Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “You know, Charles,” Mr. Burton had continued, “Guthrie Mayhew and I have quite an idea. We’re going to get hold of Tommy Mapes on the New Haven and see if he can’t get us a special car on the eight-thirty. How about getting aboard? My idea is to call it the Crackerbarrel.”

  “Why, thanks,” Charles had said. “I’d like to very much, Tony.”

  He had worked late that night and he could not remember what train he had taken home, but Nancy had been asleep when he got there.

  “Nance,” he said, “wake up. I’ve got something to tell you. Burton’s asked me to call him Tony.” And Nancy had sat bolt upright in her twin bed.

  “Start at the beginning,” Nancy had said. “Exactly how did it happen, and don’t leave out anything.”

  They must have talked for a long while, there in the middle of the night. Nancy had known what it meant because she had worked downtown herself.

  “Now wait,” she had said. “Let’s not get too excited. Who else calls him Tony?”

  “I don’t think anyone else does,” Charles had told her, “except the officers, and old Jake when he speaks of him.”

  “Who’s old Jake?” Nancy asked.

  It surprised him that Nancy did not know, for she usually kept everything straight, but when he told her that old Jake was a day watchman in the vault who had been there when Mr. Burton had first started at the bank, Nancy had remembered.

  “Darling, we ought to have a drink of something, shouldn’t we?” she said, but it was pretty late for a drink. “Darling, I knew it would happen sometime. I’m pretty proud of you, Charley.”

  It was only a week later that they found out that Mr. Burton had also asked Roger Blakesley to call him Tony and they never could find out whom Mr. Burton had asked first.

  Tony Burton always boarded the eight-thirty at Stamford and it occurred to Charles that it might be a good idea to walk through the cars and to sit by him if the seat beside him should be vacant. He had nothing particular to say to him, but it might be a good idea. He even went so far as to think of a suitable conversational subject and he decided on the action of the market. He knew it would be a risky subject, to be approached cautiously, because Tony Burton was always careful to say that he was not interested in stock-market gyrations. The Board was convinced, and Charles was too, that the general situation predicated a long-term rise and that the present slump was a temporary adjustment and not the beginning of a bear market, no matter what the statisticians might conclude, unless a drastic change appeared in the foreign situation.

  The station was crowded and damp, but in spite of the crowd the atmosphere was restful. You had a feeling that the rush of commuters was nearly over for the day and that of the whole army that had marched to the city only the rear guard was left. The men in the station gave an impression of executive leisure, appearing as if they did not have to arrive anywhere at any particular time, but as if nothing of importance could happen until they did arrive. Their mail would be open and waiting and everything else would be waiting. In the meanwhile, they gathered about the radiator near the ticket windows, talking about the weather, and the waiting room was almost like a club where everyone was on a first-name basis.

  As Charles moved to the newsstand to buy the New York Times he noticed that Mr. Mayhew was wearing a new gabardine raincoat. He nodded to Courtney Jeffers of the New York Life and to Rodney Bishop in the General Foods sales department and to Bill Wardwell in Eckert and Stokes. Curiously enough, it was all more familiar than home because it was all a part of the city to which they all were going, something more important than any suburb, a part of life that was more genuine.

  There was a sort of preoccupation today, almost a feeling of suspense. He had just bought the New York Times and had turned away from the newsstand when he saw that he was face to face with Roger Blakesley. Roger was wearing a blue, pin-striped suit, double-breasted and carefully pressed, in Brooks Brothers’ most conservative tradition. His dark brown hat went very nicely with his cheviot overcoat. He was polishing his rimless glasses with a fresh handkerchief and his face, which had grown plumper and more rotund lately, was fresh and shining.

  “Why, hello, Charley,” Roger said.

  “Hello,” Charles answered, and then he went on because one had to say something. “Are you still using that electric razor, Roger?” It must have been the smoothness of Roger’s cheeks that made him say it.

  “Frankly, yes,” Roger said. “My beard is just the thing for it, and besides”—he put on his glasses and laughed—“it makes me feel like a putting green.” It was just the sort of thing that Roger would have said and his broadening smile showed he was pleased with it.

  “Or a bowling green,” Charles said.

  “All right,” Roger said, “a bowling green, as long as you don’t cut it too fine. That was a swell party last night, wasn’t it? I couldn’t tear myself away.”

  “Neither could I,” Charles answered, and they both smiled. “Listen, Charley,” Roger asked, “will you have any time on your hands today?”

  “Not much,” Charles said. “How about lunch?”

  “I can’t make it,” Roger said. “I have a date with Tony at the University Club. After that Mapes is coming in, but we’ve got to check up on that Catlin thing sometime before we meet the attorneys.”

  There was a roaring sound outside and everyone was moving. The eight-thirty was coming in.

  “We can go over it on the train if you want to,” Charles said. “I’ve got the papers here.”

  Roger Blakesley patted his shoulder.

  “Boy, I simply can’t,” he said, close to Charles’s ear because of the roaring of the train. “Tony wants me. He’s saving me a seat.”

  Charles raised his voice.

  “There’s a lot more to banking than you think, isn’t there?” he said. “It’s an art, isn’t it?”

  Roger laughed and linked his arm through Charles’s.

  “Charles,” he said, “you’re always subtle in the morning. Well, I’ll see you in the studio.”

  “All right,” Charles said. “Don’t mix your colors wrong, Roger.”

  Roger had not heard him. He was already bounding up the steps of the third coach. Roger was always quick on his feet and this sort of thing had been going on long enough for Charles to understand its shades of meaning. He was reasonably sure that Tony Burton had not asked Roger to sit with him, and he was not even entirely sure that Tony Burton had asked Roger to lunch at the University Club, even though Tony Burton tried to lunch there when he could on Tuesdays.

  Charles found a seat by a window and opened the New York Times to the financial page. There was nothing like competition. His mind had been working more alertly since he had met Roger Blakesley and everything assumed a new significance. They were both assistant vice-presidents in the trust department now, but they had both worked almost everywhere in the bank, except the vaults. Either could handle customers about as well as the other. They both were very bright boys, but he had never worried about Roger much until lately. There would have been no reason to do so now if Roger had gone to the war instead of using that period to make himself useful. The financial page was dull but Charles put his mind on it. Roger had a quick way of jumping at facts without examining them first. His own memory was far more retentive and reliable than Roger’s and Tony Burton undoubtedly knew it. Charles knew more about the trust accounts than anyone in the bank, more about the limitations under the wills and about the lawyers and the specific family situations. His mind was working smoothly now that he was on the train.

  When the train pulled into the lower level of the Grand Central Station, habit made Charles move instinctively, almost oblivious to his surroundings. Without consciously noticing the polished marble of the lower level or the starry vault of the concourse on the upper level, he was aware of the changing spaces, for habit had made him a proprietor of that station and all the streets around it. Habit made him move instantly to the broad stairs on the right
and he ran up gently and easily, for no good reason except that he had always taken them at a run. On the upper level he turned sharp right again, walking past the parcel checkroom to the ramp on the left and past the heaps of newspapers by the doors and out to the corner of Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue.

  Whenever he emerged from the station and set foot on Forty-second Street, he experienced in varying degrees a sense of coming home. Sometimes this feeling was one of deep gratitude and more often only one of boredom, but whenever he arrived there, all those other times he had reached Forty-second Street somehow added themselves together into an imponderable, indivisible sort of sum. His mind was adjusted to the traffic, to the drugstores and the haberdasheries, to the Lincoln Building and the Park Avenue ramp. He belonged to New York, and conversely New York belonged to him, if only because so much of his life and energy and thought had been spent within its limits.

  It did not matter that he had not been born and raised there, because New York belonged almost exclusively to people who had come from other places. New York in the end was only a strange, indefinable combination of triumph, discouragement and memories. It did not matter what the weather was there, or the season of the year, or whether there was war or peace—he was always able to lose himself in the city’s abstractions. The place was changing—new stores, new façades, new plastics—without his being able one jot to influence that change, but still the changing place belonged to him. The only institution in the neighborhood that had not been altered much was the Stuyvesant Bank, which had been given its name when Murchison Brothers had first started the business on lower Broadway in the early 1800’s. It had moved uptown long since, but almost from the beginning of its history the Stuyvesant had been what it still was, a family bank.

  It was essentially the same, Charles often thought, as it had been when he had first entered it with his father on a trip to New York when he was twelve years old. It was too late now to recall the circumstances which had caused that trip, but it must have been one of those times when some transaction in Boston had put his father temporarily in a genial and opulent mood or they never would have come to New York or stopped at the Hotel Belmont. Another sign that something must have gone exceptionally well was that his father had brought his cigar case, and what Charles could remember most clearly about the trip was the rich smell of heavy Havana tobacco. It was always a good sign when his father took his cigar case from the back of his upper bureau drawer. Charles remembered very clearly the oak woodwork in the downstairs room of the Belmont where they had breakfasted after driving in a taxicab from the Fall River Line pier. There was no need, his father had said, to bother taking the elevated or the subway. They had breakfasted on grapefruit with a red cherry in the center, oatmeal and cream, kippered herrings and scrambled eggs, and after consuming a pot of coffee his father had lighted a cigar.

  “It’s a great town, New York, when you get to know it,” his father had said, “and everyone ought to get to know New York.” It was pathetic, Charles sometimes thought, that desire of his father’s to be a man of the world. It was not unlike Tony Burton’s desire to be a great cosmopolitan, and their efforts achieved approximately the same measure of success. “Now straighten your tie. We’re going to the bank to cash a check, and pull your stockings up.”

  It was God’s truth, and not a very palatable one, that Charles wore black ribbed stockings and knickerbockers, purchased at Setchell’s on Dock Street at Clyde. He was old enough to be painfully embarrassed at the way his stockings kept slipping down and he tried to change the subject.

  “What bank?” he asked.

  “Let’s see,” his father said, and he pulled a letter from his pocket. “The Stuyvesant Bank. It’s just a few blocks from here.”

  Even in 1916, banks were beginning to be imposing, and Charles was disappointed when he first saw the Stuyvesant, for anyone could see that it was a bank in a former private dwelling, a big New York corner house of somewhat sooty brick and brownstone. A doorman in a black chauffeur’s uniform stood on the sidewalk near what had been the front door, and once they were inside the impression of being in a house still remained, though all the ground floor had been remodeled to make room for the tellers’ cages. One side was for ladies. Here in an open fireplace a little fire was burning, and near by was a desk behind which sat a white-haired gentleman whose duty it was to give the ladies advice and help, just as Mr. Cheseborough did now. There were the same mahogany roll-top desks by the windows, and other desks in the distance under electric lights. Charles could remember staring at the flight of stairs leading to the vaults in the old house cellar while the teller read his father’s letter and asked his father whether he wanted it in fives or tens.

  “That’s a good bank,” his father had said when they were out on the street again. “A family bank, without any funny business. It stood up through the panic of ’ninety-three.”

  That old house of the Stuyvesant was still an asset. It was still a family bank, whose doorman could greet depositors like the doorman of a club, and inside there was always a studied atmosphere of leisure. One had a reassuring suspicion, as one entered, that the Stuyvesant had handled the same family accounts for generations and that an effort had always been made to think of individuals as well as the size of their deposits. Superficially the Stuyvesant was more like Brown, Shipley, 123 Pall Mall, in London than like an American bank, and it paid to keep it that way.

  Year after year there had been talk about a new building, not necessarily a modern one but something Colonial and bright like that brick effort of the Bank of Manhattan on Madison Avenue—but the directors had always in the end turned down such proposals. It paid to keep the Stuyvesant in that ugly old brownstone mansion with its floor plan about the way it had been when the Stuyvesant had first moved there. Though adjoining houses had been added and though its interior had been refinished and its exterior occasionally sandblasted and cleaned in the rough beauty-parlor treatment given to old houses, it paid to keep everything looking essentially the same. It paid to keep the open fire that burned real logs and to encourage tellers and investment counselors to be patient with confused old ladies and genial with arthritic old gentlemen. It paid to have a foreign department which could take great pains about letters of credit and perhaps advance allowances to depositors’ grandchildren overextended while traveling on the Continent. It paid to have kindly tax experts seemingly willing to waste hours over minor problems of bewildered clients.

  Other banks, larger ones, were constantly advertising their friendly services and pointing out the almost insoluble personal complications faced by anyone who owned property in this period of economic change and regulation, but the Stuyvesant seldom advertised. It was a matter of deeds rather than words at the Stuyvesant, and it paid. The wills of deceased depositors were proof enough that the Stuyvesant had been an institutional friend through life. The Stuyvesant had been named as executor and trustee in hundreds of wills. The employees of the Stuyvesant understood rich clients and knew all the pains and drawbacks of being rich, although they were not rich men themselves. They had to deal familiarly, almost jovially, but always scrupulously with large sums of money, while living usually on modest salaries.

  If you were successful at the Stuyvesant you ended by developing a priestly, untouchable, ascetic attitude. You learned to think of your own financial life and your own problems as something apart from those other financial complications. If you did well enough to become an executive in the Stuyvesant, and this required a long time and an arduous apprenticeship, you found yourself solving the problems of individuals who had difficulty living within incomes approaching a hundred thousand dollars a year. You found yourself spending the working day discussing the investment of huge sums of money, only to get home yourself and to worry because the butcher’s bill had risen some twenty dollars above the previous one. You had to debate the purchase or the sale of controls in business enterprises and then return home yourself to decide whether
or not you could afford to buy a motor lawn mower, or a ready-made or a tailor-made suit. In time this gave you a split personality since you had to toss your own problems completely aside and never allow them to mingle in any way with those of clients and depositors when you reached your desk at the Stuyvesant. At your desk you had to be a friend and confidant, as professional as a doctor or a lawyer, ready and with an intelligent perspective for almost anything. Anthony Burton had once said that this attitude was one’s responsibility toward society. Though personally Charles had never felt like a social worker, he felt this responsibility. He was already forgetting Nancy and the children, already assuming his business character, when he said good morning to Gus, the doorman on the sidewalk outside the Stuyvesant.

  “Is it wet enough for you, Mr. Gray?” Gus asked.

  “It has to rain sometime,” Charles said. “Are you a grandfather yet?”

  “No, not yet,” Gus said, “but any minute now.”

  Then Charles said good morning to Joe inside the door. The bank was scrupulously neat and cleared for action. He could hear the click of the adding machines in back and he could see the new pens and blotters on the depositors’ tables as he walked past the tellers behind their gilded wickets and turned to the right past the foreign department to the coat-room. When he had hung up his coat and hat, he looked at himself in the mirror. Though his herringbone suit was a little tight, it was adequate, and he automatically straightened the coat and adjusted his tie. His slightly freckled face was moist from the rain and his sandy hair, though it was carefully trimmed, needed brushing, so he went to the washroom. He had learned long ago that you did not neglect exterior details when you sat out near the vice-presidents’ desks by the front window.

  Though you seldom talked of salaries at the Stuyvesant, your social status was obvious from the position of your desk. Charles occupied one of the two flat mahogany desks that stood in a sort of no man’s land between the roll-top desks of the officers and the smaller flat-tops of lesser executives and secretaries crowding the floor of the bank outside the cages. A green rug extended from the officers’ desks, forming a neat and restricted zone that just included Charles’s desk and the one beside it which was occupied by Roger Blakesley. Charles could see both their names, Mr. Blakesley and Mr. Gray, in silver letters, and he was pleased to see that he had got there first from the eight-thirty, a minute or two ahead of Roger and Mr. Burton and ahead of everyone else near the windows.