So Little Time (75 page)

Sally was wearing a green pull-over sweater, the sleeves of which were pushed up. Madge was right; Sally did have a good figure and carried her head and shoulders very well. She had on a short flannel skirt and her legs were bare. Girls never wore stockings any more. She was wearing low-heeled sandals that showed her toes between the strips of braided leather.

She was smiling at him as though she were a pretty girl he was going to take somewhere—as though he and she were going somewhere alone.

“It's awfully nice you asked me,” Jeffrey said. As soon as he spoke her expression changed and he was old and she was young. He saw her glance toward Jim, and Jeffrey wished he did not know so much because he knew exactly what was going through her mind. She was thinking that Jim should never have told him, that Jim had spoiled some of it.

“Jim almost thought of it,” she said. It was exactly as though she owned Jim and yet as though they both owned him, and as though they both knew a great deal more about Jim than he knew about himself.

“Come on,” Jim said, “let's go. I'm getting hungry.”

It sounded like Jeffrey's own voice years back telling Madge—“Let's go.”

“Jim,” Sally said, “have you brought a book?” And she smiled at Jeffrey. “I always like to bring a book and Jim always forgets it.”

“It doesn't matter,” Jim said. “We never get to reading it.”

“Jim,” Sally said, but she laughed.

“We've been on a whale of a lot of picnics,” Jim said, “last summer and the summer before, and we've never read a book yet.”

Sally laughed again.

“We might,” she said. “We ought to.”

“We ought to, but we don't,” Jim said, and then he looked at Jeffrey. “Sally's hell for picnics. I know why it is—she's never had to eat outdoors.”

“You two get in the front seat,” Jeffrey told them. “I'll sit in back with the lunch.”

“Oh, no, don't,” Sally said. “There's lots of room in front.”

That was what girls always said when Jeffrey was young. It was always crowded but there was always room in front.

“Come on,” Jim said, “let's go!”

Jeffrey felt very anxious to get away before anyone saw them from the house, before the telephone rang or before Madge came back from town, before anything could spoil it. The September sunlight was softer and yellower than August and nothing that he saw felt as if it belonged to the present.

“‘We're going to a happy land,'” Jim was singing, “‘where everything is bright, where the highballs grow on bushes and we stay out every night.'”

Jeffrey turned toward him very quickly.

“Now where did you learn that?” he asked.

“They sing it out in Sill,” Jim said. “It's an old Air Corps song, I guess.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said: “‘Where you never lift a finger, not even darn your socks, and little drops of Haig and Haig come trickling down the rocks.'”

“Let's eat,” Jim said. “When do we eat?”

“When we find a nice place,” Sally said. “We'll find one pretty soon.”

“How about finding one now?” Jim said. “How about right here?”

“No,” Sally said, “not here. There must be cows in there.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “there must be cows, and besides there might be a bull.”

“Sally's always looking for a nice place,” Jim said, “and you can't tell what she means.”

“Jim doesn't understand it,” Sally said. “He just wants to stop anywhere beside the road.”

“How about here?” Jim asked. “Here's a nice place.”

“No,” Sally said. “Let's go a little farther.”

“You tell us, Sally,” Jim asked, “what you mean by a nice place.”

“I know,” Jeffrey said. “There has to be a brook in it.”

“Of course there has to be,” Sally said.

“And pine trees and moss and rocks and ferns and hay and no papers,” Jim said.

“You see, he'll never wait long enough,” Sally said. “But I'm right about it. There has to be everything.”

“My dear,” Jeffrey said, “there has to be, but there never is—not ever.”

“There's no harm in wanting there to be,” Sally said.

“No,” Jeffrey told her, “no harm at all.”

“I just mean,” Sally said, “it seems to me silly not to be happy when you have a chance, and you have a chance when you go on a picnic. That's what I mean.”

“Listen, Toots,” Jim said, “how can you be happy if you don't eat? How about stopping right here and eating in the car?”

“He always wants to eat in the car,” Sally said. “Jim dear—”

Then she stopped.

“Go ahead and call him that,” Jeffrey said, “if that's the way you feel about him.”

“Jim dear,” Sally said, “let's go on a little longer, just around the bend.”

“There'll always be another bend,” Jim said.

“No,” Sally answered, “just this one.”

“Promise?” Jim asked her.

“Yes,” she answered, “promise.”

“Boy,” Jim said, “it looks as though we're going to eat! We're going to eat even if it's a junk yard.”

Once during the next summer even in spite of the gas rationing Jeffrey took the station wagon by himself and tried to find the place. When he sat alone in the front seat he tried to think of Jim and Sally as being there with him. He tried to fit those trivial bits of conversation again to the landmarks as he passed them. No, not here; there were cows here. No, not there; it wasn't a pretty place. There had to be a brook and everything, and there was no harm in wanting everything.

“I want to eat,” he could hear Jim say. “We've got to eat sometime, Toots.”

Jeffrey knew the country very well. They had driven up the concrete road. He remembered the turn to the right on the tar road, and where the roads forked, and where they had taken the dirt road to the left. Ever since the last war Jeffrey had noticed terrain and hills and woods, and his mind sorted them out carefully whether he wanted it to or not, but when he tried that next summer, he could not find the place, certainly not for sure. There was a maddening similarity about those bends in the road, so that he could not recall the bend where Jim had said promise and Sally had said, yes, promise. He knew there was a brook and a barbed-wire fence, but he found two brooks and two bends and he could not tell which was the right one. It was gone like Jim and everything else, and perhaps he was glad that it was gone, for it could always be something to remember that belonged to the three of them and to no one else.

At any rate it was not a bad place. There was a brook, a rather wide brook with a sandy bottom, and Jeffrey remembered distinctly that there were trees growing near it, because he remembered the sun and shadows on the water. There was a bank where they sat looking at the water and a rock against which Jeffrey had leaned his back and it was not a bad rock either. Sally had gone in wading. She had left her sandals beside the rock.

“She always goes in wading,” Jim said, “whenever she sees a brook, and she's that way whenever she's on the beach. Come on, Toots, we're hungry!”

“Yes,” she called, “I'm coming.”

“She always likes to set the things out,” Jim said. “And she polices it afterwards. She's pretty good that way.”

When Jeffrey heard the word, the war was back again and he stared up at the sky.

“Sometime,” he said, “I'd like to talk to you about war, but never mind it now.”

“No,” Jim said quickly, “Sally, she—Well, never mind it now.”

“It gives you a different point of view,” Jeffrey said. “I've never lost it, quite.”

“What point of view?” Jim asked.

Jeffrey still looked at the sky. It was very clear. There was not a cloud in it, not a sound in it, nothing.

“It won't be long now,” Jeffrey said. “That's one way to put it.”

Then he looked at Jim. He could not keep his eyes from Jim because Jim looked as though time could never touch him.

“How do you mean,” Jim asked, “it won't be long now?”

“Boy,” Jeffrey said, and he smiled because he knew something that Jim didn't. “Maybe you'll never know. I hope to God you won't.”

Sally was on her knees taking out the picnic and laying it on the ground, and Jim was saying he didn't care how it looked if he could eat. When he reached for a sandwich, Sally slapped his wrist and Jim turned and kissed her quickly before she could guess what he was going to do.

“Jim!” Sally said.

“Don't say ‘You stop,'” Jim said. “You had it coming to you.”

It was completely unexpected, but they must have been doing that sort of thing for a long, long time, and it caused Jeffrey no embarrassment. It seemed quite all right that he was there.

They ate the sandwiches and drank the wine and coffee. He listened to Jim and Sally talking and Madge had been wrong about Sally. Her voice was not bad at all. It was a contented voice. He was not conscious of her actual words because he was thinking of one thing she had said—“silly not to be happy when you have a chance.…”

“I'm going to walk up the brook,” she was saying to him. “I'm going to sit somewhere under a tree. You haven't had a chance to talk to Jim.”

It was easy to see why Jim liked her.

“No,” he said, “don't go away. There's something I want to talk to you and Jim about. I suppose it's none of my business. No one can mind his own business really. Maybe you'll find it out someday.”

He stopped because he was afraid of being wheezy and portentous, and then he went on.

“It's a funny thing to say to you, but I think this is the last quiet summer we're going to have for quite a while. You two kids like each other quite a lot, don't you?” He waited and they did not answer, and he spoke louder. “Don't you?”

“Yes, sir,” Jim said. “I'll say we do.”

Jeffrey smiled. He always could get on with Jim.

“All right,” he said. “This is a time when, if you love someone, you'd better love her.”

It was not exactly what he had meant to say but now he had started, he spoke more quickly.

“I mean, if you kids want to get married, you'd better get married. It may not work, but—you haven't got much time. I mean a lot by that. I mean before you die you want to live. I'd do it before anybody tells you differently. I'd do it—right away.”

“Right away?” Jim repeated after him.

“I don't mean that exactly,” Jeffrey said, “but if you want to, this is between you and me. I'll do the talking afterwards and don't worry about money.… I have fifty thousand dollars in stocks and bonds, but you'd better think fast, both of you. You haven't got much time.”

48

The Little Men

In his last letter to Sally, Jeffrey had mentioned that he would be at the Hotel Shoreham in Washington early in November with Jesse Fineman and the cast of the play which Jesse was preparing for Broadway. Jesse had been unusually worried about this particular play, and Jeffrey thought with reason. They had tried it out in Bridgeport; they had tried it out in Baltimore; and it was not ready yet. Jesse felt it had the intrinsic qualities but not what he called the “sweep,” and that was why they were trying it in Washington for three nights. Jeffrey had never approved of it and he had told Jesse so. He had told Jesse that it was too much like the Sherwood play “There Shall Be No Night.”

It was one of those plays the scene of which was laid in an occupied country of Europe. There was a family of happy folksy people with liberal leanings. There was a pretty girl with pigtails, and not much else, and a neurotic brother who wanted to be a composer—You knew he was a composer because he kept ticking a metronome at odd moments during each act—and a comfortable bourgeois father who ran some sort of a cannery, and a mother who fried things in the kitchen and kept bringing in plate after plate of them all through the acts, for the family to eat when they were emotionally disturbed. Then came the Nazis—stamp, stamp,
Heil Hitler
!—and talked of the New Order. Then you saw each member of the family reacting to the New Order, and then the man from the Gestapo in his black leather coat who loved the girl with the pigtails. You can imagine what he did to the girl with the pigtails and what all the other Himmler employees did to the father when he came home from the cannery and to her brother when he dropped his metronome and tried to break down the door. It was what Jesse called a stark, ruthless work. They stepped all over that family in the second act, and continued stepping on them in the third act, and then shot them in the last five minutes—all except the girl with pigtails who would have been better, far better, dead. Yet through it all was that unconquerable spirit. You stepped on them but you could not conquer them. Jesse said it had the message, it had everything, and when Jeffrey said it was the same old pap Jesse was very hurt and asked Jeffrey if he was turning into a fascist or an isolationist, and whether he believed or did not believe in democracy. That was the trouble with everyone in November 1941. They could not discuss art or entertainment without bringing in long and indigestible words.

Jeffrey told Jesse that it did not matter whether he was pro-Semitic or anti-Semitic, or a Stalinist or a Trotskyist, or a Liberal or one of Mr. Pelley's Silver Shirts—it was a poor play and no one would want to sit through it, and Jesse could call him a fascist if he wanted.

Jesse said it showed that Jeffrey was fascist-minded though perhaps he might not know it. It was the nearest Jeffrey had ever come to quarreling with Jesse. But then that autumn everyone was close to quarreling. He told Jesse that he was tired of reading books and seeing plays in which everyone was stepped on. He would like to see a play for a change where some of those people who believed in democracy bashed a few Nazis over the head; and Jeffrey believed it might make a play if the family killed a few Nazis in the last act and escaped over the border with some of the mother's fried food. He and Jesse were scarcely speaking when they got to Bridgeport, but after Baltimore, Jesse said that perhaps Jeffrey was right. He asked him if he could change the last act, and that was why they were at the Shoreham.