All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell Page B

when he was affectionate with her it was always as if the moment were slightly out of focus; he felt a restraint. He worried lest it be too close to making love to her. The difference was not great, and he was not sure whether it existed at all.
    “Would you like to hear a riddle?” she asked.
    “All right.”
    “Who was the fastest runner in history?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, smiling at her. “Who was?”
    “Adam. He was the first in the human race.… Teeheeheeheehee, wasn’t that a good one?”
    W AKING in the night, Cindy heard her mother and father laughing behind the closed door of their room. It was a sound she liked to hear, and she turned over and went right back to sleep.
    “W HAT was that?”
    He raised his head from the pillow and listened.
    “Somebody crying ‘Help!’ ” Iris said.
    He got up and went to the window. There was no one in the street except a taxi driver brushing out the back seat of his hack. Again he heard it. Somebody being robbed. Or raped. Or murdered.
    “Help …” Faintly this time. And not from the direction of the park. The taxi driver did not look up at the sound, which must be coming from inside a building somewhere. With his face to the window, George waited for the sound to come again and it didn’t. Nothing but silence. If he called the police, what could he say? He got back into bed and lay there, sick with horror, his knees shaking. In the morning maybe the
Daily News
would have what happened.
    But he forgot to buy a
News
on his way to work, and days passed, and he no longer was sure what night it was that they heard the voice crying “Help!” and felt that he ought to go through weeks of the
News
until he found out what happened. If it was in the
News
. And if something happened.

The Trojan Women
    T HE business district of Draperville, Illinois (population 12,000), was built around a neo-Roman courthouse and the courthouse square. Adjoining the railroad station, in the center of a small plot of ground, a bronze tablet marked the site of the Old Alton Depot where the first Latham County Volunteers entrained for the Civil War, and where the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln halted briefly at sunrise on May 3rd, 1865. Other towns within a radius of a hundred miles continued to prosper, but Draperville stopped growing. It was finished by 1900. The last civic accomplishment was the laying of the tracks for the Draperville Street Railway. The population stayed the same and the wide residential streets were lined with trees that every year grew larger and more beautiful, as if to conceal by a dense green shade the failure of men of enterprise and sound judgment to beget these same qualities in their sons.
    The streetcar line started at the New Latham Hotel and ran past the baseball park and the county jail, past the state insane asylum, and on out to the cemetery and the lake. The lake was actually an abandoned gravel pit, half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, fed by underground springs. Its water was very deep and very cold. The shoreline was dotted with summer cottages and between the cottages and an expanse of cornfields was a thin grove of oak trees. Every summer two or three dozen families moved out here in June, to escape the heat, and stayed until the end of August, when the reopening of school forced them to return to town. After Labor Day, with the cottages boarded up and the children’s voices stilled, the lake was washed in equinoctial rains, polished by the October sun, and became once more a part of the wide empty landscape.
    On a brilliant September day in 1912 the streetcar stopped in front of the high school, and a large, tranquil colored woman got on. She wasburdened with a shopping bag and several parcels, which she deposited on the seat beside her. There were two empty seats between the colored woman and the nearest white passengers, who nodded to her but did not include her in their conversation. The streetcar was open on the sides,