All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell Read Free Book Online

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 couldmake 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