They Came Like Swallows (17 page)

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“I knew that there was a chance that things might work out all right. That we might be able to bring them up in the way she would have wanted.”

While the man from the undertaker’s went back for another load of chairs, there was time for James to walk—to make the circuit from the library out into the front hall, then through the living-room, which was filled with flowers, and into the library again.

He would have preferred to walk alone, but Robert stood waiting at the foot of the stairs and James did not have the heart to refuse him. Robert was freed from his mistake. It was evident from the way he
walked. Neither Robert nor anyone else was responsible for Elizabeth’s death. And anyway, it was what people intended to do that counted—not what came about because of anything they did. James saw that, clearly. And he saw that his life was like all other lives. It had the same function. And it differed from them only in shape—as one salt-cellar is different from another. Or one knife-blade. What happened to him had happened before. And it would happen again, more than once. Probably some one would lie awake all night in that very same hospital feeling his lungs contract and expand, contract, expand—until the whole of him was limited to the one effort of breathing for somebody else … But it would not be Elizabeth who was dying of pneumonia two rooms down the hall.

He would have liked to explain all this to Robert. And about the rectangle of light on the ceiling above his hospital bed. And also about the interurban, which no longer bothered him. It would be years probably before he could make Robert understand what happened when he met Crazy Jake collecting tin cans at midnight. But there was comfort at least in Robert’s company, and in resting his arm on Robert’s shoulders. Robert belonged to him. James could feel that in the way they walked together. They were of the same blood.

When he was Robert’s age his father and mother went South and took him with them, for the winter. They rented a farmhouse on the side of a hill overlooking
a Confederate cemetery. And he had no one to play with, being a Northerner, and he wanted to go home.

James remembered that winter, though of all the rest of his boyhood there was almost nothing left to him. The remembrance of a cellar door that sloped and could be used for hiding. A mulberry tree and the smell of harness, and brown stain of walnuts on his hands…. Even these things could not be shared with Robert, who was growing up in a different world.

Without their noticing it, they had changed the direction of their walking, and it now brought them straight toward the coffin. They stepped up to it, together, and it was not as James had expected. He did not break down, with Robert beside him. He stood looking at Elizabeth’s hands, which were folded irrevocably about a bunch of purple violets. He had not known that anything could be so white as they were—and so intensely quiet now with the life, with the identifying soul, gone out of them.

They would not have been that way, he felt, if he had not been doing what she wanted him to do. For it was Elizabeth who had determined the shape that his life should take, from the very first moment he saw her. And she had altered that shape daily by the sound of her voice, and by her hair, and by her eyes which were so large and dark. And by her wisdom and by her love.

“You won’t forget your mother, will you, Robert?”
he said. And with wonder clinging to him (for it had been a revelation: neither he nor anyone else had known that his life was going to be like this) he moved away from the coffin.

ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS
The Collected Stories

The twenty-one stories in
All the Days and Nights
take us from a small town in turn-of-the-century Illinois to a precariously balanced enclave of the good life in Manhattan; together they make up what William Maxwell calls “a Natural History of home,” a tour of the world that engages us entirely, and whose characters command our déepest loyalty and tenderness.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76102-0

ANCESTORS
A Family History

Ancestors
is the history of William Maxwell’s family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. Out of letters and journals, memory and speculation, Maxwell leads his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen and makes us understand the way they saw their world and imagined the world to come.

Literature/Memoir/0-679-75929-8

THE CHÂTEAU

In 1948, two awestruck American tourists arrive at a stately chateau whose residents are just beginning to recover from the horrors and indignities of the war. Out of this tragicomic premise, William Maxwell creates the most astute and affectionate novel of cross-cultural incomprehension since the masterworks of Henry James.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76156-X

THE FOLDER LEAF

This classic novel is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s. In his portrait of the lasting friendship between the two, William Maxwell reveals the impossibility of their longings and the keenness of their losses with an eye that is as forgiving as it is omniscient.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-77256-1

TIME WILL DARKEN IT

Time Will Darken It
is a wryly funny and deeply compassionate novel of a small Midwestern town in the early years of the century. When Austin King befriends his young foster cousin, Nora, he unwittingly sets in motion a chain of events which could drastically alter every aspect of his life.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-77258-8

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