So Little Time (3 page)

“Jeff, is that from Alf?” She must have seen the writing. “You just sent him five hundred dollars, didn't you?”

“It looks as though he's broke again,” he answered. “You know Alf.”

But she did not know Alf the way he knew him. You could not share everything with anybody in the world.

“If you'd just put him on a definite allowance,” she began. “Other people's brothers—” She stopped, and Jeffrey looked back at the letter. It was Air Mail from California. Soon there would be a telegram and then there would be a telephone call, charges reversed. He knew Alf.

“Jeffrey,” he heard her say, “Jim's overdrawn. There's a letter from the Cambridge Trust Company.”

Jeffrey folded his letter.

“When he tells me about it, I'll take it up with him,” he said. Breakfast was over, and it was time that he was going.

“Don't forget,” she told him, “to put some money into the housekeeping account this morning, and then there's the country—”

“What's wrong in the country?” Jeffrey asked.

“Closing the house,” she told him. “Mr. Gorman had the Martinelli boy wrapping up the rosebushes. You know how much you like the garden.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “the garden.”

“Jeff.” A change in her voice made him look at her quickly. “You're not sorry, are you?”

“Sorry?” he repeated after her. “Sorry about what?”

“I mean,” she said, “you've liked it, haven't you? The children and the country and being here in the winter. You
have
liked it, haven't you?”

You would think that everything was settled, and then when you least expected it, a question like that would come out of nowhere. He could not imagine why she had selected such a time to ask him.

“Why, of course I like it,” he said. “Why, Madge, if you hadn't married me, I'd have been Bohemian.”

“I just wonder sometimes,” she said.

“If I've said anything,” he began, “to make you think—”

“No,” she said, “I just wonder sometimes, if it's what you really wanted. Jeff, we
have
had a good time, haven't we?”

“Look here,” Jeffrey told her, “we're just having breakfast, aren't we? We're just beginning another day, aren't we? Don't talk as though you were going to die.”

“All our friends,” Madge said, “and the house in the country—I wouldn't have bought it if you hadn't wanted it—and the children. They are nice children.”

“Look here,” Jeffrey said, “why do we have to go into this the first thing in the morning? I didn't say the children weren't nice—they're swell. Everything is swell. The house in the country is swell, even the garage.”

“You wanted the garage,” Madge said.

“I didn't say I didn't want it,” Jeffrey told her, “I just told you everything is swell.”

“I just wonder sometimes,” Madge said, “I just wonder what you'd have been like if we hadn't got married.”

“Look here,” Jeffrey told her, “I don't see why you bring this up. It's pretty late in the game to wonder—we'll be married twenty-one years December.”

“Well, here we are,” Madge said; “I didn't think you were going to remember.”

“That's exactly the point,” Jeffrey told her. “Here we are, and I'm not going to stay here any longer because I've got to get dressed and get out. Just remember everything is swell, that is, unless you're tired of it.”

“No,” she said, “of course I'm not. It's everything I've wanted.”

Jeffrey walked around the card table and kissed her, and she clung to him for a moment.

“Jeffrey.”

“What?” he asked her.

“Don't worry about the war. You can't do anything about it.”

Sometimes when he thought she did not know anything about him, suddenly he found she knew just what he was thinking.

“It hasn't been on my mind at all,” he said, but he knew she did not believe him. “Nothing's on my mind. Wait a minute, if we're going to Fred's and Beckie's, have you read
World Assignment
? Wait a minute.” He crossed the room to one of the shelves and pulled out a book. “I haven't read it, either, but maybe you'd better look at it. Here it is. Walter gave it to me,” and he opened the cover and showed her the flyleaf. “See, he wrote in it. ‘Cheerio, to my old friend Jeff, with very sincere regards, Walter Newcombe.'”

Jeffrey stood leaning over her shoulder, and she looked up at him.

“Why, Jeff,” she said, “you never told me that he gave you that book. I thought it had come from the Book-of-the-Month Club. You never tell me anything at all.”

The elevator boy wore white cotton gloves that wrinkled above his knuckles.

“Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” he said, “it's a fine morning.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “it is a nice morning, isn't it?”

“It's always good weather in October,” the elevator boy said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “October is always a fine month.”

“October is the best month of the year,” the elevator boy said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “that's so. October is always a good month.”

The doorman held open the door for him. “Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” the doorman said.

“Good morning,” Jeffrey answered.

“It's a fine morning, Mr. Wilson,” the doorman said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “it's a nice October morning.”

“October, I always say,” the doorman told him, “is the best month of the year.”

Jeffrey was out in the street in the best month of the year, but he was not thinking about it.

“I wonder sometimes …” he heard Madge saying, but then, perhaps everyone occasionally wondered. He could hear her voice again. The background of sound made by the elevated and by the trucks and taxicabs had the same quality of rushing water which sometimes seems to reproduce a voice.

“
Don't worry about the war
.”

You had to admire that ability of hers to turn her back upon anything unpleasant.

“Let's not talk about it now,” she used to say.

You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music. And she was right, there was nothing you could do about it.

2

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

If you had known someone well long ago, it was hard to break the habit of thinking of him as he looked and behaved in what we sometimes call “those days.” Back in those days Walter Newcombe had looked like a young clerk in a general store from the interior of Massachusetts. This was not peculiar because Walter did come from there and his uncle did keep a general store, although Walter's father was a motorman. After graduating from High School Walter attended Dartmouth. It was too far away now for Jeffrey to recall exactly how Walter got a newspaper job. After all, how is anyone ever taken on a paper? At any rate, Walter used to sit at the telegraph desk and when the Associated Press dispatches popped out of the tube, falling like light explosive bombs into a wire basket, Walter would pull them out of their leather projectiles, unfold and smooth the sheets, and hand them over to Mr. Fernald.

He was a thin blond boy with irregular teeth and incorrect posture. His nose always had a red, shiny look, and he wore steel-rimmed glasses. He also wore those elastic bands around his shirt sleeves—pink, crinkly elastic bands, to keep his cuffs from getting soiled. No one seemed to wear those things any more and even then they were a badge of crude unworldliness. Someone told Jeffrey later—because he had left the paper in Boston very shortly after Walter had been taken on—that Walter bought a pair because Mr. Fernald wore them. Old Mr. Jenks wore them too—Mr. Jenks who clipped the bits out of the foreign exchanges for Miscellany, and did the column called “What's New in Europe's Capitals” for the Saturday paper. His arm bands, however, were not conspicuous because Mr. Jenks always wore an old frock coat, except in midsummer, when he used to hang it up on the hook beside the water cooler. Mr. Jenks must have been close to seventy then, and he was a newspaper man of the old school. Years earlier, before he came to that safe port in the old telegraph room, Mr. Jenks had been the Paris correspondent for the old
New York Herald
—years earlier, and he brought with him a faint continental atmosphere and a bland sophistication that Jeffrey never forgot.

When the page for the last edition closed at ten minutes to four each afternoon, Edgar, the office boy, would bring out the dominoes, and Mr. Jenks and Mr. Fernald would play for a while to see who would pay for the five-cent cigars. Walter was the one who went to buy them at the United Cigar Store on the corner of Washington Street, just as Jeffrey had when he had started there. On the occasions when Mr. Jenks won, he would lapse into gay reminiscence concerning those bright lands across the Atlantic, for they were as fresh in his memory as though he had been there yesterday. He would usually tell of the time when he met Prince Henry of Prussia, or perhaps about his interview with that intrepid aviator, Santos-Dumont. His stories sounded somewhat like Du Maurier, and they went well with the fresh smell of ink from the composing room that blew down the dusty stairs from the floor above. Once when he was examining the photographs in the
Manchester Guardian
Mr. Jenks contributed an interesting sidelight on his private life.

“By thunder,” Mr. Jenks said. He was looking at the photograph of a fountain in Stuttgart. The fountain consisted of a thinly draped girl holding a conch shell from which came a jet of water that descended into a basin held up by sea horses. “By thunder,” Mr. Jenks said, pointing to the photograph of that marble figure, “I slept with that girl once, in Berlin, in 1885—” At least this was what his old friends on the paper told Jeffrey.

“What?” Walter said. “How could you? She's a statue, Mr. Jenks.”

Walter was always a little slow on the uptake then, and when everybody began to laugh, he turned beet-red. He was a shy boy, and he knew that he had spoken out of turn, but Mr. Jenks was always kind to the young men. He never barked at them the way Mr. Fernald did.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Jenks said, “she's a statue now, but she wasn't a statue then. Her name was Tinka.”

“Oh, God,” Mr. Fernald said, “excuse me just a minute,” and he pushed back his swivel chair and ran out front to the editorial room to tell Mr. Eldridge and Mr. Nichols, who did the columns called “The Listener” and “Books and Authors.” And then Mr. Fernald went in back to the City Desk and then he told old Frank Sims, who was the foreman of the composing room. That is the sort of thing that sticks in a journalist's memory. Whenever any of the old crowd spoke of Walter afterwards, in spite of all the years between, they would somehow get back to the statue.

They would say, “But she's a statue, Mr. Jenks,” and then although their ways had not crossed in years, and though Mr. Jenks was moldering in his grave, and though a lot of them were also dead or dead-broke, and though the old paper had folded up, somehow those bright days would come back and they would all be drawn together. Outsiders could never see why it was as funny as it really was. You had to be a part of the mystic brotherhood in that old telegraph room. You had to have the feel of it and the smell of it.

“My God,” Walter said once, “can't anybody ever forget it? Why, they even told it at an informal little dinner that the Governor General gave for me in Hong Kong—and back in London, even Winston knows about it.”

“Winston who?” someone asked, and Walter blushed slightly. He never seemed able to tell whether or not people were serious.

“Churchill,” he said, “Mr. Churchill.”

“How about the Duke of Windsor?” someone asked.

“Who? David?” Walter asked, and he brightened. Clearly he wished to get away from his salad days. “Did I ever tell you boys about that swim we took together at Deauville?”

Once, during the September that marked the second year of World War II, when Jeffrey had been in Boston, he had looked up Mr. Fernald in Woburn. It was years since he had “got through,” as the saying was, and there was no longer any paper and he even had a sickening uncertainty as to whether Mr. Fernald might be alive or dead or in a poorhouse. But Mr. Fernald was there in Woburn in the house that he had bought out of his sixty-five a week. He was sitting on his front piazza with his feet up on the railing watching his boy Earl, who was a clerk in Kresge's, mow the patch of lawn out front. Mr. Fernald looked very frail and old, older than Mr. Jenks had ever looked. Mr. Fernald's coat was off, his vest unbuttoned, and sprinkled as it had always been with cigar ash, and he still wore those pink garters around his arms. It was hard to find anything to talk about until the telegraph room came into the conversation.

“Jesus,” Mr. Fernald said, “do you remember Walter Newcombe? That was just before you went to New York.” And Walter's face came back, with its shiny nose and the shock of yellow hair.

“I wonder,” Mr. Fernald said, “what the hell ever happened. He was always a damned fool. How the hell did he ever do it?”

If you had ever known anyone in his early budding years, living through those chapters which a biographer might entitle “Boyhood Portents,” it was hard to imagine that he ever could amount to much. Sitting there with Mr. Fernald seemed to Jeffrey a little like sitting in a projection room and running a picture backward just for fun. In both their minds, Walter Newcombe was running backward to the time that must have pleased him least; and after all, how had he ever done it? What hidden springs had there been within him that had pushed him out ahead? It was a little like those marathon runs, where some scrawny, hollow-chested boy, the last one who you would think could do it, would cough and wheeze his way out front.