All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell Page B

escaped most people, or that annoyed his father. Hissister Virginia was real, but his father and mother he was aware of mostly as generalities, agents of authority or love or discipline, telling him to sit up straight in his chair, to stand with his shoulders back, to pick up his clothes, read in a better light, stop chewing his nails, stop sniffing and go upstairs and get a handkerchief. When his father asked some question at the dinner table and his mother didn’t answer, or, looking down at her plate, answered inaudibly, and when his father then, in the face of these warnings, pursued the matter until she left the table and went upstairs, it didn’t mean that his mother and father didn’t love each other, or that Edward didn’t have as happy a home as any other boy.
    Meanwhile, his plans made, his blue eyes a facsimile of innocence, he waited for them all to go some place. Who then moved through the still house? No known Edward. A murderer with flowers in his hair. A male impersonator. A newt undergoing metamorphosis. Now this, now that mirror was his accomplice. The furniture was accessory to the fact. The house being old, he could count on the back stairs to cry out at the approach of discovery. When help came, it came from the outside as usual. Harrison Geliert, passing the door of his son’s room one November night, seeing Edward with his hand at the knob of his radio and the headphones over his ears, reflected on Edward’s thinness, his pallor, his poor posture, his moodiness of late, and concluded that he did not spend enough time out-of-doors. Edward was past the age when you could tell him to go outside and play, but if he had a job of some kind that would keep him out in the open air, like delivering papers … Too shocked to argue with his father (you don’t ask someone to give you a job out of the kindness of their heart when they don’t even know you and also when there may not even be any job or if there is they may have somebody else in mind who would be better at it and who deserves it more), Edward went downtown after school and stood beside the wooden railing in the front office of the Draperville
Evening Star
, waiting for someone to notice him. He expected to be sent away in disgrace, and instead he was given a canvas bag and a list of names and told to come around to the rear of the building.
    F ROM five o’clock on, all over town, all along College Avenue with its overarching elms, Eighth Street, Ninth Street, Fourth Street, in the block of two-story flats backed up against the railroad tracks, and on those unpaved, nameless streets out where the sidewalk ended and the sky tookover, old men sitting by the front window and children at a loss for something to do waited and listened for the sound of the paper striking the porch, and the cry — disembodied and forlorn — of “Pay-er!” Women left their lighted kitchens or put down their sewing in upstairs rooms and went to the front door and looked to see if the evening paper had come. Sometimes spring had come instead, and they smelled the sweet syringa in the next yard. Or the smell was of burning leaves. Sometimes they saw their breath in the icy air. A few minutes later they went to the door and looked again. Left too long, the paper blew out into the yard, got rained on, was covered with snow. Their persistence rewarded at last, they bent down and picked up the paper, opened it, and read the headline, while the paper boy rode on rapidly over lawns he had been told not to ride over, as if he were bent on overtaking lost time or some other paper boy who was not there.
    In a place where everybody could easily be traced back to his origin, people did not always know who the paper boy was or care what time he got home to supper. They assumed from a general knowledge of boys that if the paper was late it was because the paper boy dawdled somewhere, shooting marbles, throwing snowballs, when he should have been delivering their paper.
    Every