Tomorrow Is Forever (2 page)

“Not bad,” he observed, “for a little girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

Elizabeth laughed at him. “Are you coming home for dinner?”

“I certainly am. Why the query?”

“It may be pretty noisy. Dick and Cherry are having a couple of youngsters in.”

“What on earth are you feeding them with?”

“I was very lucky. I got some short-ribs of beef. And shrimps to start with.”

“Better than anything I could get at the commissary. I'll be there. If Kessler turns up with an idea worth talking about, I may be a bit late.”

“All right. But I'll have to feed the children. We'll start at seven-thirty whether you're there or not. How's that?”

“Okay. I'll have to go in now.”

He waved her goodby. Elizabeth watched him until he went into his bungalow, then turning the car around she went back through the gate and started toward the canyon pass that would lead her home to Beverly Hills.

It was a gay, bright October day and as the cars rushed past her the sun scurried over their fenders in a string of little white fires. Elizabeth liked their brightness and their hurry, and the whole general atmosphere of everybody's being importantly busy. Her few minutes alone with Spratt had smoothed her irritation at Mrs. Farnsworth. There were always people like that in the world, and they really shouldn't matter; you could usually avoid them, and when you did run into them, as Spratt said, they served the good purpose of reminding you of how lucky you were in having somebody interesting to live with. Spratt was such a dear; success never went to his head and hard work never gave him the wretched disposition that made life so difficult for the wives of some executives. “Twenty years,” Elizabeth said to herself with a pleasant warm feeling, “and I like him better than ever. That's really something, with all the strain Hollywood is supposed to put on marriage.”

Elizabeth had a high opinion of marriage, because it was an institution in which she had found a great deal of happiness. She had been married twice, the first marriage joyous but brief, for it had ended in 1918 by a shell at Chateau-Thierry. Strange to remember now that she had thought her life was over, for she was only twenty when it happened, and nobody could have told her she was going to meet Spratt. She had had no children by her first husband and there was nothing concrete in her present life to remind her of him. But it was her memory of Chateau-Thierry that made her more frightened than Spratt when they spoke of their son's approaching military age. Spratt loved Dick as much as she did, but he had not had a personal experience of the price of war. Though Spratt was an eminently practical man, his mind simply did not accept the possibility that Dick could be killed. Her mind did accept it, because she had been through it once and knew it could happen. But she tried sincerely not to think about it, and for the most part she succeeded. Dick would inevitably be eighteen: what took place after that was up to him and his country. Horrible as it was, this war was nevertheless a battle against evil that must be stopped or it would make the world unfit for Dick to live in. There was no use letting herself get useless and shaky with dread. “I won't have to face it for nearly a year,” Elizabeth said to herself for the thousandth time. “Anything can happen before then.” So she let it go. Dick was still seventeen, and she had everything she had ever wanted—a congenial marriage, three children, and days full of worthwhile occupation. “It's a good life,” she thought as she turned into the canyon road and the fragrance of sage blew up to her from the glens. “A very good life. I like it.”

On either side of her the mountains stood brown against the bright sky, thirsty for the winter rains. Here and there along the slopes were what looked like dead sticks five or six feet high. Next spring grass like green velvet would cover those gaunt hills, lupin and wild poppies would be blowing in sheets of purple and gold and the dead sticks would be tall white plumes of yucca blossoms. Along the roadside were houses half hidden in the folds of the hills, each with its garden a tangle of bloom. The wind blowing over the gardens brought rich damp odors to mix with the odors of gasoline and scorching tires from the cars hurrying along the pass.

The road wound magnificently through the canyon, one of those triumphs of engineering that Elizabeth could never regard as commonplace though nobody could live here without seeing them every day. It always lifted her spirits to be reminded of the energy that had conquered this countryside. She wished sometimes that she had been alive to come here in the early days, when the pioneers were confronting California like the knights of legend who drew their swords before a dragon guarding a pile of treasure. For had there ever been, she wondered as she drove among the mountains, another country where such wealth had been guarded by such barriers?—as though nature itself had stood up to say, “This, at least, you shall not take.”

It must have seemed impossible, if they had been people to whom anything seemed impossible, to live in a country of such tremendous mountains and such killing thirst. But they had conquered, not with swords but with machines and mathematics, and though Elizabeth's knowledge of both was too sketchy for her to have described how it had been done, she was thrilled to comprehend the victory. When she reached the peak of the canyon road and looked across miles and miles of her country, and smelt the wild odors of dust and sage and gasoline and eucalyptus, and heard the swish of a hundred tires together with the swish of the wind in the glens, she felt, as she always felt at the top of the pass, that this was what it meant to be an American. It was no accident of birth, it was a way of thinking that made you part of the future instead of something leaning back on the past, an attitude that made you more excited by the Los Angeles Aqueduct than by any castle or cathedral left over from the Middle Ages.

Some people did not like it. That was all right for them; if they didn't like it they could go rest on the mossy stones of some civilization that was old and tired, where they couldn't possibly put in a new drainage system because there was a precious ruin standing in the way. Well, it didn't get them much, this reliance on the old way of doing things. War and terror and hate, because the world did change, and if you resisted change it exploded on you. The future insisted on pushing the past out of the way, that was all there was to it—even Hitler, trying to enforce his ancient barbarism, admitted this when he called it the New Order, though as somebody had remarked, it wasn't order and it certainly wasn't new. Why couldn't the Germans and Japanese understand that the whole trend of human thought was away from their brutalities? Why couldn't they yield to the new world of science that made human beings healthy and their lives more worth living? Why couldn't fools like Mrs. Farnsworth understand that their nonsense was as outmoded as it was ugly? No matter how much you liked the Middle Ages you couldn't go back to them. The new world was here, it was real, it was California where they built highways over awful mountains and stored water until the desert was alive with ranches that could feed half of tortured Europe if only their submarines would let the food get in. It was so stupid, so maddeningly senseless.

Ahead of her a transport plane buzzed like a fly across the face of a cliff. Elizabeth wondered if it would be very difficult to learn to pilot a plane. “I'd probably break my neck,” she thought as she started downhill and put her foot on the brake. “Suppose I did? I'd rather break my neck having fun than let it get stiff with being bored. I'm certainly not bored,” she reflected as she guided the car along the downward curves. “Running a household for a movie producer and three youngsters is hardly what you'd call a life of effortless ease.”

The road flattened, and ahead of her lay the flowering plain of Beverly Hills. Elizabeth drove home. How pretty her house looked, glittering in the sun. It was not elaborate, but it was big and comfortable, and though everything about it was well kept it had a pleasant air of being in use. The gardener, who was busy among the chrysanthemums, had turned on the sprinklers to get the grass watered while he was working. On the lawn were three rows of six sprinklers each. Above them the mist spun like a dancer's veils, throwing rainbows back and forth across the grass. From the back Elizabeth could hear shouts of young voices and the splashing of water in the pool. The children were at home, and evidently their dinner-guests were already with them.

In the driveway she paused to give some directions to the gardener. Her youngest, Brian, aged eleven, appeared with his bicycle. She called to him.

“Where are you going, Brian?”

“Scout meeting.” He looked up and down the street. “Peter's supposed to come by and go with me. I said I'd wait in front for him. He ought to be here now.”

“All right.” She nearly added, “Be careful of the traffic,” but stopped herself. Brian was as expert with a bicycle as she with a car. He had never got himself hurt riding, and there was no sense in being overly fussy with him. From scanning the street he turned to look up at her.

“Mother, can I stay for dinner with Peter?”

“Has he asked you?”

“Not yet, but I'm going home with him after Scout meeting to see his lepidoptera—” Brian got out the word importantly—“and he might. I mean if he does, can I stay?”

“Not unless his mother asks you,” she answered gravely. “You mustn't ever go to dinner with any of the boys unless their mothers ask you, Brian. If Mrs. Stern invites you to stay, tell her you aren't sure, and ask her to call me up.”

“If Mrs. Stern calls you up, can I stay?”

“You won't say anything about wanting to stay unless she suggests it first?”

“No, I won't. Honest. I promise.”

“All right then, if she calls me.”

“Okay,” said Brian, with confident satisfaction. “Oh, there he is. Hi, Peter!” He swung to his bicycle and was off.

“How busy they are,” Elizabeth thought as she looked after the two little boys whisking down the street. “Everything they do is so important. I wish life was always like that. Oh, fiddlesticks and fury, I don't either. Getting wistful about childhood is a temptation, but how dreadful if childhood lasted sixty years. Living always on the top of things, with no idea what goes on underneath.”

Laughing at herself, she started the car again and drove toward the garage at the back. The children did not notice her at once, so Elizabeth pressed the brake and paused a moment to watch them. Her two older children, Dick and Cherry, were there by the pool with their two friends. One of the latter was a leggy freckled girl named Julia Rayford, whom Dick for some obscure reason considered beautiful. Elizabeth could not see that the child had any beauty except what went with health and high spirits, but she was glad Dick admired her, for Julia was a nice girl and as she was Cherry's best friend they all got along amiably together. Cherry, now, was a really adorable creature, all curves and a cascade of dark hair, and her two-piece bathing suit, clinging wetly to her luscious person, did more to emphasize her hips and her round young breasts than to conceal them. Elizabeth suddenly thought, “Good heavens, how fast I'd have been arrested if I'd gone swimming as nearly naked as that when I was her age! But she's really lovely.”

Since Cherry was his sister, Dick rarely paid much attention to how she looked, but it was quite evident that the fourth member of their party was aware of her charms; he was a classmate of Dick's, who, since his name was Herbert Clarendon Whittier, was known to his intimates as Pudge. At the moment Pudge was shaking the lemon tree while Cherry scrambled around gathering the lemons as they fell. Dick stood poised on the diving-board, evidently about to perform some marvelous feat for the admiration of his girl friend, who sat with her legs dangling into the water at the shallow end, watching him. What a healthy-looking creature he was, Elizabeth thought, and how he was growing up. He really looked more like a man than a boy now, and she suddenly thought of Dick as he had been when he was so tiny she could carry him on one arm, and he was soft and warm and smelt like talcum powder. “That's how it goes,” she thought. “Strange, and of course it isn't strange at all, it's been happening like this for ten thousand years, but it still seems strange when it happens to yourself. Now before many years more he'll marry some immature little girl like that Julia Rayford, and she'll have a baby, and he'll come in and bend over it with that same Good-Lord-it's-alive expression that Spratt had the first time he saw Dick. If it's a boy they'll name him Richard Spratt Herlong III and if it's a girl they'll argue about every name from Amaryllis to Zillah and compromise on some prosaic family name like mine, and I'll get a smug matriarchal air about me, and we'll all have a grand time and be just as excited about it as if it hadn't happened to anybody else. Of course, before that we'll have to get through the war. Oh, why should any group of power-mad scoundrels have the power to send the world into a holocaust? Boys like Dick—I will
not
think about it now. He doesn't think about it. Or I wonder if he does?”

She recalled Dick at the radio the day of Pearl Harbor. She came into the living room, as stunned as everyone else was that day, to find him listening, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an expression of horror almost grotesque on so young a face. As she entered he looked up at her and said deliberately, “The yellow-bellied bastards.” She gave an exclamation, shocked to discover he had such an expression in his vocabulary, but all he did was grin mirthlessly and reply, “I know some worse words than that and if you don't want to hear them you'd better go out and listen to the portable in the garden with the boss, because I feel like saying them.” Elizabeth was astonished, not only at his words but at his vehemence. It was the first time Dick had ever seemed to her like anything but a fun-loving little boy. The news from Pearl Harbor had shocked him into a strange and sudden maturity. She went out to the garden and told Spratt what he had said. Spratt answered tersely, “I know just how he feels.” “So do I,” said Elizabeth, “I couldn't have scolded him with any conviction.” They listened awhile to the enraging radio voices, and suddenly she exclaimed, “Spratt! We're in the war. That means that before long—it means Dick.” Spratt said, “Yes. I wish it meant me.” Elizabeth got chilly all over, but she told herself that day for the first time, “I don't have to face it yet!”