22

Where Everything Was Bright

Although Jeffrey’s most violent ambitions and emotions had been fulfilled or frustrated in the years following the last war, that postwar decade now possessed the same elusive quality which he encountered in the pages of what the book trade termed “Costume fiction.” Somehow it had actually become a historical epoch and sometimes he could think that he and all the rest of his contemporaries might just as well have been wearing satin breeches and cloaks and swords, and taking snuff and saying “Zounds!” It seemed as far removed from the present as that.

Jeffrey had saved six hundred dollars from his officer’s pay and the bulk of the bills in his inside pocket made him feel richer than he had ever felt before. When he tried on the civilian clothes which he had left behind him, they fitted as badly as all the life which they had represented. They were too tight across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves, and so he had bought a new gray flannel suit in Boston. He bought it in a store on Boylston Street which he would not have thought of patronizing before the war. He had entered the store in his uniform, so the clerks had no way of judging him by his clothes. Later, he knew the suit he had purchased was not at all bad. He remembered standing before the mirror so that he could see himself from the front and side while the fitter marked the sleeves and the length of the trousers, and he had as hard a time recognizing himself as anyone else did who had been in uniform for two years. His face was tanned, and his hair was still very short as he had worn it in France. His eyes were grayish like the coat and at first the whole suit had felt loose, too light, and too easy. He stood straight in it, although there was no longer need for standing straight.

“How much does it cost?” he had asked the clerk.

When the man said that the price was fifty-eight dollars, Jeffrey was startled. He could see that he had made a mistake, going to a store on Boylston Street, but now that he was there, he had to buy it, and besides, he had six hundred dollars. What made it more difficult was that they expected him to buy other things. He bought a pair of low tan shoes which cost ten dollars and three pair of socks for a dollar and a half apiece, and three soft shirts at four dollars apiece, and two ties for two dollars each, and a brown felt hat for seven dollars. The total cost was appalling, but somehow he had to buy them, now that he was in the store.

“What about something dark,” the clerk asked, “for afternoon?”

“No, thank you,” Jeffrey said, “not today.”

“How are you fixed for evening clothes?” the clerk asked.

The clerk was wearing rimless spectacles. Jeffrey had never thought about evening clothes.

“No, thanks,” he said, “not today.”

“How about a suitcase?” the clerk asked.

The clerk and the whole store were driving him into a corner, obviously taking him for someone else.

“I guess not, thanks,” Jeffrey said, “not today.”

Jeffrey bought the suitcase in a luggage store near Franklin Street where everything was marked down fifty per cent for the August sale. When he took the ten o’clock train at the South Station, he wore the gray suit and the brown hat and one of the soft shirts. Inside his suitcase were the other shirts, the socks, one clean suit of underwear and one pair of pajamas. When he stopped at the newsstand to buy a morning paper, a porter asked if he might carry his suitcase. It must have been the fifty-eight dollar suit, for no porter had ever asked him that before. All these details were trivial, but in some way they illustrated his state of mind, and that of his country, now that he was back. Everyone was very prosperous in those days. Everyone was spending too much money. It was hard when he saw the people hurrying past him to the trains to realize where he had been or what he had seen. Everyone was getting back to normalcy, as Mr. Harding was to say a little later. Everyone in America was forgetting about the war.

Jeffrey waited on the platform for a half an hour at Stamford for the local train. He did not mind because everything was still new to him. He watched the automobiles drive up, and the chauffeurs get out and the baggage trucks roll down the platform with the mail. He wondered where the automobiles were going—surely not to any of that part of Stamford which he saw from the platform. There seemed to be more of everything than he had ever remembered and the whole face of his country seemed transformed. When he took the local train and sat looking out of the window, there were no soldiers on the platforms and no Military Police. He pulled his suitcase from the rack above his head when the brakeman called the name of the station, and when he was standing on the platform in the sunlight, looking at the automobiles, he saw Minot Roberts. Minot was in tennis flannels, white buckskin shoes and a tweed coat. Each one must have felt for a moment that the other was a stranger.

“Hello, boy,” Minot said, and then they shook hands. “Give me your bag, and let’s get out of this.”

“Oh, no,” Jeffrey said. “I can carry it.”

“Go to hell,” Minot said. “Give me your bag,” and they both grabbed for the yellow suitcase.

“God almighty,” Minot said. “It’s funny seeing you.”

Minot had met him in a gray Cadillac phaeton with red leather seats, and Jeffrey even remembered the smell of the leather. He wished that it all had not reminded him of David Copperfield for he had never admired either the novel or the style of Charles Dickens. Once long afterwards Madge had spoken of it, when he tried to tell her about that week end.

“Why, darling,” Madge had said, “it must have been like David Copperfield and Steerforth.”

This had annoyed Jeffrey more than he had ever told her, though Madge had been annoyed when she said it. For one thing, he did not want Madge to think, or anyone else, that he had ever been like David Copperfield, whom he had always looked upon as an impossible, sniveling and conceited little fellow; besides he was always sure that Dickens had never known any people like the Steerforths, and had drawn them very badly.

They drove through the main street and out along the Post Road. The houses standing on their lawns behind their shrubbery kept growing larger, but Jeffrey had no definite impression of them, until the car turned between two granite gateposts and moved up a blue gravel drive toward a granite house with a large stable and greenhouses.

“Here it is,” Minot said.

“You mean you live here?” Jeffrey asked—“God almighty,” and somehow it made him laugh.

Jeffrey was always glad that he took it that way, and he never forgot that Minot took it that way, but then, there was no other way in which they could have taken it. When the car stopped, a man came running down the steps and took the bag.

“Up by my room, Burns,” Minot said. “Come on, Jeff, Mother wants to meet you.”

Mrs. Roberts was in the morning room, writing a letter at a high secretary desk. When they came in, a small griffon in a basket began to bark, and Minot picked the dog up and tucked it beneath his arm.

“Shut your ugly little face,” he said. “Mother, here’s Jeff Wilson.”

Mrs. Roberts must have been beautiful when she was young. She was dressed in black. Her brown hair was growing gray, and she was smiling.

“I’ve been wondering what you’d look like,” she said.

Jeffrey never understood why he was not afraid of her. He remembered the roses in the bowl on the table and the way the blinds were drawn so that shafts of light made a ladder across the carpet.

“It’s very kind of you to have me here,” he said.

“It isn’t kind,” Mrs. Roberts said, “we’re proud to have you here.”

In the second’s silence that followed, Jeffrey felt his face grow red. He had never encountered anyone before who could make such an answer sound entirely kind and simple.

“That’s it,” Minot said, “you tell him, Ma,” and Minot put the dog back in the basket.

“I’ve been wondering how you’d look,” Mrs. Roberts said again. “Minot, where are you going this afternoon?”

“Tennis,” Minot said, “over at the Hayeses’. How about a set of tennis, Jeff?”

Jeffrey glanced at Minot and back at Mrs. Roberts.

“I’d like to watch,” he said.

“What?” Minot said. “You don’t play tennis?”

“No,” Jeffrey said, “I never had much time to learn, but I’d like to watch.”

Even while he was speaking, he thought how beautiful Mrs. Roberts must have been when she was young. Later he sometimes suspected that the picture he had always kept of her in his mind was not accurate at all. He must have always believed—as a boy sometimes believes of an older woman—that she knew all about him. He had never wished to tell anyone else everything, but he wanted to tell her about Bragg and about Louella Barnes—about everything he thought.

“We’ll be alone for dinner,” she said, “but don’t be late.”

He often thought of all of the things that another woman would have said—that of course no one played tennis well, and that you had to learn sometime and that now was the time to learn, that there were sneakers and tennis clothes and racquets in the house, and that Minot would get them for him and that they must all hurry out now and have a good time. She did not say anything like that; she made him feel that he was all right the way he was, and she always made him feel that way.

“It’s very kind of you to have me here,” he said again.

His room was done in glazed chintz and the spread on the bed matched the curtains and the cushions on the window seat. There was a fireplace with brass andirons and a mahogany bureau with a shaving mirror. There was a table beside the bed with books on it and a thermos water jug and an eight-day clock in a leather case. There was an armchair by the window seat, and in back of it a door opened to a white-tiled bathroom. The man named Burns had opened Jeffrey’s suitcase, and he asked if there was any other baggage coming from the station.

“Mr. Wilson’s just back from France,” Minot said. “That’s all now, Burns.”

Jeffrey stood in the center of the room. It seemed necessary to make some sort of explanation for not having brought more clothes but he did not mind it as much as he should have, because he knew Minot Roberts.

“I’m sorry,” he began, and then he stopped. He did not want to say that he had not known any better, and it would have been bad taste to say that he hadn’t known what he was getting into.

“I can lend you anything you want,” Minot said.

“Oh, no,” he answered, “no, thanks.”

He had never borrowed anything from Minot Roberts. He must have seen that it would spoil everything and that Minot would think the less of him; and also he must have had some sort of fear of losing his own identity, the primitive sort of apprehension which one experiences among strangers in a strange place. Jeffrey remembered how the chintz curtains in the window rustled, and the clean, waxy smell of the room and the faint scent of blue petunias in the little vase on the mantelpiece. No matter what clothes he was wearing, he wanted to be himself.

“I’ll be ready in five minutes,” Minot said. “Just sing out if you want anything. My room’s right here.”

Minot opened an adjoining door and left it open, and Jeffrey could hear him moving about in the next room, singing a catch of that song:—

“You’re going to a happy land where everything is bright, Where the hangouts grow on bushes and we stay out every night.…”

Jeffrey was still grimy from the daycoach. He took off his coat, laid it very carefully on the armchair and walked into the white bathroom. The tub was a huge piece of glazed porcelain set on a floor of octagonal white tiles. There was an elaborate shower fixture with a white curtain. The washstand stood on a solid pedestal, and there was a smell of scented soap. There were huge bath towels with monograms and smaller towels of different sizes. He had never seen so many towels.

“Jeff,” he heard Minot call. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he called back, “I’m all right.”

Then that old pursuing thought came over him again as he picked up an embroidered washcloth. He wondered why he was there and how he had ever got there. He had never been so far away from anything familiar, even in the war. His mind went back to the Barneses’ front porch that first time he had called on Louella, and he remembered how the rocking chair had tipped backwards and how he had kicked out his legs involuntarily to balance it. He was not the same person any longer, and the worst of it was, he could not tell how it had happened. Even his face in the mirror above the washstand looked as though it were a stranger’s.

They drove over in the gray Cadillac with the red leather upholstery. It was a warm day in late August, and whereas at home at Bragg there was already a hint of autumn which was making the first swamp maples turn, it was still hot summer by the Sound. This may have been why Jeffrey always associated the place with that steaming hum of the tree locusts in the daytime and with the insistent clamor of katydids at night. He always pictured the water of the Sound as peacefully blue, beyond a warm golden light which fell on lawns and silver beeches, and on umbrella trees and weeping birches. He always heard the snipping of shears, squaring off a privet hedge, and voices and laughter from the lawns. He always connected Willow Road, where Madge had lived, with a clear hot summer’s day and with just a faint breeze stirring from the water; so that often on a hot day when he heard the locusts on the trees, a great deal about Willow Road would come back to him again. He had seen it all, he had heard all the voices first in summer, and that was the way it stayed in his mind. Somewhere back among the pages of what was known as “youth’s lexicon,” that 1919 model Cadillac was running on tires which sometimes would last for as much as eight or ten thousand miles, and he was on the front seat with Minot Roberts.

“Here it is,” Minot said. “The court’s in back. It’s better than the Club.” There was no way of telling that he would know the Hayes place very well and that Mrs. Hayes would ask him to plant willow trees on it because he was so practical and that finally he would be the one who would see about selling that place and removing all the furniture. The house was one of those rambling structures, built with the grotesque effort at informality which was common in the early nineteen-hundreds, and all the landscape gardening was dated and too ornate, but it did not seem so then.

Minot Roberts parked the car at the edge of the turn-around at the front of the house and slammed the door and picked up his tennis racquet.

“They’re all at the court,” Minot said. “Come on.”

When they walked across the lawn there was a smell of freshly mowed turf that was sweet and very warm. He could never understand why, as the voices came nearer, the idea of meeting strangers had not thrown him into a panic, except that he was still so far removed from anything he had known. There was so much of everything and everything seemed to be untouched by any of the things that worried most people.

They were playing mixed doubles on the clay court beyond a broad sweep of lawn. The backstops were covered with rambler roses. Some men and girls were seated watching, and a man in a white crew sweater clutching a handful of grass was chasing a girl in a short white dress along the terrace. The players had stopped their game, and everyone was laughing. The girl ran very fast, and she was laughing too, and it seemed to Jeffrey that they were too old to be making so much noise. It made him feel embarrassed, because the girl was pretty, although he never could tell what her looks had to do with it.

“Damn you,” he heard her call, “please, Roger, damn you, not in my hair.”

She was slender and very pretty, especially her legs, although Jeffrey realized that he should not have thought of them.

“Minot,” she called. “Minot, he—”

It was the sort of byplay, indirectly connected with sex, that embarrassed Jeffrey then, and afterwards. He wished that people, if they wanted to do that sort of thing, would chase each other in private. When they saw that Jeffrey was a stranger, the girl and the man both stopped. The man named Roger had short, blond hair. His face was chubby and red from his exertions.

“She put grass down my neck,” he said.

Perhaps the man knew he had made a fool of himself, but it would have been better to have passed over the explanation. The girl pushed a wisp of damp hair off her forehead. She was out of breath, and she had stopped laughing, but her lips were parted in a smile. She was smaller than Jeffrey had thought at first, and she stood very straight.

“This is Mr. Wilson,” Minot said, “Miss Hayes.”

“Oh, yes,” Madge said, “hello.” Then she wriggled her shoulders and clutched at the front of her dress.

“Something’s come undone inside,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a pin.”

She was looking up at him, smiling, and that memory always had a queer discordant note of triviality. He had no way of knowing that Madge’s underwear was always coming loose and that she was always unnecessarily frank about it. He had no way of knowing that they would fall in love. Jeffrey supposed that all married people must have shared some such moment of their own, for he had heard many of them speak of something like it with a sort of faraway affection. “We met in the strangest way,” they would say. “It was in front of the Information Desk at Grand Central.” They met on boats, they met at hotels, or someone introduced them. After all, they had to meet somewhere. They must have remembered it so clearly because it was the one time that most human beings ever realized how greatly a fortuitous circumstance could change a life. All this was so obvious that it made him impatient when he heard them talk about it; but when it came to himself and Madge, it had the difference of being their private property. It stayed there, suspended in time. It was something mentioned in happiness and quarrels. It was always there, something they would always share in common. He had heard Madge wish to God that he had never come there that afternoon, and he had wished the same thing. He had heard her say how dreadful it would have been if he had never come, and he had said the same thing, too. No matter how he and Madge might feel, it was always there, and there was something a little sad in the knowledge that it was so irrevocable, and a sadness in the thought that they had both been so free, so young and so unwise, perhaps. They were always young in that picture in his mind.

Once when they were speaking of it with that queer sort of curiosity with which one speaks of such things, Jeffrey asked her what she had ever seen in him. It was an unfortunate time to ask the question for it was during one of those occasions when Madge saw nothing in him that was desirable.

“I don’t know,” she said, but she must have tried to live it all again. “You were different.”

It was not any sort of answer, and he told her so.

“That gray suit,” she said, “it looked like blotting paper.” He knew that she was seeing it all again.

“It wasn’t a bad suit at all,” he said, “it cost me fifty-eight dollars.”

“The trousers were too long,” she said. “They wrinkled around your shoes, and your necktie didn’t match.”

“It wasn’t meant to match,” he said, but he knew that she could see it all, just as he often saw it.

“It was all a terrible mistake,” she said.

“All right,” Jeffrey said, “all right, if you say it was.”

“Everyone always said it was,” she answered, and then neither of them spoke for a while.

“You looked so alone,” she said. “You looked so sure of yourself.”

At first he thought she did not mean it. It showed how little she had understood him to have thought that he was sure of himself.

“Besides, you were very good-looking,” she said. “You looked—I don’t know. You had nice shoulders.”

He tried to piece something together from her words, but they did not make much sense.

“Darling,” she said, “if you hadn’t liked me, you wouldn’t have—looked the way you did.”

“How did I look?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “the way you did. Darling, what was it—”

She stopped, but he knew what she meant.

“It must have been your hair,” he said. “I liked your hair. Your hair was coming down.”

“Jeff,” she said, “there must have been something else, there must have been—”

“There’s no use analyzing everything,” Jeffrey said, and then before she could stop him, he knew the answer, although it could not bear analysis. “There’s no use going over it. We couldn’t help it, Madge.”