They Came Like Swallows
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Authors: William Maxwell
William Maxwell
“He has a magic way with words…. Among the past half-century’s few unmistakably great novelists.”
—The Village Voice
“Maxwell’s [fiction] honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity and the English language with consummate craft.”
—Wall Street Journal
“No comparison does [Maxwell] justice…. [In] his fictional worlds … we often encounter an intimacy so intense it literally gives us goose bumps.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[He] holds an almost legendary place in the American literary world.”
—Newsday
“Maxwell is one of our finest writers … and like all great writers he deals in truth: an uncompromising vision of the way we are and why.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye …. [He is] a wise observer of ordinary human behavior … a writer of impeccable English prose.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Mr. Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters that the reader is constantly made aware of the larger redemptive patterns that subsume their individual problems.”
—The New York Times
“One of American literature’s best-kept secrets.”
—New York
magazine
“Mr. Maxwell’s work is thoroughly balanced, gentle and humane His powers of description are remarkable.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Rare sensitivity, telling detail and bare, graceful prose.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“No one else currently writing can capture as [Maxwell] does a sense of life in the balance, of a moment appreciated…. The beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Maxwell is … a novelist intrigued by the nuances of social form and a strongly visual writer fascinated by the way things look and feel…. His work [has grown] into an act of the imagination that [can] encompass a world of time and thought beyond the immediacy of recollection. By transfiguring the past in the crucible of art, he has held it in trust for the future.”
—The New Republic
“His characters are so well drawn you want to know more and more about them. His writing is simple and direct, poignant without being sentimental.”
—Houston Post
William Maxwell
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS
William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at
The New Yorker.
From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife in New York City.
William Maxwell
All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories
(1995)
Billie Dyer and Other Stories
(1992)
The Outermost Dream
(1989)
So Long, See You Tomorrow
(1980)
Over by the River and Other Stories
(1977)
Ancestors
(1971)
The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing
(1966)
The Chateau
(1961)
Stories (1956)
(with Jean Stafford, John Cheever, and Daniel Fuchs)
Time Will Darken It
(1948)
The Heavenly Tenants
(1946)
The Folded Leaf
(1945)
They Came Like Swallows
(1937)
Bright Center of Heaven
(1934)
They came like swallows and like swallows went.
And yet a woman’s powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen information there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air …
—W. B. YEATS
WHOSE ANGEL CHILD
1
Bunny did not waken all at once. A sound (what, he did not know) struck the surface of his sleep and sank like a stone. His dream subsided, leaving him awake, stranded, on his bed. He turned helplessly and confronted the ceiling. A pipe had burst during the winter before, and now there was the outline of a yellow lake. The lake became a bird with a plumed head and straggling tail feathers, while Bunny was looking at it. When there were no further changes, his eyes wandered down by way of the blue-and-white wallpaper
to the other bed, where Robert lay sleeping. They lingered for a moment upon Robert’s parted lips, upon his face drained and empty with sleep.
It was raining.
Outside, branches of the linden rose and fell in the wind, rose and fell. And November leaves came down. Bunny turned over upon the small unyielding body of Araminta Culpepper. Because he was eight, and somewhat past the age when boys are supposed to play with dolls, Araminta hung from the bedpost by day—an Indian papoose with an unbreakable expression on her face. But at night she shared his bed with him. A dozen times he drew her to him lovingly in sleep. And if he woke too soon and it was still dark, she was there. He could put out his hand and touch her.
Before him—before Peter Morison who was called Bunny—was the whole of the second Sunday in November, 191
8.
He moved slightly in order that Araminta Culpepper might have room for her head on the pillow. If it had been a clear day, if the sky were blue and full of sunlight, he would have to go off to Sunday school and sing hymns and perhaps hear the same old story about Daniel who was put in the lions’ den, or about Elisha, or about Elijah who went to Heaven in a chariot of fire. And what would become of his morning? As soon as he got home and spread the funny-paper out on the floor where he could look at it comfortably, some one would be sure to come along and exclaim over him:
For Heaven’s sake, it’s too nice a day to be in the house. Why don’t you go outdoors
and get some exercise?
And if he pretended that he was going to but didn’t, they would come again in a little while. He would have to put on his cap and his woolly coat and mittens, whether he wanted to or not. He would be driven out of the house to roll disconsolately in a bed of leaves or to wander through the garden where nothing bloomed; where there were only sticks and crisp grass and the stalks of summer flowers.
But not now, Bunny said to himself, hearing the sound of water dripping, dropping from the roof. Not this morning. And somewhere in the front part of the house a door opened so that his mother’s voice came up the stairs. A spring inside him, a coiled spring, was set free. He sat up and threw his covers to the foot of the bed. When he was washed and dressed he went downstairs. His mother was sitting at the breakfast table before the fire in the library,
“How do you do?” He threw his arms about her and planted a kiss somewhat wildly on her mouth. “How do you do and how do you do again?”
“I do very well, thank you.”
She held him off in front of her to see whether he had washed thoroughly, and Bunny noticed with relief the crumbs at his father’s place, the carelessly folded napkin.
“Did you have a good night? Is Robert up?”
Bunny shook his head.
“Stirring?”
“No.”
“I thought that would happen.”
While Bunny settled himself at the table she buttered
a piece of toast for him. When she had finished she lifted the platter of bacon from the hearth.
“Robert stayed up until ten o’clock, trying to finish
The Boy Allies in Bulgaria.
I told him they wouldn’t assassinate anybody without him, but he wanted to finish it just the same.” She helped herself to another cup of coffee. “You know how he is.”
Robert was thirteen and very trying. More so, it seemed to Bunny, than most people. He wouldn’t go to bed and he wouldn’t get up. He hated to bathe or be kissed or practice his music lesson. He left the light burning in the basement. He refused to eat oysters or squash. He wouldn’t get up on cold mornings and close the window. He spread his soldiers all over the carpet in the living-room and when it came time to pick them up he was never there; he had gone off to help somebody dig a cave. And likely as not he would come home late for dinner, his clothes covered with mud, his knuckles skinned, his hair full of leaves and sticks, and a hole in his brand-new sweater.
There was no time (no time that Bunny could remember) when Robert had not made him cry at least once between morning and night. Robert hid Bunny’s thrift stamps and his ball of lead foil. Or he danced through the house swinging Araminta Culpepper by the braids. Or he twisted Bunny’s arm, or showed him a fine new trick, the point of which was that he got his thumbs bent out of shape. Or he might do no more than sit across the room saying
Creepy-creepy-creepy
… pointing his finger at Bunny and describing
smaller and smaller circles until the tears would not stay back any longer.
Before this day was over, it too would be spoiled like all the others. But while Robert was still upstairs in bed there was nothing for Bunny to worry about, no reason on earth why he should not enjoy his breakfast.
