All the Days and Nights (56 page)

When the woman raised her head, she saw a young man whose face, even in the dying firelight, she recognized. There before her stood her child, her little son, but grown now, in the pride of manhood. All power of speech left her. She put out her arms and in that instant, brought on by such a violent beating of wings as few men have ever dreamed of, the air turned white. What the woman at first took to be tiny feathers proved to be snow. It melted against her cheek, and turned her hair white, and soon put the fire out.

The snow came down all night, and all the next day, and for many days thereafter, and was so deep that it lasted all winter, and in the spring grass grew up in what had once been the rooms of the farmhouse, but of the woman there was no trace whatever.

O
NCE
upon a time there was a country where everyone wore masks. They were born wearing them. About twelve months they lasted, and were shed the way a snake sheds its skin, and for the same reason, and under the old mask there was a new one, at times all but undistinguishable from the old one, at times startlingly different. The first warning was a loosening of the skin next to the hairline, and as soon as he noticed it the person would retire for two days, and food would be left on a tray outside his door, and when he emerged with an entirely new mask his friends and family were careful not to stare openly at him until he had got used to it. The masks were not what we think of masks as being — for purposes of disguise, say, at a fancy-dress ball, or for purposes of concealment. In that fortunate country people had no need to conceal their feelings, and the masks let anger come through, as an ordinary face does, and joy, and sadness, and triumph. That is to say, the mask was their true face but they could not keep it for more than twelve months, and if you had said what a pity, they would have said, “Yes, but so is it a pity that my little granddaughter cannot always stay five years old. Never to change one’s mask is not in the nature of things.” When that same little granddaughter, who had been wearing the mask of a strong and healthy child, emerged from her room with the mask of a child who is wan, tires easily, and is sickly, it struck terror to the old woman’s heart, for the masks were sometimes prophetic.

People were fond of their masks and did not discard them when they were no longer of any use. Parents saved the masks of their children until they were old enough to take care of them themselves and realize their value. In the privacy of his own room, the person would go to the closet where the masks were kept and take out the mask of the period when he
had been most happy, or sometimes the opposite of it, and try it on in front of the mirror, remembering old emotions. Sometimes they even went so far as to wear them in public, fastened on over their current mask, with an elastic under the chin, and the hair down to conceal the Une where it had peeled from the face. And their friends would affectionately smile, remembering how they were at that period, and understanding why they chose to return to it for a brief moment. Ministers of the Gospel, professors, politicians and statesmen, official heroes of all kinds were obliged to wear the same mask year after year, no matter what new mask had formed under the old one, or how ragged the original mask had become with constant wear. When a great artist died, or a king, or a President, or a general who had changed the course of history, his masks, all of them, were hung in a museum that had been built for that purpose, and the idea was that they would hang there in perpetuity, for the edification of posterity. No doubt they would have if there had been such a thing as posterity. Or perpetuity. Instead, the masks of the great and famous were forever being shifted around — from the most conspicuous place in the main hall to some obscure alcove, and vice versa. Or even to a storeroom in the basement, where they were to be seen only on written request. When an ordinary person died, his masks were gathered up, usually by someone whose own mask was bathed in tears, and put away in a pine box. From time to time the box would be opened and the masks looked at longingly or with new understanding. They did not deteriorate, or suffer the slightest change. As year after year passed, the box would be opened less frequently, and sometimes when it was opened it would be by a person who had never actually seen any of the masks before, though he had of course heard of the person they belonged to. Or it might be someone who had the name and even the facts wrong, and, studying the masks, would arrive at all sorts of interesting conclusions that were occasionally taken seriously, and so muddied the stream of history.

The living masks of saints grew less distinct in outline the closer they came to the knowledge of God. Lovers, especially at the beginning of their rapturous exploration of one another’s natures and bodies, would sometimes childishly exchange masks — as if it made the slightest difference to a heart overflowing with feeling. The masks of husbands and wives long married and deeply connected by subterranean knowledge of one kind and another grew to look more and more alike, so that if they had changed masks with each other it would hardly have been noticed. The discarded masks took up more and more room, inevitably, and people
with imagination sometimes felt that it was hardly worth their while to grow a new mask every twelve months when there were so many of them in pine boxes in storeroom after storeroom stretching back and back into the distant past. They didn’t expect anyone to take their carping seriously, but on the other hand change would never come about if people did not, for one reason or another, accept it as a possibility. In the case of the fortunate kingdom where everyone wore masks, it began with the young. Whereas people in their forties and fifties and upward continued to retire into their bedrooms at the appointed time and to emerge with a new face, it was said that fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds were passing the time when this should happen, and rejoiced in the thought that in failing to produce a new mask they were defying their parents. When several years passed and they still had not changed their masks, they knew they were part of a New Movement. “It’s a fad,” people said. “And like every other fad it will pass.” But they saw nervously that the younger children had taken the idea up too, and finally it spread to children too young to know what it meant not to change one’s mask ever. And, not wanting to appear peculiar, the older people did not retire when the twelve-month period was up, and, instead, kept their old mask, and so it became clear at last that Nature, not Fashion, was at work.

After that the discarded masks were taken out of the pine boxes and thrown out on the dustheap, and with time they became extremely rare, like authentic Chippendale and Chinese Export and gold coins from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. They were studied by the historian and the moral philosopher. As for people in general, they seemed to grow old much faster than formerly, because having no mask they had to create one with the play of facial muscles, and this gave rise to crow’s-feet, and wrinkles across the forehead, and deep lines etched from the corners of the nose to the corners of the mouth, and sagging flesh, which fooled nobody, of course, because the heart of the person underneath this simulated mask was either always young or never had been.

O
NCE
upon a time there was a man who lost his father.

His father died of natural causes — that is to say, illness and old age — and it was time for him to go, but nevertheless the man was affected by it, more than he had expected. He misplaced things: his keys, his reading glasses, a communication from the bank. And he imagined things. He imagined that his father’s spirit walked the streets of the city where he lived, was within touching distance of him, could not for a certain time leave this world for the world of spirits, and was trying to communicate with him. When he picked up the mail that was lying on the marble floor outside the door of his apartment, he expected to find a letter from his father telling him … telling him what?

The secret of the afterlife is nothing at all — or rather, it is only one secret, compared to the infinite number of secrets having to do with this life that the dead take with them when they go.

“Why didn’t I ask him when I had a chance?” the man said, addressing the troubled face in the bathroom mirror, a face made prematurely old by a white beard of shaving lather. And from that other mirror, his mind, the answer came:
Because you thought there was still time. You expected him to live forever … because you expect to live forever yourself
. The razor stopped in mid-stroke. This time what came was a question.
Do you or don’t you? You do expect to live forever? You don’t expect to live forever?
The man plunged his hands in soapy water and rinsed the lather from his face. And as he was drying his hands on a towel, he glanced down four stories at the empty street corner and for a split second he thought he saw his father, standing in front of the drugstore window.

His father’s body was in a coffin, and the coffin was in the ground, in a cemetery, but that he never thought about. Authority is not buried in a
wooden box. Nor safety (mixed with the smell of cigar smoke). Nor the firm handwriting. Nor the sound of his voice. Nor the right to ask questions that are painful to answer.

So long as his father was alive, he figured persistently in the man’s conversation. Almost any remark was likely to evoke him. Although the point of the remark was mildly amusing and the tone intended to be affectionate, there was something about it that was not amusing and not entirely affectionate — as if an old grievance was still being nourished, a deep disagreement, a deprivation, something raked up out of the past that should have been allowed to lie forgotten. It was, actually, rather tiresome, but even after he perceived what he was doing the man could not stop. It made no difference whether he was with friends or with people he had never seen before. In the space of five minutes, his father would pop up in the conversation. And you didn’t have to be very acute to understand that what he was really saying was “Though I am a grown man and not a little boy, I still feel the weight of my father’s hand on me, and I tell this story to lighten the weight.…”

Now that his father was gone, he almost never spoke of him, but he thought about him. At my age was his hair this thin, the man wondered, holding his comb under the bathroom faucet.

Why, when he never went to church, did he change, the man wondered, dropping a letter in the corner mailbox. Why, when he had been an atheist, or if not an atheist then an agnostic, all his life, was he so pleased to see the Episcopal minister during his last illness?

Hanging in the hall closet was his father’s overcoat, which by a curious accident now fit him. Authority had shrunk. And safety? There was no such thing as safety. It was only an idea that children have. As they think that with the help of an umbrella they can fly, so they feel that their parents stand between them and all that is dangerous. Meanwhile, the cleaning establishment had disposed of the smell of cigar smoke; the overcoat smelled like any overcoat. The handwriting on the envelopes he picked up in the morning outside his door was never that handwriting. And along with certain stock certificates that had been turned over to him when his father’s estate was settled, he had received the right to ask questions that are painful to answer, such as “Why did you not value your youth?”

He wore the overcoat, which was of the very best quality but double-breasted and long and a dark charcoal grey — an old man’s coat — only in very cold weather, and it kept him warm.… From the funeral home they
went to the cemetery, and the coffin was already there, in a tent, suspended above the open grave. After the minister had spoken the last words, it still was not lowered. Instead, the mourners raised their heads, got up from their folding chairs, and went out into the icy wind of a January day. And to the man’s surprise, the outlines of the bare trees were blurred. He had not expected tears, and neither had he expected to see, in a small group of people waiting some distance from the tent, a man and a woman, not related to each other and not married to each other, but both related to him: his first playmates. They stepped forward and took his hand and spoke to him, looking deeply into his eyes. The only possible conclusion was that they were there waiting for him, in the cold, because they were worried about him.… In his father’s end was his own beginning, the mirror in his mind pointed out. And it was true, in more ways than one. But it took time.

H
E
let go of the ghost in front of the corner drugstore.

The questions grew less and less painful to have to answer. The stories he told his children about their grandfather did not have to do with a disagreement, a deprivation, or something raked up out of the distant past that might better have been forgotten. When he was abrupt with them and they ran crying from the room, he thought,
But my voice wasn’t all that harsh
. Then he thought,
To them it must have been
. And he got up from his chair and went after them, to lighten the weight of his father’s irritability, making itself felt in some mysterious way through him. They forgave him, and he forgave his father, who surely hadn’t meant to sound severe and unloving. And when he took his wife and children home — to the place that in his childhood was home — on a family visit, one of his cousins, smiling, said, “How much like your father you are.”

“That’s because I am wearing his overcoat,” the man said — or rather, the child that survived in the man. The man himself was pleased, accepted the compliment (surprising though it was), and at the first opportunity looked in the mirror to see if it was true.

T
HERE
was an old woman whose house was beside a bend in a running stream. Sometimes the eddying current sounded almost like words, like a message:
Rill, you will, you will, sill, rillable, syllable, billable
.… Sometimes when she woke in the night it was to the sound of a fountain plashing, though there wasn’t, of course, any fountain. Or sometimes it sounded like rain, though the sky was clear and full of stars.