So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

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.

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.

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.

and 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

The day we moved in, Grace, overtired, dropped a bottle of iodine she was putting in the medicine cabinet of the upstairs bathroom and it fell into the washstand and broke. She and I spent our first evening in the new house scrubbing at what looked like bloodstains on the shining white wall.

Once in an outdoor gym class a football came through the air and I managed to hang on to it. This was long after the class had stopped expecting me to catch anything and there was general rejoicing and disbelief. But they never rode me. 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.

Why didn’t I speak to him? I guess because I was so surprised. And because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what was polite in the circumstances. I couldn’t say I’m sorry about the murder and all that, could I? In Greek tragedies, the Chorus never attempts to console the innocent bystander but instead, sticking to broad generalities, grieves over the fate of mankind, whose mistake was to have been born in the first place.

the fields were separated from each other by Osage-orange hedgerows that were full of nesting birds.

This statement was followed by a flood of tears such as I hadn’t ever known before, not even in my childhood. I got up from the leather couch and, I somehow knew, with his permission left his office and the building and walked down Sixth Avenue to my office. New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.