So Little Time (36 page)

“It isn't kind,” Mrs. Roberts said, “we're proud to have you here.”

In the second's silence that followed, Jeffrey felt his face grow red. He had never encountered anyone before who could make such an answer sound entirely kind and simple.

“That's it,” Minot said, “you tell him, Ma,” and Minot put the dog back in the basket.

“I've been wondering how you'd look,” Mrs. Roberts said again. “Minot, where are you going this afternoon?”

“Tennis,” Minot said, “over at the Hayeses'. How about a set of tennis, Jeff?”

Jeffrey glanced at Minot and back at Mrs. Roberts.

“I'd like to watch,” he said.

“What?” Minot said. “You don't play tennis?”

“No,” Jeffrey said, “I never had much time to learn, but I'd like to watch.”

Even while he was speaking, he thought how beautiful Mrs. Roberts must have been when she was young. Later he sometimes suspected that the picture he had always kept of her in his mind was not accurate at all. He must have always believed—as a boy sometimes believes of an older woman—that she knew all about him. He had never wished to tell anyone else everything, but he wanted to tell her about Bragg and about Louella Barnes—about everything he thought.

“We'll be alone for dinner,” she said, “but don't be late.”

He often thought of all of the things that another woman would have said—that of course no one played tennis well, and that you had to learn sometime and that now was the time to learn, that there were sneakers and tennis clothes and racquets in the house, and that Minot would get them for him and that they must all hurry out now and have a good time. She did not say anything like that; she made him feel that he was all right the way he was, and she always made him feel that way.

“It's very kind of you to have me here,” he said again.

His room was done in glazed chintz and the spread on the bed matched the curtains and the cushions on the window seat. There was a fireplace with brass andirons and a mahogany bureau with a shaving mirror. There was a table beside the bed with books on it and a thermos water jug and an eight-day clock in a leather case. There was an armchair by the window seat, and in back of it a door opened to a white-tiled bathroom. The man named Burns had opened Jeffrey's suitcase, and he asked if there was any other baggage coming from the station.

“Mr. Wilson's just back from France,” Minot said. “That's all now, Burns.”

Jeffrey stood in the center of the room. It seemed necessary to make some sort of explanation for not having brought more clothes but he did not mind it as much as he should have, because he knew Minot Roberts.

“I'm sorry,” he began, and then he stopped. He did not want to say that he had not known any better, and it would have been bad taste to say that he hadn't known what he was getting into.

“I can lend you anything you want,” Minot said.

“Oh, no,” he answered, “no, thanks.”

He had never borrowed anything from Minot Roberts. He must have seen that it would spoil everything and that Minot would think the less of him; and also he must have had some sort of fear of losing his own identity, the primitive sort of apprehension which one experiences among strangers in a strange place. Jeffrey remembered how the chintz curtains in the window rustled, and the clean, waxy smell of the room and the faint scent of blue petunias in the little vase on the mantelpiece. No matter what clothes he was wearing, he wanted to be himself.

“I'll be ready in five minutes,” Minot said. “Just sing out if you want anything. My room's right here.”

Minot opened an adjoining door and left it open, and Jeffrey could hear him moving about in the next room, singing a catch of that song:—

“You're going to a happy land where everything is bright, Where the hangouts grow on bushes and we stay out every night.…”

Jeffrey was still grimy from the daycoach. He took off his coat, laid it very carefully on the armchair and walked into the white bathroom. The tub was a huge piece of glazed porcelain set on a floor of octagonal white tiles. There was an elaborate shower fixture with a white curtain. The washstand stood on a solid pedestal, and there was a smell of scented soap. There were huge bath towels with monograms and smaller towels of different sizes. He had never seen so many towels.

“Jeff,” he heard Minot call. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he called back, “I'm all right.”

Then that old pursuing thought came over him again as he picked up an embroidered washcloth. He wondered why he was there and how he had ever got there. He had never been so far away from anything familiar, even in the war. His mind went back to the Barneses' front porch that first time he had called on Louella, and he remembered how the rocking chair had tipped backwards and how he had kicked out his legs involuntarily to balance it. He was not the same person any longer, and the worst of it was, he could not tell how it had happened. Even his face in the mirror above the washstand looked as though it were a stranger's.

They drove over in the gray Cadillac with the red leather upholstery. It was a warm day in late August, and whereas at home at Bragg there was already a hint of autumn which was making the first swamp maples turn, it was still hot summer by the Sound. This may have been why Jeffrey always associated the place with that steaming hum of the tree locusts in the daytime and with the insistent clamor of katydids at night. He always pictured the water of the Sound as peacefully blue, beyond a warm golden light which fell on lawns and silver beeches, and on umbrella trees and weeping birches. He always heard the snipping of shears, squaring off a privet hedge, and voices and laughter from the lawns. He always connected Willow Road, where Madge had lived, with a clear hot summer's day and with just a faint breeze stirring from the water; so that often on a hot day when he heard the locusts on the trees, a great deal about Willow Road would come back to him again. He had seen it all, he had heard all the voices first in summer, and that was the way it stayed in his mind. Somewhere back among the pages of what was known as “youth's lexicon,” that 1919 model Cadillac was running on tires which sometimes would last for as much as eight or ten thousand miles, and he was on the front seat with Minot Roberts.

“Here it is,” Minot said. “The court's in back. It's better than the Club.” There was no way of telling that he would know the Hayes place very well and that Mrs. Hayes would ask him to plant willow trees on it because he was so practical and that finally he would be the one who would see about selling that place and removing all the furniture. The house was one of those rambling structures, built with the grotesque effort at informality which was common in the early nineteen-hundreds, and all the landscape gardening was dated and too ornate, but it did not seem so then.

Minot Roberts parked the car at the edge of the turn-around at the front of the house and slammed the door and picked up his tennis racquet.

“They're all at the court,” Minot said. “Come on.”

When they walked across the lawn there was a smell of freshly mowed turf that was sweet and very warm. He could never understand why, as the voices came nearer, the idea of meeting strangers had not thrown him into a panic, except that he was still so far removed from anything he had known. There was so much of everything and everything seemed to be untouched by any of the things that worried most people.

They were playing mixed doubles on the clay court beyond a broad sweep of lawn. The backstops were covered with rambler roses. Some men and girls were seated watching, and a man in a white crew sweater clutching a handful of grass was chasing a girl in a short white dress along the terrace. The players had stopped their game, and everyone was laughing. The girl ran very fast, and she was laughing too, and it seemed to Jeffrey that they were too old to be making so much noise. It made him feel embarrassed, because the girl was pretty, although he never could tell what her looks had to do with it.

“Damn you,” he heard her call, “please, Roger, damn you, not in my hair.”

She was slender and very pretty, especially her legs, although Jeffrey realized that he should not have thought of them.

“Minot,” she called. “Minot, he—”

It was the sort of byplay, indirectly connected with sex, that embarrassed Jeffrey then, and afterwards. He wished that people, if they wanted to do that sort of thing, would chase each other in private. When they saw that Jeffrey was a stranger, the girl and the man both stopped. The man named Roger had short, blond hair. His face was chubby and red from his exertions.

“She put grass down my neck,” he said.

Perhaps the man knew he had made a fool of himself, but it would have been better to have passed over the explanation. The girl pushed a wisp of damp hair off her forehead. She was out of breath, and she had stopped laughing, but her lips were parted in a smile. She was smaller than Jeffrey had thought at first, and she stood very straight.

“This is Mr. Wilson,” Minot said, “Miss Hayes.”

“Oh, yes,” Madge said, “hello.” Then she wriggled her shoulders and clutched at the front of her dress.

“Something's come undone inside,” she said. “I don't suppose you've got a pin.”

She was looking up at him, smiling, and that memory always had a queer discordant note of triviality. He had no way of knowing that Madge's underwear was always coming loose and that she was always unnecessarily frank about it. He had no way of knowing that they would fall in love. Jeffrey supposed that all married people must have shared some such moment of their own, for he had heard many of them speak of something like it with a sort of faraway affection. “We met in the strangest way,” they would say. “It was in front of the Information Desk at Grand Central.” They met on boats, they met at hotels, or someone introduced them. After all, they had to meet somewhere. They must have remembered it so clearly because it was the one time that most human beings ever realized how greatly a fortuitous circumstance could change a life. All this was so obvious that it made him impatient when he heard them talk about it; but when it came to himself and Madge, it had the difference of being their private property. It stayed there, suspended in time. It was something mentioned in happiness and quarrels. It was always there, something they would always share in common. He had heard Madge wish to God that he had never come there that afternoon, and he had wished the same thing. He had heard her say how dreadful it would have been if he had never come, and he had said the same thing, too. No matter how he and Madge might feel, it was always there, and there was something a little sad in the knowledge that it was so irrevocable, and a sadness in the thought that they had both been so free, so young and so unwise, perhaps. They were always young in that picture in his mind.

Once when they were speaking of it with that queer sort of curiosity with which one speaks of such things, Jeffrey asked her what she had ever seen in him. It was an unfortunate time to ask the question for it was during one of those occasions when Madge saw nothing in him that was desirable.

“I don't know,” she said, but she must have tried to live it all again. “You were different.”

It was not any sort of answer, and he told her so.

“That gray suit,” she said, “it looked like blotting paper.” He knew that she was seeing it all again.

“It wasn't a bad suit at all,” he said, “it cost me fifty-eight dollars.”

“The trousers were too long,” she said. “They wrinkled around your shoes, and your necktie didn't match.”

“It wasn't meant to match,” he said, but he knew that she could see it all, just as he often saw it.

“It was all a terrible mistake,” she said.

“All right,” Jeffrey said, “all right, if you say it was.”

“Everyone always said it was,” she answered, and then neither of them spoke for a while.

“You looked so alone,” she said. “You looked so sure of yourself.”

At first he thought she did not mean it. It showed how little she had understood him to have thought that he was sure of himself.

“Besides, you were very good-looking,” she said. “You looked—I don't know. You had nice shoulders.”

He tried to piece something together from her words, but they did not make much sense.

“Darling,” she said, “if you hadn't liked me, you wouldn't have—looked the way you did.”

“How did I look?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she answered, “the way you did. Darling, what was it—”

She stopped, but he knew what she meant.

“It must have been your hair,” he said. “I liked your hair. Your hair was coming down.”

“Jeff,” she said, “there must have been something else, there must have been—”

“There's no use analyzing everything,” Jeffrey said, and then before she could stop him, he knew the answer, although it could not bear analysis. “There's no use going over it. We couldn't help it, Madge.”

23

The Peach Crop's Always Fine

It was often difficult for Jeffrey to get his mind on any sort of work after lunching at the Clinton Club. In the last few months it had been particularly difficult to work, since whatever he turned his mind to seemed to have little connection with anything that was going on in the world. Whenever he tried to concentrate on something, his attention had a habit of focusing on something else—on the past, for instance, as it had that day. He was sure that it was not so much that he was growing older, as that time was moving so fast. New York was changing faster than he had ever known it, although it had always been a restless city; and what was more, there was a continual hint of more change to come.

When he left the Clinton Club that afternoon, the bank buildings on Fifth Avenue seemed only to give an illusion of solidity, although the architecture of banks was designed to indicate permanence. The Fifth Avenue Bank adhered doggedly to the old tradition, showing without fanfare, as Walter Newcombe would have put it, that it was the New York family bank, handling the solidest accounts over generations. Its exterior was consciously shabby, like Barclays or Brown, Shipley's in London. But the Bankers Trust was designed on a newer basis. The Bankers Trust with its plate-glass windows rose proudly toward the sky as impregnable as a superdreadnought. You could not doubt your money would be safe in such a building, all filled with bright vice presidents who knew everything about securities. Though those banks were as familiar to Jeffrey as his own face, the sidewalks in front of them and the crowds moving by them seemed shoddy, reminding him that Fifth Avenue in the Forties was not quite what it used to be.