All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories Read online

  Acclaim for

  WILLIAM MAXWELL’S

  ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS

  “Sweet and tough-minded at once, Maxwell’s stories possess unusual emotional density.… His beautifully chosen details fold out to encompass whole worlds.… One more brilliant testimony to William Maxwell’s eloquence, grace and wit.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Written with exquisite restraint, the work illustrates the rare sensitivity, telling detail and bare, graceful prose that have become Maxwell’s hallmarks. Authentic and spare, the stories balance the tension between life’s exhilaration and haunting sadness.… [Maxwell’s stories] reveal the depth of his insights, the wisdom of his gentle yet certain artistic command.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Conclusive evidence that Maxwell stands at the pinnacle of American letters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fiction that … honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity and the English language with consummate craft.… These collected stories are testament to [Maxwell’s] frequent, quietly startling success.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “No one else currently writing can capture as [Maxwell] does a sense of life in the balance, of a moment appreciated.… Maxwell, dealing in very ordinary days and nights, makes them luminous.… The beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  ALSO BY WILLIAM MAXWELL

  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 and Other Tales (1966)

  The Château (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)

  WILLIAM MAXWELL

  ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS

  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 his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  First Vintage International Edition, November 1995

  Copyright © 1965, 1986, 1992, 1994 by William Maxwell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.

  “A Game of Chess” (signed Gifford Brown) and “What He Was Like” were originally published in The New Yorker; “A fable begotten of an echo of a line of verse by W B. Yeats” was originally published in Antaeus; “The Lily-White Boys” was originally published in The Paris Review; “A mean and spiteful toad” and “The pessimistic fortune-teller” were originally published in Story under the titles “Alice” and “The Fortune-teller.” Improvisations 1, 12, and 21 were originally published in a volume of five tales privately printed in honor of the author’s eightieth birthday.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Maxwell, William.

  All the days and nights : the collected stories of William Maxwell. p. cm.

  1. City and town life—Illinois—Fiction. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Americans—Travel—France—Fiction.

  4. Family—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 1. Title.

  PS3525.A9464A79 1995

  813′.54—dc20 94-27509

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5014-9

  Author photograph © Dorothy Alexander

  v3.1

  For my one and only

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Over by the River (1974)

  The Trojan Women (1952)

  The Pilgrimage (1953)

  The Patterns of Love (1945)

  What Every Boy Should Know (1954)

  A Game of Chess (1965)

  The French Scarecrow (1956)

  Young Francis Whitehead (1939)

  A Final Report (1963)

  Haller’s Second Home (1941)

  The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel (1969)

  The Value of Money (1964)

  The Thistles in Sweden (1976)

  The Poor Orphan Girl (1965)

  The Lily-White Boys (1986)

  Billie Dyer (1989)

  Love (1983)

  The Man in the Moon (1984)

  With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge (1984)

  My Father’s Friends (1984)

  The Front and the Back Parts of the House (1991)

  The Holy Terror (1986)

  What He Was Like (1992)

  A SET OF TWENTY-ONE IMPROVISATIONS

  1. A love story

  2. The industrious tailor

  3. The country where nobody ever grew old and died

  4. The fisherman who had nobody to go out in his boat with him

  5. The two women friends

  6. The carpenter

  7. The man who had no friends and didn’t want any

  8. A fable begotten of an echo of a line of verse by W. B. Yeats

  9. The blue finch of Arabia

  10. The sound of waves

  11. The woman who never drew breath except to complain

  12. The masks

  13. The man who lost his father

  14. The old woman whose house was beside a running stream

  15. The pessimistic fortune-teller

  16. The printing office

  17. The lamplighter

  18. The kingdom where straightforward, logical thinking was admired over every other kind

  19. The old man at the railroad crossing

  20. A mean and spiteful toad

  21. All the days and nights

  PREFACE

  THE four-masted schooner lay at anchor in Gravesend Bay, not far from Coney Island. It belonged to J. P. Morgan, and I persuaded a man with a rowboat to take me out to it. In my coat pocket was a letter of introduction to the captain. The year was 1933, and I was twenty-five. I had started to become an English professor and changed my mind, and I had written a novel, as yet unpublished. I meant to go to sea, so that I would have something to write about. And because I was under the impression, gathered from the dust-jacket copy of various best-sellers, that it was something a writer did before he settled down and devoted his life to writing. While the captain was reading my letter I looked around. The crew consisted of one sailor, chipping rust, with a police dog at his side. It turned out that the schooner had been there for four years because Mr. Morgan couldn’t afford t
o use it. The captain was tired of doing nothing and was expecting a replacement the next day and was therefore not in a position to take me on. He had no idea when the beautiful tall-masted ship would leave its berth. And I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life-size characters — affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black — that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered. The Natural History of home: the suede glove on the front-hall table, the unfinished game of solitaire, the oriole’s nest suspended from the tip of the outermost branch of the elm tree, dandelions in the grass. All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story or sustain the complicated cross-weaving of longer fiction.

  I think it is generally agreed that stories read better one at a time. They need air around them. And they need thinking about, since they tend to have both an explicit and an un-spelled-out meaning. Inevitably, some of the stories I wrote, especially when I was young, are stuck fast in their period — or to put it differently, the material was not as substantial as it ought to have been — and I see no reason to republish them. When I was working on the ninth version of “A Final Report” I came on the seventh, in a desk drawer, and saw that it was better than the one I was working on and that I must have been too tired when I finished it to realize that there was no need to pursue the idea any further. On the other hand, “Love” came right the first time, without a word having to be changed, and I thought — mistakenly — that I had had a breakthrough, and stories would be easier to write from that moment on; all I needed to do was just say it.

  The stories I have called “improvisations” really are that. They were written for an occasion — for a birthday or to be rolled up inside a red ribbon and inserted among the ornaments on the Christmas tree. I wrote them to please my wife, over a great many years. When we were first married, after we had gone to bed I would tell her a story in the dark. They came from I had no idea where. Sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of a story and she would shake me and say “What happened next?” and I would struggle up through layers of oblivion and tell her.

  Over by the River

  THE sun rose somewhere in the middle of Queens, the exact moment of its appearance shrouded in uncertainty because of a cloud bank. The lights on the bridges went off, and so did the red light in the lantern of the lighthouse at the north end of Welfare Island. Seagulls settled on the water. A newspaper truck went from building to building dropping off heavy bundles of, for the most part, bad news, which little boys carried inside on their shoulders. Doormen smoking a pipe and dressed for a walk in the country came to work after a long subway ride and disappeared into the service entrances. When they reappeared, by way of the front elevator, they had put on with their uniforms a false amiability and were prepared for eight solid hours to make conversation about the weather. With the morning sun on them, the apartment buildings far to the west, on Lexington Avenue, looked like an orange mesa. The pigeons made bubbling noises in their throats as they strutted on windowsills high above the street.

  All night long, there had been plenty of time. Now suddenly there wasn’t, and this touched off a chain explosion of alarm clocks, though in some instances the point was driven home without a sound: Time is interior to animals as well as exterior. A bare arm with a wristwatch on it emerged from under the covers and turned until the dial was toward the light from the windows.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten after.”

  “It’s always ten after,” Iris Carrington said despairingly, and turned over in bed and shut her eyes against the light. Also against the clamor of her desk calendar: Tuesday 11, L. 3:30 Dr. de Santillo … 5:30–7:30?… Wednesday 1:45, Mrs. McIntosh speaks on the changing status of women. 3:30 Dr. F.… Friday 11 C. Get Andrea … Saturday, call Mrs. Stokes. Ordering pads. L ballet 10:30. 2 Laurie to Sasha’s. Remaining books due at library. Explore dentists. Supper at 5. Call Margot …

  Several minutes passed.

  “Oh my God, I don’t think I can make it,” George Carrington said, and put his feet over the side of the bed, and found he could make it, after all. He could bend over and pick up his bathrobe from the floor, and put it on, and find his slippers, and close the window, and turn on the radiator valve. Each act was easier than the one before. He went back to the bed and drew the covers closer around his wife’s shoulders.

  Yawning, stretching, any number of people got up and started the business of the day. Turning on the shower. Dressing. Putting their hair up in plastic curlers. Squeezing toothpaste out of tubes that were all but empty. Squeezing orange juice. Separating strips of bacon.

  The park keepers unlocked the big iron gates that closed the river walk off between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. A taxi coming from Doctors Hospital was snagged by a doorman’s whistle. The wind picked up the dry filth under the wheels of parked cars and blew it now this way, now that. A child got into an orange minibus and started on the long, devious ride to nursery school and social adjustment.

  “Have you been a good girl?” George inquired lovingly, through the closed door of the unused extra maid’s room, where the dog slept on a square of carpet. Puppy had not been a good girl. There was a puddle of urine — not on the open newspaper he had left for her, just in case, but two feet away from it, on the black-and-white plastic-tile floor. Her tail quivering with apology, she watched while he mopped the puddle up and disposed of the wet newspaper in the garbage can in the back hall. Then she followed him through the apartment to the foyer, and into the elevator when it came.

  There were signs all along the river walk:

  NO DOGS

  NO BICYCLES

  NO THIS

  NO THAT

  He ignored them with a clear conscience. If he curbed the dog beforehand, there was no reason not to turn her loose and let her run — except that sometimes she stopped and arched her back a second time. When shouting and waving his hands didn’t discourage her from moving her bowels, he took some newspaper from a trash container and cleaned up after her.

  At the flagpole, he stood looking out across the river. The lights went off all the way up the airplane beacon, producing an effect of silence — as if somebody had started to say something and then decided not to. The tidal current was flowing south. He raised his head and sniffed, hoping for a breath of the sea, and smelled gasoline fumes instead.

  Coming back, the dog stopped to sniff at trash baskets, at cement copings, and had to be restrained from greeting the only other person on the river walk — a grey-haired man who jogged there every morning in a gym suit and was afraid of dogs. He smiled pleasantly at George, and watched Puppy out of the corner of his eyes, so as to be ready when she leapt at his throat.

  A tanker, freshly painted, all yellow and white, and flying the flag of George had no idea what country until he read the lettering on the stern, overtook him, close in to shore — so close he could see the captain talking to a sailor in the wheelhouse. To be sailing down the East River on a ship that was headed for open water … He waved to them and they waved back, but they didn’t call out to him Come on, if you want to, and it was too far to jump. It came to him with the seriousness of a discovery that there was no place in the world he would not like to see. Concealed in this statement was another that he had admitted to himself for the first time only recently. There were places he would never see, experiences of the first importance that he would never have. He might die without ever having heard a nightingale.

  When they stepped out of the elevator, the dog hurried off to the kitchen to see if there was something in her dish she didn’t know about, and George settled down in the living room with the Times on his lap and waited for a glass of orange juice to appear at his place at the dining-room table. The rushing sound in
side the walls, as of an underground river, was Iris running her bath. The orange juice was in no hurry to get to the dining-room table. Iris had been on the phone daily with the employment agency and for the moment this was the best they could offer: twenty-seven years old, pale, with dirty blond hair, unmarried, overattached to her mother, and given to burning herself on the antiquated gas stove. She lived on tea and cigarettes. Breakfast was all the cooking she was entrusted with; Iris did the rest. Morning after morning his boiled egg was hard enough to take on a picnic. A blind man could not have made a greater hash of half a grapefruit. The coffee was indescribable. After six weeks there was a film of grease over everything in the kitchen. Round, jolly, neat, professionally trained, a marvellous cook, the mother was everything that is desirable in a servant except that, alas, she worked for somebody else. She drifted in and out of the apartment at odd hours, deluding Iris with the hope that some of her accomplishments would, if one were only patient, rub off on her daughter.

  “Read,” a voice said, bringing him all the way back from Outer Mongolia.

  “Tonight, Cindy.”

  “Read! Read!”

  He put the paper down and picked her up, and when she had settled comfortably in his lap he began: “ ‘Emily was a guinea pig who loved to travel. Generally she stayed home and looked after her brother Arthur. But every so often she grew tired of cooking and mending and washing and ironing; the day would seem too dark, and the house too small, and she would have a great longing to set out into the distance.…’ ”

  Looking down at the top of her head as he was reading, he felt an impulse to put his nose down and smell her hair. Born in a hurry she was. Born in one hell of a hurry, half an hour after her mother got to the hospital.

  LAURIE Carrington said, “What is the difference, what is the difference between a barber and a woman with several children?” Nobody answered, so she asked the question again.