Tomorrow Is Forever

by Gwen Bristow

  Dick stood up. “Holy smoke,” he said slowly. “It’s ghastly. You’re right—it’s too awful to think about. You just think of kids as kids, but golly—when you do think about them as growing up, or not growing up, I mean the important ones—suppose the Germans had blitzed England fifty years ago and had got Churchill, I mean, and now we’d never know.”

  Elizabeth put her hands over her eyes. It seemed to her that she could suddenly see them, little boys like Brian, little girls with fat pigtails like Margaret, the Einsteins, Chiangs, Curies of the future, going in a horrible procession to annihilation. Suppose the bombs had dropped fifty years ago. She thought of sulfanilamide and the Four Freedoms, television and cargo planes, vitamins and the Panama Canal. Her generation had these because the men and women who brought them into being had been allowed to grow up. She could hear Kessler’s voice, passionate with a great grief.

  “That’s the real horror of fascism. We are sick at what they are doing today, but this is such a little part of it. Their awful crime is what they are doing tomorrow. We don’t know what they’ve already destroyed—a cure for cancer, a new philosophical system, a rocket to the moon. Margaret got out, but the others who didn’t get out—my God, the books that will never be written, the work that will never be done. They’re destroying tomorrow, and tomorrow is forever.”

  For a moment nobody answered him. They were looking at what he showed them, and it left them stricken. At last Dick spoke, slowly, as though to himself.

  “Tomorrow is forever,” he repeated. “I guess that’s right. We’ll never know what we might have had but for them. Nobody will ever know.”

  After he had spoken none of them said anything else for what seemed a long time. Elizabeth looked up at the bright Christmas tree. Cherry moved restlessly, stirring the branches; the ornaments tinkled and glittered as though laughing at the world’s pain. Margaret came in.

  “Mrs. Stackworth is making some tea for you,” she announced.

  They all looked at her, without answering; she was suddenly a rare and precious symbol left standing above a vast destruction. Margaret continued,

  “She’s making some sandwiches too, and she says tell you they’ll be ready in a minute.” Margaret looked up at Cherry. “What are you still sitting up there for? Isn’t the tree done? Why don’t you come down?”

  “I—I guess I forgot about it,” Cherry returned lamely. “We were—we were talking.”

  “What were you talking about?”

  Elizabeth got up and went over to Margaret. She bent down and took Margaret’s hands in hers.

  “We were talking about what a dear girl you were, and how glad we are you came to this country to be with us. We hope you’re going to have a wonderful Christmas.”

  Margaret smiled at her, shyly. “You’re sort of like my mother,” she said. She hesitated a moment, and then, conquering her diffidence, she put her arms around Elizabeth’s neck and kissed her.

  10

  Several days after the turn of the New Year, Kessler received a letter from Dick:

  Dear Mr. Kessler,

  I guess there is no use trying to tell you how shocked I was at what you said the other day. My sister felt the same way I did. I do not write very well and it is hard to say what I mean. But this is what I am getting at. I know you are a very busy man but if there is a day, maybe a Sunday, when you have some time to spare would you let me come over and see you? I did not want to bother you until after Christmas, but there are some things I have been thinking about and I would like to talk to you anyway. You seem to understand our family very well and I know they like you and would not mind anything I said to you. Let me know if this would be convenient.

  Sincerely yours,

  RICHARD SPRATT HERLONG, JR.

  After he had read Dick’s letter, Kessler sat for some time thinking, his forehead resting on his big thick hand. These months in Beverly Hills had been more difficult than he had thought they were going to be. Most things were, when you came down to them.

  In the beginning Elizabeth had frightened him when she said he looked familiar. But she had not mentioned it again for some time, and by the time she did bring up the subject, the evening after Margaret’s swimming party, he had discovered that she needed him. Elizabeth thought she understood disaster. Looking back on what he had learned, Kessler knew she had only a small conception of it. As for Spratt, keenwitted, successful, humorous, devoted Spratt, he had none at all. But Kessler knew what it took to keep going in this world. He had a great deal to give them and he intended to stay here and do it. By this time Elizabeth appeared to have given up the idea of having seen him before; if she said anything about it again, there was nothing for him to do but convince her she was wrong. But as long as she needed him as she did now he was going to stay.

  She and her children were asking more of him than they knew. Even if he had wanted to, it would have been hard to explain to such vital persons the strain they were placing on his emotional and physical powers. But if he was wearing out it did not matter very much, except for Margaret, and he would take care of her somehow. What did matter was that he could be of use now to Elizabeth and the people she loved.

  When he came to Beverly Hills, it had not occurred to Kessler that she would have any need for him. He had wanted to see her secure. He had not realized that she would not be secure.

  Odd, he reflected, that when you thought of persons you had not met for a long time, you thought of them as being still like what you remembered. You never grasped beforehand that time had affected them as it had affected yourself. It was not merely that you were surprised to find them older—though you usually were, absurdly enough—but you were surprised to find that they lived, not in the world where you had left them, but in the world of today.

  At first Elizabeth had seemed to be all he had wanted to find her—poised, serene, beloved, mother of children who had no faults except the over-assurance of young ignorance. He had been so absorbed in watching the outer manifestations of this fullness of living that he had not at first realized that it covered what he should have known it did cover, the trembling uncertainty of the age Elizabeth lived in. Everything she had was a potential source of danger. Perhaps, he thought wearily, it might have been just as well if he had come back from the last war and let her wear herself out taking care of him. Then at least, today she would have nothing to lose.

  He jerked himself back angrily. He had given her the chance to be happy and she had used it; if happiness brought its own penalties that was not his fault or hers. She had a great deal to lose. Nobody knew what the war might do to this country before it was over, and the whole fabric of her life and her children’s future might be ripped to shreds in the days to come. She had made that clear to him when she said, “If my world is shot to pieces again I can’t go back and start over. I did that once.” Elizabeth did not suspect that when he heard her say that he had nearly burst out sobbing with defeat. He had been so sure, back in 1918, that when he gave her the chance to start over it was the chance to build for permanence. Now he had no consolation to give her, or to give himself—nothing but a desperate courage. There was nothing to do but go on telling her what he had already tried to tell her: that in the final analysis life consisted mostly of doing things one did not want to do, and the only way to keep any self-respect through the whole wretched business was to look squarely at what had to be done and then go ahead and do it.

  Now he had to tell Dick the same thing. Not tell him to go to war, that Dick was ready to do; but he could understand from the boy’s awkward little letter that now Dick wanted to be told what it was all about. It would be so much simpler if Dick could be left with the idea that it was merely a matter of killing Japs and Germans before they killed you. Or it would be very simple to tell Dick what the men of his father’s generation had been told, that he was going to come back into a new civilization of innocence and glory. B
ut Dick would not believe him, for Dick had never seen the world except when it was looking back on one war or looking forward to another, and to any such statement he would retort, “Are you a fool or do you think I’m one?”—which was exactly what it would deserve.

  Then what could he tell him? The truth, as he saw it, which might be wholly wrong or at best only an approximation of the whole truth, but which was the only thing he could say that had any meaning. And if it was hard to do, he could at least be glad that by this time he was used to knowing that the business of living was not easy.

  Kessler turned to his typewriter, holding the paper with his thumb and forefinger while he turned the platen with the other three fingers, made steady by the pressure of his palm. He wrote:

  My Dear Dick,

  Can you come around Sunday afternoon about three? Margaret is learning to skate and will be at the ice-rink with her playmates, so we can count on not being interrupted. I’ll be very glad to see you.

  Your friend,

  ERICH KESSLER.

  He signed the letter with the silver pen Dick’s father had given him for Christmas.

  Dick arrived at ten minutes to three. They did not waste any time on preliminary courtesies. Dick had a lot to ask and he immediately started asking it.

  “You see,” said Dick, “I’m just about to be eighteen, and as soon as I’m eighteen I’ll get into the service. Maybe I’ll join up before then. I kind of like the Marines. That’s okay—I’m not saying I’d join the Marines if there wasn’t a war, but there is a war, so that’s what you do, the Marines or whoever will have you. But there are some things—” He hesitated.

  “Yes, Dick, I think I understand, but you tell me so we can be sure we’re thinking together. What things?”

  “Well—” Dick looked down, frowning at his hands. He was sitting in his favorite ungraceful position, straddling a chair, his arms crossed on the back of it so he could look across at the person he was speaking to as though leaning on a fence. To Kessler he looked very innocent and very young. “Poor kid, he is having a fight,” Kessler thought. “I remember, I had one too, but I was ten years older than this. Why do these things have to happen? Even if I had no interest in her, I’d understand what his mother feels. Dick’s a nice boy. He’s too thoroughly a nice boy to conceive of what his civilization is up against. That’s the trouble with all of us. We can’t imagine what goes on in the mind of a moral imbecile.”

  “Well, you know, Mr. Kessler,” said Dick, “it comes as a sort of shock to a fellow the first time he notices that his mother is smaller than he is.” He looked up shyly. “You know what I mean?”

  “Why yes, Dick, I know.”

  “I guess you do. Gosh, it’s good to get this off your chest to somebody who’s older. At school they hear about complexes and they think they know it all, I mean it gets so a fellow might as well say he’s got a complex as own up that he likes his mother. But I do like her, Mr. Kessler. I like her and I like the boss too. They’re all right. They take a lot of interest in me.”

  He paused again, but Kessler only nodded without interrupting him. Dick went on.

  “I know a lot of things about them they don’t think I know. I know they don’t want me to get mixed up in this war. They haven’t said a word, they’ve been awfully good sports about it, but here lately I can see that it’s mighty hard on them. At first I didn’t notice it. We all talked about it—the fellows I mean—and we knew we’d get into it and we sort of took it for granted, I mean we got sort of impatient, it seemed silly to stick around doing algebra and things with so much going on. The day of Pearl Harbor I was so mad I could have lit into every Jap gardener I saw and it burned me up to think I couldn’t do anything about it. I just wanted to kill them. I still do. The Japs, I mean. I never did get that excited about the Germans; I guess it was because they were going after other people but it was the Japs who had tried to sink the whole Navy when the Americans weren’t doing anything to them. The Germans—I don’t mean because you’re a German, anyway you never do seem like one—but I’d been hearing about Hitler practically all my life and I guess I’d got kind of used to him.”

  “I suppose you would,” Kessler observed thoughtfully. “You were eight years old when he burned the books.”

  “Was I? I don’t remember it. The first thing I remember­—I think it was the first thing—was something about a pogrom. The boss read about it in the paper, and he laughed. I suppose that sounds strange to you, but he did, and my mother too. The boss said, ‘Imagine his thinking he can get away with anything like that in this day and age,’ and my mother said, ‘Oh, the man’s insane, Spratt.’ I asked what a pogrom was and my mother said, ‘There are some people who think so highly of themselves that they want to exterminate everybody who isn’t exactly like them.’ I was just a little boy then. I had forgotten about that, but I remembered it the other night when you were telling us about Margaret. That night I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking about it. I thought that was the trouble with my folks, they’re too decent, they’re so decent they’re innocent, like children who don’t know anything can happen to them.”

  “They are, Dick. All civilized people are. I was thinking the same thing a few minutes ago.”

  “Well, I was pretty innocent myself until just lately,” Dick confessed with confiding wisdom. “I thought wars were just wars, because somebody had to run the earth and it had better be your side than their side, and mostly wars were fought to take care of trade and profits and it was principally the Morgans who got us into the last one, and we’d never have been in this one if the Japs had minded their own business. Now I see that’s not right, you can’t go along letting things happen the way they are happening, things like Margaret I mean. But what I want to know is, what can I say to my mother and father? I can’t just go off and have them smiling and shriveling up inside the way they are doing. Don’t think my mother has said anything to me, Mr. Kessler! She hasn’t. She won’t either. But I can’t just go off grinning and let them think I don’t know anything about it. You see, there’s something else I guess you don’t know,” Dick continued, regarding his friend so seriously that it gave him a pucker between his eyebrows. “The boss is my mother’s second husband. She never says anything much about the other guy, just occasionally when she’s had to fill out a legal paper and give all the names she’s ever been known by, or something like that, in fact it was so long ago I suppose she’s more or less forgotten about it. But anyway, he was killed in that other war.” Dick suddenly began talking very fast. “I never had thought about that, but I got to thinking about it the other day and I thought it might have been pretty tough for her at the time, because she didn’t know then she was going to meet my father. But that guy was killed—and now me—you know, we don’t say much about it but you were in the other war yourself and you know a man does think about that sort of thing when he’s about to get into a uniform.”

  He laughed a little, as though embarrassed to have mentioned the subject, and went on talking fast, more to be talking than to get anything said. “Funny how she happened to mention his having been killed, I mean it would seem funny to you since you haven’t been around Hollywood very long, but you know how people are always getting divorced here, children take divorces for granted in a way they don’t most places. It was years and years ago, Cherry asked her—Cherry couldn’t have been more than six or so—we were all in the living room and there was something on the radio about some movie star getting a divorce, and Cherry said, ‘Mother, have you and the boss been divorced or are you the only husband and wife you ever had?’ Mother said no, she had been married before but she’d never been divorced, her other husband had been killed in the war, and the boss said something about what a place this was to bring up children, they didn’t think there was any way to terminate a marriage except in court, and it never would have occurred to him to ask his parents such an idiotic question when he was a
little boy in New York. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Why—yes, yes,” said Kessler. “It’s funny.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose I’d ever thought about her first husband five minutes at a time in my life, but just in the past few weeks, when I got so close to military age, all of a sudden I thought about him, and I thought, well, she never says anything, but it must be tough on her, another war. You know it must be.”

  “Yes, Dick,” Kessler said slowly. “It must be, and it is. I’ve come to know your mother rather well since I’ve been here. She’s a brave woman, but she’s not finding any of this easy. You’d like to make it easier for her. So would I.”

  “And we can’t. Can we?” Dick exclaimed with unconscious appeal.

  “No, we can’t,” Kessler answered without hesitation. “Leave me out of it. You’re the one she’s interested in. There’s just one thing you might do, if you can do it.”

  “What?” Dick asked eagerly.

  “Let her and your father understand that you know what you’re doing. Don’t let them believe that you’re going off grinning, as you express it, just to put an end to a lot of toothy villains because mass hatred happens to be the emotion of the moment. It’s not merely that they have a right to think better of you than that. But if you expect them, and the rest of the decent people in the world, to get anything from this war except more destruction and suffering, if you want it to be something more than just another war, you’ve got to have an idea of what you want it to bring about. Even if you know what you want you may not get it, but if you don’t know, this certainly won’t be anything but just another war.”

  “Well, what do we want to get?” Dick demanded. He laughed uncomfortably. “I guess you think I’m pretty silly to ask that, don’t you? I guess you think I ought to know.”

  He stopped to listen. His attention was itself a demand. Dick had spent his life in a world where everything was in its right place, so he knew of chaos only by hearsay. The turbulence of his century had reached him by newspaper and radio, and from remarks made by refugees he had met occasionally, but it had been such a long way off that it had never had as much reality as the week’s football game. His habitual tolerance of mind had developed, not in response to opposition, but partly in reflection of his parents’ attitude and partly because he lived in a corner of the earth where there was enough for everybody and hence no reasonable objection to anybody’s having a share. Now that he felt himself confronted with the necessity of plunging into the confusion beyond his safe island, he felt bewildered. Having begun to understand that his arrogance had been that of an amateur who thinks a problem easy because he has never tried to solve it, he felt his confidence turning to humility. This war, involving a country that had assured him it was never going to have another war, was an enigma he wanted explained.