Jim came into that bare room of his two days before he was to leave. Jeffrey always remembered it as one of those rare moments which come when you least expect them. It was ten o’clock on a hot Monday morning and he was reading the New York Times, avidly skimming over each dispatch with the hope that he might come on something reassuring between the lines. He was reading one of those accounts of a bombing raid over Germany—“bad weather over the Channel but the clouds had cleared away over the target.” Somehow the clouds in those dispatches always cleared away, and the bombs were dropped through a heavy fire of ack-ack—Archies, as they used to call them in the other war—and then there were a few terse lines from a pilot or an observer. “We hit them on the button this time. The fires were visible for thirty miles.”
Then Jim knocked on the door.
“Are you busy?” Jim asked.
“No,” Jeffrey said, “I’m not busy.”
Jim stood leaning against the side of the half-open door, exactly as he had years before when he wanted to ask something.
“I haven’t seen much of you,” Jim said. “If you’re not busy how about you and Sally and me taking a picnic and going somewhere?”
“Oh, no,” Jeffrey said, “you and Sally had better go alone.”
“No,” Jim said. “No. Sally thought of it.”
It was strange how tactless one could be when one was young. He would have given a great deal if Jim had thought of it instead. Somehow it did not seem fair to Madge, going off with Sally and Jim, but he knew that it was a chance he might never have again.
“All right,” he said, “we’ll take a bottle of wine.”
It had been a long time since Jeffrey had even considered going on a picnic. The summer he and Madge were first married and owned their first car, they had bought a picnic basket with cups and plates and two thermos bottles which had cost sixty-five dollars, but somehow the picnic basket had not worked. Now it must have been given away long ago, or else it was in the attic somewhere with all those other forgotten objects of the past.
Jeffrey could remember a number of reasons why those picnics had been discontinued. Madge would say how nice it would be to go for a picnic, just she and Jeffrey and a book, and if Jeffrey did not want to read, Madge would read aloud as long as Jeffrey did not go to sleep. Then they would get the picnic basket, which was very heavy when it was filled with ice and sandwiches and milk and tea. Then they would get in the automobile—it was one of those four-cylinder Dodges, Jeffrey remembered, which seemed capable of lasting forever. They would get into the Dodge and the top would rattle and Madge was always distracted when it rattled, because it was her Dodge, not his Dodge. It was always a sunny morning like the present one, for picnics and the sun always went together. Jeffrey would begin to feel very hungry after motoring for a while, and he would say to Madge, “How about stopping here, or here, or here and eating?” But Madge would never want to stop here or here. Madge had a number of definite requirements for a picnic place. She always wanted it to be “cozy,” which was a term which covered almost anything, and then it had to be near a brook without any cows. It was amazing when you looked how few brooks there were, and all of them had cows. Sometimes they would even get to the brook and then along would come the cows and they would have to close the basket up and go. Jeffrey had always told Madge that cows in pastures were harmless, but Madge always said there might be a bull. Jeffrey said you could always tell a bull by his general contours if nothing else, and Madge said she did not want to get near enough any cow to judge.
He and Madge would ride and ride looking for that brook and that “cozy” place, and Jeffrey was always dull about suggesting here and here. He did not seem to have the spirit of picnicking, and Madge did not want to stop there or there either. They could go a little farther and then they would find it, or just a little farther still, because they had all day. Finally a time would come when Jeffrey would say he had to eat and why not stop the car and eat in the car? And Madge would not eat in the car. They would stop over there, just around the corner, and when they stopped over there, there was no brook, nothing but paper cups which other people had left. There was never any place to sit, except hard rocks or soft moist sod, and Madge would ask him why he hadn’t stopped back there—miles back where she had thought of stopping. And while they ate he would explain to Madge that she was the one who had told him to go on, and not stop there, and Madge would not remember that she had said any such thing. Madge would ask him why he wouldn’t sit down and be comfortable and not stand up munching a sandwich and looking as though someone were going to come out of the farm on the hill and chase them. They had just crawled under the barbed-wire fence and of course the farmer wouldn’t mind. Then Jeffrey would say that there wasn’t anything to sit on, and besides he liked to eat standing up.
Then, as he stood there with his sandwich and one of those paper coffee cups that always burned his fingers, Jeffrey was always reminded of something else, which may have been why picnics never worked. Wherever they might be, all at once the field and the woods and even the cozy brook assumed a sinister aspect. Although he never said a thing about it to Madge, because it was absurd, there was always a quality for him in the sun and the stillness that reminded him of that field in France and that patch of woods where he and Stan Rhett had been shot down. He and Stan Rhett, always young, would seem to be there with Stan leaning heavily on his shoulder. It was absurd, but he would always feel the old watchful attitude and he would find himself staring around him carefully, and Madge would tell him to sit down, to please for heaven’s sake sit down.
Jeffrey had not been on a picnic for years and years with Madge or with anyone. Even in California when Marianna had suggested one, he had told her no, that he was not good at picnics.
Yet, when Jim spoke of it that morning he was surprised to feel a sense of anticipation that included no thoughts of rocks or cows or hardship. His mind had gone further back to a time when he was younger even than Jim, to a time when there were family picnics at Bragg, when you hitched the horse to a tree and gave him a bag of oats and Jeffrey and Alf went swimming somewhere, while his father and his aunt and Ethel set out the things. You did not mind where you sat then, and his aunt had always said that food always tasted better outdoors, and it did taste better outdoors then. There was a fresh scent of flowers in the fields and a more subtle scent of leaves and that basking heat of summer. You were never tired. Your muscles were never stiff. You never needed a drink to make it bearable. That was the way he felt when Jim asked him to go. It was like being offered something that had belonged to him once and which had been lost for a long while.
Jim and Sally had planned the picnic before they had invited him, because the station wagon was out by the front door already with the picnic in the back seat and with Sally waiting to get in. They must have just been leaving when the idea struck them that they should ask him.
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?”
So Little Time Page 58
