Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

“If you mean I’m out in front,” Charles said, “I suppose I am. Mr. Burton asked me to attend to the matter, but of course if you’re not satisfied—”

  “How much do they pay you for doing it?” Mr. Selig asked. “Ten grand a year?”

  Mr. Selig was looking at him curiously, in a way that reminded Charles of Malcolm Bryant.

  “That hasn’t anything to do with your account, has it?” Charles asked—but still, he was fronting for the crowd. He liked the expression “fronting for the crowd.” Mr. Selig was looking at him with a new sort of interest.

  “Guys like you fascinate me,” Mr. Selig said. “I don’t see why you do it, for that money.”

  “I suppose I think I’m underpaid,” Charles said. “It’s human nature.”

  Mr. Selig lowered his voice.

  “How would you like twenty-five grand a year?”

  “What for?” Charles asked.

  “For what you’re doing here,” Mr. Selig said. “Fronting for the crowd.”

  It was something, after all it was something. At least it meant that he had not done his job badly.

  “Thanks,” Charles said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t use it, but I appreciate your asking.”

  “You guys fascinate me,” Mr. Selig said. “Money everywhere and you don’t want money.”

  “Maybe we get too used to it,” Charles said. “Maybe we get tired of seeing so much of it around.”

  “That’s what fascinates me,” Mr. Selig said. “All of it around, and you don’t take it. Well, no hard feelings.”

  They both stood up and shook hands.

  “Oh, no,” Charles said. “Not at all. We’re very sorry, Mr. Selig.”

  “It takes poise,” Mr. Selig said. “I wouldn’t have the poise.”

  “I wouldn’t call it poise,” Charles said. “I’d call it temperament and timidity. Good-by. We’re sorry, Mr. Selig.”

  There was no flagging in the bank’s activity, but Charles was conscious of a ripple of excitement, of curious glances from the cashiers’ cages and the smaller desks. They were all like good little boys and girls who had witnessed one of their number having it out in the school yard with a naughty boy from the street. The adding machines were still clicking and whirring with the typewriters, the cashiers were still thumbing through their currency, but beneath it there was a flurry, a sense of the unusual. Mike Cavanaugh, the bank detective, was moving toward him, not hurriedly but quietly as though he were only making his afternoon rounds, and Roger Blakesley had turned in his swivel chair.

  “How was he?” Mike Cavanaugh asked.

  “He was a perfect gentleman,” Charles said. “He asked me if I was fronting for the crowd.”

  Then Roger Blakesley asked whether Mr. Selig was mad, but Charles had no time to answer. Mike Cavanaugh had stiffened to attention and Charles saw that Mr. Burton had come in, still in his overcoat, just back from lunch.

  “Has Selig called?” Tony Burton asked.

  “He’s just left,” Charles told him.

  “Well, I’m glad I missed him,” Tony Burton said. “How did he take it?”

  “His feelings were hurt,” Charles said, “but then mine would have been. I wouldn’t say he was angry at me personally.”

  “There aren’t any complications, then?” Tony Burton asked.

  “No,” Charles said, “I don’t think so.”

  “This sort of thing always worries me,” Tony Burton said. He began to move away to the coatroom.

  “Oh, Mr. Burton,” Roger Blakesley said, and Mr. Selig and possible complications left Charles’s mind. Roger sounded like a model student speaking in one of the classes at the Harvard Business School. He was being careful not to call the president by his first name right in the middle of the bank.

  “Yes, Roger,” Tony Burton said, benignly, like a kind teacher.

  “Have you got time to see me for a minute?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Burton said. “If it’s only for a minute.”

  Charles had rung for Miss Marble and Miss Marble was bringing back the trust folders. He was careful to show no undue anxiety but such a request of Roger’s, at such a time, might have implications. Ordinarily, either he or Roger Blakesley, because of their position, would have risen and walked over to the president’s roll-top desk without asking for any sort of appointment. That request of Roger’s meant that he wanted to see Tony Burton privately and perhaps about something personal. It might even mean that Roger, like himself, was getting tired of waiting and that Roger was going to step over, as Charles had often dreamed of doing in the last few weeks, and ask right out about the vice-presidency. It was not like Roger, but it was possible—on the grounds that this sort of waiting was bad for general morale.

  Mr. Burton had left his coat and was settling down at his desk and Roger Blakesley had risen.

  Anxiety and self-inflicted suspense were useless and unprofitable, but there was nothing one could do. Charles was back in his personal world again, his little narrow world, and the trust accounts were facing him. It was time to be going through them, because it was after three o’clock, but something discordant moved him beyond the control of ingrained habit and system. Ordinarily his ability to concentrate enabled him to forget his own problems by plunging into a good page of figures on a balance sheet, but now he could not keep his attention on the trust accounts. His eyes were on a list of common stocks—American Can, American Cyanamid, American Tobacco B, American Telephone and Telegraph. Through wars and rumors of wars, in the midst of panic and depression, out of the maze of taxes and social change, through all the welter of a cracking tradition, American Tobacco B and American Tel and Tel stood, with occasional lapses, like the precepts of early life, like the granite peaks of a half-submerged continent, serene above a swirl of hostile seas. Other securities might go sour, but not Telephone and Tobacco—or not very sour. Still, though he was surrounded by those trusted symbols, his thoughts kept wandering off at tangents.

  Roger Blakesley was over by the front windows, his chair pulled close to the president’s desk, talking very earnestly. Charles could not forget what Nancy had said that morning—that he could go to Tony Burton and put his cards on the table. Even though he dismissed it as just the thing a woman would suggest, still Nancy had good judgment. She understood as well as he did the routine and jealousies and discipline of an office, and besides there was the question of personal dignity. It was humiliating, considering his position, to sit, day after day, waiting for Tony Burton to tell him what was on his mind, when he had probably made his choice already. It was humiliating to have one’s life and a good part of one’s future depend on one man’s eccentricity, but that was the way it always was.

  Charles had often thought that it was fortunate for Tony Burton that he seldom needed to make quick decisions. Tony Burton had told him himself that he liked to mull over problems and fuss with them, particularly problems of personnel, but he usually did what he decided in the first place, from sheer intuition and instinct tempered by training and experience. All his talk of mulling and weighing and balancing was vacillation, if you wanted to use a harsh word for it. There were also the qualms that always surrounded a definite negative. That probably was what was delaying Tony Burton—the certainty that no matter what he did someone would be hurt.

  It would obviously have ruined everything if Charles had endeavored to end the suspense by talking it over with Tony Burton. It was against all convention and Tony would instantly have put him in his place, but still it was possible to consider such an impossible scene. He could even frame just what he would say.

  “Listen, Tony,” he would say, “let’s face the facts. Maybe you’re removed from office politics, but everybody here in the bank knows that you are considering proposing either Blakesley or me for this vice-presidency. Maybe you don’t know, but you ought to, that they’re making bets on it in the washroom. It isn’t dignified. It isn’t fair to Roger or me to keep us waiting. We’re both of us making monkeys of ourselves runn
ing around and polishing apples. You know everything about me, Tony. I’ve been around here long enough. Of course, I was out in the war, but you approved my going, or you said you did, and I’m about the same as I ever was in spite of it. I know it’s hard to step on somebody’s face, but this thing has been going on for months, ever since Arthur was killed, and I’m tired of staying awake at night, and Nancy’s getting tired, too. How about it, Tony?”

  It was not a bad speech, either, even though it was out of his usual line and beyond the realms of discipline. In fact the words were so vivid in his mind that he seemed to be saying them right now at the far corner by the window, but of course he would never say them. He was at his desk and out of the corner of his eye he saw that Roger Blakesley was back again, leafing through a pile of papers with his left hand while he scribbled with his right on a memorandum pad. It may have been that Roger also had been dreaming of a talk with Tony. He could even make a savage, unkind parody of Roger’s possible speech, which Roger would have called an “approach.”

  “Listen, Tony,” Roger would have said (that is if he had said anything), “how about you and me doing a little mind reading? You’ve got one of the best poker faces I’ve ever seen. I love your inscrutability, but let’s unscrute, shall we? That’s a pretty good word, what? I always knew I should have been an English professor and not just a poor dumb bank boy.… Well, to get back to it, Tony. I know you’re hot and bothered, and I don’t want to bother you and I know old Charley doesn’t. Why, Charley’s the grandest guy I know. You and I don’t want to hurt old Charley, especially after the war, and you don’t want to hurt me, but you couldn’t hurt me, Tony, the way I feel about you. It’s just a little matter, Tony, and Charley and I can take it, though maybe Charley’s more brittle than I am. I never take things hard, Tony. Let’s help each other out and let’s get an extra on the street …” That was the way Roger would do it, because Roger had the sales technique. If it made Charles impatient sometimes, he was broad-minded enough to know that a lot of people liked it.

  The shades on the front door were drawn already, showing that the bank was closed to depositors, and there was the inevitable air of relaxation now that they were no longer on public display. Voices were louder. There was a snatch of laughter. People were assuming more comfortable positions and far in the back of the room, in that region where there was not so much to gain or lose, he saw some of the boys moving toward the washroom to smoke a cigarette. If he had wished to have that talk with Tony Burton, now would have been the time, but he still sat at his desk with the trust accounts in front of him. The tension was beginning to undermine his judgment and self-control but if they wanted to keep him waiting, he was not going to show that it bothered him. Just then his desk telephone rang with its specially contrived device to avoid undue noise. It was Miss Sumner, Tony Burton’s secretary.

  “Oh, Mr. Gray,” Miss Sumner said. Her voice was sweet with the assured authority of being the dean of all secretaries, the repository of all secrets. “Mr. Burton wants to know if you can see him for a moment.”

  There were some reactions you could not control and in spite of himself his heart was beating faster. He deliberately finished the page of his report before he rose, and when he was on his feet he looked at Roger Blakesley.

  “Yes, Sugar,” Roger was saying over his own telephone, which meant that Roger was speaking to his wife. “I’ll be there on the five-thirty, Sug. Yes, I’ll pick up the prescription.”

  Roger’s concentration on his conversation was not misleading. Charles was sure that Roger knew exactly why Tony Burton wanted to see him for a moment.

  Tony Burton looked very fit, in spite of his white hair and his roll-top desk which both conspired to place him in another generation. For years Charles had accepted him as a model willingly, even though he realized that everyone else above a certain salary rating also used Tony Burton as a perfect sartorial example, and he was pretty sure that Tony himself was conscious of it. Charles never rebelled against this convention because Tony had everything one should expect to find in a president of a first-rate bank. It was amusing but not ridiculous to observe that all the minor executives in the Stuyvesant, as well as the more ambitious clerks, wore conservative double-breasted suits like Tony Burton’s, at the same time allowing undue rigidity to break out into pin stripes and herringbones, just like Tony Burton’s. They all visited the barber once a week. They all had taken up golf, whether they liked it or not, and most of them wore the same square type of wrist watch and the same stainless-steel strap. They had adopted Tony Burton’s posture and his brisk, quick step and even the gently vibrant inflection of his voice. In fact once at one of those annual dinners for officers and junior executives when everyone said a few words and got off a few local jokes about the bank, Charles had brought the matter up when he had been called upon to speak. Speaking was always an unpleasant ordeal with which he had finally learned to cope successfully largely from imitating Tony. He remembered standing up and waiting for silence, just as Tony waited, with the same faint smile and the same deliberate gaze.

  “I should like to drink a toast,” he had said, “not to our president but to everyone who tries to look like him. When I walk, I always walk like Tony, because Tony knows just how to walk; and when I talk, I always talk like Tony, because Tony knows just how to talk; and when I dress, I always dress like Tony, in a double-breasted suit. But no matter how I try, I cannot be like Tony. I can never make myself sufficiently astute.”

  It was the one time in the year, at that annual dinner, when you could let yourself go, within certain limits, and Tony Burton had loved it. He had stood up and waited for the laughter to die down and then he had spoken easily, with just the right pause and cadence. He had said that there were always little surprises at these dinners. He had never realized, for instance, that there could be a poet in the trust department, but poetry had its place. Poetry could teach lessons that transcended pedestrian prose.

  “And I’m not too old to learn,” Tony Burton had said, “and I’m humbly glad to learn. Sometimes on a starlit night I’ve wondered what my function was in the Stuyvesant. I’m very glad to know it is that of a clothing dummy. It’s a patriotic duty. It’s what they want us to be, in Washington.”

  That was back in 1941, but Tony Burton still had the same spring to his step, the same unlined, almost youthful face, and the same florid complexion; and he had the same three pictures on his desk, the first of Mrs. Burton in their garden, the second of their three girls standing in profile, like a flight of stairs, and the third of his sixty-foot schooner, the Wanderlust (the boat you were invited on once every summer), with Tony Burton in his yachting cap standing at the wheel. Time had marched on. All of the girls had come out and all were married, and the Wanderlust had been returned by the navy in deplorable condition, but Tony Burton had no superficial scars.

  No matter how well Charles might know him, in that half-intimate, half-formal business relationship, he still had a slight feeling of diffidence and constraint. It was the same feeling that one had toward generals in wartime or perhaps toward anyone with power over one. There was always a vestige of a subservient desire to please and to be careful. You had to know how far to go, how long to laugh, and how to measure every speech.

  Tony Burton looked up and smiled and waved his hand with the circular motion at the wrist that everyone had tried to imitate.

  “Sit down, Charley,” he said. “Have a cigarette and relax.”

  No matter how much you might pretend, it was no time for relaxing, and Tony Burton must have known it. It must have been a little hard for Tony, trying to be friends and always being faced by that line of demarcation. It might have been different, Charles was thinking, if he had inherited money of his own instead of being dependent on a job. It might have been different, even, if he had received some attractive offer lately, if he had known that there was something waiting for him elsewhere with the same salary, instead of knowing that times were tight and
uncertain.

  Everything was uncertain and there was nothing to do but to wait. He shook his head when Tony Burton offered him a club cigarette from his gold case. There was the unwritten rule of no smoking on the banking floor—even though Tony Burton suggested it be broken.

  “What’s on your mind, Tony?” he asked. There was nothing to do but wait, while Tony Burton laid his cigarette case on the desk in front of him. From where he sat Charles could read the engraving on its gold surface, done in script in three different specimens of girlish handwriting. “To America’s most representative daddy, Gladys, Olivia, Babs.”

  “The girls gave it to me on Father’s Day,” Tony Burton said. “I didn’t know I was a representative dad.”

  “I didn’t know you were either,” Charles answered, “but it must be nice to know.”

  There was nothing to do but wait, but it was clear already that they were not going to talk about the future or they would not have begun with the cigarette case. At the same time, it was also clear that Tony Burton did have something on his mind. Charles glanced at his cool and placid features, set in assured, easy lines etched by a career in which everything had always worked out right. From the very beginning Tony Burton could have had no doubts about anything. From the very beginning he must have known that he would end where he was sitting.

  “I don’t like being representative of anything,” Tony Burton said.

  “I don’t see how you can help it very well,” Charles said.

  “How do you mean, I can’t help it?” Tony Burton asked.

  “Sitting where you are,” Charles said, “you’ve got to represent. That’s all I mean.”

  “Well, I was thinking the other day,” Tony Burton said, “that you’re pretty representative yourself.”

  “I hope I am, Tony,” Charles answered. “I try to be, in business hours.” He did not like the conversation because he did not know where it was leading, although he understood that this was all a part of Tony’s technique.

  “We ought to call this place the House of Representatives,” Tony Burton said, “but it isn’t a bad shop, is it?”