So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

Very few families escape disasters of one kind or another, but in the years between 1909 and 1919 my mother’s family had more than its share of them. My grandfather, spending the night in a farmhouse, was bitten on the ear by a rat or a ferret and died three months later of blood poisoning. My mother’s only brother was in an automobile accident and lost his right arm. My mother’s younger sister poured kerosene on a grate fire that wouldn’t burn and set fire to her clothing and bore the scars of this all the rest of her life. My older brother, when he was five years old, got his foot caught in a turning carriage wheel. I was so small when these things happened that either I did not know about them or else I didn’t feel them because they took place at one remove, so to speak.

My younger brother was born on New Year’s Day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother died two days later of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.

At a time when the epidemic was raging and people were told to avoid crowds, he and my mother got on a crowded train in order to go to Bloomington, thirty miles away, where the hospital facilities were better than in Lincoln. But even if she had had the baby at home, she still would have caught the flu. My older brother or my father or I would have given it to her. We all came down with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the beginning and end of the album, pasted in what must have been blank places, since they run counter to the sequence, are a dozen pictures of my father. Except for the one where he is standing with a string of fish spread out on a rock beside him, he is always in a group of people. He has a golf stick in his hand. Or he is smoking a pipe. Or he is wearing a bathing suit and has one arm around my stepmother’s waist and the other around a woman I don’t recognize. And looking at these faded snapshots I see, the child that survives in me sees with a pang that—I am old enough to be that man’s father, and he has been dead for nearly twenty years, and yet it troubles me that he was happy. Why? In some way his happiness was at that time (and forever after, it would seem) a threat to me. It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in, but why should that trouble me now? I do not even begin to understand it.

it was the year 1921, and women had begun to cut off their hair and wear their skirts above their knees and drink gin out of silver flasks in public. Now and then one of them drank too much and had to be taken home. The gossips had a great deal to shake their heads over. In the light of what followed, the twenties seem on the whole a charming, carefree period. So far as good manners are concerned, it was the beginning of the end.

One of the things my mother loved about my father was that he was a natural musician. Hoping that this talent might have been inherited, she arranged for my older brother to take piano lessons from a nun who taught music in the Catholic school. When I was six I accompanied him to the house where the nuns lived, for my first music lesson. Sister Mary Anise showed me where to put my hands on the keyboard and I looked up at her teeth, which were frightfully crooked, and burst into tears. She told my brother to bring me back when I was seven—by which time she was wearing false teeth that were not crooked and I could look at her with equanimity. I was not musical and I didn’t like to practise.

My father kept a small victrola on top of the upright piano in the living room and after dinner, having played a new record through two or three times while he figured out the chords, he was off, he had it. He played ragtime and songs from the musicals of the period. He had a beautiful touch and people loved to hear him. One day he sat down at the piano with me and tried to teach me how to play by ear. I didn’t understand one word he was saying.

I went straight home from school to the new house. Though as a grown man I have often stood and looked at the old house, I have never been inside it since that day, when a great many objects that I remember and would like to be reunited with disappeared without a trace: Victorian walnut sofas and chairs that my fingers had absently traced every knob and scroll of, mahogany tables, worn Oriental rugs, gilt mirrors, pictures, big square books full of photographs that I knew by heart. If they hadn’t disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, as Ortega y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.

I did not so much miss the old house as blot it completely out of my mind. We had gone down in the world and there didn’t seem to be anything to do but make the best of it.

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.

The small towns in central Illinois nearly all owe their existence to the coming of the railroads in the decade before the Civil War.

My father found most old things oppressive, but especially old houses with high ceilings and odd-shaped rooms that opened one out of another, offering a pleasant vista that required a great deal of coal to heat in the harsh Illinois winters.

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.

Looking back, it seems clear enough that I brought my difficulties on myself. To begin with, I was as thin as a stick. In any kind of competitive game, my mind froze and I became half paralyzed. The baseball could be counted on to slip through my overanxious fingers. Nobody wanted me on their team.

I also had the unfortunate habit, when called on in class, of coming up with the right answer. It won me a smile of approval from the teacher, and it was nice to see my name on the Honor Roll. It was not nice to be chased home from school by two coal miners’ sons who were in the same room with me but only because they could not escape from the truant officer.

Nowhere was I safe against them—neither in the classroom, where their eyes were always on me, or in the school yard, where they danced around me, pushing me off balance and trying to get me to fight back so they could clean up on me. All this took place in plain sight of everybody, all the boys I had grown up with, and no hand was ever raised in my defense, nobody ever came to my rescue—I expect partly because they had their own vulnerab...

one of my mother’s friends, a woman I knew but not very well, invited me to come to her house after school on Friday and stay until Sunday afternoon. She had a son who was a year or two older than I was and everything a boy that age ought to be—open and easy with adults, bright in school, and beyond being pushed around by his contemporaries. I slept in the same room with him and I was with him all day Saturday and Sunday.

Most of the time he was friendly, and then suddenly he would mutter something under his breath that I could not quite hear and that I knew from a heaviness in my heart was the word “sissy.” I ignored it, not knowing what else to do; not having enough experience of the world to take my toothbrush and pyjamas and go home, leaving him to explain to his mother why I wasn’t there.

it was so nice to be doing something with another boy for a change.

He was exactly the kind of boy I would have liked to be, and I was ready to imitate him in any way I could. One minute I was encouraged to do this and the next I felt—I was made to feel—that he despised me.

Whatever I suggested doing we did. I never asked Cletus if there wasn’t something he’d rather be doing, because he was always ready to do what I wanted to do.

I supposed he must have liked me somewhat or he wouldn’t have been there. And that he was glad for my companionship.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding. And because there was an element of cruelty in my older brother’s teasing (as, of course, there is in all teasing) I didn’t trust him, though I perfectly well could have, about larger matters. Anyway, I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck, as we sat looking down on the whole neighborhood, and he didn’t tell me about his.

we climbed down and said “So long” and “See you tomorrow,” and went our separate ways in the dusk. And one evening this casual parting turned out to be for the last time. We were separated by that pistol shot. There was never any real doubt about who had killed Lloyd Wilson. The only person who had any reason to do it was Clarence Smith, Cletus’s father.

His mother had sued his father for a divorce, the grounds being extreme and repeated cruelty. His father then filed a cross bill charging her with infidelity and naming Lloyd Wilson, who lived on the adjoining farm, as corespondent.

I wrote to my stepcousin Tom Perry and asked him if he could dig up for me those issues of the Courier-Herald that had anything in them about the murder of Lloyd Wilson. He reported back to me that the Courier’s file (the Herald was dropped a long time ago) did not go back to the year 1922 and that the public library had destroyed its file six months before and what I’d better do was apply to the Illinois State Historical Society in Springfield.

I did as he said, and the Historical Society sent me, from its microfilm library, photostatic copies, not always entirely legible, of eight issues of a newspaper once as familiar to me as the back of my hand.

Several of the pieces about the murder were written by the editor, whom I remember as a high-strung, dark-haired man with a green eyeshade and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

People are quoted as saying things I have trouble believing that they actually said, at least in those words. I am reasonably sure, for example, that Cletus’s father did not say to a man he met on the street the day before the murder, “I am broken and a failure and I have nothing for which to live.” Nobody I know in the Middle West has ever gone out of his way to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

There was another angle to the case that the Courier felt obliged to consider. In the spring of the year before he was killed, Lloyd Wilson’s wife left him, taking their four girls, the youngest of whom was a baby eleven months old, and moved to town. She did not divorce him but got a legal separation.

The settlement Lloyd Wilson made on his wife may have represented all the money he had. I don’t know what she looked like. Most farm women of her age were reduced by hard work and frequent child-bearing to a common denominator of plainness.

I fancy that this was true of Lloyd Wilson’s wife and that it was not true of Cletus’s mother, but there is no warrant for my thinking this, and the simple truth is that though so much is made of the woman’s beauty in love stories, passion does not require it.

Cletus’s mother had been an orphan and was brought up by an aunt and uncle, who lived in town. When she left Cletus’s father she moved back to the house she grew up in.

“A year ago,” the Courier-Herald goes on to say, “there were no better friends than Wilson and Smith. They were often in town together. If Smith bought a cigar for himself he also bought one for Wilson, who did the same. In an argument they stuck up for each other against all comers, and people often spoke about what bosom friends they were.

Unlike the wicked stepmother in the fairy tales, she had a gentle nature and could not bear any kind of altercation. And it was not in her to wrestle, like Jacob with the angel, until I stopped being faithful to a dead woman and accepted her as my mother. Instead she chose the role of the go-between. When my older brother had a Saturday-night date and wanted my father to let him have the car, he enlisted her aid and went off with the car keys in his pocket.

It was an all but passive, wholly private passion that turned me into two boys, one of whom went to high school and was conscientious about handing in his homework and tried out for the glee club and the debating society and lingered after school talking to his algebra teacher. The other boy was moody and guilt-ridden and desired nothing from other people but their absence. When I was in bed, with the light out, the two boys became one,

My father was offered a promotion that meant he would work in the Chicago office of the fire insurance company and be home every night like other men.

My stepmother could not bear the thought of leaving Lincoln and her family and her friends. Night after night she wept while she and my father talked behind the closed door of their room. After a few years she could say that she preferred living in Chicago, but she was never again as lighthearted as she was before they left Lincoln.

The move to Chicago came in March but I stayed behind to finish the school year. I was taken in by old Mrs. McGrath. Her house had only two bedrooms, and for three months Grace’s brother Ted and I slept in his room, in twin four-poster beds.

As I looked out of the window at Sheridan Road they looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.

My father found a job for me in his office as a filing clerk, and he and I went to work together on the El.

I was accepted for what I was. It was, after all, not a small town but a big city, and in that school there was no one who was not accepted.