So Little Time (16 page)

In the meanwhile, Beckie knew that they must start on everything very carefully. She and Fred weren't idiots enough to think that they could do it all themselves as the Waldrons down the road had tried to do, and other people whom she would not mention. She had tried and tried to get Madge to employ an architect when Madge had bought her place, and not one of those little country contractors who had no imagination and who didn't really know anything about plumbing or about gracious living. Beckie knew that the selection of an architect was a very crucial problem and one which had made many of her friends, whose names she wouldn't mention either, fall perfectly flat on their faces at the start. She wanted an architect who of course would have ideas about vistas and stairs and halls and sinks and things like that, but she wanted one who would be receptive to her ideas, and Fred's too, since after all, it was going to be their house and not the architect's, wasn't it? In short, she wanted an architect who would work both with her, as she said, and for her. And that was how they had found Simpson Boiling. They had just met quite by accident at a cocktail party after she had been listening to “Tristan,” and Simpson had been wonderful.

Simpson had built those stone wings on either side of the old house, one for the children and one for the guests, exactly the way she and Fred, too, had wanted them. Simpson and Beckie had both been quite passionate about Norman-French architecture and at almost the same time they had thought of a turret, not for a staircase, but for a little hide-a-way study, and when it was all finished, it had proved what Beckie had always said—that Norman-French and New England were really the same thing, basically, and she and Simpson had not done a single thing, either, to spoil the spirit of the old house. They had simply made it the central motif of a little old Norman courtyard where peaches and plums were espaliered against the walls.

Beckie was never tired of telling about the fun that she and Simpson and Fred, too, had had with that old house, and if they had to start and do it all over again, they would not have done a thing differently, not even Fred. She was the one who had discovered, when they started to scrape away the wallpaper in the little parlor, that there had been layers and layers, but underneath them was the original paper of all, made to look like gray-stone blocks with little flowers growing in the cracks. One of the little men from the village had been scraping the wall, and he had scraped off most of it, but Beckie had caught him in time to save enough of it, which only went to show that you had to be there every
minute
when you were doing an old house, even if you were working with someone who had Simpson Boiling's reverence. No one had seen anything like that paper, and Fred had known how wild she was about it. It had been perfectly mad of him, and he never would tell her how much it cost, but he had had that paper copied, printed from wood blocks and everything, and now the blocks were right upstairs in the attic and no one else could ever have any paper like that, ever.

That was only one of the discoveries lying in wait for them in the old house. There was the Dutch oven in the Rumpus Room, for instance, which had been all covered up with plaster, and the hand-hewn oak beams in the living room—Simpson knew they would be there if you ripped off the ceiling—and then the enormous fireplace. First there had only been a hole for a stovepipe, made, Beckie supposed, by those Leveroni people; but when you took the plaster away, there was a tiny little bit of a fireplace, and when you took the bricks away from that, there was a bigger one. It was the size of the fluted pine mantel that had shown that there must have been a bigger one still sometime, although you couldn't hope that it existed. Yet, when they tore out that second fireplace, there was the great big one, and the old crane was hanging right inside it with the old pothooks on it, just as you could see it now, and Fred could warm a toddy from it when they came down there in winter.

There had been only one real disagreement with Simpson, but Fred had stood right behind her, and Beckie and Fred had been perfectly right. Simpson had wanted to tear down the old barn, because he said it was leaky and full of rats, but when she, and Fred too, saw the old rafters, all pegged together by hand-cut pegs, they simply could not do it, and so you had the barn as it was now—a sort of a museum and a sort of a secondary playroom when the Rumpus Room grew too crowded on rainy days, but it was still a barn. Even the hay was still on the lofts on either side, and you did not need to worry about cigarettes because the hay had been fire-proofed by something that had been squirted all over it. It no longer smelled like hay, but Beckie said perhaps this was just as well because couples never wanted to get lost long in the hayloft. The rest of it was simple, once you had the groundwork. It was then only a question of moving old trees and grouping them, and Fred had seen to that. Fred used to call it a rodeo, when they rounded up old trees. You just herded them together and fed them, and there you were.

10

Just Don't Say We're Dead

“It's the next road to the right,” Madge said. “We've passed the big signboard with the cigarette advertisement, and there's the filling station.”

There had not been a cloud in the sky all day, and now the shadows were growing long, and the leaves of the maple trees glowed red and yellow in the sunlight. Now they had turned off the concrete of Route 7, there were no more roadside stands or signboards; they were in the real country. The only day that was ever as good as you thought it was going to be was an October day. There was a sweetish smell of falling leaves and of fresh earth then that always turned Jeffrey's thoughts backwards to where he had lived as a boy, although the air was not cold enough, and there was not quite the same autumn haze. He and Madge were driving in the country, but the aura of the city was still over it because there were too many city people there. Too many writers, too many illustrators, too many advertising men and motion-picture executives and actors and radio-script men, and frustrated women who did houses over, and business men who wanted to get away somewhere—come the Revolution—and nice young couples and ones that weren't so nice, and retired colonels, were all buying Connecticut farms and setting up roadhouses and tearooms and antique shops and camps and schools. It was the vanguard of the city moving out through those stony fields and old orchards. You could hop in a car and be at 42d Street in an hour and a half, using the Merritt Parkway, and yet it reminded Jeffrey of what he still thought of as home. It was the air and the smell of leaves and that dank musty smell from the alders and the brown grass that were the same. For some reason, it made Jeffrey think of Halloween, of stealing garden gates and of tying strings to knockers.

They were approaching what Beckie called the “little” village where she tried to buy as much as she could from the “little” grocery store and the “little” hardware store. The village had the wide, elm-shaded street characteristic of all Connecticut towns, the white church with its double-arched window with small uneven glass panes that glittered crookedly in the sunset, the white houses with green blinds, and the general store with its wide front stoop and its placards advertising soft drinks and tobacco. The store looked as though it had always been there, but the old house beside it had been turned into an antique shop with a cradle, a rocking-horse, and four huge green glass bottles on its lawn. The old inn had been renovated, all fitted out with a taproom. It was called the Coach and Kettle, and a sign hanging from it, new and fresh, depicted a coach and a kettle. The village green had never been intended to be quite so neat. There should have been a cow grazing on it and a milk pail sunning on a hook by a kitchen door and boys playing ball or tag. Now there was nothing except the clear October sun and a boy in a white coat brushing the steps of the Coach and Kettle. Jeffrey could see that nearly all the houses on the green had been bought by people from New York, interesting, sensitive people, and that the villagers lived on a back street somewhere else. Beckie had said that they were getting just the kind of people who would appreciate the charm of that little village. Phil Rheingold lived on the green—the Rheingold who did the etchings of wild ducks. Then there was a Mr. Tevis of the firm of Tevis and Waddley, insurance brokers in New York, who collected locks and door latches as a hobby. Then, too, there was Mrs. Leland Hanscom who sold the antiques, a very gallant person from New York whose husband never could seem to get anywhere but now she had him in back somewhere regluing chairs—and there were more people like this who were coming all the time. Fred and Beckie's place was still a mile beyond the village.

“Jeffrey,” Madge said, “please drive past the graveyard very slowly.”

Madge was always interested in graveyards, and there it was beside the road, an acre or so of tilting stones surrounded by sapling-choked fields. Some of the stones, you could see, were very old slate, and there were some flat tombs of red sandstone that were disintegrating with the weather, and others were newer, of white marble, and some still newer of purplish polished granite. The little flags from Decoration Day, bleached and sodden by the rain, still stood above the graves of those who had been soldiers.

“It's like ‘Our Town,'” Madge said.

He knew that she was not referring to her town, or his, but to the play by Thornton Wilder.

“Well,” Jeffrey said, “you can't hurt a graveyard.”

“But Jeff,” Madge said, “you said you liked ‘Our Town.'”

“It was all right,” Jeffrey said, “but—never mind.”

It was not the memory of the play so much as the actors that bothered him, and it was not the actors so much as the critics who had written of it, for they had been dealing only with what they thought a town should be. It was like one of those sweet potatoes which used to stand on the kitchen windowsill immersed in a glass of water. Sprouts would come from the top of it, and roots would drop down from below, dangling nakedly in that slightly turbid water, seeking vainly for the earth. He might be wrong, but he thought that the play had lacked earth, except for the graveyard scene, and you couldn't do much to a graveyard. The village green had been like that, an artistic conception more than a place.

“We're nearly there,” Madge said. “There are Fred's new hurdle fences.” Then they saw the Norman tower and the barn roof of Higgins Farm, and they turned up the driveway.

“Look,” Madge said, “they're on the lawn, sitting on the Joggle Board.”

“What?” Jeffrey said. “What in hell is that?”

“Oh, Jeff,” Madge said, “Fred brought one from Carolina. They used to have them on plantations. It's just a big long board bench, and when you sit in the middle of it, it joggles.”

“Oh me, oh my!” Jeffrey said.

“Oh, Jeff,” Madge told him, “please be nice. Fred sees us. He's going to ring the bell.”

“Oh me, oh my,” Jeffrey said. “Since when did he start bell ringing?”

“Oh, Jeff,” Madge said, “
please
be nice. He just bought the bell.”

Sure enough, you could see the front of the house now with the fanlight over the doorway and the terrace and a long board bench with people sitting on it; and sure enough, Fred was running to the side of the driveway ringing a large dinner bell. Fred was dressed in something light blue from Brooks Brothers called a “Frontier Suit,” and with it he wore a red-checked shirt.

“Hi,” Fred was yelling, “hi.” The car was suddenly stuffy as it always was after a long trip. There were stray packages of cigarettes on the seats and petals from the chrysanthemums, and extra overcoats, and powder had spilled from Madge's compact. Beckie was running toward them. Beckie was wearing a full pleated gingham dress, brownish purple with little roses on it. Her skirt was billowing and her legs were bare; she was wearing sandals and horn-rimmed glasses. Then Jeffrey was shaking hands with Fred while Madge and Beckie kissed. Then Fred dropped the bell and threw his arms around Madge and kissed her, and then Jeffrey kissed Beckie. Years ago Madge had told him always to kiss Beckie, because she expected it. Your best friend, Madge had told him, always expected to be kissed by your husband.

“Jeff,” Beckie said, “you oaf, you, I was worried you weren't coming.” Jeffrey started to answer, but there was no time.

“We've been working all day,” Beckie said, “and you've missed it. We've had weeding teams, but now Adam is going to make us juleps.”

“Maybe that's why I was late,” Jeffrey said.

“You oaf,” Beckie told him, “you'll work tomorrow, even if it's Sunday. You'll be on my team tomorrow.”

“Leave the car right here,” Fred called. “Adam will put it away, and he'll rustle up the bags. Come and meet everybody. They're great people.”

“Fred, dear,” Beckie said, “perhaps they'd like to see their room, first, and wash up a little. You're going to be in the Old House, in Uncle Joel's room.”

Jeffrey looked across the lawn. The old well was still there with a brand-new well sweep on it.

“All day long,” Jeffrey said, “someone has been asking me if I don't want to wash my hands.”

“Jeff,” Madge said, and looked at him hard, “Jeff.” But Beckie had begun to laugh.

“Don't scold him, dear,” she said, and she linked her arm through his.

“Come on,” Fred said, “stop necking, and meet the company.”

“Fred,” Beckie said, “perhaps some of the others will begin to think you always talk this way—just like a local yokel.”

“That's what a farm's for, ain't it, by heck?” Fred said. “Come out and see my new turning lathe, Jeff. I've got a real woodworking shop here now.”

“A woodworking shop,” Jeffrey said, “by heck!”

“Jeff,” Madge said, “you don't have to be a local yokel, too.”