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

was as though he had been overtaken by a cloud shadow — until he forgot all about it, a few seconds later. But he could have stopped just once, and he hadn’t. When thewindow was open he could have called out to her, even if it was only “Good morning,” or “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
    He could have said,
Don’t do it
.…
    Sometimes he came back by the little house on East End Avenue where he had seen the woman in the red coat. He invariably glanced up, half expecting her to be lying there on the stoop. If she wasn’t there, where was she?
    In the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital was the answer. But not for long. She and the doctor got it straightened out about her mother’s gold thimble, and he gave her a prescription and told her where to go in the building to have it filled, and hoped for the best — which, after all, is all that anybody has to hope for.
    T HE weather thermometer blew away one stormy night and after a week or two George brought home a new one. It was round and encased in white plastic, and not meant to be screwed to the window frame but to be kept inside. It registered the temperature outside by means of a wire with what looked like a small bullet attached to the end of it. The directions said to drill a hole through the window frame, but George backed away from all that and, instead, hung the wire across the sill and closed the window on it. What the new thermometer said bore no relation to the actual temperature, and drilling the hole had a high priority on the list of things he meant to do.
    There was also a racial barometer in the apartment that registered
Fair
or
Stormy
, according to whether Bessie had spent several days running in the apartment or had just come back from a weekend in her room in Harlem.
    The laundress, so enormously fat that she had to maneuver her body around, as if she were the captain of an ocean liner, was a Muslim and hated all white people and most black people as well. She was never satisfied with the lunch Bessie cooked for her, and Bessie objected to having to get lunch for her, and the problem was solved temporarily by having her eat in the luncheonette across the street.
    She quit. The new laundress was half the size of the old one, and sang alto in her church choir, and was good-tempered, and fussy about what she had for lunch. Bessie sometimes considered her a friend and sometimes an object of derision, because she believed in spirits.
    So did Bessie, but not to the same extent or in the same way. Bessie’smother had appeared to her and her sister and brother, shortly after her death. They were quarreling together, and her mother’s head and shoulders appeared up near the ceiling, and she said they were to love one another. And sometimes when Bessie was walking along the street she felt a coolness and knew that a spirit was beside her. But the laundress said, “All right, go ahead, then, if you want to,” to the empty air and, since there wasn’t room for both of them, let the spirit precede her through the pantry. She even knew who the spirit was.
    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