So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists any more. 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.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

the simple truth is that though so much is made of the woman’s beauty in love stories, passion does not require it. Plato’s idea that lovers were originally one person, the two parts having become separated and desiring to be joined, is as good an explanation as any for what cannot in the mind of an outsider ever be convincingly accounted for.

The women serenely doubled and redoubled each other’s bids without ever losing their way in the intricacies of some piece of gossip, and the one who was adding up the score was still able to deplore, with the others, the shockingness of some new novel that they had all put their names down for at the library.

The house was a lot larger and more comfortable than his, and there was a sandpile in the back yard, but what was a sandpile compared to the horse barn, the cow barn, sheds, corncribs, the chicken house, the root cellar, the well, the windmill, the horse trough, and a swimming hole? In town there were cardinals and bluebirds and tanagers and Baltimore orioles, but he had the mourning dove, the forever inquiring bob-white?, the hoot owl, and the whippoorwill.

On the seventh day they rested; that is to say, they put on their good clothes and hitched up the horse again and drove to some country church, where, sitting in straight-backed cushionless pews, they stared passively at the preacher, who paced up and down in front of them, thinking up new ways to convince them that they were steeped in sin.

In the daytime the sky is an inverted bowl over the prairie. On a clear night it is sometimes powdered with stars.

The mortgage is paid off and she doesn’t have to take in roomers. It is all hers—meaning the pollarded catalpa tree by the front sidewalk, the woodshed around in back, the outside sloping cellar door, and the porch light that doesn’t turn on. Meaning also the white net curtains that have turned grey and are about ready for the ragbag, the nine-by-twelve linoleum rug in the front room, with the design worn completely away in places, the ugly golden-oak furniture that could be duplicated in any secondhand store, “Sir Galahad” and “The Dickey Bird,” and the smell of the kerosene heater.

The two upstairs rooms are hot in summer and expensive to heat in winter, and so she doesn’t use them. The big double bed all but blocking the front door makes the front room look queer, but she has stopped caring what people think. She means to die here, in her own house, in this very bed.

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.

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.