So Little Time (15 page)

“Well, I wish I could do anything like that,” Madge said.

“Thank God you can't, dearie,” Jeffrey told her.

“No matter how I try,” Madge said, “I can't ever be such a good wife and such a good mother as Beckie, so there.”

“Dearie,” Jeffrey told her, “just give up trying. It's time you settled down.”

“I like it when you call me ‘dearie,'” Madge said, “it means you're in a good mood. I wish I knew what gets you into one. I can't ever seem to tell.”

Then they began talking about the children, about the boys who were beginning to call on Gwen, and Jeffrey said he could not see what she saw in any of them, and Madge said she liked the little one named Norman Phelps, and Jeffrey could not remember Norman Phelps at all. Then they talked about Charley at school and they both agreed they ought to go sometime to see Charley there, but Jeffrey said a boy Charley's age was always ashamed of his parents. Charley was always afraid that they would behave abnormally. Then they talked about Jim and what Jim was going to do when he got through College. Madge had wanted him to be a doctor because doctors lived such full, useful lives, or if they didn't they should, and speaking of doctors, Madge wondered why obstetricians were always so happy, and Jeffrey told her it was because they brought babies into the world and didn't have to support them. He was in a good mood. Then they talked about Jim and Sally Sales, and Jeffrey told her not to keep worrying about Sally Sales. He admitted that he had never seen the girl and it might very well be that she was gauche and a little ordinary, as Madge had heard her friend Beckie say. But there was no use worrying about Jim or wondering what he was doing because when it came to a boy Jim's age, maybe what you didn't know didn't hurt you. Besides, Jeffrey told her, it was normal for a boy to have a love object that wasn't his mother and Madge told him not to put it in such a horrid way.

“When I was Jim's age I was in love myself,” Jeffrey said.

“Who?” Madge asked. “You never told me.”

“Back at home,” Jeffrey said. “You know, I've often told you about her—Louella—Louella Barnes.”

“Oh, yes,” Madge said. “That one. You must have been awfully cunning.”

“If it's just the same to you,” Jeffrey told her, “would you find another word for it?”

“Darling,” Madge said, “you'd be happier if you didn't worry about words.” Jeffrey was in a good mood that afternoon. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Jeffrey, are you in love with anyone now?” she asked. “And don't put it off by saying you're in love with me. Married people can't always be in love.”

“They can be according to sex manuals,” Jeffrey said.

“Jeffrey,” Madge asked, “are you in love with Marianna Miller?”

“Marianna?” Jeffrey said. “Good God, no!”

“Well, when I see her with you—” Madge began.

“You don't understand that sort of person,” Jeffrey told her. “She—she's a great artist and all great artists go on that way.”

“She's going to be at Fred's and Beckie's.”

“Dearie,” Jeffrey told her, “it's beginning to sound like the queer people at the circus at Fred's and Beckie's. We'll lock our bedroom door. We won't let Marianna in.”

It was just the way things had been in '39. He was not thinking about the war news. They were going along the Merritt Parkway at fifty miles an hour and soon they would turn off on Route 7.

The leaves of the newly planted trees between the concrete lanes were turning like the larger trees on either side. He was always vaguely disturbed by the Merritt Parkway and all the other parkways because once you were on them you had no way of telling that you were getting anywhere. There were no houses, just trees and bridges, trees and bridges, and no grades that were too steep. The whole thing must have cost the taxpayers a great deal more money than was necessary, but no one cared about money any more. The parkway was like a part of the new national thought, and it was all too easy. There were no towns, only shrubs and bushes from some nursery, and you never knew where you were until you got to Route 7.

“I wish,” Madge said, “we could think of all the things to do to our house that Fred and Beckie think of doing to theirs. This time I'm going to make a list.”

That was one of the things that always worried him about going to Fred and Beckie's, because Madge inevitably came back with ideas that she wanted to apply to their own house, and he never wanted any of them. Fred and Beckie were always reading catalogues and going to architects' sample rooms and getting new ideas such as paddock fences and outdoor fireplaces. He didn't want any of those things.

“We can never seem to think of anything,” Madge said. “I wish our place were half so cunning.”

“Don't,” Jeffrey said, “please, don't say ‘cunning.'”

It annoyed Jeffrey particularly when Madge wanted her life to be more like Fred and Beckie's, and wanted their children to be more like Fred and Beckie's. It never did any good to explain to her that nothing was ever like that unless you had a large and regular income derived from inherited securities. Madge always said that they could be more like Fred and Beckie if they would only budget. Beckie had three large account books all ruled off for Laundry, Dentist, Entertainment and Miscellaneous, and she put everything down in those books. She was able to do this because Fred could remember where the money went, and he was always doing little things for Beckie, always. Jeffrey had said something once which Madge had asked him never to repeat again as long as they lived, and if he did, she would walk right out of the house and leave him. Jeffrey had said that Fred and Beckie's life that Madge liked so much was like playing dolls. He never repeated the remark again, though in his own thoughts, he often elaborated on it.

After Yale, Fred had gone into his father's business—which involved chiefly the selling of safe municipal bonds to investors able to afford to live on the low yield of these securities and thus avoid the burden of state and federal income taxes. Thus Fred knew a great deal about tax exempts, though Jeffrey could never see why there was much to know, but Fred once said that it was tax exempts that kept him young.

It had never seemed to Jeffrey remarkable that Fred should have married Beckie, but to Madge that courtship and its subsequent culmination was invested with a sort of deathless beauty. It seemed that, for some reason which Madge always took for granted, all the girls wanted to marry Fred, but after Fred met Beckie at one of the Met dances—and Madge remembered everything about it because she and Beckie had been there together, just little girls from Farmington, and neither of them had hoped to have a good time—there had been no one else for Fred. Beckie had on a red dress and red slippers and she had that beautiful hair—it looked more like fresh taffy then than it did now—and she was so intelligent. Fred and Beckie had danced five dances and then they had gone away somewhere, and when Madge had asked Beckie afterwards how in the world they had found so much to talk about, Beckie had said they had talked about life and Omar Khayyám. Jeffrey imagined that the scene must have been a little like a page of F. Scott Fitzgerald and once considerably later, Fred had actually met Fitzgerald at the Ivy Club or somewhere, after one of the games with Princeton, and Fred had always had a suspicion, one which Jeffrey himself had heard him mention once, that because of that meeting he could see himself as one of the characters in the Fitzgerald novel,
The Beautiful and Damned
.

When they went to bed that night, Madge and Beckie had talked about Fred for three hours. Fred had not tried to paw her as some of those drunken boys from Groton and Harvard had. He was a very real person. And the next day, what do you think happened? Fred sent her at the Plaza where she had spent the night an enormous box of snow-white orchids all pinned separately on a card so that the bottom of the box was just a field of white and green and with the orchids a card without his name or anything, just these words: “Do you remember? I do.” And Beckie would never tell Madge, although they were best friends, what it was that she remembered because it was something that she could never tell anyone, not ever. But that very next Sunday, although she had never told him where she lived—when he asked her she had just told him to find out—Fred came up the drive of Beckie's house on Willow Road in the big red Cadillac runabout that the family had given him for Christmas, and they had played tennis all afternoon, and then when Beckie was afraid he might be bored seeing too much of her, he stayed all evening and didn't go home until half-past one in the morning.… And Madge had been the maid of honor at the wedding. There was only one touch more which had tied it into a sort of unity to which Jeffrey could scarcely give credence because it seemed so remote from human behavior as he knew it. Beckie had shown Madge the inner surface of her wedding ring—not platinum but a plain gold band like Beckie's mother's—and in it was engraved in tiny letters these words: “Do you remember? I do.”

Jeffrey often wished that Madge had never told him, for the honesty and enthusiasm and paucity of thought embarrassed him whenever he saw the ring on Beckie's finger, and it did no good to tell himself that he was a cynic. No man should have had such a thing engraved inside a wedding ring, and yet perhaps millions of other people had. And that was all there was to it, except that Madge loved them. They were like the characters of those magazine stories of the Twenties where everyone had been gay at the Country Club and where no one took to drink or ran off with someone else's wife or talked about working conditions in the steel mills, or about the uneven distribution of wealth, because the advertisers would not have liked it. Madge said they had everything, and they deserved everything, Fred and Beckie.

Madge said they had such luck, and their old farm in Connecticut was just another example of it. It had simply been an old ramshackle tumbledown place occupied by an Italian family named Leveroni, although the house was one of the dearest old salt-boxes that Beckie had ever seen, whatever a saltbox might be, and it dated back easily to the Revolutionary War. Beckie was the one who saw its possibilities. Before those Italians moved in, when all the farms in that soft blue valley were going to seed, the place had been owned by good Yankee stock. It had been called “the Higgins farm,” and after Beckie and Fred had bought it they rode around the country calling on the last of the old natives who were left in the valley to ask for details about the Higgins farm, because Beckie wanted it to have tradition; and Beckie had written the story of it and had collected all those anecdotes in a tooled Florentine leather book which Fred had given her. The book lay on the maple drop-front desk in the little formal parlor, a desk which Fred and Beckie had found in the kitchen of one of the natives. The little cabinetmaker in the little village had been surprised at how well the little desk came out, but Beckie had seen its possibilities right away. Now the book lay on the desk, and the book was called “Higgins Farm—1770”—and that was what the place was called, just “Higgins Farm.”

It seemed that one of the main characters of this Higgins family, or at least the one who lived most vividly within the memories of the natives whom Fred and Beckie had visited, was a man named Joel Higgins. This “old bird,” as Fred called him, although he sometimes referred to him as “Beckie's real boy friend,” must have been what Fred called “quite a salty character.” He used to go down at six in the morning to the cellar in back of the summer basement kitchen, where the Rumpus Room now was, and draw off a gallon of hard cider; and at four o'clock in the afternoon he would go down cellar again, his jug empty, and replenish it. That was why Beckie always kept a barrel of cider in the Rumpus Room, and called it “Uncle Joel's barrel.” Jeffrey often wondered what Uncle Joel would have said if he could have seen what Fred and Beckie had done to the Old House and to the Springhouse and to the old barn of the Higgins Farm.

“They must have put a hundred thousand dollars into it,” Jeffrey said once. Madge had told him that that didn't represent the thought they had put into it, and that she wished that he would not always think about how much people put into things, and besides, it was perfectly darling.

Beckie used to say that she hated to think of those beautiful farms in Connecticut with their big elms and maples and rolling meadows that had been simply ruined by the people who had bought them, some of them dear friends of hers and Fred's, too, although she was not going to mention names. The things they had done in polishing up and landscaping those old New England farms hurt Beckie almost physically and she simply had not allowed anything like that to happen to their place. She wanted it to have personality: hers, and Fred's too, of course; but she wanted it also to have primarily the atmosphere of those dear old people who had lived on it and who had made things with their hands, such as pail yokes and wooden scoops and sap buckets, and those dear little cobblers' benches that you could stand in front of the fireplace to put things on, such as cigarettes and cocktail glasses and what have you. She wanted the barn to be full of the things that those dear old people used, an old pung, perhaps, some sleighbells on a hook, a wooden rake and a part of a hay rigging and what have you—not in the way, of course, but still there to give the atmosphere. Someday, perhaps, they would really have cows and chickens and some fluffy white ducks in the brook and all those other things that go with a farm, and what have you, but you couldn't very well have them all in the barn so near the house with a manure pile right by the clothesyard. Someday when Freddie made a lot of money selling some of those City of Detroits at one-and-a-half, or whatever it was that Freddie did, they were going to build a little house on a corner of the place for a real farm, and it was going to be surrounded by sheep barns and cow barns and pig barns, and what have you, and everybody could go down and look at it, and really learn about life in a barnyard—but that was going to be someday.