or seven. Mr. Mclvor hadn’t come home from his office yet, she said, and retired to the kitchen.

I couldn’t remember ever having been inside the house before, and I looked around the living room: dark varnished woodwork, Mission furniture, brown wallpaper, brown lampshades. It didn’t seem at all likely that after Aunt Beth died Mr. Mclvor destroyed all traces of her, but neither did it seem possible that she would have chosen to live with this disheartening furniture. There were brass andirons in the fireplace but no logs on them and no indication that the fireplace was ever used. No books or magazines lying around, not even the
Saturday Evening Post
. The little boy wanted to show me the Christmas tree, in the front window. The tree lights were not on, and he explained that they were broken. The opened presents under the tree — a cowboy suit, a puzzle, a Parcheesi board, and so on — were still in the boxes they had come in. With a screwdriver that the housekeeper produced for me I located the defective bulb, and the colored lights shone on the child’s pleased face. The stillness I heard as I stood looking at the lighted tree was beyond my power to do anything about. I said good-bye to the little boy and picked up my hat and coat and left, without waiting for Mr. Mclvor to come home.

W
HEN
I married I took my wife to Lincoln. She was introduced to all the friends of the family, including Aaron Mclvor, whom she was charmed by. She told me afterward that at one point in their conversation he turned and looked at me and then said, “He’s a nice boy but queer — very queer.”

W
HEN
I went to see Mr. Mclvor on the day after my father’s funeral, his criticism boiled down to the fact that my father liked women too much, and let them twist him around their little finger.

My father was an indulgent husband, but he hated change and was devoted to his habits, and it took a prolonged campaign and all sorts of stratagems on my stepmother’s part to get him to agree to enclose the screened porch or buy a new car. In any case, he was not a skirt chaser. So what did all this mean?

I think even more than by what he said I was upset by his matter-of-fact tone of voice — as if my father’s death had aroused no feelings in
him whatever. There was no question that my father considered Aaron Mclvor his friend. Could it be that he disliked my father, and perhaps always had? Or did he dislike everybody, pretty much?