“It isn’t a line,” Marianna said, “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that about me. I believe in you, I believe—”
“Marianna,” Jeffrey said, “stop and think and you’ll see that it doesn’t make sense. You’re a nice girl, and we’re just having lunch. Don’t talk lines.”
“I wish—” Marianna began.
“Listen, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “let’s talk about something else. This doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m not as good as you think I am.”
“All right,” Marianna said, “you talk about something else. When did I see you last?”
“At Jesse’s office,” Jeffrey said, “the day before yesterday. You wore a gardenia, and you never look well with gardenias.”
“All right,” Marianna said, “then tell me what you did yesterday.”
Then everything was pleasant and he forgot that everyone in the Echelon knew who Marianna was. It was always easy to talk to her because he knew that she liked to listen to him and would not be thinking of something else. She was interested in all sorts of things which would never have interested Madge. He found himself telling her about Walter Newcombe and the Bulldog Club and it made an amusing story, considering the news in the morning paper.
“You know,” he said, “I wonder what Walter is thinking. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to call him up and ask him. You don’t mind, do you?” And she said she did not mind.
She smiled at him as he stood up.
“Just don’t be too long,” she said.
The telephone booth was in a stuffy little corner near the cloakroom. Its interior smelled of face powder when he closed the door and dialed the number of the Waldorf.
“Mr. Newcombe’s apartment,” he said. “Mr. Walter Newcombe.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then he heard a thin childish voice answering, and it sounded surprisingly domestic after Marianna’s.
“Is that you, Edwina?” Jeffrey asked. “This is Mr. Wilson. I saw you yesterday afternoon. Is your father there?”
“No,” he heard her answer. “No, he isn’t here.”
“Where is he?” Jeffrey asked.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone where?” Jeffrey said.
“To London,” he heard her say. “He took the Clipper this morning, but Belle Mère’s here, if you want to speak to Belle Mère.”
“No thanks,” Jeffrey said. “Good-by, Edwina.”
It was just as though a telephone connection had been broken. There was the same dead sound in his ears and the same sense of frustration.
“How the devil does he do it?” Jeffrey said. He wished that he were going to London. He wanted to be anywhere but where he was.
8
That Old Town by the Sea
It was very hard for Jeffrey to remember what he had been thinking that previous spring, now that it was October. So many of the days of that spring and summer were like the parts of one of those dreams, which you know are dreams even when you are asleep and the worst parts of which, your sleeping logic tells you, are not true. He was still not able to understand how the city, in October of 1940, could look as it always had, beautiful and indifferent, or how there could be new model cars, or how there could still be antiques and silver and flowers and saddles and bridles and tweeds for sale on Madison Avenue. Everyone was back in town again and there was the same feeling of anticipation in the air. You could not tell from externals that isolationists and interventionists were quarreling. There was no way of knowing whether aid to Britain would keep us out or get us into war that October morning. The voice of Wendell Willkie and the Willkie Campaign Kits made no impression on the weather. It was easy to forget that “A VOTE FOR WILLKIE IS A VOTE FOR HITLER,” and, “IT’S MOVING DAY ELEANOR, THE WILLKIES ARE COMING.” It was easy to forget the speeches and the fireside chats. It was another October morning, and he and Madge were going to Fred and Beckie’s for that week end in the country.
The bags were in the elevator. The garage had delivered the coupé at the door and Madge had given Albert and Effie the telephone number where they were staying in case anything should happen, and now Madge was wondering whether there might still be anything important that she had forgotten and Jeffrey was telling her not to worry, that it was easy enough to telephone. It was possible to think of German bombers sweeping over London and at the same time it was possible to think about the suitcases. Madge had said that they could put all their clothes together in one suitcase. For years she had been suggesting this, because it was easier to have one piece of luggage than two. She could never understand that it was undignified and that her boxes of powder might get open and spill on Jeffrey’s evening clothes and that Jeffrey could never possibly find anything in a woman’s suitcase.
“Jeffrey,” she asked, “did you pack your sport clothes? Have you got the keys to the car? Have you set your watch, Jeffrey?”
“Yes,” Jeffrey answered, “everything’s all right.”
“Jeffrey, I’ll drive,” she said.
“No, that’s all right,” he answered, “I’ll drive.”
“Then keep your mind on it,” Madge said, “and don’t start thinking about the war.”
Madge was looking in her bag to be sure that she had her lipstick and her compact, and then she asked if he had any money with him, and he told her that of course he had money, and she said that he never carried enough with him in case the car broke down or something, and the last time they were at Fred’s and Beckie’s he might remember that he had to borrow something from Fred so that he could leave something for the servants. Jeffrey said that he had enough money and he looked at his watch. It seemed to him that they were starting early. It was true that they were to stop on the way at Madge’s Uncle Judson’s for lunch, but there would be nothing to do if they got there early.
“And remember this, Madge,” he said, “let’s get away from there as soon as we can. It—you know the way it is.”
Madge smiled her brightest smile.
“It won’t be any problem,” she said. “Uncle Judson always has his nap right after lunch, and we’ll just say we can’t wait until he wakes up. And Jeffrey dear, remember …”
“Remember what?” Jeffrey asked.
“Remember not to say you have any doubts about Wendell Willkie, and don’t say you think it’s funny that Mr. Ickes called him a ‘barefoot boy from Wall Street’ the way you did last night. Uncle Judson might think you weren’t going to vote for him.”
“Maybe I’m not,” Jeffrey said, and he started the car. “Maybe that’s just what he is—a ‘barefoot boy from Wall Street.’”
And then she made an unexpected suggestion.
“Let’s go out on the Post Road, the way we used to,” she said. “We haven’t been there for years.”
“The Post Road?” Jeffrey repeated after her.
The Post Road had become an ugly highway of oil-spattered concrete, choked with trucks and bordered by hamburger heavens and filling stations. You could avoid it now and save twenty-five minutes by cutting across town to the West Side Highway and then taking the new Parkway and cutting back to the Sound, but all at once he felt the way Madge must have. He wanted to see the Post Road again.
It was hard to find the landmarks on it, and even the towns had changed, except for their names. The road seemed to have sucked a part of the city out with it, making the highway a little like a river full of driftwood. Mt. Vernon and New Rochelle were full of apartment houses and so were Pelham Manor, Larchmont and Mamaroneck. There had been fine country residences once along the Post Road, and now they had been turned into convalescent homes, or tourist homes, or roadhouses. They stood sadly behind gasoline pumps and roadside booths with their grounds and shrubbery uncouth.
The farther Madge and Jeffrey got from the city along the road the more familiar the sights became. Jeffrey had the sensation of having been dead for a hundred years, and of now being back and trying to orient himself in the land of the living, and of look
ing vainly for stone walls, close-cropped lawns and tree-shaded driveways. Of course everyone had left the Post Road years before, because of the roar of traffic which continued day and night along it, and because the houses were too old, or too ugly, and the city was crowding outwards.
The town where he had first met Madge was a place now where commuters lived. The lawns and meadows which had once surrounded it were cut by little roads that led into real estate developments made up of small houses, each with a garage attached. These stood now among the red of small maple trees and among the gold-yellow of poplars. The Willis place was gone and so was the Henderson place. As they started down the hill to what used to be the village, he could see the fieldstone Episcopal Church, but he could not recognize a single house near it. The Roberts place was as completely gone as though it had never been there. There was no sign of the driveway or of the gray granite house or of the garage-stable or of the greenhouses. He was sure that this was just where it had stood beside the Post Road, but now he could not recognize a single tree.
“Jeff,” Madge said, “go a little slowly. Here—do you remember this?”
An oil truck roared by them clanging a chain behind it on the concrete. To the right was a white house with two fir trees in front of it, and beneath the trees were wire cages filled with cocker spaniel pups for sale.
“Jeff,” Madge said, “don’t you remember? This was where you kissed me.”
“What?” Jeffrey asked. “Where?”
“Right here,” Madge said. “Jeff, can’t you remember? It was the first time you ever kissed me—when we came back from the Golf Club dance. I had to drive you. It was the family’s old Cadillac. You didn’t know how to drive anything except a plane.”
Then he remembered the white house and the fir trees. There had not been a sound, for it had been very late. There had not been another car on the Post Road that night, and all the houses had been sound asleep, but no one would ever select it again as a propitious spot in which to kiss a girl. It made him feel sad, exactly like a ghost.
“We’re early,” Madge said. “Let’s drive through the village to the railroad station. Do you remember the first time I met you there when you came down to stay with us? I’ve thought about it all day. I didn’t think you were glad to see me.”
She was wrong there. He had not wanted her to know how glad he was to see her.
There was no past tense about that town, only a pushing present and a doubtful future. It was just a suburb now where commuters spent the night, where houses were leased and sublet as casually as apartments in New York. There was no permanence and no very tangible evidence that it was a town at all. One’s children would not live there. The store names had changed on Purchase Street and all the façades were new, glittering with plate glass and neon lights and plastics, but the railroad station had not been touched. It was painted the same sickly buff yellow; and as they looked, an express train hurtled by it on its way to Boston.
“Well, we’d better turn around now,” Madge said. “Jeffrey, it’s queer, isn’t it? It was so lovely once.”
It was not exactly queer because it was a concrete fact to which one might as well adjust oneself. You thought things would remain the same, and somehow nothing did. It was a picture of one generation giving way to another, and the new one never wanted any longer what the old one had to offer.
“You can’t tell,” Jeffrey said. “Maybe the people here think it’s lovely now.”
He wished they had not come up the Post Road, and Madge must have been thinking the same thing. As they drove toward the Sound there were fewer small houses, but no one was living in the large ones any longer. They stood ugly and unwanted on their uncut lawns, their windows unwashed and blank. The weeds were growing on their drives, but there were signs of hopeful real estate agents staked in front of them. There was an amusement park on the old beach by the Sound and no one wanted to live near an amusement park, and the water of the Sound, which he always thought of as clear and bluish green, was too polluted for bathing any longer. He wondered if it all struck Madge in the same way. As a stranger, he had once thought the places along the Sound were impregnable. It must have been more of a shock to him than it was to her to see them now.
“No,” Madge said, suddenly, “don’t take Willow Road. Take Rock Point Road, it’s only a little longer.”
He knew she did not want to see the house where she had lived on Willow Road, and she did not want to see what had happened to the privet hedge or to the wall garden or to the cutting garden, and he did not want to either.
A few miles back in the country from the Massachusetts town where Jeffrey had been born there had been plenty of deserted farms with their barn roofs falling and with the saplings growing up in the hayfields, but these had been peaceful in their utter loneliness because there had been no life around them. It was different here because there was too much life. It all made him think of the place which he and Madge owned in Connecticut, and of all the trees he had planted, and it filled him with a sense of futility. There was no use thinking any longer that someone who belonged to you might live in your house after you were through with it. The rows of trees which he and Madge had planted on the hill in the country would not look like much for another forty years because elm trees seldom did, but Madge had said that they would be nice for the children and their children. She must have known, if she had faced it, that even if the children wanted it, they would never be able to afford it, but still you went on hoping in that archaic way. Madge’s father and mother must have had some sort of belief that the house on Willow Road would surely be owned by Madge, just as surely as the coupons would be good on a gilt-edged bond. He wondered what her uncle thought about it, for he was the only one who had not sold and moved away, but then, perhaps the old gentleman was too old to think at all. Jeffrey heard Madge sigh.
“Jeff,” he heard her ask, “do you remember when I took you to see him?”
He knew that she meant the time when she took him there to tell her Uncle Judson and her Aunt Clara, who was living then, that they were engaged.
Somehow it was discordant after all the rest of it that her uncle’s house and grounds should still be exactly as he first remembered them. The lawn had been freshly mowed, although it was October. The crimson woodbine around the gateposts had been pruned back, and the turf along the edges of the drive was freshly trimmed. There was the same dark bank of rhododendrons, with the oak trees just behind them. The leaves of the copper beech in the center of the lawn had not turned yet. Two gardeners were cutting back the shrubbery and a third was mulching the rosebed. The sun was striking the roof of the greenhouse that held the hothouse grapes. The stable door was open and the blue gravel of the whole drive was raked smooth. The flower boxes on the edge of the porte-cochère contained their familiar red geraniums and nasturtiums. The sun struck on the veranda with its green rocking chairs and there was a smell of smoke in the air from burning autumn leaves.
“Do not leave anything to be done in the spring,” Madge’s uncle had always said, “that can possibly be done in the autumn.”
The house itself glistened with a fresh coat of gray paint and there was not a slate missing on the mansard roof. As the coupé stopped beneath the shadow of the porte-cochère, the screen door at the top of the granite steps was opened by old Lizzie who had been Madge’s aunt’s maid. Lizzie’s face was firmly set and her apron was freshly starched and her hair, though it was sparser and whiter, was done up in the same tight knot that Jeffrey remembered.
“Lizzie, dear,” Madge said, “we’re not late, are we?”
“No, Miss Madge,” Lizzie answered, “he’s just coming down the stairs.” And when she looked at Jeffrey he felt as he had that time when he had first come to call. Lizzie must still be thinking of all the young gentlemen whom Miss Madge might have married.
“Hello, Lizzie,” he said.
“Good afternoon,” she answered, “Mr. Wilson.”
The hall seemed
dark after the bright October sunlight, but he could distinguish the long Kermanshah carpet, the seat that opened for rubbers with the mirror above it and racks for canes and umbrellas on either side, the wide gaping arch of the fireplace with the head of a moose over it and the oil painting of a grass-grown Roman ruin. He could see the cool, waxed yellow-oak staircase curving upward two ways from the landing—the design sometimes used on ocean liners. There was a tart, clean smell of chrysanthemums from the vases just below the landing window, and sure enough, just as Lizzie had said, Madge’s Uncle Judson, clean and brushed for lunch, was walking down the stairs.
He walked deliberately but not feebly, resting his hand lightly on the golden-oak bannister. His face was long and thin and paler than it had been. His starched collar and his dark suit looked too large for him.
“Well, well,” he said to Madge, when he kissed her, “if you want to tidy up, everything is ready in your Aunt Clara’s room.”
“No, no, Uncle Judson,” Madge said, “I don’t want to keep you waiting.”
He moved his head sharply sideways when she spoke, toward the tall clock which was ticking beside the umbrella stand.
“You have time,” he said, “you’re early. There is everything in your Aunt Clara’s room.”
Then he moved another step down the hall, and Jeffrey moved toward him.
“How do you do, Jeffrey?” he said.
“How do you do, sir?” Jeffrey answered.
Uncle Judson cleared his throat.
“Do you want to wash your hands?”
“No thanks, sir,” Jeffrey said.
From the way Uncle Judson looked at him, Jeffrey could not tell whether he was suspected of exhibiting exceptional strength or weakness. Time had nothing to do with it. Jeffrey felt the way he always had with Madge’s uncle, that he was being dealt with according to the best rules of hospitality, but that it had all been a whim of Madge’s—an accident.
“There’s sherry in the library,” Uncle Judson said.
The French doors of the library opened to a piazza, and from outside there was the same smell of chrysanthemums.
So Little Time Page 10
