So Little Time (18 page)

“Jeff,” Walter asked, “does that mean we just wash, or do we dress?”

“You dress,” Jeffrey said, “but you wear a soft shirt because we're in the country.”

“You know damn well we dress,” Mrs. Newcombe said. “Don't act as though you haven't been to houses.”

“I was only asking, sweet,” Walter said, “sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.”

“Afterwards,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “let's go up to our room and get fried. Walter has a bottle.”

“Now, sweet,” Walter said, “Jeffrey's wife is here. We'll see you later, Jeff. It's like old times.”

He understood what Walter meant, but it wasn't like old times.

The stairway of the old Higgins house, built around the old chimney, was steep and narrow, but Beckie had left it just that way. The paint had been scraped off the old pine railing and risers and one of the old pine doors still had an original butterfly hinge on it which had been carefully copied so that now all the doors had them. Uncle Joel's room was done in blue-and-pink-checked glazed chintz. The only new things in it, Beckie always said, were the box spring mattresses on the twin beds. The beds themselves were old spool bedsteads cut down and waxed and oiled. The room had a fireplace with Hessian andirons and a tavern table with a mirror over it decorated with a picture of a tombstone and a weeping willow. There was also an old maple chest of drawers which Beckie and Fred had scraped down themselves and there were some of those comical old framed mottoes on the wall, such as “God Bless Our Home,” and several more tombstone memorials of weeping willows with the names of the deceased written in with pen and ink. On the mantel was an arrangement of wax flowers under glass. There were also two very early bannister-back chairs and a Boston rocker with an embroidered picture of a cat on its cushion. Then there were the rugs. Beckie and Fred had been everywhere to find them. There was an old braided rug in front of the fireplace made by a little old country woman whom Beckie had found, and several hooked rugs with cats and horses on them. The plumbing connected with Uncle Joel's room was modern, of course. It had been installed in a closet, called by connoisseurs of old houses the “prayer room,” and perhaps it had been better for prayers than bathing. The checked chintz spreads were still over the beds, and Madge's suitcase rested on one baggage rack, and Jeffrey's on another. There were some autumn leaves on the bedside table and a copy of Peter Amo's
Stag at Eve
, and two copies of
House and Garden
. Jeffrey took off his coat and opened his suitcase. It was empty.

“Madge,” Jeffrey said, “they've unpacked everything. It's going to be like ‘Button, button, find the button.'”

It was one of those houses where the maids unpacked and hid everything and you tipped them for it, but they never packed you up again.

“Don't shout so,” Madge said. “Fred and Beckie are right across the hall.”

Those oiled pine doors were not meant for privacy—he could hear Fred singing in his shower. Jeffrey began opening the drawers of the maple chest. All of them squeaked and stuck.

“These damn drawers—” Jeffrey began.

“Don't bang around so,” Madge said. “You can't expect an old bureau to be perfect. That's half the fun of it.” She was beginning to sound like Beckie, as she always did when she was there. She was examining enviously the details of that room. “You know it's all awfully cunning.”

“Only guests sleep in it,” Jeffrey told her, “and the toilet paper is connected with a music box—”

“Jeff,” Madge said, “they'll hear you. It's just a joke of Fred's.”

Jeffrey did not answer; he was still struggling with the bureau drawers.

“Jeff,” Madge said, “Mr. Newcombe looks very intelligent. What were you and his wife talking about?”

Jeffrey did not answer. His socks were not in the bureau. They were on a shelf in a little cupboard beside the fireplace with his shirts.

“Jeff, what is Mrs. Newcombe like?”

“Like?” Jeffrey repeated. “Not what you'd think from looking at her.”

“Jeff, you're having a good time, you know you are.”

“Damnation!” Jeffrey said. “Button, button, button?”

“But Jeff, they're the sort of people you always say you like.”

Jeffrey was looking for his brushes, and he found them, for no conceivable reason, in the drawer of the bedside table, together with a bottle of aspirin, but her voice made him look up. She wanted him to say he liked it all.

“They're all right,” he said. “Maybe it's this room that gets me down. Madge, I have the damnedest sort of feeling.”

“Jeff,” Madge said, “you should have let me drive. You're tired.”

“It's just a sort of feeling,” Jeffrey said, “like the end of the world. None of us belong here.”

They stood staring at each other across the room. He could see the vertical lines deepen in her forehead, and he noticed that they both were holding hairbrushes. He had the ivory-backed ones which she had given him, and she had the gold-backed one which he had given her. They had nothing to do with the subject, but there they were.

“How do you mean,” she asked, “that we don't belong here?”

“It's just a feeling,” Jeffrey said, “it came over me out there on the lawn, when I saw all of us—It was a little—” He walked over to the mirror. “Maybe it's these pictures of tombstones. It was a little as though we all were dead, and didn't know it.”

He heard her catch her breath, but he could not see her face.

“Jeff,” she said, “please—” Then he saw that she was smiling at him. “I know what you mean,” she said, “but don't be so gloomy. Just don't say we're dead.”

He had not thought that she would have felt it too, but she must have felt it. He wished that he had Madge's resilience. Madge could toss away any thought that was uncomfortable as you might toss off a coat when the weather was too hot.

11

This
—
Is London

Fred was downstairs waiting for them, wearing a velvet dinner jacket the color of old Burgundy and a tie and cummerbund to match.

“Come on, everybody,” he called, “cocktails in the Rumpus Room.”

The Rumpus Room in the basement had been the summer kitchen. Its floors were paved with bricks and its walls were finished in old pine paneling which Beckie had picked up here and there, and Fred had found a bar in an antique store in New York—a real old tap bar such as had existed in taverns at the time of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. There was a ping-pong table in the Rumpus Room and all sorts of indoor games such as slot machines.

“Here,” Beckie called, “here are nickels for anyone who wants to play the slot machines.”

Fred was behind the bar taking ice cubes from a small electric refrigerator and arranging bottles and glasses and maraschino cherries and slices of orange and bitters.

“Anybody who doesn't want an old-fashioned yell,” Fred said, but no one yelled.

“Dotty,” Beckie said to Mrs. Sales, “help Fred, will you dear? Before he drops something.”

Mr. Sales and Marianna were playing the slot machine. Marianna had a red-and-white-striped camellia in her gold hair. Her dress was white piqué, very simple, and Jeffrey wanted to tell her that he liked it, when she looked up at him and smiled, but there was no time. He watched the way she moved her hands. She was the best-looking woman in the room, but she was not trying to be—she had learned that she did not have to try. Buchanan Greene was lighting a cigarette for Mrs. Newcombe and Walter was talking to Madge.

“This must be an ideal place,” he heard Walter saying, “for a rainy day.”

“Jeffrey,” Beckie said to him softly, “you're going to sit next to Mrs. Newcombe at dinner. I hope you don't mind.”

“Mind?” Jeffrey said. “Why, no.” He would not mind anything as soon as he had a drink.

“I knew you wouldn't,” Beckie said, “and after dinner I want you to help me draw out Mr. Newcombe, and I think perhaps—Fred's going to try—perhaps Buchanan Greene will read us something.”

Everyone was speaking in careful, measured tones as you always did before the cocktails, but it was different later. A glow of good fellowship began to fill the Rumpus Room.

“I was afraid Mr. Newcombe wouldn't mix,” Beckie said, “but it's better now.”

It was better now; all the voices were mixing loudly and Adam was bringing in sausages impaled on little toothpicks stuck in an apple, and contorted anchovies curled on crackers, and red caviar, and hot olives wrapped in bacon. Walter had picked up an olive.

“Le Touquet,” he said to Madge, “have you really been to Le Touquet, Mrs. Wilson? Mrs. Newcombe and I went there for our honeymoon.” Then his expression changed. He had placed the olive and the bacon in his mouth.

“Oh, dear,” Madge said, “it's awfully hot.”

Walter removed the olive.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Wilson,” he said, “I have never seen one of those before.”

“Why,” Madge said, and she laughed, “I thought you'd seen everything.” But nobody listened; everyone was talking.

“I'll have to speak to Fred,” Beckie was saying. “If he takes another cocktail, he'll go to sleep after dinner.”

The dining room upstairs had been enlarged from the old farm winter kitchen and Beckie had kept the general atmosphere carefully within the limits of what she called “old, farmy and kitcheny.” In taking your place at the seventeenth-century trestle table, which Fred had found on Madison Avenue, you had to be careful not to stumble over spits and pots and candle molds and pestles and mortars and other ancient implements which had been collected on the old kitchen hearth. An old pine dresser, very old and very battered, was filled with pewter. Candles burned in pewter candlesticks and the central table decoration was a great mound of small multicolored gourds, all varnished and heaped on an enormous pewter platter. Around the platter and among the candles were ears of red and yellow corn, and a few small pumpkins to show that it was autumn. The chairs were simple wooden kitchen chairs which Fred and Beckie had been collecting over a period of years, constantly discarding one when they found a better one, until all of them now had a fine patina. Fred had once said that he hated to think how many pants seats had been worn out, and how many spines had been curved, giving those chairs their present luster.

The dining room might be plain and farmy, which was the way Beckie wanted it, but it was different with the food, because both she and Fred were members of the Wine and Food Society, and if you gave cooking and food a little thought, it paid enormous dividends. For just one thing there was the matter of salad. It made all the difference in the world if someone who was sensitive mixed the dressing, and somehow, even the greatest “treasure” you could ever get in the kitchen—Adam's wife, Cynthia, really was a “treasure,” a rolypoly old darling who should be wearing a red bandanna and gold earrings—somehow the greatest “treasure” could not get the ingredients right. But Fred was marvelous with French dressing. He liked to tell that story about the Chinese servant who was able to give just a suspicion of garlic to his salads without putting garlic in them. And how had Wong done it? He had done it by eating the garlic himself and then blowing on the lettuce. Personally, Fred always rubbed the inside of the bowl with just a little garlic, but it was something you had to do yourself, because no servant knew when to stop, and you had to stop with garlic, and even so, husbands and wives had to promise both to eat the salad or not to touch it. Fred always mixed the salad at the end of the room on a hunting board, no matter how many there were for dinner. He needed exactly the right number of pepper mills, each containing a slightly different condiment, and a salt grinder, because common salt spoiled it. The lettuce leaves must be cold and crisp and dry, and none of that iceberg lettuce, either. The dressing was only half the battle. The main art of making salad consisted in
fatiguéing
it properly, as the French so picturesquely put it. It was not a matter of taking your wooden fork and spoon and torturing the mixed greens into a pulp. It was rather a problem of being sure that every leaf had its just proportion of the dressing on both sides.

Fred was there at the hunting board working at the salad already and when they sat down, Beckie tapped on a glass because she wanted everyone to know that the recipe for the cream of leek soup that they were going to have had come from a very old English cookbook, and she hoped that everyone would excuse her about the wild ducks. They were mallards which a client of Fred's had sent them from the Eastern Shore, but mallards or not, Beckie felt that ducks were ducks, not to be served raw, but cooked like any other ducks with bread stuffing and onions and applesauce.

They were all seated by the time Beckie had finished telling them about the ducks, and the soup was coming on. Jeffrey was seated between Mrs. Newcombe and Mrs. Sales.

“What's the matter, dear old playmate?” Mrs. Newcombe said to him. “Does the soup taste bad, old chap?”

“It isn't the soup,” Jeffrey said. “You ought not to kill a duck and do anything like that to it.” But Mrs. Newcombe was not interested.

“Not rahally,” Mrs. Newcombe said, “not rahally, dear old chap.”

“Where do you get the ‘dear old chap' stuff?” Jeffrey said.

“From that rahally delightful poet,” Mrs. Newcombe said; “he's a dear old chap, and whether he's a friend of yours or not, he gives me a pain in the—”

“Now, sweet,” Jeffrey said, “now, sweet.”

Mrs. Newcombe looked at him and smiled.

“Why hasn't Walter ever told me about you?” she asked. “How did you ever get in here, precious?”

“By accident, like you, I guess,” Jeffrey said.