So Little Time (53 page)

Minot lived in an apartment on the upper part of Fifth Avenue, overlooking the Park, just where he should have lived. He had moved there, twelve years before, after his mother died, and it had never occurred to Jeffrey until that afternoon that all that part of Fifth Avenue could ever be out of date. He had never noticed before how dingy the baroque façades of the private houses had grown. He had never noticed how many of them were unoccupied, how many were for sale or to let. He remembered the Richard Harding Davis story of the big red touring car panting at the curb, waiting for our hero to descend in his dustcoat and goggles from the old family mansion on the Park. The Park had scarcely changed, except for the additions to the Art Museum, which had been too large before, and except for the monument to the 27th Division. But opposite, the houses and the apartments looked as dusty and as technically dated as the works of Davis or Chambers. Even Minot's apartment house, which had obviously always been kept in meticulous order, gave Jeffrey, that afternoon, the illusion of a perfectly preserved survival. It had as little to do with what was going on at present as Minot himself or the Prince or the horse or the five-foot jump, and yet neither Minot nor the apartment was very old. The building had actually been erected in 1915, and Jeffrey could never get it out of his head that 1915 was only yesterday. It always surprised him to realize how much taste had changed, and taste, he supposed, really represented a sort of human aspiration. The hall was Gothic. The floor, of course, was laid in black and white marble squares, slightly worn. The walls were decorated with excellent replicas of tapestry, or they might have been originals, as far as Jeffrey knew. The elevator was of gilded metal and black walnut with a green plush seat, and the little car and its white-haired attendant, who was wearing a livery not unlike a Prince Albert coat, seemed to Jeffrey to move upward with a tantalizing slowness, very unlike the elevators on Park Avenue.

The hall of Minot's apartment was dark oak with an Italian refectory table and a Venetian gilded mirror above it and a silver plate for calling cards. Minot's man—Minot always called him his man—must have come to the door as soon as he heard Minot's latchkey. He smiled at Jeffrey, because Jeffrey was Minot's friend.

“Make us a cocktail, will you William?” Minot said. “And light the fire. Where shall we sit, Jeff, in the parlor or the den?”

That was an anachronism, too. It went with the apartment house and that part of the Avenue, with Robert W. Chambers and Richard Harding Davis. You never called them “dens” any longer. They were “libraries” or “studies” now, not that he could ever think of Minot as seriously studying anything, and when Jeffrey thought of the leather-backed books which Minot never read, and of Minot's silver trophies on the mantelpiece, he did not want to go there.

“How about the parlor?” Jeffrey asked.

“All right,” Minot said. “Wait for me there, will you, Jeff? Read the paper or get the six-o'clock news. I'll just take off these boots.”

It always interested Jeffrey to observe how other people lived. Their tastes, and the possessions with which they surrounded themselves, often set a punctuation, sometimes amusing and sometimes sad, upon everything they had done. Until that afternoon he had always accepted the big room in Minot's apartment uncritically, but he thought of it analytically now, in spite of himself, and this seemed almost disloyal. When he and Madge had first come there to dinner, when the chandeliers were lighted and the logs in the Italian marble fireplace were burning, it had seemed to epitomize, more than any room he had ever seen, an impregnable sort of stability. Now it seemed silent, sensitive to his criticism. Those minutes before dusk were the least flattering time for any room, for everything had a weary look, and the curtains should have been drawn and the lights turned on in order to conceal a day that was dying. The room was crowded with pictures and furniture and bric-a-brac and Persian rugs which were a little too large for the floor space, all from Minot's mother's house, brought there after she had died. The Louis Seize chairs in blue damask had come from his mother's parlor. There was a bench covered with
petit point
, with Jacobean legs, standing just in front of the Renaissance lion-headed brass andirons, which were too large for the fireplace. The piano in the corner was covered with a silk Persian rug, and on top of the rug was a cluster of photographs of Minot's friends and family, each in a heavy silver frame.

There was one of Minot's father sitting at a desk and pictures of Minot's two daughters in white frilly dresses, and in one of the frames Jeffrey saw a picture of himself, heavily lighted and dramatized by a theatrical photographer, taken, he remembered, on the only occasion when Jesse Fineman had ever produced a play of his. There was a photograph, growing a little yellow, of Stanley Rhett in his leather coat and helmet. He was leaning against the wing of a biplane, smiling, and always young, because Stan was dead, smiling from the past that Minot still loved best. Across the corner in rather unformed letters were the words, “
Happy Landings—Stan
.” Then there was a picture of Captain Strike, their flight commander. “
Always, Minot—Bill
.” The photographs stared at Jeffrey from their frames in the unrelieving light. They had always seemed to him completely natural until that afternoon, but now they had become the sort of thing that guests would look at surreptitiously and speak of gently among themselves without asking impertinent questions.

In the silence of the room, Jeffrey could almost hear their voices: “The old man, Minot's father … Jeff Wilson, you know, the one who does something about plays—the one he met in the war who married Madge Hayes … Minot's little girls—living with their mother after the divorce … That one, Stan Rhett—you know, Bill Rhett's brother, killed in the war … Captain Somebody-or-other, someone he knew in the war.” But Jeffrey had always been pleased that his picture was among them. It was a part of Minot's loyalty.

There were two Sèvres vases on the marble mantelpiece, so large that you knew that they had never been bought for it, and on the wall above the mantel was John Singer Sargent's portrait of Minot's mother. Jeffrey had always loved to see her there—she was so alive, so much the way he always remembered her. As he looked at her now, she seemed very glad to see him. All sorts of memories came to him of her kindness, and yet that afternoon, he had another thought. It might have been the skill of Sargent that made her appear to own that room and to give every object in it some fragment of her memory. Everything in that room had been hers. It had always seemed fitting and touching to Jeffrey that it had been so, until that afternoon, but now he understood how difficult it might have been for another woman to have come to that place and to have lived with a memory. There was no unity in that room, to which everything had been brought so obviously from somewhere else. It represented a taste belonging definitely to another generation. The room itself was an effort at survival. It was Minot's effort to cling to everything that he liked. It was Minot's lack of resilience and compromise. Jeffrey told himself that the room was all right because it was a part of his friend, but he wished that he had not suddenly seen it in a new perspective.

The radio, too, was like Minot in that it represented his self-indulgence and his ability to get anything he wanted. The box was covered with all sorts of dials for short wave and long wave which Jeffrey could not understand, and adjustments for every sort of kilocycle. It was one of those radios which could pick up Japan as easily as a local station, and he finally saw where to turn it on. The uncanniness of a strange voice breaking the silence was stranger that afternoon than usual.

“And now this ends Jo-Jo and Mu-Mu. They'll be back again with you tomorrow, same time, same station. In fifteen seconds it will be exactly six o'clock, Lovely Watch time. L-o-v-e-l-y … and spelling, too, compact daintiness. Lovely Watch time. And now, friends, in these late days of March, the danger month, do you feel run-down, a little headachy, without the old pep to put things over? There's an easy answer. Mu-Mu Tablets. They work in six easy ways. At your neighborhood druggist, and remember, the letters of these two words read backwards spell ‘um-um,' and that's the way they taste. And now it is six o'clock, and the friendly voice of your friendly reporter brings to you the latest flashes off the wires of the world press.”

It was not decent. Jeffrey wondered why he tolerated such an intrusion on his thoughts. If he turned it off, he would not hear the news. The makers of Mu-Mu, spelt backward meaning “um-um,” and of Lovely Watch, were trading on anxiety, tramping over the blood of battlefields to get the sordid anticlimax of their message home. He knew he would not like the voice of the friendly reporter, either, a fluty, cheery voice, dealing with headlines which were a distortion of fact.

“… and now—Berlin.… On his arrival in Berlin from Moscow, Japan's foreign minister, Matsuoka, said in a message to the German people, “The Japanese nation is with you, in joy or sorrow.' And he went on to say that Japan, and I quote, ‘will not lag behind you in fidelity, courage, and firm determination to arrange the world on the basis of the New Order.'”

It was not hard to form an idea of what was meant. After waiting patiently, balancing everything, the government of Japan was reaching the conclusion that Germany could not help but win the war. It was possible to consider it as another piece of devious, oriental straddling, but he knew he would not have thought so if he were a Japanese. He thought of Japanese he had known, mostly salesmen in oriental stores and houseboys. Once he and Madge had employed a Japanese, an unhappy little man.

“The little bastard,” Jeffrey said, and he turned off the radio. Then he heard Minot's voice behind him.

“What's the news?” Minot asked. Minot was wearing a quilted smoking jacket and patent-leather pumps.

“Japan is going to get into the Axis,” Jeffrey said.

“A damn good thing if she does,” Minot answered. “Let 'em come on in. You ought to hear the boys in the navy. What we won't do to Japan!”

“If we're going to convoy,” Jeffrey said, “we won't have much navy in the Pacific.”

“We'll have enough,” Minot said. “I'll tell you something. When I was coming North, I stopped in Washington, and I won't tell you who told me, but they're just waiting for the Japanese—I'll tell you something, Jeff, a war with Japan would be an air war and people with Mongoloid eyes can't focus the way we can. Everybody knows they can't fly.”

Minot was like everyone else, busily repeating something which someone else had said, and Jeffrey listened, as others always listened, hopefully taking that piece of gossip and trying to add it to something else.

“Gosh,” Minot said, “it's gloomy here. Why haven't you turned on the lights? Where's William? Let's light a fire.”

It was not so much the light that made it gloomy as those obtruding thoughts from which you could never escape. There was that tremor of insecurity again. It looked stormy outside and Jeffrey could see lights across the Park through the windows. He had loved the sensation once of standing behind the dark panes and listening to the invisible rain beat against them and hearing the roar of thunder overhead. He had loved it, because he had felt dry and secure, but now it was like standing behind a window and knowing that the rain would smash through into the room before the storm was over, and that everything would be a sodden, irreparable mess.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “it still gets dark early.”

Then the lights were on, and the whole room looked better. William had entered, with two cocktails on a silver tray.

“Well,” Minot said, “happy landings!”

William touched a match to the fire and there was a sudden illusion of serenity and ease. Jeffrey raised his glass. He found it easier to take a drink that winter than it had ever been before. You could take a cocktail, and you did not care so much.

“So you're going to Hollywood,” Minot said. “What do they want you for?”

Jeffrey had a suspicion that Minot looked upon Hollywood as a gay adventure, a round of yachting parties and night clubs. Jeffrey might have talked until he was blue in the face without ever convincing anyone like Minot that the work was hard.

“It's a script,” Jeffrey said. “Their regular writers are bogged down with it. I have a sort of reputation for pulling things together.”

Minot sat comfortably, looking at the fire.

“You won't be mad if I say something?” Minot said.

“No,” Jeffrey said, “of course not,” but he knew exactly what it was that Minot was going to say.

“Jeff, why don't you write something of your own instead of doing pot-boiling for someone else?”

It sounded exactly like Madge. That was what they always called it, “pot-boiling.” He could not understand why that hackneyed term had such appeal for an amateur. It indicated the same type of mind that referred to writing as “scribbling,” and he hoped very much that Minot would not use that term, but Minot used it.

“I mean,” Minot said, “if you're going to do scribbling, why don't you do your own scribbling?”

Jeffrey hesitated. He even contrived to smile.

“I can't afford it, Minot,” he said. “You see, I've got to pay the bills, and it takes a good deal of money, with the new income taxes.”

When he saw Minot smile, he knew that Minot was exactly as annoyed by this explanation as he had been by Minot's reference to scribbling.

“Jeff,” Minot said, “Madge has plenty of money.”

“I thought you'd say that,” Jeffrey answered. “Maybe it's funny of me, but I like to run my own show, while I can.”

Minot nodded, and Jeffrey knew Minot was thinking that it was quite correct, that one did not take money from women.