Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “No,” Charles answered, “it isn’t. I’m glad to be back in it, Tony,” and Tony Burton smiled at him, almost as though they were friends.

  “Well,” Tony said, “speaking of representatives—” and he paused and Charles sat motionless. For a second he thought that he had been wrong and that they were coming to the point at last, but only for a second. “How did you represent things to Selig?”

  “I told him he would be happier elsewhere,” Charles said. “I told him there were too many complications.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him that we’d have room for him in the quite near future?”

  “Because he wouldn’t have believed it,” Charles said. “He had to know, not that he hadn’t guessed already.”

  “Did he take it?”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “he took it.”

  Tony Burton leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “He has a lot of good connections. That’s the trouble with life these days. There’s no pattern. You don’t know where you’re at any more. The girls keep going to La Casita. It’s a damn funny world, isn’t it? It’s getting curiouser and curiouser.”

  “A man told me at lunch today,” Charles said, “that no matter what the world is doing, man remains the same.”

  Tony Burton unclasped his hands from behind his head and placed them on the arms of his chair.

  “Well, let’s forget it, Charley. There’s one other thing.”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said. He knew it was the other thing that Tony Burton wanted to talk about and he knew that informality was over. It was time to be a bright young man again and to call Tony Burton “sir.”

  “About that loan.”

  “Which loan, sir?” Charles asked.

  “The one we were talking about this morning. That cordage company. You said you were born up there. What’s the name of the place?”

  “You mean Clyde?” Charles answered. He had never dreamed that Clyde would come into the conversation again, yet now that it had, it seemed inevitable. All day, from the moment he had arisen in the morning, Clyde had been behind everything.

  “Yes,” Tony Burton said, “that’s it. Clyde. Somebody ought to see that company and it just occurred to me”—he raised his hand from the right arm of his chair and rotated it slowly from the wrist—“it just occurred to me if you’ve lived up there and know the background, you’d better go up for a day or two and look things over, just quietly. Talk to people. Find out from the bank. Nothing is secret about any business in a small town.”

  “No, sir,” Charles said. “Everybody in Clyde knows about everything.”

  “Well, if you want to, take the midnight, or take the plane up to Boston tomorrow morning. Stay as long as you like and see if you can get some figures.”

  Charles nodded slowly. He did not want to speak for a moment. He was going up to Clyde and he could not help it. He was going back to where he had come from because Roger Blakesley had seen Mr. Burton for just a minute.

  “I envy you getting away for a while,” Tony Burton said. “You’re looking a little tired, Charles.”

  “Do you want to come along?” Charles asked.

  “I wish I could,” Tony Burton said, and he laughed, “but I’m the representative dad.”

  Charles’s thoughts were moving smoothly again. For an instant he thought of refusing. He even began to invent a possible excuse, but a refusal or excuse would have been as bad as going.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question, Tony?” he asked.

  “Why, no, of course not, Charley,” Tony Burton said.

  “Did you think up this idea yourself?”

  It was dangerous, impertinent, and out of order, but from the slight narrowing of Tony Burton’s eyes and from a faint look of surprise, he knew that Tony Burton understood, and that was all he wanted.

  “Why, no,” Tony Burton said. “Now that you mention it, it wasn’t entirely my idea.”

  At least Tony Burton understood, if he had not before, why Roger had suggested it. It was an opportunity to get Charles Gray away for a while, out of sight and out of mind in a crucial period. Charles had to admit that it was clever of Roger Blakesley.

  “I suppose Roger ought to go,” Tony Burton said. “It’s his responsibility, but he doesn’t know Clyde. How about riding back with me on the five-thirty?”

  “I can’t,” Charles said. “The Whitakers want to see me at five. They’re very short of money.”

  Tony Burton frowned. He was thinking, obviously, of dignity and convention.

  “Why can’t they come down here like other people?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Whitaker hasn’t been well,” Charles said, “and so I thought—” He did not have to tell what he thought because Tony knew. They both knew the size of the Whitaker account.

  “All right,” Tony Burton said. “Let’s see, you’ll be back by Friday, won’t you? Remember you’re coming to dinner on Friday.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Charles said.

  When their glances met, there was no doubt that Tony Burton knew what he meant. He smiled in a paternal way, far removed from any trouble of Charles’s but still with sympathy.

  “Well, relax and have a good time, Charley,” he said, and he leaned forward and slapped Charles’s knee.

  “That’s the second time,” Charles said, “that you’ve told me to relax.”

  “Well, do it,” Tony Burton said. He seemed to be speaking from a great distance, from Olympian heights of security which Charles would never reach; or he might have been speaking from the deck of the Wanderlust, with a wet sheet, a flowing tide, and sailors in white drilling pulling on the braces. He sounded like a doctor in his office, giving sound advice to a nervous patient.

  “Go ahead and relax, Charley. I’ll see you Friday,” and then his voice had a note of kindly promise in it. “Just you and Nancy are coming, and you and I’ll have a good long talk about the whole situation here on Friday.”

  6

  We’re Both Doing What We Do Very Well

  The apartment building on Park Avenue where the Whitakers lived was one of those co-operative structures built in 1926 on an unstable foundation of high mortgages. Charles could recall as he walked under the green awning off the street through the travertine marble doorway into the travertine marble hall that the Whitakers’ equity on the fifteenth floor of the house had cost them originally two hundred thousand dollars. He could also recall a later period when equities in nearly all co-operative apartments had dropped from nothing to a minus quantity, and when tenants had frantically endeavored to avoid their upkeep and mortgage charges by giving away their equities and even paying prospective tenants handsome bonuses for taking them off their hands. That was the period when people used to say the purchase of a co-operative apartment was like buying the hole in a doughnut.

  This particular building, Charles remembered very well, had gone through the financial wringer in the year of ’thirty-three. There had been a time when its lawyers, agents, and even its uniformed attendants had worn the worried and courteous expressions that he had observed on the faces of all persons dealing with white elephants, but it was different now. It seemed to Charles that the hall attendant who ushered you to the elevator and who looked, even in his light blue uniform, something like Tony Burton wore an expression of unctuous triumph, and he was justified. God was in His heaven again. The building was solvent again. If you were in one of those brackets, with which Charles was academically familiar, it cost very little to live in a co-operative apartment now, when so much of the annual expense could be written off on the income tax as interest charges. On the whole the Whitakers had done very well because they had held on with faith in the ultimate victory of righteousness.

  The hall attendant was looking now at Charles questioningly, particularly at his worn pigskin brief case. People, of course, who entered from the street with brief cases fell into a dubious professional category and were not always people
whom tenants would welcome. No matter how beguiling their superficial appearance might be, a brief case always meant that such individuals were not calling on tenants for purely social purposes. They might be insurance agents or even a Fuller Brush man, or a server with a summons. Charles could understand and even sympathize with the doubt. He himself was like the attendant. He could feel the vague bond of fellowship that came of being an employee.

  “Is Mrs. Whitaker expecting you?” the attendant asked. He might conceivably have asked the same question, Charles was thinking, but he certainly would have called him “sir” if it had not been for the brief case.

  “Yes, I have an appointment with Mrs. Whitaker,” Charles answered. “Call, if you like—Mr. Gray.” If he had been carrying a small black bag, he might have been taken for a doctor and there would have been no question.

  “Oh, no,” the attendant said,—“if Mrs. Whitaker’s expecting you. The elevator to the right.”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “I know,” and then it annoyed him that he had said he knew, because there was no reason for it except some subconscious one to make it clear that he had been to the Whitakers’ before.

  The street door opened. An elderly lady in a mink coat had entered. Her gray hair beneath her ineffective little hat had a fashionable bluish tinge. In front of her, pulling at a leash, was a toy poodle, cut to resemble an Airedale. Its fur was also bluish gray.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Gorham,” the attendant said. “It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, after all, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, spring is almost here,” Mrs. Gorham answered.

  “Hello, Bobo,” the attendant said, and he leaned forward eagerly to address the poodle. “How’s it outside, Bobo?”

  It was not clear whether or not Bobo had enjoyed it outside. He was pulling Mrs. Gorham also to the elevator at the right.

  When Charles followed them into the small mahogany lift, neither Mrs. Gorham nor Bobo looked at him until he asked the elevator man for Mrs. Whitaker’s apartment, please. Then when Mrs. Gorham saw his brief case she looked away and they rode in stony silence, both denizens of different worlds, both thrown together in that moving car against their wills.

  Charles was very conscious of the fact that he belonged in a different world whenever he entered the Whitakers’ apartment. When he handed the butler his hat and coat, he knew that he understood the whole place very well, academically but not practically. It was an environment in which he could move gracefully, without tipping things over, but one in which he would never live.

  The hall was filled with all sorts of objects which he knew had come from the house on Fifth Avenue belonging to Mrs. Whitaker’s father, that canny Yankee from Maine. The Isphahan runner in the hall, and the heavily gold-framed pictures on the walls of Corot-like landscapes and of Oriental ladies with guitars on Moorish roof-tops, all told their tale of an art collection acquired in the eighties and nineties when such things were an essential part of a businessman’s background. Above the small refectory table that held a silver tray for visiting cards there was even a portrait of Cyrus J. Smedley, Mrs. Whitaker’s father, still dominating those possessions. It was a three-quarters portrait of an elderly man in a high-lapelled dark business coat, a high waistcoat, and a large cravat. He had a lantern-jawed, wary look, and a sort of assurance that belonged to another generation. He was dyspeptic and dangerous looking, and Charles was always acutely aware of his presence. If the old man had been alive, he often thought, he would never have needed the services of the trust department of the Stuyvesant. His general taste in furniture might have been terrible, but it must have been impeccable in blue-chip securities. There must have been a time, Charles was also thinking, when Mr. Whitaker had been obliged to face Cyrus J. Smedley and to tell of his intentions, in a Victorian sort of way, and it made Charles feel sorry for Mr. Whitaker.

  It was obviously going to be another family conference because the room at the end of the hall was set for it, a large room that looked small because of the piano and the Bouguereaus and Alma-Tademas on the wall, the Italian chairs, the overstuffed sofas, and the maze of silver-framed photographs on the tables. The family had all been waiting for him, although he was certain that he was there right on the dot of five. Mrs. Whitaker, in a dark tailored suit, was seated on a sofa in front of the fireplace, amazingly upright in spite of the sofa’s yielding upholstery. She was obviously prepared for the interview because she was holding a tablet on her knee with questions written on it. She always wrote down questions. Mr. Whitaker was standing near the fireplace in a suit that was too tweedy for him, looking round and red and uncomfortable. Their son Albert, who had risen when Charles came in, looked more like his mother than his father. You could see that he had kept his figure by conscientious outdoor exercise, and he had kept his hair, too, though it was gray at the temples.

  Albert’s wife as usual looked very bored. Though she and Charles had never exchanged more than a word of greeting, it always surprised him how clearly she could tell him what she was thinking without saying a word, not that she cared whether he knew or not. She was telling him simply by perching on the edge of one of the Italian chairs that she was bored by having to be there, that she was too young, too pretty, too blond, to be there, that she hated the stuffy furniture and her family-in-law, and that she was bored by Albert, too. She was telling him that she wanted to get away somewhere and have a Martini, that she wanted to play a rubber of bridge or something, that only necessity had brought her to this place and that he mustn’t think that she liked it, or that she liked him either. She knew just what he was, a tiresome man from the bank, called for one of those damned family conferences that Mother Whitaker was always having. She knew just where he belonged and there was no need for any introductions.

  “I hope I’m not late,” Charles said.

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “I know we can count on your never being late. Sit down here beside me, Mr. Gray, so we can read things together.”

  Charles sank down beside her on the sofa. He wished that he could sit upon it as straight as Mrs. Whitaker.

  “Albert,” Mrs. Whitaker said, “get Mr. Gray a little table.”

  “Oh, I don’t need a table,” Charles said. “There won’t be anything to sign.”

  “You’ll need it to put things on,” Mrs. Whitaker said, “the things out of your brief case. It’s always so reassuring to see you with a brief case. I can’t imagine how you’d look without it.”

  “That’s true,” Charles said. “I don’t believe you’ve ever seen me here without it.”

  “You’d look, well, almost naked without it,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “I remember what Father always used to say.”

  “What did he use to say?” Albert asked.

  “You were too young to remember Granddaddy well, dear,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “I wish you could have seen him, Mr. Gray. Hewett, doesn’t Mr. Gray remind you of Papa?”

  “Well, not altogether, Ellie,” Mr. Whitaker said.

  “I don’t mean altogether, Hewett. I mean partly. He has the same expression sometimes, when we’re getting down to brass tacks, as Papa used to say. Papa always used to say when you do business with someone, be sure he does business.”

  “I understand what he meant,” Charles said. “Shall we get down to brass tacks?” and he reached for the catch of his brief case where it lay across his knees.

  “Hewett.”

  “Yes, Ellie,” Mr. Whitaker said.

  “Perhaps Mr. Gray would like a Scotch and soda.”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Charles said.

  “Well, I’d like one,” Albert said. “Come on, Dad. How about it, Dorothy?”

  “Well,” Dorothy said, and her voice was coldly sweet, “I might have one if Mother Whitaker doesn’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t mind, darling,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “Why on earth should I mind? Mr. Gray and I will have some tea when everything is over. Won’t we, Mr. Gray?”

  “Why, yes,”
Charles said. “That would be very nice.” He saw Dorothy glance at him. She was telling him as plainly as though she had spoken for God’s sake to get on with it, and he hoped that he was telling her when he glanced back at her that, for God’s sake, he wanted to get on with it, that he didn’t like sitting there any more than she did, that he was only present as she was because he had to be.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Whitaker, “let’s begin at the beginning. Let’s begin by having you scold us, Mr. Gray, because we all need a good scolding.”

  “About what, Mrs. Whitaker?” Charles asked.

  “About the ranch,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “I know how it must look with the world the way it is, but it’s really for Albert’s sinus. Albert and Dorothy are just back from Arizona. You can tell it by looking at them, can’t you?”

  Charles looked up at Dorothy and their glances met again.

  “Albert,” Dorothy said sweetly, “why don’t you show him the photographs? That’s what you brought them for, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh yes,” Albert said. “If you have to be out there, you might as well have some sort of place and not stay at a hotel. We saw this one fifty miles out of Tucson. These are just snapshots but they’ll give you an idea, and Dorothy’s crazy about it. She needs some sort of place.”

  Curiously enough he could feel their uncertainty as Albert handed him the photographs and he knew that they were anxious for his approval. The photographs were mountain and desert views with low buildings of the Spanish hacienda type in the foreground, corrals, patios, galleries, a swimming pool. They represented an exotic life pattern which the Whitakers must have known was entirely out of his experience, but still they wanted him to approve.

  “If you really want it,” Charles said gently, “I don’t know why you shouldn’t have it. Is a hundred thousand the asking price? If you really want it, you’d better give me the agent’s name.”

  “He does really want it,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “If you could call up the agent it would be sweet of you, Mr. Gray. It would sound better than having Albert do it.”