All the Days and Nights (6 page)

Instead of answering, George got up and looked at the weather thermometer outside the west window of their bedroom. “Twenty-seven,” he said, when he came back. But he still didn’t answer her question. He was afraid to answer it, lest it be the wrong answer, and she blame him. Actually, there was no answer that was the right answer: They had tried sending Cindy to school and they had tried not sending her. This time, Iris kept her home from school — not because she thought it was going to make any difference but so the pediatrician, Dr. de Santillo, wouldn’t blame her. Not that he ever said anything. And Cindy got to play with Laurie’s things all morning. She played with Laurie’s paper dolls until she was tired, and left them all over the floor, and then she colored in Laurie’s coloring book, and Puppy chewed up one of the crayons but not
one of Laurie’s favorites — not the pink or the blue — and then Cindy rearranged the furniture in Laurie’s doll house so it was much nicer, and then she lined up all Laurie’s dolls in a row on her bed and played school. And when it was time for Laurie to come home from school she went out to the kitchen and played with the eggbeater. Laurie came in, letting the front door slam behind her, and dropped her mittens in the hall and her coat on the living-room rug and her knitted cap on top of her coat, and started for her room, and it sounded as if she had hurt herself. Iris came running. What a noise Laurie made. And stamping her foot, Cindy noted disapprovingly. And tears.

“Stop screaming and tell me what’s the matter!” Iris said.

“Cindy, I hate you!” Laurie said. “I hate you, I hate you!”

Horrible old Laurie …

But in the morning when they first woke up it was different. She heard Laurie in the bathroom, and then she heard Laurie go back to her room. Lying in bed, Cindy couldn’t suck her thumb because she couldn’t breathe through her nose, so she got up and went into Laurie’s room (entirely forgetting that her mother had said that in the morning she was to stay out of Laurie’s room because she had a cold) and got in Laurie’s bed and said, “Read, read.” Laurie read her the story of “The Tinder Box,” which has three dogs in it — a dog with eyes as big as saucers, and a dog with eyes as big as millwheels, and a third dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen.

T
AP
, tap, tap
on the bedroom door brought him entirely awake. “What’s Laurie been reading to her?” he asked, turning over in bed. That meant it was Iris’s turn to get up. While she was pulling herself together, they heard
tap, tap, tap
again. The bed heaved.

“What’s Laurie been reading to you?” she asked as she and Cindy went off down the hall together. When she came back into the bedroom, the light was on and he was standing in front of his dresser, with the top drawer open, searching for Gelusil tablets.

“Trouble?” she said.

S
TANDING
in the doorway of Cindy’s room, in her blue dressing gown, with her hairbrush in her hand, Iris said, “Who sneezed? Was that you, Cindy?”

“That was Laurie,” Cindy said.

So after that Laurie got to stay home from school too.

“I
SAW
Phyllis Simpson in Gristede’s supermarket,” Iris said. “Their cook committed suicide.”

“How?”

“She threw herself in the river.”

“No!”

“They think she must have done it sometime during the night, but they don’t know exactly when. They just came down to breakfast and she wasn’t there. They’re still upset about it.”

“When did it happen?”

“About a month ago. Her body was found way down the river.”

“What a pity. She was a nice woman.”

“You remember her?”

“Certainly. She always waved to the children when I used to walk them to school. She waved to me too, sometimes. From the kitchen window. What made her do such a thing?”

“They have no idea.”

“She was a big woman,” he said. “It must have been hard for her to pull herself up over that railing. It’s quite high. No note or anything?”

“No.”

“Terrible.”

O
N
St. Valentine’s Day, the young woman who lived on tea and cigarettes and was given to burning herself on the gas stove eloped to California with her mother, and now there was no one in the kitchen. From time to time, the employment agency went through the formality of sending someone for Iris to interview — though actually it was the other way round. And either the apartment was too large or they didn’t care to work for a family with children or they were not accustomed to doing the cooking as well as the other housework. Sometimes they didn’t give any reason at all.

A young woman from Haiti, who didn’t speak English, was willing to give the job a try. It turned out that she had never seen a carpet sweeper before, and she asked for her money at the end of the day.

W
ALKING
the dog at seven-fifteen on a winter morning, he suddenly stopped and said to himself, “Oh God, somebody’s been murdered!” On the high stone stoop of one of the little houses on East End Avenue facing the park. Somebody in a long red coat. By the curve of the hip he could tell it was a woman, and with his heart racing he considered what he ought to do. From where he stood on the sidewalk he couldn’t see the upper part of her body. One foot — the bare heel and the strap of her shoe — was sticking out from under the hem of the coat. If she’d been murdered, wouldn’t she be sprawled out in an awkward position instead of curled up and lying on her side as though she was in bed asleep? He looked up at the house. Had they locked her out? After a scene? Or she could have come home in the middle of the night and discovered that she’d forgotten to take her key. But in that case she’d have spent the night in a hotel or with a friend. Or called an all-night locksmith.

He went up three steps without managing to see any more than he had already. The parapet offered some shelter from the wind, but even so, how could she sleep on the cold stone, with nothing over her?

“Can I help you?”

His voice sounded strange and hollow. There was no answer. The red coat did not stir. Then he saw the canvas bag crammed with the fruit of her night’s scavenging, and backed down the steps.

N
OW
it was his turn. The sore throat was gone in the morning, but it came back during the day, and when he sat down to dinner he pulled the extension out at his end and moved his mat, silver, and glass farther away from the rest of them.

“If you aren’t sneezing, I don’t think you need to be in Isolation Corner,” Iris said, but he stayed there anyway. His colds were prolonged and made worse by his efforts to treat them; made worse still by his trying occasionally to disregard them, as he saw other people doing. In the end he went through box after box of Kleenex, his nose white with Noxzema, his eyelids inflamed, like a man in a subway poster advertising a cold remedy that, as it turned out, did not work for him. And finally he took to his bed, with a transistor radio for amusement and company. In his childhood, being sick resulted in agreeable pampering, and now that he was grown he preferred to be both parties to this pleasure. No one could
make him as comfortable as he could make himself, and Iris had all but given up trying.

O
N
a rainy Sunday afternoon in March, with every door in the school building locked and the corridor braced for the shock of Monday morning, the ancient piano demonstrated for the benefit of the empty practice room that it is one thing to fumble through the vocal line, guided by the chords that accompany it, and something else again to be genuinely musical, to know what the composer intended — the resolution of what cannot be left uncertain, the amorous flirtation of the treble and the bass, notes taking to the air like a flock of startled birds.

T
HE
faint clicking sounds given off by the telephone in the pantry meant that Iris was dialing on the extension in the master bedroom. And at last there was somebody in the Carringtons’ kitchen again — a black woman in her fifties. They were low on milk, and totally out of oatmeal, canned dog food, and coffee, but the memo pad that was magnetically attached to the side of the Frigidaire was blank. Writing down things they were out of was not something she considered part of her job. When an emergency arose, she put on her coat and went to the store, just as if she were still in North Carolina.

The sheet of paper that was attached to the clipboard hanging from a nail on the side of the kitchen cupboard had the menus for lunch and dinner all written out, but they were for yesterday’s lunch and dinner. And though it was only nine-thirty, Bessie already felt a mounting indignation at being kept in ignorance about what most deeply concerned her. It was an old-fashioned apartment, with big rooms and high ceilings, and the kitchen was a considerable distance from the master bedroom; nevertheless, it was just barely possible for the two women to live there. Nature had designed them for mutual tormenting, the one with an exaggerated sense of time, always hurrying to meet a deadline that did not exist anywhere but in her own fancy, and calling upon the angels or whoever is in charge of amazing grace to take notice that she had put the food on the hot tray in the dining room at precisely one minute before the moment she had been told to have dinner ready; the other with not only a hatred of planning meals but also a childish reluctance to come to the table. When the minute hand of the electric clock in the kitchen
arrived at seven or seven-fifteen or whatever, Bessie went into the dining room and announced in an inaudible voice that dinner was ready. Two rooms away, George heard her by extrasensory perception and leapt to his feet, and Iris, holding out her glass to him, said, “Am I not going to have a second vermouth?”

To his amazement, on Bessie’s day off, having cooked dinner and put it on the hot plate, Iris drifted away to the front of the apartment and read a magazine, fixed her hair, God knows what, until he discovered the food sitting there and begged her to come to the table.

“T
HEY
said they lived in Boys Town, and I thought Jimmy let them in because he’s Irish and Catholic,” Iris said. “There was nothing on the list I wanted, so I subscribed to
Vogue
, to help them out. When I spoke to Jimmy about it, he said he had no idea they were selling subscriptions, and he never lets solicitors get by him — not even nuns and priests. Much as he might want to. So I don’t suppose it will come.”

“It might,” George said. “Maybe they were honest.”

“He thought they were workmen because they asked for the eleventh floor. The tenants on the eleventh floor have moved out and Jimmy says the people who are moving in have a five years’ lease and are spending fifty thousand dollars on the place, which they don’t even
own
. But anyway, what they did was walk through the apartment and then down one floor and start ringing doorbells. The super took them down in the back elevator without asking what they were doing there, and off they went. They tried the same thing at No. 7 and the doorman threw them out.”

W
ALKING
the dog before breakfast, if he went by the river walk he saw in the Simpsons’ window a black-haired woman who did not wave to him or even look up when he passed. That particular section of the river walk was haunted by an act of despair that nobody had been given a chance to understand. Nothing that he could think of — cancer, thwarted love, melancholia — seemed to fit. He had only spoken to her once, when he and Iris went to a dinner party at the Simpsons’ and she smiled at him as she was helping the maid clear the table between courses. If she didn’t look up when he passed under her window it was as though he had been overtaken by a cloud shadow — until he forgot all about it, a few seconds later. But he could have stopped just once, and he hadn’t. When the
window was open he could have called out to her, even if it was only “Good morning,” or “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

He could have said,
Don’t do it
.…

Sometimes he came back by the little house on East End Avenue where he had seen the woman in the red coat. He invariably glanced up, half expecting her to be lying there on the stoop. If she wasn’t there, where was she?

In the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital was the answer. But not for long. She and the doctor got it straightened out about her mother’s gold thimble, and he gave her a prescription and told her where to go in the building to have it filled, and hoped for the best — which, after all, is all that anybody has to hope for.

T
HE
weather thermometer blew away one stormy night and after a week or two George brought home a new one. It was round and encased in white plastic, and not meant to be screwed to the window frame but to be kept inside. It registered the temperature outside by means of a wire with what looked like a small bullet attached to the end of it. The directions said to drill a hole through the window frame, but George backed away from all that and, instead, hung the wire across the sill and closed the window on it. What the new thermometer said bore no relation to the actual temperature, and drilling the hole had a high priority on the list of things he meant to do.

There was also a racial barometer in the apartment that registered
Fair
or
Stormy
, according to whether Bessie had spent several days running in the apartment or had just come back from a weekend in her room in Harlem.

The laundress, so enormously fat that she had to maneuver her body around, as if she were the captain of an ocean liner, was a Muslim and hated all white people and most black people as well. She was never satisfied with the lunch Bessie cooked for her, and Bessie objected to having to get lunch for her, and the problem was solved temporarily by having her eat in the luncheonette across the street.

She quit. The new laundress was half the size of the old one, and sang alto in her church choir, and was good-tempered, and fussy about what she had for lunch. Bessie sometimes considered her a friend and sometimes an object of derision, because she believed in spirits.

So did Bessie, but not to the same extent or in the same way. Bessie’s
mother had appeared to her and her sister and brother, shortly after her death. They were quarreling together, and her mother’s head and shoulders appeared up near the ceiling, and she said they were to love one another. And sometimes when Bessie was walking along the street she felt a coolness and knew that a spirit was beside her. But the laundress said, “All right, go ahead, then, if you want to,” to the empty air and, since there wasn’t room for both of them, let the spirit precede her through the pantry. She even knew who the spirit was.