So Little Time

by John P. Marquand

  “It doesn’t do any good for you or me to think,” he said.

  “Jeff,” she began. Then someone was knocking on the bedroom door.

  “Yes,” Madge called, “what is it?”

  That was the way it always was. When you were married and had children, you changed from one mood to another, passing, each day, through a gamut of moods. It was Gwen dressed ready for school.

  “Oh,” Gwen called, “oh, Daddy, darling.”

  Now he was a lovable, broken-down old gaffer again, and Gwen was kissing him, just as she knew a girl of sixteen should kiss a dear old father. “Daddy darling, your breakfast is ready in the study. You must be awfully hungry.”

  “Why, Jeff,” Madge said. “Haven’t you had breakfast, dear? I didn’t mean to keep you talking.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Jeffrey answered. “I should have got a cup of coffee when I got off the train.”

  “But Jeff,” Madge said, “why didn’t you?”

  He stood there looking at Gwen with her little brown hat and short skirt, his daughter, who thought he was a lovable old darling and of whom he did not know what to think, and at Madge with her new kimono with white storks on it. It occurred to him that the decorations were inappropriate. There had been too many storks.

  “You see, I wanted to get home,” he said.

  He thought that Madge looked happy, and so did Gwen.

  “Daddy,” Gwen said, “you like us, don’t you, Daddy?”

  “God, yes,” Jeffrey said. “I like you.”

  There they were, and there he was, tied together by that sort of accident that makes a family, tied inescapably, no matter what apartment they might live in, no matter whether the servants left, no matter whether everything split wide-open, but he was thinking about Jim. Jim might as well have been there. He wished they had not guessed that he was not entirely happy.…

  27

  The World of Tomorrow

  At first Jeffrey told himself that he had always respected the privacy of other people and that he surely should respect his son’s. Nevertheless, Jim had asked him to see Sally Sales. When he wrote the letter, all sorts of hesitations and trepidations emerged from his past. He seemed to be Jim’s age or younger when he wrote it. In the first place he did not know whether to call her “Sally” or “Miss Sales,” and there was no book of usage to help him.

  Dear Sally [he wrote]:

  I hope you’ll excuse my calling you by your first name, but I think of you that way because Jim has told me so much about you.

  Then he threw the letter away. He seemed to be building himself up into a character in a Barrie play, or worse still, becoming like the hero of a drama in which Ruth Chatterton once starred. He could almost hear Sally Sales saying, “Oh, I’m going to call you ‘Daddy Long-Legs.’” The trouble was, he did not know what Sally Sales was like; all he could do was to picture her from his limited experience with girls he had known in his youth, or from the works of Scott Fitzgerald, from a few short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, and from his observation of his daughter Gwen who was younger. There was his niece, Ethel’s child, in West Springfield—but he was sure that Sally would not be like her. Gloria wore glasses and her chin receded and her parents were saving money to send her to Wellesley College.

  Dear Sally [he wrote again]:

  Jim has told me so much about you that it seems strange to me that I have never seen you. I wish we could have lunch together someday, if you ever find yourself in town, only because any friend of Jim’s is a friend of mine—no other reason.

  He wanted to make it very definite that there was no other reason. There were any number of restaurants in New York, but each one had a certain quality. If he took her to Twenty-One, he would see people he knew who would ask him later who the little girl was. It was the sort of thing anyone would make a joke of, and later Madge would hear about it.

  I sometimes have lunch at the Echelon [he wrote], a little place on 56th Street on the right-hand side, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, going from Fifth. I don’t remember the number, but you’ll see the name outside on a canopy. If you could let me know some day when you’ll be in town, I’ll meet you there. I suppose I might be wearing a carnation in my buttonhole, but I won’t.

  He crossed the last sentence out, because it sounded too cute, too much like “Daddy Long-Legs.”

  You won’t know what I look like, but if you ask any of the waiters for me, they’ll point me out. They say I used to look just like Jim, but I don’t believe that the resemblance would impress you. I do hope that you can arrange to come.

  Sincerely yours,…

  He understood that he could not expect an answer immediately, but on the second day when none came he wondered whether there had been anything wrong with his letter; whether she had been frightened, or whether she had shown it to her parents, or what had happened. On the third day, when Madge was sorting out the mail at breakfast, he saw her holding a letter addressed to him. There was always something unconcealable about a young girl’s handwriting, something conscientious, confident and sprawling.

  “Why, Jeff,” Madge said, “here’s a letter from a little girl.”

  He wished that Madge would hand it to him and not keep examining it. He felt the way Jim must have felt when Madge looked at his letters.

  “What makes you think so?” Jeffrey asked.

  “I don’t know,” Madge answered. “You can always tell. They look like the letters Jim gets, not yours. Why Jeffrey, I think it’s that Sales girl’s writing.”

  It never occurred to him that of course she might know the writing, having seen it before on envelopes addressed to Jim.

  “They all look alike,” Jeffrey said. “It’s probably an advertisement. They get debutantes to address them so you’ll open them, you know.”

  When he opened it with Madge still watching him, he felt exactly as though Madge were his mother or his aunt, and that he had dropped a rung in the generations.

  Dear Mr. Wilson [he read]:

  It’s simply grand of you to ask me to lunch and at the Echelon. If I don’t hear from you, will Thursday at one be all right? I’ll know what you look like and I’ll adore having lunch, and thank you.

  Sincerely,

  SALLY SALES

  “Is it an advertisement?” he heard Madge ask.

  “Yes,” he said, and he thought he was quite clever. “It’s a restaurant. The Echelon restaurant.”

  There was one thing certain, he did not want Madge to know, and Madge had come very close to guessing.

  When he examined the letter later, it did not tell him much about Sally Sales. The paper came from that place in Peru, Indiana, with her name on the top, “Sally Sales,” and her address. He found himself examining it exactly as though he were Jim, trying to read between the lines to discover whether she was glad that he had asked or not. He imagined that any girl in those days “adored” to go to lunch and that it was “simply grand” to be asked. He wondered whether she had simply dashed off that note or had written it as many times as the one he had written her.

  The one thing he wanted was to try to meet her without a sense of that gap in age, to try to talk to her naturally as he sometimes talked to Gwen—but what would there be to talk to her about? Nothing except Jim.

  When he reached the Echelon, he had doubts as to whether he should have asked her there. The Echelon was one of those restaurants for people who understand the art of eating, one of those little places, self-consciously transplanted from France, with a tiny and uncomfortable lounge just off the coatroom where you could wait for your companion if you wanted, and then the main room, two steps down with red leather seats along the wall where you and your companion would sit side by side, tête-à-tête, or perhaps a little more than tête-à-tête. There was a little bit of a bar, made to look like a bistro with some slightly off-color Parisian illustrations and a great many tables on wheels so that salads and crêpes Suzettes could be prepared right under the noses of you and yo
ur companion. Jeffrey had entirely forgotten that the Echelon was so intimate.

  When he arrived there were already a few companions at the tables. In one corner there was a redheaded girl, toying with her cocktail glass and talking softly to a man who was obviously not her husband although she looked as though she had one. There were also two corpulent French refugees speaking in their native tongue and two young men seated very close together, one of whom wore a bracelet. Jeffrey had never been so conscious before of the atmosphere of the Echelon. It had not seemed like that when he had last taken Marianna Miller there to lunch.

  “Good day, Mr. Wilson,” Jacques, the headwaiter, said; and then he added, because the Echelon was Continental, “Bien bon jour, Monsieur Wilson, vous portez-vous bien, monsieur?”

  “I’m expecting someone,” Jeffrey said, “I won’t order yet.”

  “The corner table, then,” Jacques said. “Pssst.”

  Jacques’s smiling mask changed for a second into a malignant threatening expression which shocked a waiter who was lounging near the bar into nervous action. A busboy also came running and all of them began pulling back the corner table. Jeffrey sat down cautiously on the red leather bench. Wherever you sat in the Echelon, your legs were curled around a table leg.

  “Can’t you move it a little sideways?” Jeffrey said.

  “But certainly,” Jacques said. “Pssst.… An apéritif while you are waiting, Mr. Wilson? A little cocktail?”

  He sounded like one of those books describing a French scene where the French words were always repeated in English for the benefit of the ignorant reader.

  “Dry sherry,” Jeffrey said. “I’m expecting a—young lady.”

  He was curious about her, but at the same time, he wished that he had never attempted it. Even after the sherry he felt old. He was the man about town, the gentle, cynical roué who had tasted life. He kept looking across the room toward the little vestibule and the revolving door out front so that he saw her just as soon as she came in, and so did the other patrons. He saw the two Frenchmen look up with the hard, appraising glance that Frenchmen bestow on women. The redheaded girl and the man beside her looked with momentary curiosity, and then they must have thought it was a father taking his daughter to the matinée. At least Jeffrey hoped that was what they thought, for she was as young as that. Her complexion was very fresh and fair. Her mouth was a little large, with too much lipstick on it. Her hair was the color of pulled molasses candy, very fine with little crinkles in it. Her legs looked a trifle large and she walked with a slightly shambling gait. She was wearing a black-fur-trimmed coat, and her dress was green wool trimmed with the same black fur cut round at the neck. She was utterly indistinguishable from any other girl her age. He had forgotten that anybody could look so young.

  For a moment Jeffrey struggled behind the table. It was always difficult to stand up in those places, where they pressed the edge of the table into the pit of your stomach. He had to push it out, and the glasses rattled.

  “Hello,” he said. “It’s ever so nice of you to come.”

  Then she smiled. Her voice was high and unmusical.

  “It’s swell of you,” she said, “to ask me, Mr. Wilson.”

  The waiter and the busboy were pulling out the table. He had not thought of her sitting on the bench right beside him. It was difficult to see her, turning sideways.

  “Well,” he said again, because he had to say something. “It’s swell you could come.”

  Then he saw that she was nervous and frightened. They were pushing the table back, now that she was sitting down. They were handing them menus, written on huge pieces of paper in indistinguishable characters. “Canapé,” “Entrée,” “Roti.” He saw her hand shake when she took the card, and he saw her swallow.

  “Perhaps,” Jeffrey said, “you’d like a drink.”

  He saw her glance at him, frightened, but trying to be as nice as she could.

  “I shouldn’t,” she said, “but, yes, thank you. I’d like a little sherry.”

  Then she was looking helplessly at the lunch card.

  “Never mind,” Jeffrey said, “I’ll read it. They fix it so you can’t understand it. They like the chance to explain.”

  When he ordered the lunch, he was sure that he was not appearing well. He knew that he was more emphatic and more artificially gay than was absolutely necessary, behaving as he sometimes did with someone whom he did not know and wished to impress favorably. It was a part of a shyness which he had never entirely lost. Now that he had seen her, he did not know what to do next, any more than she did. It all reminded him of something, he could not remember exactly what, until he noticed the color of her hair again. All his shyness was a part of that past, some half-forgotten pattern of behavior. Just as the clear soup was coming on, he remembered—Louella Barnes.

  Sally Sales looked just enough as Louella had looked once to set the train of habit stirring. Her hair, voice, the way she held her head—it was as though he were living through an encounter with Louella again, vicariously.

  He had been wondering what on earth Jim saw in that little girl and why Jim liked that undeveloped sweetness. She had seemed so young, so devoid of poise, but now she assumed her own individuality. He could understand Jim better, now that he remembered, although it was disconcerting, eating fillet of sole with her there at the Echelon. She had been talking and he had not even been listening.

  “But I liked the World of Tomorrow best,” she said.

  Jeffrey wished that she had been sitting across the table, so that he did not have to turn his head to see her. He did not know at first what she meant by “the World of Tomorrow.”

  “Everyone does,” he said. “That is, when they’re your age.”

  Then it came to him that she must have been talking about the World’s Fair, which seemed as old as his own thoughts, gone like a dream, as though it had never existed, a sad, materialistic fantasy of peace and plenty, a sort of satire which should have had no place in the world of today or any other world. He thought of the Moscow subway and of the red workman holding up his star, and of the Japanese pavilion, with its silkworms, both slightly dubious monuments to international good will, and he thought of those other buildings around the Lagoon of Nations, glorifying nations which had already fallen, while that fantasy was going on—Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, France.

  “Did you see the Houses of Tomorrow?” he asked.

  Yes, she had seen the houses, too, and the Kodak Building and the Telephone Building. It had been funny at the Telephone Building. It still made her laugh before she told about it. A boy in the booth on the stage had been talking to a girl in San Francisco.

  “Herbert,” the girl asked, “do you still love me?”

  “Don’t ask that, Myrtle,” the boy had said, “there’s five hundred people listening.”

  Then Sally’s cheeks had a higher color. She glanced away from him and looked hard at her plate.

  “I don’t see why he minded,” she said, “what difference did it make?”

  It was the first thing she had said which gave him any idea of what she might be like.

  “Did you see the Midget Village?” he asked, “and Bring Them Back Alive?”

  She had seen them all, and the Panda and the Seminole Indians.

  “But I liked the World of Tomorrow best,” she said.

  He looked at her again, wondering what she had seen in it, trying to discover some taste that they might possess in common. It was hard to find one because Sally Sales was the world of tomorrow, not even the world of today.

  “I wonder—” he said—“did Jim take you to the Fair?”

  “Yes.” Her voice sounded startled. “Yes, didn’t he tell you?”

  “No,” he said. “You see, Jim comes and goes. He never tells me much.”

  He was thinking of Jim and Sally Sales on one of those clear, hot August days perhaps, wandering over the crowded bridges with all the pennants waving, walking down those endless streets,
stepping aside for the little cars whose horns caroled “The Sidewalks of New York,” walking endlessly, walking in a dream. It was not for him, but it gave him vicarious pleasure. He could see Jim looking at it as he would have once, and he could imagine he was Jim sitting with Sally Sales in the dark, holding her hand and gazing down at the roads and streets and cities of the peaceable World of Tomorrow. And now he knew, and everyone must have known, that the world of tomorrow would never be like that, for it was gone, exactly like his world of yesterday.

  “It must have been a nice place to take a girl,” he said.

  “Yes, it was,” she answered. Her voice was softer, and she smiled.

  “You remind me of a girl I used to know,” he said.

  He glanced up from his coffee and saw that she looked startled.

  “Was she nice?” she asked. “I hope she was.”

  “Of course she was,” he said. It was not the way he had intended to talk to her at all. “Her name was Louella—Louella Barnes.”

  He was walking up the tar path off Center Street again, not that it made any sense. He was sitting on that rocking chair again, looking at the iced-tea glasses. There was a magic in it which he had entirely forgotten.…

  “Perhaps I should have married her,” he said.

  Then he came to himself abruptly. He was back in the Echelon again talking to a rather gauche little girl in a green dress with hair like molasses candy, with hands a little too large, with too much lipstick, and not enough powder on her nose.

  “Oh, Billy,” the young man with the bracelet was saying, “oh, Billy, say you like it, but you simply can’t adore it.”

  Jeffrey frowned. He had never told anyone in the world that perhaps he should have married Louella Barnes. All at once he felt very warm, and kindly. He wished she had not spoken of the World of Tomorrow because he could not get tomorrow from his mind.

  “I wonder—” he said, and he hesitated—he was never good at sentiment—“if you would mind if I asked you something.”

  She turned toward him enquiringly, and then looked frightened.