William Maxwell, "With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge"

razor-containing apples & chillingly minor injuries

“I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted.”

I find William Maxwell terrifying. This seems absurd — he is, by reputation, the twinkly grandpa of American literature, always either shepherding some brilliant but under-appreciated writer into the pages of The New Yorker (where he served for decades as the fiction editor) or writing letters so courtly and charming that, even when he’s rejecting a piece or canceling a trip, his recipients levitate while reading them.

And his fiction too — dealing as it does in horses, wagon wheels, and well-pumps — seems about as threatening as a randomly selected episode of A Prairie Home Companion. So Long, See You Tomorrow. The Folded Leaf. Gentle wisdom, sepia snapshots — his books sound like just the things to read under a woolen blanket before surrendering to a nap.

Well: wake up. Because behind Maxwell’s kindhearted facade lies a psyche dangerous in its pitilessness, its coldness, its lack of illusion. His books are terrifying not in the way of Stephen King; they are terrifying in the way of an early-morning encounter with a too-bright mirror. The apples he hands out from the rocking chair on his porch (Here you are, my dear) contain razor blades, every one of them.

Take, for instance, “With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge,” a five-page story I reread every couple of years, always with a shiver. 

The story begins, as Maxwell’s fictions do, in a voice so clear and calm that it barely feels like writing at all. Other writers force neon energy drinks or elaborate cocktails on you; Maxwell pours spring water. 

“When I see ten-year-old boys, walking along the street in New York City or on the crosstown bus, I am struck by how tiny they are. But at the time I am speaking of, I wasn’t very big myself.”

The narrator, in harmless grandpa mode, goes on to tell us about his Boy Scout troop (“I went out of my way to help elderly people across the street who could have managed perfectly well on their own”) and their saintly troop leader, Professor C.S. Oglevee. Maybe, we think, this won’t be so much as a story as a bit of tender reminiscence.    

But there is, if you feel for it, already a chill in the air.

“[Oglevee] was immensely patient, good-natured, and kind. So clearly so that I felt there was not room in his nature for the unpredictable crankiness and unreasonable severity other grown-ups exhibited from time to time. If anybody said one word against him, even today, I would get excited. Which means, of course, that I didn’t allow for the fact that he was a fallible human being. The flaws that as a fallible human being he must have had nobody ever knew about, in any case.”

And then a further chill: a new boy joins the troop. His name is Max Rabinowitz, and he’s younger than the narrator, friendless, the son of a struggling shop-owner (and, not incidentally, a Jew). The specter of bullying, and of a blithe sort of anti-semitism, rears its head.

But it had better — for narrative purposes — accelerate the pace of its head-rearing, because four of the story’s five pages have already elapsed. Maxwell hardly seems to have left himself room for anything memorable to happen, let alone anything dark. 

“We taught the Cub Scouts how to tie a clove hitch and a running bowline and how (if you were lucky) to build a fire without any matches and other skills appropriate to the outdoor life.”

You see?, you say, holding up your all-but-finished apple. No razor!

Chew carefully.

“Somebody, after a few weeks, decided that there ought to be an initiation. Into what I don’t think we bothered to figure out.”

The narrator and the older boys walk the Cub Scouts out onto a bridge. An air of ambient mischief hovers, looking for a suitable action into which it can be distilled. Someone proposes a blindfolded foot-race (the Cub Scout uniforms come with bandanas).

The narrator comes up with a better idea.

“I noticed that the bridge we were standing on had low sides that came up about to the little boys’ belly buttons. I cannot pretend that I didn’t know what was going to happen, but a part of me that I was not sufficiently acquainted with had taken over suddenly, and he/I lined the blindfolded boys up with their backs to one side of the bridge, facing the other, and said, ‘On your marks, get set, go!…’ and they charged bravely across the bridge and into the opposite railing and knocked the wind out of themselves.”

This sentence — which contains the whole of the incident that gives the story its title — is a marvel. Look at how deftly Maxwell manages the choreography of what might have been a hard-to-visualize moment. Notice how he folds in subtle touches of psychology (a part of me that I was not sufficiently acquainted with, he/I) without weighing down the action. But this sentence is also, with its many clauses and its slash and its incorporated dialog, uncharacteristically fancy. Now Maxwell gets back to pouring water.

“I believe in the forgiveness of sins. Some sins. I also believe that what is done is done and cannot be undone. The reason I didn’t throw myself on my knees in the dust and beg them (and God) to forgive me is that I knew He wouldn’t, and that even if He did, I wouldn’t forgive myself. Sick with shame at the pain I had inflicted, I tore Max Rabinowitz’s blindfold off and held him by the shoulders until his gasping subsided.” 

The violence here is, in the scheme of things, ridiculously slight. The first time I read the story I expected one of the boys to go over the railing, or to trip and give himself a cerebral hemorrhage — something that would allow me to place this safely in the realm of short stories. Hemingway’s Francis Macomber getting shot in the head; Ambrose Bierce’s condemned man falling into the icy river — that’s how the short story anthologies do it. 

But that isn’t how Maxwell does it. He keeps his story’s feet insistently on the ground. He doesn’t want you to confront the darkness in some persona off in the literary distance; he wants you to confront the darkness in yourself. And so he ends the story like this:

“Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person’s life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted.”

The hairs on the back of my neck have usually been stirring throughout this entire last page — this is the moment when they stand up. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted. 

The line — so bare in its honesty that even a comma would feel evasive — has an O’Henry-ish quality to it: it feels like a twist. But it’s an inner twist, an emotional twist — the narrator has discovered that the part of himself with which he wasn’t sufficiently acquainted, the he within the I, will be a permanent resident. Sometimes in a fight — on the page or in life — one person says something so cruel, so unexpected and merciless and true, that it changes the air pressure, it carves a little pocket of silence around itself. Here the narrator uncorks such a line on himself. 

Maxwell often seems, in his fiction and his letters and even in his sweetly melancholy author photos, so elegant, so virtuous, so wise, that he could never, would never, hurt you. He isn’t. Take him at his word.