So Little Time (74 page)

“She didn't tell me,” Jeffrey answered. “Jim told me.”

“Jim?” Madge repeated. “Why don't you ever tell me anything, Jeff? I tried to talk to Jim about her and he was so self-conscious and elusive—What else did Jim tell you, Jeff?”

“Ask Jim,” Jeffrey said. “He can tell you if he wants.”

“Don't be so mysterious, dear,” Madge said. “Please don't act as if Jim were grown-up and you were men sticking together.”

“I'm only being fair,” Jeffrey said. “She's his girl, she isn't mine. Go ahead. What else is wrong with her?”

Madge looked at him sharply and her forehead wrinkled.

“Jeff,” she said, “you act as if she were your girl. You really do.”

It startled Jeffrey, because she was right in a way.

“You're not jealous, are you?” he asked.

The wrinkles in her forehead deepened.

“Darling,” she said, “I suppose you read that somewhere, the mother-son complex. I suppose I'm secretly in love myself with Jim and I don't know it. Jeff, you must have noticed her voice. You're so sensitive to voices. And the words she used. Everything was ‘sweet, sweet, sweet.'”

“Listen, Madge,” Jeffrey said. “Don't you know she was scared to death? Don't you see she's awfully young?”

“I wish you'd stop it, Jeff!” Madge said, and her voice had a wholly different note. “Don't keep saying she's young.”

“Well, she is,” Jeffrey said. “She's young.”

“If you keep saying that,” Madge said, “I'll scream! Do you or don't you want Jim to marry her?”

“Madge,” Jeffrey said, “the storm's over now. Let's turn out the light and go to sleep.” But she said it again.

“Do you,” she asked, “or don't you want Jim to marry her?”

“My God,” Jeffrey said, “I don't know. Let's turn out the light and go to sleep.”

“You don't know?” Madge repeated, and her voice rose higher. “You don't know?”

“No,” Jeffrey answered. “It just seems to me he's in love with her, awfully in love with her, and she's awfully in love with him. You and I don't know what may happen. We were awfully in love ourselves once, Madge.” He was sorry for her because she was as much involved with it as he was and she too was identified with Jim. She too was living his life vicariously and passionately, and there was nothing you could do about it the way the world was going. The thunder was moving off eastward to the Sound but it still sounded like artillery. The air was fresher as it always was after rain.

“Oh, Jeff,” she said.

He did not answer.

“Jeff, I wish you wouldn't keep acting as if Jim were going to die.”

It made him answer very quickly.

“I never said that,” he answered. “And don't you say it, either, Madge.”

“You act that way,” Madge said.

“Madge,” Jeffrey said, “I'm tired. Let's go to sleep.”

“Jeff,” she began, “oh, Jeff, don't you see …”

There was enough light in the sky to show the outlines of the maple branches against the window. He could see the leaves moving softly because a light breeze was coming up. He was listening to her ideas and everything she said was true. It was absurd because they were so young. Their characters were not developed and they both might realize later that they had made a mistake. Then there was the matter of difference of background. She and Jeffrey had struggled with that difference—and how could Jim marry a girl if he could not support her? As soon as Jim saw her with some nice girls … Jeffrey lay there listening and staring at the dark.

“They've been in love quite a while,” he said.

He lay there listening, staring at the dark. There were those verses from Ecclesiastes again. For everything there was a season, a time to love and a time to hate, a time to laugh and a time to weep, and a time to live. The way things were going, God knew there was not much time.

47

Just around the Corner

Jeffrey was old enough to know that nothing ever turned out quite the way one hoped, but he had looked forward for a long time to those ten days when Jim would be at home. He had thought of them ever since he had come to the country that June and he had not considered them entirely in terms of himself. He had thought of the whole family being together, and of getting back again to the family where he belonged. He was more conscious than he ever had been before that Madge and the children were all that mattered and all that he had left. Then, also, there were all those things that he wanted to say to Jim, now that Jim was grown-up, but for which there seemed to be no time now that Jim was back. Jeffrey felt as though he were only standing watching in a helpless sort of way, listening to the children's voices and to Jim's voice, and somehow he was not an essential part of it. Everything seemed to be going very well without him, almost as though he were not there.

Madge said, because Madge was conscious of it too, that Jim's infatuation for Sally Sales had spoiled it all, and sometimes Jeffrey agreed with her, but not entirely. He did not want to impose on Jim; he only wished that he were not standing looking while the time went by, because there were so many things he wanted to do with Jim which he thought Jim would like. He told himself that it was not Jim's fault, that Jim had no time for him.

He did not want Jim to feel any obligation toward him and he told himself so carefully every day. Yet when Jim got his orders in the middle of the week to report to a camp near Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey wished that they might have gone over Jim's plans together. Jeffrey could have told him a good deal about the West Coast and Oregon. He still felt that he knew camps and the army better than Jim did. There were things that might make you very unhappy in the army if you did not understand them. When you were young, for instance, all field officers seemed very old and as far removed from the realities of military life as a group of strange animals. When a young officer came in contact with his superiors he generally considered them overbearing and stupid and usually they were. Nevertheless, he wanted to tell Jim that this apparent stupidity and this West Point conceit, which every civilian officer hated, was apt to cloak a distinct combative ability when you got into a fight. He wanted Jim to realize that he must suspend judgment on majors and colonels and to realize that they were not as bad as you thought they were. He wanted to tell Jim a great many things that had happened in the A.E.F. in France which he had never told anyone, but which he thought might be useful if they got into war. He wanted to tell Jim to remember that everyone was afraid and not to be ashamed of it. He wanted Jim to realize that there were times to be careful and times not to be. He wanted to tell Jim about Stan Rhett that day they were shot down; and there never seemed to be an opportunity—never the time or the place. Madge or Charley was always there, or Sally Sales. There was never any time.

Jim came into that bare room of his two days before he was to leave. Jeffrey always remembered it as one of those rare moments which come when you least expect them. It was ten o'clock on a hot Monday morning and he was reading the
New York Times
, avidly skimming over each dispatch with the hope that he might come on something reassuring between the lines. He was reading one of those accounts of a bombing raid over Germany—“bad weather over the Channel but the clouds had cleared away over the target.” Somehow the clouds in those dispatches always cleared away, and the bombs were dropped through a heavy fire of ack-ack—Archies, as they used to call them in the other war—and then there were a few terse lines from a pilot or an observer. “We hit them on the button this time. The fires were visible for thirty miles.”

Then Jim knocked on the door.

“Are you busy?” Jim asked.

“No,” Jeffrey said, “I'm not busy.”

Jim stood leaning against the side of the half-open door, exactly as he had years before when he wanted to ask something.

“I haven't seen much of you,” Jim said. “If you're not busy how about you and Sally and me taking a picnic and going somewhere?”

“Oh, no,” Jeffrey said, “you and Sally had better go alone.”

“No,” Jim said. “No. Sally thought of it.”

It was strange how tactless one could be when one was young. He would have given a great deal if Jim had thought of it instead. Somehow it did not seem fair to Madge, going off with Sally and Jim, but he knew that it was a chance he might never have again.

“All right,” he said, “we'll take a bottle of wine.”

It had been a long time since Jeffrey had even considered going on a picnic. The summer he and Madge were first married and owned their first car, they had bought a picnic basket with cups and plates and two thermos bottles which had cost sixty-five dollars, but somehow the picnic basket had not worked. Now it must have been given away long ago, or else it was in the attic somewhere with all those other forgotten objects of the past.

Jeffrey could remember a number of reasons why those picnics had been discontinued. Madge would say how nice it would be to go for a picnic, just she and Jeffrey and a book, and if Jeffrey did not want to read, Madge would read aloud as long as Jeffrey did not go to sleep. Then they would get the picnic basket, which was very heavy when it was filled with ice and sandwiches and milk and tea. Then they would get in the automobile—it was one of those four-cylinder Dodges, Jeffrey remembered, which seemed capable of lasting forever. They would get into the Dodge and the top would rattle and Madge was always distracted when it rattled, because it was her Dodge, not his Dodge. It was always a sunny morning like the present one, for picnics and the sun always went together. Jeffrey would begin to feel very hungry after motoring for a while, and he would say to Madge, “How about stopping here, or here, or here and eating?” But Madge would never want to stop here or here. Madge had a number of definite requirements for a picnic place. She always wanted it to be “cozy,” which was a term which covered almost anything, and then it had to be near a brook without any cows. It was amazing when you looked how few brooks there were, and all of them had cows. Sometimes they would even get to the brook and then along would come the cows and they would have to close the basket up and go. Jeffrey had always told Madge that cows in pastures were harmless, but Madge always said there might be a bull. Jeffrey said you could always tell a bull by his general contours if nothing else, and Madge said she did not want to get near enough any cow to judge.

He and Madge would ride and ride looking for that brook and that “cozy” place, and Jeffrey was always dull about suggesting here and here. He did not seem to have the spirit of picnicking, and Madge did not want to stop there or there either. They could go a little farther and then they would find it, or just a little farther still, because they had all day. Finally a time would come when Jeffrey would say he had to eat and why not stop the car and eat in the car? And Madge would not eat in the car. They would stop over there, just around the corner, and when they stopped over there, there was no brook, nothing but paper cups which other people had left. There was never any place to sit, except hard rocks or soft moist sod, and Madge would ask him why he hadn't stopped back there—miles back where she had thought of stopping. And while they ate he would explain to Madge that she was the one who had told him to go on, and not stop there, and Madge would not remember that she had said any such thing. Madge would ask him why he wouldn't sit down and be comfortable and not stand up munching a sandwich and looking as though someone were going to come out of the farm on the hill and chase them. They had just crawled under the barbed-wire fence and of course the farmer wouldn't mind. Then Jeffrey would say that there wasn't anything to sit on, and besides he liked to eat standing up.

Then, as he stood there with his sandwich and one of those paper coffee cups that always burned his fingers, Jeffrey was always reminded of something else, which may have been why picnics never worked. Wherever they might be, all at once the field and the woods and even the cozy brook assumed a sinister aspect. Although he never said a thing about it to Madge, because it was absurd, there was always a quality for him in the sun and the stillness that reminded him of that field in France and that patch of woods where he and Stan Rhett had been shot down. He and Stan Rhett, always young, would seem to be there with Stan leaning heavily on his shoulder. It was absurd, but he would always feel the old watchful attitude and he would find himself staring around him carefully, and Madge would tell him to sit down, to please for heaven's sake sit down.

Jeffrey had not been on a picnic for years and years with Madge or with anyone. Even in California when Marianna had suggested one, he had told her no, that he was not good at picnics.

Yet, when Jim spoke of it that morning he was surprised to feel a sense of anticipation that included no thoughts of rocks or cows or hardship. His mind had gone further back to a time when he was younger even than Jim, to a time when there were family picnics at Bragg, when you hitched the horse to a tree and gave him a bag of oats and Jeffrey and Alf went swimming somewhere, while his father and his aunt and Ethel set out the things. You did not mind where you sat then, and his aunt had always said that food always tasted better outdoors, and it did taste better outdoors then. There was a fresh scent of flowers in the fields and a more subtle scent of leaves and that basking heat of summer. You were never tired. Your muscles were never stiff. You never needed a drink to make it bearable. That was the way he felt when Jim asked him to go. It was like being offered something that had belonged to him once and which had been lost for a long while.

Jim and Sally had planned the picnic before they had invited him, because the station wagon was out by the front door already with the picnic in the back seat and with Sally waiting to get in. They must have just been leaving when the idea struck them that they should ask him.