“Of course,” Charles said, “you’ll have to use a little capital, but I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
He was opening the brief case, taking out the folders and spreading them on the table. There was no earthly reason why they shouldn’t, any more than there was any earthly reason why he should not have bought a three-dollar book if he had really wanted it, or an overcoat if he really needed it, but it hardly mattered as much to them as a new overcoat would have mattered to him. It was not a conventional way of looking at the problem and he wondered what they would have thought if he had presented it to them in this light.
“That’s all that bothers me,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “Papa always said never to touch capital. It always was his rule.”
That was what clients like the Whitakers were always saying. No matter what capital might grow to, you must never touch your capital.
“Things are a little different now,” Charles said, “with the tax rate the way it is in the higher brackets.”
He saw that Dorothy was watching him. She was bored and telling him wordlessly to get on with it, but at the same time it looked as though she understood what he would have to go through. It would be necessary to discuss the tax structure again.
“But don’t you think,” Albert Whitaker was asking, “that there’s going to be a twenty per cent reduction across the board?”
“They’re talking about it, but I wouldn’t count on it,” Charles said.
“If they’re going to reduce taxes,” Albert said, “the only sensible, democratic way would be to reduce them across the board.”
“I know,” Charles said, “but I’m afraid that isn’t the way a politician’s mind works. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t sell some of these short-term governments. They scarcely yield any income at all after taxes.”
He was speaking quickly, easily, just as though their problems were his own, dealing in millions just as though they belonged to him. He explained painstakingly item after item on the list.
“You make everything seem so reasonable, Mr. Gray,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “I really don’t know what we’d do without you.”
The Whitakers were as helpless as the soft Manchu descendants of the hardy Mongols who once sat in their moldering Peking palaces, surrounded by Chinese attendants and estate stewards, before they were overtaken by the Boxer rebellion. Somewhere along the way the Whitakers had lost their ability to cope with any present exigency. Their life had taken from them all the ordinary drives of ambition, hope and fear.
“You could always find someone else, Mrs. Whitaker,” Charles said, “and he might be better.”
“No,” said Mr. Whitaker. “You’re the only one who’s ever seemed to make Mrs. Whitaker understand.”
“I don’t know why you say that,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “I’ve always been taught to supervise my own affairs, and Mr. Gray knows it.”
“Yes,” Charles said. “I’m developing a great respect for your general judgment, Mrs. Whitaker.”
“I do hope they appreciate you at the bank as much as we do,” Mrs. Whitaker said.
“I hope they do, too,” Charles answered, and he picked up some of the papers on the little table in front of him as a hint that he had been there for nearly an hour. He wanted very much to catch the six-thirty.
“Well,” Albert said, “if everything’s settled perhaps Dorothy and I had better be pushing off.”
Dorothy rose from the edge of her chair, gracefully, without pushing herself from it.
“It stays light so long,” she said, “that I keep forgetting what time it is,” but Mrs. Whitaker had picked up the pad from her knee.
“I thought you told me that you didn’t have any engagement until dinner, dear,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “Now that Mr. Gray’s here, I did have a few other questions, but if you want to run along—”
“Oh, no,” Dorothy said. “We’re really in no hurry.”
She smiled at Charles—a ghost of a smile—and sat down again and folded her hands carefully in her lap. She did it brightly and cheerfully, without a hint of resignation, but Charles was sure he knew what she was thinking. Oh, God, she was thinking, here it goes again, the same damned questions.
Mrs. Whitaker’s mind was always filled with unshaped, broad-gauge thoughts that mingled confusingly with little ones. There was still that matter of trying to settle a little more on Albert and of balancing the gift against inheritance taxes. She knew, as Charles had so often said, that these were really legal problems and she had nothing at all against Mr. Stone who handled them, but she did value Mr. Gray’s opinion and her father had always said that two minds were better than one.
It seemed to her that the government, which she had always been taught was created to protect people and the things they owned, was making a deliberate effort to discourage people who had a little something. For some reason, no one seemed to appreciate any longer what people in her position were doing. What would charities do without people in her position, what would the government do without the taxes, what would business do without the money of people in her position? She knew that she had said all these things before, but she did wish that Charles would take a copy of Mr. Stone’s last letter to read, and, when he had time, consult with Mr. Stone.
Then there was the question of the place on Long Island. With wages rising the way they were, she wondered if Charles would mind sometime looking over the books that Mr. Stone was keeping, because she knew, although it was not in his sphere, that he would have some suggestion for cutting down. Then she wanted to know what Charles really thought of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, and besides there were several other questions, but now tea was coming in and perhaps they had better put most of it over until another day, but while they were having tea she would like to look over the security list with Albert. It was high time that someone gave it attention beside herself because she was tired of having everyone expect her to do everything alone.
“Nothing’s been changed since last time,” Charles said.
“I know,” she said, “but I would like to look at it with Albert for a minute if you wouldn’t mind waiting, Mr. Gray. Why don’t you take your tea and talk with Dorothy?”
Charles rose and picked up his teacup. Dorothy had moved to a window with her highball glass in her hand. She stood there straight and beautiful, smelling faintly of Chanel Five, looking out on Park Avenue, and she smiled cordially at Charles.
“I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” Charles said.
“Why don’t you take a drink?” she said. “I would.”
“Oh, no,” Charles answered. “I don’t believe you would.”
“Well, maybe I wouldn’t,” she said, and she smiled again and glanced toward the sofa where Mr. Whitaker and Albert stood looking over Mrs. Whitaker’s shoulder.
“I didn’t know,” he heard Mrs. Whitaker saying, “that we had so many shares in Homestake Mine.”
Dorothy had turned toward him again. Her beautifully molded, made-up face and the wind-blown look to her hair had an impermeable sort of completeness. It made him nervous that there was so little wrong about her. There was nothing wrong about her delicate hands and her pointed red fingernails, nothing wrong about her silk print dress or her diamond clip or her straight, lithe figure or her nylon stockings, but still there was something baffling.
“What do you do,” she asked, “when you aren’t doing this?”
“I go home,” Charles said. “It looks as though I’m going to be late tonight.”
“You make me curious,” she said. “You really do.”
“Why?” Charles asked.
“You make me curious because I can’t picture you as doing anything but what I see you doing.”
“Well,” Charles answered, “now you mention it, I’ve been thinking about the same thing about you.”
Her lips curved in that same faint smile.
“That’s because we’re both doing what we do very well,” she said, “but it
takes a lot of trouble, doesn’t it?”
“Well,” Charles answered, “sometimes—yes.”
“Do you ever wonder whether it’s worth it?” she asked.
“Yes,” Charles said, “occasionally. I suppose everyone does.”
“That’s the question,” she said. “Is it worth it? I’m glad you’re curious about me. I didn’t know you were.”
“I am,” Charles said, “academically.”
“You know,” she said, “we ought to have a long talk sometime.”
Charles squared his shoulders. He could not imagine how he had become involved in such a conversation and nothing would have been more unwise than having a long talk with Dorothy Whitaker sometime.
“I’m very glad you suggested it,” Charles said. “It’s an interesting idea.”
“It would be a lot of fun.” Her smile grew broader. “If we could sit in a bar some afternoon and get quietly tight and talk—”
Charles found that he was laughing. The beauty of it was that it was so impossible that there was nothing at all to worry about.
“You see,” she said, “I’d find out what you used to be and how you got the way you are.”
“It wouldn’t be worth it,” Charles said. “I’ve always been about the same.”
“Oh, no,” she said, “nobody ever is. We can’t help working on ourselves.”
He had a momentary picture of her working on herself, sitting before her mirror with her lipstick and her powder base, and brushing back her hair.
“Not on ourselves,” he said. “Everyone works on us. Everyone wears us down.”
“If you’re tough enough,” she said, “you don’t have to be worn down.”
Charles found himself laughing again.
“All right,” he said, “what did you use to be?”
She shook her head slowly and her smile had gone.
“Nicer,” she said, “quite a good deal nicer.”
“Oh, Mr. Gray,” Mrs. Whitaker was calling, “could you come over here for a minute?”
“Good-by,” she said. “Good luck.”
“I see you have a question mark in pencil after Smith Chemical,” Mrs. Whitaker was saying.
7
Shadows of the Evening
The six-thirty from the upper level of the Grand Central was a good train, express to Port Chester and never crowded. Though it would get him home late for dinner, he welcomed the opportunity of riding on it because he could be reasonably sure of not having to talk to anyone and it gave him an opportunity to go over all the events of the day, the people he had seen, and what he had done well or badly. As the train moved out of the station into the dark beneath Park Avenue, Charles laid his brief case on the vacant seat beside him and took out the book, Yankee Persepolis, that Malcolm Bryant had given him. He laid it on top of his brief case and then looked at the headlines on the front page of the New York World-Telegram.
The headlines had the same disturbing quality as his personal thoughts for it seemed that nothing was in order that day with himself or with anything else. They were still arguing in Moscow over German reparations, which everyone must have known could never be collected. There were terrorist bombings in Palestine and the news was bad in Turkey and there were student riots in Cairo. It often seemed to him that Cairo students never had time to study. All that foreign world kept slopping over its borders like water spilling untidily out of a shaking dish.
He was thinking, for no good reason, of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo as he had first seen it from the jeep that had brought him in from the army airfield in the desert. He remembered the beige façade and the robes and the red caps of the dragomans and the khaki shorts of the British and colonial officers crowding the terrace and their caps and tam-o’-shanters that somehow made them look like grown men pretending to be Boy Scouts at a children’s party. It all made no particular sense, since neither he nor anyone at headquarters had ever found why he had been sent to Cairo. Then he thought of the field at Prestwick and of the uncompromising Scottish streets of Glasgow. Then he was thinking of the main street in Clyde, of the brick sidewalk and a display of elastic bandages and digestive powders in the windows of Walters’s drugstore, and the tools and galvanized pails and hickory bushel baskets in front of Harrison’s hardware store which was only a few doors further down the street, just before you came to Bates’s grocery. There was no reason to think of Clyde and Shepheard’s and of some dingy pub in Glasgow all at the same time, except that everything was closer together than it used to be.
He could hear the creaking, complaining sounds of the train and he was aware of the dim tunnel lights moving past the windows in an even sequence of light and dark that was punctuated now and then by a blue electric flash when some locomotive lost contact with the rail. Although his thoughts had no appreciable pattern, he knew that they were all symptoms of his own uncertainty.
The people he had seen that day and the things that he and they had said had no disturbing connotation in themselves. Taken separately, they were all elements that he might encounter in any working day. The trust conference, the interlude of lunch, the activities of Roger Blakesley, his words with Mr. Selig, his talk with Tony Burton and his conference with the Whitakers, were manifestations that he had encountered often in slightly different forms, yet taken all together they achieved a different stature. Even the question of competition, of his having been outmaneuvered, though he was keenly conscious of it, was not what disturbed him. There was something more in the sum of all of it that lay within himself.
For some reason Clyde kept coming into it, and for some reason he kept seeing events in terms of Clyde; and all the things he had done that day were like things he had done in Clyde, on a different projection and a wholly different scale. Actually he was not very different from what he had at one time been. But nicer. He remembered the word “nicer.” The train was out of the tunnel, moving by the lighted tenements of uptown New York whose unshaded windows gave abrupt glimpses into other people’s lives.
When he had stood by that other New York window watching Dorothy Whitaker’s tapering fingers with their brightly polished red nails as she held her half-empty glass, he might again have been calling on Jessica Lovell at the Lovell house in Clyde. Granted that Jessica was a wholly different person, there was that same indirect involvement. It was true that if you weren’t tough enough, contact with other people wore you down.
“Tickets,” the conductor was saying. He had not noticed the conductor walking through the car. You had to have some sort of ticket for everything and it was generally one-way. Then he remembered that he had used up the last of his commutation ticket that morning.
“I’ll have to pay you,” Charles said. He could not remember when he had last forgotten a ticket. “How much is it to Clyde? … I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”
Charles picked up the book from the top of the brief case and began to turn the pages.
“For the purposes of distinction,” he was reading again, “it will be well arbitrarily to define the very definite and crystallized social strata of Yankee Persepolis as upper, middle, and lower. These will be subdivided into upper-upper, middle-upper, and lower-upper …”
Since he was late, he had to take a taxi. The taxi starter, who sorted the clientele, putting those who were going in the same general direction into the same cab, was standing at the far end of the platform, a lay figure silhouetted against the headlights of the cars.
“Sycamore Park,” Charles said, and the starter called out his words above the rumbling of the train that was leaving.
“Sycamore Park. Anyone else going to Sycamore Park?”
The night air was fresher and it smelled of spring, and there was a vacancy of sound after the train had left. The train seemed to have carried away everything that Charles had been thinking. Everything connected with the city, Smith Chemical, Telephone, American Tobacco B, and short-term governments, was gone with the train. He was going home again, and
no one else was going to Sycamore Park. He was returning to the basic reason for everything for which he had been working.
As he sat in the back seat of the taxicab he still thought about Clyde. They used to play hide-and-seek in the old back garden of the Meader yard in the spring, just when it was getting dusk—he and Melville Meader and Earl Wilkins and all the rest of the crowd along Spruce Street. There was a better chance of hiding, just when it was dusk. You could hide downstairs in the bam or back of the carriage shed or anywhere in the garden. There was always that indecision, that rushing about, until you heard “five hundred, coming, ready or not.” Then you tried to sneak back without being seen. The best way was to dodge around the carriage house and then to the corner of the bam where you could watch the back porch, which was home, until everything was clear. There was always an uncertainty, a wondering whether you could make it, and then that dash for home. If you got there safely, all the other incidents were behind you. There was a triumphant, out-of-breath feeling, a momentary impression that nothing else mattered, when you called out “Home Free!”
Sycamore Park had been developed in 1938 on the forty-acre grounds of an old estate and the subdivision had been excellently managed by the local real estate firm of Merton and Pease. As Mr. Merton had said, it was a natural, and he had never understood why someone had not dreamed it up long ago—not too far from the shopping center and the trains, and yet in the neighborhood of other larger places. Every place had its own acre, and no house was to be constructed for a cost of less than thirty thousand dollars. It would have been wiser, perhaps, never to have gone there but to have bought a smaller place.
It would have been wiser, easier, and much safer. He had not at that time been moved up in the trust department and in 1939 all he had was twenty thousand dollars in savings, part of which was in paid-up life insurance. He could never analyze all the urges that made him lay everything on the line in order to live on a scale he could not immediately afford, discounting the possibilities of illness or accident and relying on possibilities of promotion. He only remembered having had an irrational idea that time was of the essence, that he would always stay on a certain business level if he did not take some sort of action, and Nancy, too, had shared that feeling.
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