So Little Time (9 page)

When the elevator stopped, Jeffrey felt in his pocket for his key. Inside, he put his hat on the table beneath the mirror. Then he took off his overcoat and tossed it on one of the chairs in the hall that you never sat on, and then he saw that there was another overcoat and another hat. As he looked at it, he heard voices from the kitchen beyond the dining room. It was the new couple, Albert and Effie, arguing. You could ask that man until you were blue in the face, and still he would never close the pantry door, and when you rang the bell or called, he would never hear because he was either scolding Effie or Effie was scolding him.… There was always something wrong with couples, but as Madge had said, these two were willing to go to the country.

The hat and coat were familiar, but he could not place them. It was obviously someone waiting to see him, because he knew that Madge was out. It would be someone who wanted to sell something or talk seriously about something or else he wouldn't have waited. Then a voice called:—

“Hello, Pops, is that you?”

It was the voice of his eldest boy, Jim. Jeffrey hurried past the staircase and into the living room. The armchairs and the sofas had on their chintz slipcovers and there were daffodils in the bowl on the table by the wall, but in spite of those signs of spring the living room still looked very much as it had in winter. There were the same ornaments on the mantelpiece above the fireplace and the same birch logs behind the brass andirons and the same low coffee table in front of the sofa, and the piano, with its piece of damask, and the silver cigarette boxes and the eighteenth-century armchairs which Madge had bought at the Anderson Galleries. The walls and the window curtains, in fact the room itself, seemed temporary, but the furniture was different because it had been in so many other of their rooms that every piece of it was a sort of accepted fact. They had bought the piano when they had lived on Eighteenth Street. The dark refectory table, which stood between the windows, they had bought in an antique shop on the Left Bank in Paris once. It was a fake but they did not know it at the time. The Jacobean chair on one side of it had come from Madge's family's house, and so had the sofa. The second time he had ever kissed Madge was when they had been sitting on that sofa, but since then it had adjusted itself to the other furniture. The drum table near it had belonged to his mother, one of the few things he owned that had come from the house on Lime Street, and the two pink Staffordshire dogs on the mantelpiece had come from Lime Street also.

He remembered the occasions when all that furniture had stood in the street, suddenly naked and insignificant on its passage in and out of moving vans, but when it was arranged in some new place, it all came alive again, expanding like those Japanese sticks which swelled up and turned into flowers when you dropped them into water. Jim had crawled on that sofa when he was a baby and once he had soiled it so that the whole thing had to be reupholstered. Once Jim had pulled the drum table on top of himself and there was still a slight scar on his forehead where it had struck him. Jim had also smashed one of the pink dogs and you could still see the marks where it had been mended, but there was no danger of Jim's being destructive any longer. You did not have to watch him and tell him not to pull the cigarettes off the table, and not to tip over the flowers because the flowers were meant to be looked at and not to be torn to pieces. You did not need any longer to tell him to go upstairs for a minute and then he could come right down after he had been upstairs for a minute, because Jim was entirely grown-up, although the chairs and tables were just the same. Jim was standing in front of the fireplace between the two pink dogs, looking almost like a stranger, not even adolescent. He had his mother's brown eyes, but his nose and hands and the set of his shoulders were like the pictures which Jeffrey remembered of himself, and something like Jeffrey's mental image of his own father.

Jim stood there, a combination of complex circumstances dressed in a tweed suit made by J. Press, that ubiquitous school and college tailor. His brown hair, which used to be rumpled, was now held in place by some sort of lotion which Jim always spilled all over the bathroom. His soft collar was held in place by a clip and his trousers were held in place by a belt with a monogram buckle, but nothing held up his blue wool socks, which cascaded toward the uppers of his crepe-soled low shoes, one of which was untied.

“Hello, Pops,” Jim said. “Where's everybody?”

“What's the matter?” Jeffrey asked. “What's the trouble, Jim?”

“Why is it,” Jim asked him, “when I drop in you always ask me that? I just came down on the one o'clock. I'm going back tomorrow.”

“You just came down on the one o'clock,” Jeffrey said. “What are you doing, commuting?”

“Listen,” Jim answered, “don't be sarcastic, Pops.”

“Don't call me ‘Pops,'” Jeffrey said.

“What else can I call you?” Jim asked him. “I always think of you as ‘Pops.'”

“Well, think of something else,” Jeffrey said, and he stood and looked at Jim. If it wasn't Jim at college it was Charley at school, and if it wasn't Charley it was Gwen.

“It's all right,” Jim said, “relax, Pops. I'm not here for anything you think. I just came down on the one o'clock. Didn't you ever come down on the one o'clock?”

“No,” Jeffrey answered, “I never used to have money to travel on Pullmans. I used to stay there and like it.” But he was not sure that this was true.

Jim shifted his weight from one foot to the other while Jeffrey watched him. He could not understand what boys did with their time at college now. He could remember vaguely what he had done, but everything had been different then.

“Jim,” he asked, “what good is a day in New York?”

Jim's eyes grew wide. His whole face was incredulous.

“That's a hot question,” Jim said. “‘What good is a day in New York?' Why, a day in New York is everything.”

When Jeffrey considered his own day he could sympathize with Jim, though only academically. It was like reading a book of travel about some distant country where one had been once and which one would never see again. Talking with Jim was becoming very much like that. Jeffrey was always striving to remember what things had been like when he had been Jim's age. They must have been as new as they were to Jim; the values and the impulses and the wishes must have been essentially the same. Yet, though they used the same language and the same words, for each of them the words had a different meaning and a different value.

“How do you mean ‘everything'?” Jeffrey asked.

“What I say,” Jim answered: “New York has everything. Everything's in New York.”

“‘New York has everything,'” Jeffrey repeated. “‘Everything's in New York.'” He spoke the words with a cadence that made them sound like a song. They sounded as tinny and at the same time as poignant. They sounded like “The Red Mill” and all the others … “In old New York, in old New York”… “Me and Mamie Rorke, tripped the light fantastic on the Sidewalks of New York.”

“What are you laughing at?” Jim asked him. “What's so funny about it?”

“I'm laughing,” Jeffrey said, “but it isn't very funny …”

Out of the window he could see the East River. The sky above Queens was hazy and the buildings along the waterfront were fading into dusk. The tide was ebbing and three sand barges were being pulled against the current and the cars on the bridge upstream looked like little drugstore toys. Even with the windows closed, he heard the sound of a plane and the faint droning of the motors made him turn again and look at Jim.

“Just try to remember,” Jim said, “just remember you were young once yourself.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Jeffrey said, “but when you're my age, don't be your age. Suppose you remember that.”

“Okay,” Jim answered, “but I'm not your age. What's so funny now?”

“Nothing,” Jeffrey said. “Have you told Albert you're here? Are you going to be in to dinner?”

Jim moved from one foot to the other.

“Stay in here to dinner?” he said. “When I have only one day in New York? I don't mean I don't want to see the family, but I called up Sally and we're going out some place.”

“Sally,” Jeffrey repeated the name, “Sally who?”

Jim's face assumed a patient, pained expression.

“She says her father knows you,” Jim said. “He knew you back in the war or somewhere. Sally Sales.”

“Oh,” Jeffrey said, “well, that was a pretty big war and there were a lot of people in it.”

“Well, he remembers you,” Jim said. “Listen, just remember you were in love once yourself.”

“What?” Jeffrey said.

“Just remember you were in love once yourself.”

Jeffrey sat down on the sofa and opened the cigarette box on the coffee table.

“Yes,” he said, “it happens sometimes.”

“Then don't be so hard-boiled,” Jim said.

“I'm not hard-boiled,” Jeffrey answered, “I'm just trying to adjust myself. This spring you're in love with a girl named Sally Sales. All right. I didn't know.”

“In love with her?” Jim's voice made him look up. “Why, I'm practically engaged to her.”

It was nice of Jim to tell him. It made Jeffrey feel that they were friends in spite of all the difficulties that stood in the way of friendship between a father and a son, but he should probably have reminded Jim that he was in his second year of college and that he would have to earn his living.

“I mean,” Jim said, “we're not really engaged. You know the way it is, I'm just telling you because it's different this time and I know you'll keep it under your hat. There are a lot of things I want to talk to you about sometime, you know—you were young once yourself.”

There were a lot of things Jeffrey knew he should have said, but instead he felt proud and grateful because Jim had told him and had not told anyone else.

“I'd like to meet her sometime,” he said.

“You'd like her,” Jim said, “she's swell.” And Jeffrey found it hard to think of anything further to say.

“Well,” he said, “I've got to get dressed. I'm going out. Ring the bell for Albert.”

He was smiling when Jim turned back to him.

“What's so funny now?” Jim asked. “Don't you believe me?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “I believe you. New York has everything, there's everything in New York.”

He watched Jim searching for the bell and it afforded him a moment's amusement because he always had a hard time remembering about the bell himself.

“It's behind that thing on the wall,” he said. “It's a bell pull, only don't pull it.”

The antique belt of petit point from England which Madge had bought at the Anderson Galleries was, like so many decorative ideas, self-conscious and only remotely functional.

“No, no, no,” Jeffrey said, “don't pull it.” He became nervous just as though Jim were in the destructive age of childhood. “There's an electric button just behind it. Push the button.”

“Say,” Jim said, “pretty trick, isn't it?”

“All right,” Jeffrey said, “ring it.”

After all, he paid the bills and he might as well get something out of Albert, but Albert was like Jim, something with which Jeffrey was not entirely familiar. Albert appeared, wearing a black alpaca housecoat which was too short in the sleeves and a trifle tight around the shoulders, since it had been purchased for Ferdinand, the male half of the previous couple. Ferdinand had left with six bottles of Scotch and half a dozen neckties, but he had left the coat. Albert's wrists dangled from the sleeves when he stood up straight.

“Did you ring, sir?” Albert asked.

Everything that Albert said was vaguely annoying. It was all correct, but it did not seem to belong to Albert.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “would you put out my evening clothes, please, Albert?” And somehow Jeffrey himself did not sound exactly natural. It was a little as though he and Albert were both playing a game which neither of them particularly liked.

“White tie or black tie, sir?” Albert asked. At any rate, Albert did not use the expression “Formal or informal, sir?” which Ferdinand had used.

“Black tie.”

“Thank you, sir, anything further, sir?”

“No,” Jeffrey said, “nothing further, Albert,” and he and Jim were silent while Albert walked away.

“Pretty trick, isn't he?” Jim said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey answered, “he's trick.”

“Where did you get him?” Jim asked.

“I don't know,” Jeffrey answered, “they come and go.”

“Where are you going?” Jim asked.

Jeffrey sat looking at the ancient bell pull with the electric wiring behind it.

“We have a dinner once a year,” he said. “The Contact Club—the old Air Squadron I was with in France.”

He spoke self-consciously, because it made him sound unnatural, like a retired army officer, and somehow it did not fit in with Jim or with anything that he and Jim had known together.

“Say,” Jim said, “does that racket still go on?”

Jeffrey's common sense told him that it was ridiculous to be annoyed. He could even see what the boy meant, but it did not help.

“I mean,” Jim said quickly, “I should think you would want to forget about it. I wouldn't want to remember.”

Jeffrey was trying to do the impossible and put himself in the position of his son.

“I mean,” Jim said, “I'm not blaming you, or any of your generation. It was a matter of mass hysteria wasn't it, and the old British propaganda? It just doesn't work with my generation. Personally, my generation thinks that war stinks.”

“You mean,” Jeffrey said slowly, “that we all made a big mistake—is that your point of view?”