So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

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. 3 The New

He hated himself for being weak, for having no will, but it wasn’t that he didn’t try to overcome the feelings he knew he shouldn’t have. Time after time he thought he had overcome them, and it always turned out that he hadn’t. Excuses to pay a visit to the barns (where she wouldn’t be, so there was no harm in it) or to the house (where she would be) occurred to him constantly. He would reject four in a row and find himself hurriedly acting on the fifth. His feet took him there, without his consent. He might as well have given in in the first place. Searching for a clue to her feelings, he was alert to the quality of her voice when she spoke to her children or Clarence. He knew when she was depressed. He knew also that like most married people she and Clarence quarreled sometimes. Did he imagine it or was it true that they got on better with each other and were more cheerful when he was around? If he did what he knew he ought to do, which was not go there any more, Clarence would wonder why. So would she.

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