All the Days and Nights (7 page)

I
T
was now spring on the river, and the river walk was a Chinese scroll which could be unrolled, by people who like to do things in the usual way, from right to left — starting at Gracie Square and walking north. Depicted were:

A hockey game between Loyola and St. Francis de Sales

Five boys shooting baskets on the basketball court

A seagull

An old man sitting on a bench doing columns of figures

A child drawing a track for his toy trains on the pavement with a piece of chalk

A paper drinking cup floating on the troubled surface of the water

A child in pink rompers pushing his own stroller

A woman sitting on a bench alone, with her face lifted to the sun

A Puerto Rican boy with a transistor radio

Two middle-aged women speaking German

A bored and fretful baby, too hot in his perambulator, with nothing to look at or play with, while his nurse reads

The tugboat
Chicago
pulling a long string of empty barges upstream

A little girl feeding her mother an apple

A helicopter

A kindergarten class, in two sections

Clouds in a blue sky

A flowering cherry tree

Seven freight cars moving imperceptibly, against the tidal current, in the wake of the
Herbert E. Smith

A man with a pipe in his mouth and a can of Prince Albert smoking tobacco on the bench beside him

A man sorting his possessions into two canvas bags, one of which contains a concertina

Six very small children playing in the sandpile, under the watchful eyes of their mothers or nursemaids

An oil tanker

A red-haired priest reading a pocket-size New Testament

A man scattering bread crumbs for the pigeons

The Coast Guard cutter
CG 40435
turning around just north of the lighthouse and heading back toward Hell Gate Bridge

A sweeper with his bag and a ferruled stick

A little boy pointing a red plastic pistol at his father’s head

A pleasure yacht

An airplane

A man and a woman speaking French

A child on a tricycle

A boy on roller skates

A reception under a striped tent on the lawn of the mayor’s house

The fireboat station

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, a cinder path, a warehouse, seagulls, and so on

Who said
Happiness is the light shining on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep
.…

“I
T
’
S
perfectly insane,” George said when he met Iris coming from Gristede’s with a big brown-paper bag heavy as lead under each arm and relieved her of them. “Don’t we still have that cart?”

“Nobody in the building uses them.”

“But couldn’t you?”

“No,” Iris said.

“A
LL
children,” Cindy said wisely, leaning against him, with her head in the hollow of his neck, “all children think their mommy and daddy are the nicest.”

“And what about you? Are you satisfied?”

She gave him a hug and a kiss and said, “I think you and Mommy are the nicest mommy and daddy in the whole world.”

“And I think you are the nicest Cindy,” he said, his eyes moist with tears.

They sat and rocked each other gently.

A
FTER
Bessie had taken the breakfast dishes out of the dishwasher, she went into the front, dragging the vacuum cleaner, to do the children’s rooms. She stood sometimes for five or ten minutes, looking down at East End Avenue — at the drugstore, the luncheonette, the rival cleaning establishments (side by side and, according to rumor, both owned by the same person), the hairstyling salon, and the branch office of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Together they made a canvas backdrop for a procession of people Bessie had never seen before, or would not recognize if she had, and so she couldn’t say to herself, “There goes old Mrs. Maltby,” but she looked anyway, she took it all in. The sight of other human beings nourished her mind. She read them as people read books. Pieces of toys, pieces of puzzles that she found on the floor she put on one shelf or another of the toy closet in Cindy’s room, gradually introducing a disorder that Iris dealt with periodically, taking a whole day out of her life. But nobody told Bessie she was supposed to find the box the piece came out of, and it is questionable whether she could have anyway. The thickness of the lenses in her eyeglasses suggested that her eyesight was poorer than she let on.

She was an exile, far from home, among people who were not like the white people she knew and understood. She was here because down home she was getting forty dollars a week and she had her old age to think of. She and Iris alternated between irritation at one another and sudden acts of kindness. It was the situation that was at fault. Given halfway decent circumstances, men can work cheerfully and happily for other men, in offices, stores, and even factories. And so can women. But if Iris opened the cupboard or the icebox to see what they did or didn’t contain, Bessie popped out of her room and said, “Did you want something?” And Iris withdrew, angry because she had been driven out of her own kitchen. In her mind, Bessie always thought of the Carringtons as “my people,” but until she had taught them to think of themselves as her people her profound capacity for devotion would go unused; would not even be suspected.

You can say that life is a fountain if you want to, but what it more nearly resembles is a jack-in-the-box.

• • •

H
ALF
awake, he heard the soft whimpering that meant Iris was having a nightmare, and he shook her. “I dreamt you were having a heart attack,” she said.

“Should you be dreaming that?” he said. But the dream was still too real to be joked about. They were in a public place. And he couldn’t be moved. He didn’t die, and she consulted with doctors. Though the dream did not progress, she could not extricate herself from it but went on and on, feeling the appropriate emotions but in a circular way. Till finally the sounds she made in her sleep brought about her deliverance.

T
HE
conversation at the other end of the hall continued steadily — not loud but enough to keep them from sleeping, and he had already spoken to the children once. So he got up and went down the hall. Laurie and Cindy were both in their bathroom, and Cindy was sitting on the toilet. “I have a stomach ache,” she said.

He started to say, “You need to do bizz,” and then remembered that the time before she had been sitting on the toilet doing just that.

“And I feel dizzy,” Laurie said.

“I heard it,” Iris said as he got back into bed.

“That’s why she was so pale yesterday.”

And half an hour later, when he got up again, Iris did too. To his surprise. Looking as if she had lost her last friend. So he took her in his arms.

“I hate everything,” she said.

O
N
the top shelf of his clothes closet he keeps all sorts of things — the overflow of phonograph records, and the photograph albums, which are too large for the bookcases in the living room. The snapshots show nothing but joy. Year after year of it.

O
N
the stage of the school auditorium, girls from Class Eight, in pastel-colored costumes and holding arches of crepe-paper flowers, made a tunnel from the front of the stage to the rear right-hand corner. The pianist took her hands from the keys, and the headmistress, in sensible navy blue, with her hair cut short like a man’s, announced, “Class B becomes Class One.”

Twenty very little girls in white dresses marched up on the stage two by two, holding hands.

George and Iris Carrington turned to each other and smiled, for Cindy was among them, looking proud and happy as she hurried through the tunnel of flowers and out of sight.

“Class One becomes Class Two.” Another wave of little girls left their place in the audience and went up on the stage and disappeared into the wings.

“Class Two becomes Class Three.”

Laurie Carrington, her red hair shining from the hairbrush, rose from her seat with the others and started up on the stage.

“It’s too much!” George said, under his breath.

Class Three became Class Four, Class Four became Class Five, Class Five became Class Six, and George Carrington took a handkerchief out of his right hip pocket and wiped his eyes. It was their eagerness that undid him. Their absolute trust in the Arrangements. Class Six became Class Seven, Class Seven became Class Eight. The generations of man, growing up, growing old, dying in order to make room for more.

“Class Eight becomes Class Nine, and is now in the Upper School,” the headmistress said, triumphantly. The two girls at the front ducked and went under the arches, taking their crepe-paper flowers with them. And then the next two, and the next, and finally the audience was left applauding an empty stage.

“C
OME
here and sit on my lap,” he said, by no means sure Laurie would think it worth the trouble. But she came. Folding her onto his lap, he was aware of the length of her legs, and the difference of her body; the babyness had departed forever, and when he was affectionate with her it was always as if the moment were slightly out of focus; he felt a restraint. He worried lest it be too close to making love to her. The difference was not great, and he was not sure whether it existed at all.

“Would you like to hear a riddle?” she asked.

“All right.”

“Who was the fastest runner in history?”

“I don’t know,” he said, smiling at her. “Who was?”

“Adam. He was the first in the human race.… Teeheeheeheehee, wasn’t that a good one?”

W
AKING
in the night, Cindy heard her mother and father laughing behind the closed door of their room. It was a sound she liked to hear, and she turned over and went right back to sleep.

“W
HAT
was that?”

He raised his head from the pillow and listened.

“Somebody crying ‘Help!’ ” Iris said.

He got up and went to the window. There was no one in the street except a taxi driver brushing out the back seat of his hack. Again he heard it. Somebody being robbed. Or raped. Or murdered.

“Help …” Faintly this time. And not from the direction of the park. The taxi driver did not look up at the sound, which must be coming from inside a building somewhere. With his face to the window, George waited for the sound to come again and it didn’t. Nothing but silence. If he called the police, what could he say? He got back into bed and lay there, sick with horror, his knees shaking. In the morning maybe the
Daily News
would have what happened.

But he forgot to buy a
News
on his way to work, and days passed, and he no longer was sure what night it was that they heard the voice crying “Help!” and felt that he ought to go through weeks of the
News
until he found out what happened. If it was in the
News
. And if something happened.

T
HE
business district of Draperville, Illinois (population 12,000), was built around a neo-Roman courthouse and the courthouse square. Adjoining the railroad station, in the center of a small plot of ground, a bronze tablet marked the site of the Old Alton Depot where the first Latham County Volunteers entrained for the Civil War, and where the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln halted briefly at sunrise on May 3rd, 1865. Other towns within a radius of a hundred miles continued to prosper, but Draperville stopped growing. It was finished by 1900. The last civic accomplishment was the laying of the tracks for the Draperville Street Railway. The population stayed the same and the wide residential streets were lined with trees that every year grew larger and more beautiful, as if to conceal by a dense green shade the failure of men of enterprise and sound judgment to beget these same qualities in their sons.

The streetcar line started at the New Latham Hotel and ran past the baseball park and the county jail, past the state insane asylum, and on out to the cemetery and the lake. The lake was actually an abandoned gravel pit, half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, fed by underground springs. Its water was very deep and very cold. The shoreline was dotted with summer cottages and between the cottages and an expanse of cornfields was a thin grove of oak trees. Every summer two or three dozen families moved out here in June, to escape the heat, and stayed until the end of August, when the reopening of school forced them to return to town. After Labor Day, with the cottages boarded up and the children’s voices stilled, the lake was washed in equinoctial rains, polished by the October sun, and became once more a part of the wide empty landscape.

On a brilliant September day in 1912 the streetcar stopped in front of the high school, and a large, tranquil colored woman got on. She was
burdened with a shopping bag and several parcels, which she deposited on the seat beside her. There were two empty seats between the colored woman and the nearest white passengers, who nodded to her but did not include her in their conversation. The streetcar was open on the sides, with rattan seats. It rocked and swayed, and the passengers, as though they were riding on the back of an elephant, rocked and swayed with it. The people who had flowers — asters or chrysanthemums wrapped in damp newspaper — rode as far as the cemetery where, among acres of monuments and gravestones (Protestant on the right, Catholic on the left), faded American flags marked the final resting place of those who had fallen in the Civil or Spanish-American wars. It was a mile farther to the end of the line. There the conductor switched the trolley for the return trip, and the colored woman started off across an open field.

A winding path through the oak trees led her eventually to a cottage resting on concrete blocks, with a peaked roof and a porch across the front, facing the lake. Wide wooden shutters hinged at the top and propped up on poles gave the cottage a curious effect, as of a creosote-colored bird about to clap its wings and fly away.

The colored woman entered by the back door, into a kitchen so tiny that there was barely room for her to move between the kerosene stove and the table. She put her packages down and dipped a jelly glass into a bucket of water and drank. Through the thin partition came the sound of a child crying and then a woman’s voice, high and clear and excitable.