So Little Time (24 page)

The only explanation Jeffrey could give for it was that Mr. Barnes had not heard.

Then everyone was singing the National Anthem, and it was over. He was walking with the class toward the steps of the stage and he never knew how it happened, except that he could not have been looking, for suddenly he was face to face with Louella Barnes. At first he thought that Louella herself could not have heard the poem, because she smiled at him, and she had never looked so pretty.

“That was a lovely speech. You didn't act a bit afraid,” she said. She was speaking as though nothing at all had happened. She was still smiling at him. “I didn't think much of Christine's poem, did you?”

“No,” Jeffrey said, “not much.”

“Some people are awfully silly, don't you think?” Louella said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said. “It was silly.” And he smiled too. She was beyond the jibes and japes of ordinary people. She was too fine, too rare. She was what he had always thought her—unattainable, untouchable.

“Well, good-by,” Louella said.

“Good-by,” Jeffrey answered.

There was a finality in that last word. He would never sit in the same room with her again. He would never hear her recite French. He would never watch for her in the morning at the High School door. They were on the path of life, treading different paths, but she could not stop his loving her. That was the way he felt that summer about Louella Barnes.

15

Now You've Found Your Way

In the autumn of 1939 when he was in Boston helping at the try-out of a play which Jesse Fineman was producing, Jeffrey drove out to Bragg. He had not been there since his Aunt Martha's funeral, after which they had sold the house on Lime Street, for the simple reason that no one wanted it any more. It would have made more sense if he had gone to see his sister Ethel in West Springfield. Somehow it seemed easier to get to Chicago than to West Springfield, and when Jeffrey did get there, it was an effort and one which he did not believe Ethel liked any more than he did. Alf was the only subject they had in common, and you could not talk about Alf indefinitely. He drove out to Bragg because he wanted an excuse to get away from Jesse Fineman's suite at the Ritz, and away from the show business.

The suite at the Ritz had been filled with that sort of hysteria which was always present at the try-out of a play that was likely to be a flop. It was the moment when anyone connected with such a venture was sorry for himself and was hating everyone else. The doors of all the bedrooms were open and members of the cast were sitting on the beds, and Room Service was bringing up highballs and dry Martinis and milk and three-minute boiled eggs and black coffee and aspirin and all sorts of people kept coming in. Jesse Fineman had a headache and was drinking Bromo-Seltzer. Hazel Harris was in tears and the playwright had passed out on the bed in the next room. For some reason, Jeffrey began to think of Bragg. He thought of Bragg as something solid which might give him the same sort of perspective as a visit to the Art Museum or the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or it may have had something to do with the phrase that was common then about “rededicating oneself.” He knew that all sorts of memories would hurt him, but it hurt him more to stay at the Ritz.

He rented a Drive-Yourself car from a garage near Park Square and drove through Somerville. It was colder, much colder than it ever was in New York at that time of year. Even by the time he reached the Fellsway the trees looked barer than they ever did outside of New York, and there was a grimness in the lead color of the sky, and a damp chill in the air as though winter had come already. It was still light when he reached Bragg, a solemn, dull sort of light. The trees above the houses were black. Leaves had been piled around the cellar walls and there was a smell of wood smoke. The German gun which had been placed in front of the Town Hall after the last war looked as old as the Civil War Soldiers' monument. His own name was there with the others on the bronze plaque, between the doors of the Town Hall, commemorating the sons of Bragg who had answered their country's call in nineteen hundred and seventeen, but there was nothing else of him left in Bragg any more. In a way it did not seem decent for him to be there, because he was looking at it as some person from the city might who wanted to see the fine old houses. He did not want to drive through Lime Street, but he drove quite slowly through Center Street where the Barnes house stood.

There had never been much money in Bragg, but they used to talk of Center Street and “the Center Street crowd.” The brick sidewalks were still there and the ornate fences in front of the houses. The Thompson house, which had belonged to the owners of the carpet mill, looked smaller to Jeffrey than it should have. The weeping birch trees in front of it had grown larger but they looked smaller too. The Barnes house itself looked smaller and he could see that it made an ugly interpolation on Center Street, having been built in the days when people had learned that you could do all sorts of things with turning lathes. Its shingles were cut in scallops and it still was painted yellow. There was the same iron fence and the same tar walk leading up to the front steps, and the same maple tree. There was a couch swing on the porch just where the other couch swing had been. Two boys about eleven or twelve, in blue jeans and sweaters, were chasing each other and shouting on the lawn. He remembered the tail ends of autumn afternoons when he was just their age, when you felt that there was nothing left to the day and that it might just as well be dark.

If he had wanted to, he could not have helped stopping. He could almost believe that the idea had been in the back of his mind all the time and that he had come to Bragg for just that purpose. He walked up the tarred walk, looking at the cracks in it, and as he approached the granite steps he had a spasm of innate guilt. There was a certain fine sort of justice to it that was better than the Victorianism of Locksley Hall, closer to a poem by Yeats. Nobody there preached down a daughter's heart with a little hoard of maxims. The porch made the familiar drumming sound as he stepped on it, and when he rang the bell there was Louella.

It was not fair, because he had been expecting to see her, but there was nothing except incomprehension on her face. She wore the look that a certain type of woman wears when a Fuller Brush man comes knocking at the door.

“Hello,” he said, “don't you know me?” And then she knew him.

“Why, Jeff,” she said, “Jeff Wilson.” And then she added something which was hardly true about his not having changed at all.

The little parlor looked as it always had. He faced the same heavy brass fender and high andirons and the same varnished-oak mantelpiece with the beveled mirror and the same sofa with fringes hanging from it. If the old Brussels carpet had worn out, the new one looked just like it. There was even a newspaper lying on the carpet just as though Mr. Barnes had gone out so that the young people could have the parlor to themselves. Only he and Louella had changed. Her hair was darker, and she had put on weight, but she looked the way he knew she would, integrated and comfortable.

“I haven't seen you since the funeral,” she was saying.

“What funeral?” He asked the question because he was thinking of something else.

“Your Aunt Martha's funeral,” she said. “I was there.”

“Oh, yes,” Jeffrey said. “Yes, I remember.”

“No, you don't,” she said. “You didn't see me.”

“That's right,” he said, “I didn't.” He was thinking that he had not seen her for well over twenty years.

“Are those boys yours out on the lawn, Louella?”

Yes, they were her boys, and he was thinking that they might have been his, and he supposed that she was thinking the same thing. It was getting dusk, and she lighted a lamp on the table. And then she was asking him to tell everything about himself and he told what you might tell anyone, but they never referred to what they must both have been thinking except once.

“It's funny, your stopping by,” she said. “I still think about you, sometimes.”

He wanted to change the subject, in spite of all that time.

“Louella,” he asked, “are you the president of the Women's Club?”

“Yes,” she said. “What of it?”

“Nothing,” Jeffrey said, “I'm glad you are. Your mother was.”

“We had a good program last year,” Louella said, “and this year we're going to have a better one. How's Ethel?”

“Ethel?” Jeffrey said. “Oh, she's all right. You know they're living in West Springfield.”

“Yes, I know,” Louella said. “How's Alf?”

“Right now,” Jeffrey said, “he's in California somewhere.”

“California is a lovely state,” Louella said. “Last year I was at the Federation Convention in Los Angeles.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “there are lots of conventions in California.”

“California is beautiful,” Louella said. “But I wouldn't want to live where there's no change in climate. Have you read
The Grapes of Wrath
?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said.

“I read it first for the Public Library,” Louella said, “and somehow it didn't appeal to me. Father wouldn't have had it in the house. Times keep changing, don't they?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “I wish they wouldn't change so fast.”

“I like it,” Louella said. “It keeps you alive. Well, here's Milt.”

There was a footstep on the porch, and the front door was opening.

“Milt,” Louella called, “guess who's here! It's Jeffrey Wilson.”

Milt Rolfe looked heavier too. He said he had not seen Jeff for a dog's age.

“Did you stop at the drugstore the way I asked you?” Louella said.

“No,” Milt said, “did you ask me?”

“This morning,” Louella said, “I distinctly told you to stop at the drugstore.”

“For what?” Milt asked.

“I can't say what I wanted you to get, now,” Louella said, “but I did tell you to stop. Milt, come into the hall a minute. You'll excuse us just a minute, won't you, Jeffrey?”

Jeffrey could hear them whispering in the hall.

“Well, get in the car,” he heard Louella whisper, “it's still open. Go down and get two more.”

Then Louella and Milt came back.

“We're having a pick-up supper tonight,” Louella said. “The real meal's in the middle of the day, but Milt and I would love it if you'd sit down with us and have chops.”

“Yes,” Milt said, “come on and stay, Jeff.”

But the last thing he wanted was to stay. It was growing dark outside and he wanted to get away. He had simply grown out of it and the door had closed behind him.

“I wish I could,” he said, “but I've got to be getting back.”

“Now you've found your way, come again,” Louella said.

But he knew that he would never come again, and she must have known it, too. Milt walked through the dusk with him to the car.

“Come again,” Milt said, “now that you've found your way.”

And that expression stayed with him, “Now you've found your way.” It had a solemn sound because you never found your way. You fell into it, or someone kicked you into it, but you never found it. Those might have been his children on the lawn. He might have been working in some newspaper telegraph room. They might have been living on Lime Street and perhaps they might have been happy. When you came to think of it, Louella Barnes was responsible for everything. He would never have jumped into the war so fast, he would never have been where he was at all, if he had not run away from Louella Barnes. The answer had been written somewhere. If he had married Louella Barnes, he might have been one of the men who went with their wives to the Federation of Women's Clubs' convention at Los Angeles.

16

Just the Day for Tea

During all of his four years at Harvard Jeffrey went home for Saturday and Sunday because it was cheaper than stopping at the rooming house near Central Square where he stayed during the week. Besides his tuition, his grandfather gave him four hundred dollars annually for room and board, a limitation which practically prohibited any social activities, even if he had understood that they existed at college. When they asked him at home how he liked it there, he always said, of course, that he had a fine time, but even then he did not entirely believe it. He only realized later that he was one of those boys to whom others referred as grease-balls, or other less printable names. He was a part of that grim and underprivileged group that appeared in the Yard each morning with small leather bags containing books and papers. He was one of the boys who wore celluloid collars which you could wash off in your room, and who used the reading room in the Library as a resting place because there was no other place to go, and who ate a sandwich there for lunch, and to whom no one spoke unless it was absolutely necessary. He was one of those grease-balls who used to swallow and stammer and mispronounce long words, but he was more sorry for himself later than he had been then. It was hard for him even to understand his former attitude of patient unawareness, for later he could only be appalled by his utter immaturity, and his ignorance of other modes of living.

A professor might occasionally reveal a disturbing vista, might allude to student days at Heidelberg, or pass on to Jeffrey his contagious enthusiasm for a line of poetry or a historical personage, but Jeffrey never felt that he could fully share this knowledge. He thought humbly that this was due to his natural stupidity and only realized later that those men and those books seldom used his terms of expression or resorted to any illustrations with which he was familiar. It was the same with the students who would not speak to him after class was over. It was only later that he knew any of them and that was during discussions in advanced courses, when he had developed a certain ability in prose composition. He could only recall a few occasions when glimpses of this difference had been revealed to him, for he was too absorbed in his own struggles then to understand their meaning.