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

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 kitchenarrived 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