William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow

When my father was an old man, he surprised me by remarking that he understood what my mother’s death meant to me but had no idea what to do about it. I think it would have been something if he had just said this. If he didn’t, it was possibly because he thought there was nothing he or anybody else could do. Or he may have thought I would reject any help he tried to give me. As a small child I sometimes had the earache, and I would go to him and ask him to blow cigar smoke in my ear. He would stop talking and draw me toward him and with his lips almost touching my ear breathe warm smoke into it. It was as good a remedy as any, and it was physically intimate. One night — I don’t know how old I was, five or six, maybe — bedtime came and I kissed my mother good night as usual and then went over to my father and as I leaned toward him he said I was too old for that anymore. By the standards of that time and that place I expect I was, but I had wanted to anyway. And how was I to express the feeling I had for him? He didn’t say, then or ever. In that moment my feeling for him changed and became wary and unconfident.

All up and down Ninth Street there were children I could play with, and sometimes I did, but I preferred to play by myself. On the most beautiful spring day of the year I stayed in the house, reading Tik-Tok of Oz . And when I grew tired of reading I shut myself up in a darkened room and played with my postcard projector or with a toy theater I had made out of shirt cardboards. All this worried my father, both from the standpoint of my not being outdoors enough and because if I continued to be interested in such things, how on earth would I support myself when I grew up? There was nothing comical or odd in his thinking this. We are what we are, and he was a businessman, and in his mind there was no better thing that one could be. From time to time his hand came down on some elaborate fancy and I had to pick up the pieces and go somewhere where he wasn’t in order to feel cheerful again. If he spoke impatiently to me or with what seemed to me to be harshness, I could not keep back the tears, which added to his annoyance. As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have? He didn’t say that either. It is hard enough for adults to keep their emotional reactions in something like balance. Children simply feel what they feel, and I knew I was not the apple of my father’s eye.

We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have become sympathetic and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

When a sufficient number of months had been torn off the calendar so that my mother’s friends felt they could invite my father to their dinner parties, they did. And he got dressed up and went. They ware matchmaking, of course, and like all matchmakers had missed motives. I doubt if he needed their help. He was still only in his early forties, and he had always been handsome, and liked women, and it would have been strange if he hadn’t found somebody who was willing to love him. I had no comprehension whatever of the sexual and emotional needs of a man of his age. He was simply my father, and I assumed that for the rest of his life he would be—“faithful to my mother’s memory” is how I had heard grown people express it.

While he was having his social life, I was having mine. Our room at school decided to have a Halloween party and it was a question of where to have it. I offered our house and the offer was accepted. When I told my father he shook his head doubtfully and asked what I planned to do. I said was going to carve a pumpkin and put some cornstalks around in the living room. He didn’t think the party was at all a good idea, it would mean extra-work for the housekeeper, and next time I’d better ask before I did something like that. Since I had committed myself, I could go ahead with it, provided it was confined to an empty maid’s room and they used the back stairs. My mother wasn’t there to tell him that this was unthinkable and so that’s what happened. Deeply embarrassed, I led the teacher and my classmates through rooms that were brightly lit and had always been so hospitable, through the dining room to the pantry and up the narrow uninviting back stairs. Nobody seemed to find this in any way strange. I don’t think it was much of a Halloween party. What has stayed in my mind all these years is a scene that occurred by the laundry basket by the back hall. The teacher had chosen to be the “victim” and sat down on a chair and allowed herself to be blindfolded. At this point, ideas of propriety made me hesitate. I motioned to one of the girls, who took my place. When the teacher removed the blindfold she was smiling with pleasure because a young boy — because she thought a young boy had kissed her.

In telling me that he was going to be married my father was as gentle as he knew how to be. He didn’t expect me to offer any objection, and wouldn’t have been deflected from his purpose if I had.

A year or two before this, at the Country Club on a summer day, wandering idly near the caddy house I came upon a sight I didn’t understand. I thought at first it was some new kind of animal. Then I retreaded in horror. What I was looking at was a snake in the act of swallowing a frog that was too large and wouldn’t go down. Neither would the idea that another woman was not only going to sit in my mother’s place at the dinner table but also to take her place in my father’s heart.

Where a hardier boy would have run away from home or got in trouble with the police, I sat with my nose in a book so I wouldn’t have to think about things I didn’t like and couldn’t prevent happening. It wasn’t enough for me, or for my older brother and my younger brother and me, to slip through that door to the way things used to be, when the time came; my mother would expect us to bring my father with us. And if he was married to another woman, how could we?

We had moved from our fixed position and there was now no possibility of getting back to the way things were before she died. I could not tell whether the heavy feeling in my chest had to do with what might happen or with what had already happened and was irremediable.

The kindergarten run by Miss Lena Moose and Miss Lucy Sheffield was on the second floor of a building just off the courthouse square, and the young woman who became my stepmother used to go from house to house at nine o’clock in the morning, collecting the children. When we were all assembled, she walked us downtown. She must have been in her early twenties then. As a child she had lived on Ninth Street, though she didn’t anymore. At noon, on the day of my mother’s funeral, when we went into the dining room she was there. I sat down at the table but I could not eat. My throat was blocked from crying. She came and stood behind my chair and talked to me, and urged me to eat some of the baked potato on my plate. For her sake, because she was young and pretty and because I had always liked her, I managed to do it. The taste of that baked potato has remained with me all the rest of my life.

In fairy tales the coming of a stepmother is never regarded as anything but a misfortune. Presumably this is not because of the great number of second wives who were unkind to the children of their husband’s first marriage, though examples of this could be found, but because of the universal resentment on the children’s part of an outsider. So that for the father to remarry is an act of betrayal not only of the dead mother but of them, no matter what the stepmother is like.

What strange and unlikely things are washed up on the shore of time. I have in my possession a tattered photograph album full of snapshots of my stepmother as a young woman. Very pretty and sweet she was, with a fur muff and a picture hat and her skirts almost to the floor. There are pictures of her with friends, with her mother and sister, with one or another of her four brothers, with elderly relatives on the front stoop of a turn-of-the-century house in, I think, Boston. There are two group pictures taken by a local photographer, of a masquerade party — one with masks and one without, so that you can see who the pirate, the clown, the Columbine, etc., were. Half the people there I knew when I was growing up. And then more pictures of my stepmother: in Washington, D.C., during the First World War, with a thin-faced man in any uniform whom she was in love with at the time but did not marry; back in Lincoln, holding her sister’s baby, and so on. What beautiful clothes. What glorious automobiles. What good times.