So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

What I didn’t say, across the few feet that separated our two beds, was that I couldn’t understand how it had happened to us. It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn’t be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. Actually, it was the other way round: I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope. He continued to sleep in the bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was. He gave away her jewelry, and more important to me, her clothes, so I could no longer open her closet door and look at them. I

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 any more. 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.

Now was the moment to forget about that door I had walked through without thinking, and about the void that could sometimes be bridged in dreams, and about the way things used to be when my mother was alive. Instead, I clung to them more tightly than ever, even as I was being drawn willy-nilly into my father’s new life.

There is no telling how long she would let him go on looking into her agate-colored eyes. Forever, possibly. She has made him a present of herself and nothing he does or doesn’t do will make her take it back.

They are his second family. If his mother sends him to the Wilsons’ because she has suddenly discovered that she is out of vanilla or allspice, there is a good chance that Mrs. Wilson will cut a slice off a loaf of bread that has just come out of the oven and spread butter and jam on it and give it to him. He likes her apart from that, though; he likes her because she is always the same.

All day long he thought about her. The cows sensed that he hardly knew what he was doing and turned their heads as far as their stanchions would permit and looked at him gravely.

She didn’t for a minute believe him; his manner and his voice and the look in his eyes all betrayed him. He suspected them. Of how much there was no telling. Of something. Another man would have come out with it. As long as he went on pretending not to know, her hands were tied. Maybe that was his game. She watched him for two days. On the morning of the third, he asked if there was any more coffee and she said accusingly, “You’re not fooling me! I know that you know.” When it turned out that she was mistaken and he didn’t know, there was no way she could take the words back. It was as if a hole opened suddenly at their feet and they fell into it.

Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washday, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops. His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-backed copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it. Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too—the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the open door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.

There is a limit, surely, to what one can demand of one’s adolescent self. And to go on feeling guilty about something that happened so long ago is hardly reasonable. I do feel guilty, even so. A little. And always will, perhaps, whenever I think about him. But it isn’t only my failure that I think about. I also wonder about him, about what happened to him. Whether he was spared the sight of his father’s drowned body. Whether after a while he and his mother were able to look at each other without embarrassment. Whether he had as lonely a time as I did when he first moved to Chicago. And whether the series of events that started with the murder of Lloyd Wilson—whether all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.