So Little Time (42 page)

Jeffrey knew that he would have felt better if he had stopped for a cup of coffee, but he wanted to get back to familiar surroundings. He was tired after a number of nights in a hotel and he wanted to get home. The taxi traveled quickly across town along the nearly empty streets. He smoothed the newspaper he had purchased across his knee. In Greece the Italians had reached the Kalamis River, wherever that might be. It was announced that German planes during the blitz had damaged, among other buildings, the Bank of England, the Tate Gallery, and Westminster Abbey. Election Day was just around the corner, and the Democrats were saying that the Republicans had nothing to offer, that Willkie agreed with the Roosevelt foreign policy and with the New Deal's social gains, but was there any reason that he could do it better? All the front page of the paper confirmed the frustration which always surrounded Jeffrey at seven o'clock in the morning. At his apartment house the elevator boys and the doorman were not on duty. The rugs had been rolled up from the floor of the entrance hall, and competent, muscular men in overalls who did not fit with the chandeliers and mirrors were working sullenly with mops.

The air in the living room was heavy; he put down his bag carefully and took off his coat and listened to the ticking of the clock. The place was still asleep, as it had been hundreds of times before when he arrived in New York from a night train. Effie and Albert would be down soon, and so he sat down on the living room sofa and lighted a cigarette. He had never liked that living room or any of that apartment. It was too bare and too pretentious, and their furniture had never fitted in it properly. The whole place seemed to be waiting for them to move out and to go somewhere else, as one always did in New York; and now, that sense of impermanence disturbed him.

It made him think of all the places they had lived in up and down New York. There had been the ground floor of the house on West 10th Street, where they had lived first—two rooms and a kitchenette which somehow involved itself intimately with the bathroom. He could never get over the idea that the rent for it had been very high, but he had liked it in the village. He could never understand why Madge had wanted to get out of it before Jim was born. Madge had not liked it because it was Bohemian, and there were too many germs there for a baby. Madge's mother had wanted to give them a nurse and she had said that they must have a maid and that she would send them her old Sophie. Jeffrey had not wanted Sophie, because he had felt that it was very important not to have Madge's family give them things. He remembered that Madge had cried in the hospital when he told her that he did not want her mother to give them a nurse. Everyone had said that he must not upset Madge just two days after Jim was born, and that had meant that suddenly he had been obliged to pay for the nurse himself and a woman named Hattie had come in by the day. It had meant that all the expenses had doubled. Nevertheless, he was still sure that he had been right about it. He had wanted Jim to be his, not his mother-in-law's child, and they had rented a room on the second floor of West 10th Street for Jim and the nurse, a very melancholy woman who had disliked men. It had been very hard to pay the bills, and this had first started his doing work on collaboration at a fixed price on every job. Even so, it had been difficult to come out even. Madge could never have stood it if they had not been so much in love.

He could see now that it must have been very hard for a girl of Madge's “traditions,” as Madge's mother used to call them. That was when Madge began to be afraid that they would be Bohemian. It was the year he had done some work on the play called “Rainy Afternoon,” and he had been given a substantial percentage of the author's share, the first of such arrangements that he had ever made, and the first play that he had been involved with that was close to being a hit. Then Madge had wanted to rent a little house in Scarsdale because the country would be better for Jim. Jeffrey still could feel a quiver of dislike when he thought of all the rows of little houses where everyone called on everyone else—neither the country nor the city. The year that Gwen was born they moved back to New York and lived on a floor of a brownstone house on West 18th Street, but as Madge said, the neighborhood was not good for children. Then there was the apartment on the West Side near Central Park, where the rents were lower, but Madge said that her friends never came to see her, and that year Jeffrey had made twenty thousand dollars, so they moved to the East Side.

That was the way it went. He could think of his whole life in terms of apartments, of moving days, of doormen, of visits to antique shops when they had money, of nurses' days off, of restaurants on the maid's night out, of the entertaining Madge did for her friends, of the parties which he sometimes had to give, for Madge had understood that it was necessary occasionally to entertain those “business people.” It was one apartment after another, and here he was in the last one, a duplex, the largest they had ever had.

In a way, it was the summing up of everything and what Madge had always wanted, large rooms with all the cheap furniture removed, as though there had never been any, and replaced by the kind of chairs and tables that were called “important pieces” in Madison Avenue shops. It was what Madge had wanted, and what she had always tried to get, and it was what he had wanted, too, and there it was. If it had not been for the war and the income tax, there would no longer have been much worry about money, because in his way Jeffrey was an important piece, too, like one of the Georgian armchairs by the fireplace, a piece with grace, with good finish, without anything new added, a piece that fetched a good price even when business was bad. There he was, hungry and tired, with the realization, which always came to him after a night on the train, that he was not properly washed and brushed. There he was, sitting in the living room, opening a silver cigarette box, furtively, as though it were not his, and actually it was not, because Madge had bought it with her own money.

When a shuffling sound in the dining room told him that Albert or Effie was downstairs, he walked to the petit-point bellpull and pushed the little button behind it. Ringing a bell at home had always seemed to him like ringing for the curtain, obliging him to assume a proper and dignified position. He lighted his cigarette carefully and picked up the newspaper and waited, sitting up a little straighter as he heard Albert cross the dining room.

“Good morning, Albert,” he said.

Albert was in his alpaca house coat. Albert looked pained and surprised.

“We did not know that Mr. Wilson was coming, sir,” Albert said. It was something else that Albert had learned from a book of etiquette. “Mrs. Wilson was not expecting Mr. Wilson until tomorrow.”

“Well,” Jeffrey said, “Mr. Wilson expects some orange juice and coffee and scrambled eggs and bacon upstairs in his study in fifteen minutes. Mr. Wilson is very hungry and he has a headache. Mr. Wilson feels like hell.”

He smiled at Albert to show that he was being amusing, but he saw that Albert did not appreciate his effort. In the hall, when Jeffrey started to pick up his suitcase, Albert darted forward.

“Permit me, please, sir,” Albert said.

Upstairs by the master's bedroom, the hall was still asleep. Gwen's door was closed though it was time for her to be getting up to prepare herself for Miss Spence's School—but Gwen was too big now for him to wake her up. His study door was open and a few shafts of morning light were coming through the carefully drawn curtains, crossing his desk which was covered with letters. He put his suitcase on a chair. It was filled with soiled shirts and pajamas. He had begun to open it when he remembered that Albert would unpack for him. It was still early to wake up Madge, but suddenly he wanted to talk to someone. He wanted to be convinced that he was back at home.

The Venetian blinds in the bedroom were drawn, except at one window which was open. The open window made the room cool and noisy because of the stirrings of the morning from the streets outside. It was the restless combination of sounds to which he always awakened in New York, indefinably different from any night sounds or day sounds. He could almost hear the shuffle of hurrying feet already in the rising drone of elevated trains and cross-town busses, mingling with the whistles on the river. Though the sounds were too dull to disturb him, they fitted into the background of his thoughts, making him already a part of the city.

The master's bedroom was larger than any he and Madge had ever slept in. It was furnished with her chaise longue and her bow-front bureau and the Sheraton dressing table which he had given her and his own mahogany chest-on-chest with its heavy brasses and its mirror. Even with the twin beds and the new green carpet and the chairs and the still life above the mantelpiece, the room still required more furniture. It all made him think of something that was built for another age, when nothing was too good for anyone. Madge had selected the papering herself, gay blue birds of a species he did not know, birds and baskets of flowers. The curtains were bright yellow to make it gay and the blanket covers on the twin beds were yellow too, because the color was becoming to Madge.

Madge was sound asleep. He always envied her that ability to sleep in the morning. The book she had been reading,
Country Squire in the White House
, lay beside her bed where she had dropped it, and the blue leather traveling clock, which her mother had given her, years before, was ticking beside the lamp. Her Japanese kimono was carefully folded over a chair where Effie had placed it, and her silk mules were at the base of the chair, just so. She was lying on her side, her face half-circled by her bare arm, her lips half-parted, her dark hair around her on the pillow. She looked very young there asleep. Her cheek looked very smooth and round. Her lips had that determined curve which had once made him want to laugh. That little upward curve of Madge's nose was what made her still look young, that and the roundness of her chin. There she was and there he was and all at once he did not want to waken her, and so he stood there thinking of all the other rooms which he and Madge had slept in, of the cabin on the
Bremen
, of that stuffy room at Garland's, of the corner room at the Adlon in Berlin, of the suite with the balcony at the Crillon, of the room in the front at Shepheard's the time they had gone to Cairo. He remembered, for some reason, a German and his wife in Cairo.

“The pyramids,” the German had said, once when they had all taken an
apéritif
together before dinner, “were built in three phases.”

“But, Karlschen,” his wife had said, “I thought the pyramids were built with four faces.”

“No,” the German had said, and he had grown angry, “phases, phases, not faces.”

There was no reason why such an anecdote should have come to his mind as he stood there looking at Madge asleep. It made him feel very kindly toward her, for a thing like that made a little joke which only they two had in common. Those were the things that you remembered when you had forgotten so much else. He remembered that the Arab had wanted more money in the inside of the pyramid and that Madge had been frightened. He remembered riding on a camel as all tourists did in Cairo, and he remembered how silly he must have looked with the drivers all shouting at him, wanting him, of course, to pay more money.

Then Madge stirred and opened her eyes.

“Why, Jeff,” she said, and then the little line on her forehead grew deeper and she looked a little older, now that she was awake. “I thought you were coming tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he said, “I should have telephoned.”

“What are you laughing at?” she asked. “Do I look funny?”

“No,” he said, “phases, phases, not faces.”

Her forehead wrinkled again, and then she remembered.

“Why, Jeff,” she said, “what ever made you think of that?”

“I don't know,” he answered, and he bent down and kissed her.

“Close the window, will you dear?” she said. “Jeff, Effie and Albert are leaving.”

“All right,” Jeffrey said.

“Albert thinks you don't like him,” Madge said. “I told him of course you did, but Effie says that Albert can't work for anyone who doesn't like him.”

“What does he want me to do,” Jeffrey asked, “kiss him?”

He was glad that Madge was awake, and the news that Albert and Effie were leaving seemed to draw them closer together.

“Jeff,” she said, “get me that kimono, will you?” And he wrapped it around her shoulders and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Darling,” Madge said, “how was everything?”

That was what she always asked him when he came back from anywhere.

“Everything?” he said. “Everything was about as usual.”

“Well,” Madge said, “tell me about everything.”

“Well,” Jeffrey said, “it was about the same. I'm glad you didn't come. You didn't miss much.”

“Oh, Jeff,” Madge said, “you never tell me anything. You used to tell me.”

“No, I didn't,” Jeffrey said. “You used to think I told you. Did the man come to fix the clock downstairs?”

“No,” Madge said, “he didn't. I'll call him up this morning. Jeffrey, how was Dick Breakwater?”

It was hard to tell in detail how people were, and he was feeling tired.

“Just the way he always is,” he said, “artistic.”

“Was his wife there?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said.

“Was she attractive?”

“I don't know, Madge,” Jeffrey said. “Jesse gave her some orchids.”

“He sent some to me, too,” Madge said.

“When Jesse is worried,” Jeffrey told her, “he always sends out orchids.”

“But, dear,” Madge said, “how did it go? I wish you'd tell me.”

“It didn't go,” Jeffrey answered. “Jesse is taking it off.”

“Oh, dear,” Madge said. “Did you put any money in it?”