“Where’ve you been?” Charles asked.
“Out, around,” Sam said. “Walking around, thinking.”
Neither of them spoke for a while and Charles knew that Sam did not want to be alone.
“If he hadn’t shot his mush off,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t have shot off mine.”
Again there was an interlude of wretched silence and Charles could hear the elm leaves rustle.
“I don’t like him,” Sam said. “By God, I don’t like him.”
Sam’s voice sounded unreal and unpleasant in the moonlight.
“What’s he ever done for us?” Sam said. “Not a goddam thing.”
It was very unpleasant in the moonlight and it was very unsettling to Charles because he had a deep respect for Sam’s judgment.
“It’s always the same damn thing,” Sam said. “First he shoots off his mush and then he ends by walking around his room like a squirrel, and it’s never his fault when he’s licked.” Again the room was filled with an uneasy, awful silence. “Whenever he gets his hands on money, he goes up to Boston and loses it.”
Charles did not know that Sam was discussing the eccentricities of a profit system or that it was his own first contact with a segment of living that he was later to know so well.
“How does he lose it?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t understand it,” Sam said. “Never mind how he does. You wouldn’t understand.”
There were a great many things about life that Charles did not understand but he could start with the assumption that his father was a highly intelligent man and that he must have known perfectly what the odds were. There was something which prevented men like him from stopping, something beyond the realms of ordinary reason.
“Listen, kid,” Sam said, “if you ever get to doing what he does, if you don’t take a hitch in your pants and behave like other people, I’ll beat the pants right off you.”
Sam still sat there and Charles could see his shadow as he leaned on his elbows with his chin in his hands.
“Charley.”
“Yes,” Charles said.
“If you’re over at the Masons’ tomorrow and you should happen to see May, I wish you’d give her this.” He was holding out a folded piece of paper.
“Why don’t you give it to her yourself?” Charles asked.
“You give it to her,” Sam said. “That’s a good kid, Charley.” Then Sam was gone and Charles lay staring at the moonlight, still wondering why his father acted as he did in Boston.
Once Charles did ask him why—long afterwards, the year when Charles had left Wright-Sherwin in Clyde to work in the Boston investment house of E. P. Rush & Company.
“Now don’t preach to me, Charley,” his father had said. “I’m not going to stand any of your damn sanctimonious lectures.”
Charles said he was not preaching, he was only asking why he never stopped when he had a profit.
“There you go preaching,” John Gray said again. “All right, I’ll tell you why—because I want everything or nothing.”
If you kept on wanting everything or nothing long enough, particularly if you became too anxious for it, perhaps you always ended with nothing.
4
Don’t Let Anyone Tell You, My Young Friends, That There Is Any Such Thing as Luck …
Charles always thought of the Masons when things went wrong at home. In periods of bitterness and frustration he found himself wishing that Mr. Virgil Mason were his father and that the Grays could be happy like the Masons, living in a well-painted house with everything in order, even if Mr. Virgil Mason was not as bright as his father and never read much or talked about books. Mr. Mason’s father had owned the drugstore on Lyford Street and had once compounded a toothache remedy which had sold well locally. Mr. Mason himself was in the insurance business in Boston and when he came home in the evening he liked to work in his small vegetable garden when there was light enough, a form of relaxation that John Gray hated. In the winter he liked to make things down cellar or do odd jobs around the house which were never done in the Gray house next door. Mr. Mason could make beautiful toy boats or little windmills and he liked having children around. Mrs. Mason, Charles realized, long before he was interested in such things, must once have been as pretty as May, but she was too stout now and did not worry any longer about her looks.
“Anyway,” he heard her say once, “I caught Virgil.”
His own mother was much prettier but he was sure she was not as happy as Mrs. Mason. At any rate, he always had a good time at the Masons’. May was pretty but she was not stuck-up about it and she did not correct him the way Dorothea did, and Jack was his best friend.
Charles could never discover why Jack was discontented, too. He used to think that Mr. Mason was the best sort of father one could imagine, but Jackie said once, in one of those long and confidential talks they used to have, that he wished his father were more like Charles’s father.
“I don’t see what’s the matter with him,” Charles had said; but Jack had said there was plenty the matter with him. He was always in his shirt sleeves doing work that other people should do for him. On Sunday he would be hammering and sawing and tinkering outdoors where people could see him when they went to church. His father ought to go to church more often and not work on Sunday, even if it was only the Unitarian Church.
“But my father never goes,” Charles had told him; but Jack had said that all the rest of Charles’s family did, even if it was only the Unitarian Church and not the Episcopalian.
“Besides,” Jackie had said, “my father never wants to do anything but sit around the house. He doesn’t know the right people, and almost everybody likes your father.”
Charles agreed with Jackie Mason that they were both going to be very different from their fathers. They were going to make more money when they grew up, and they weren’t going to live on Spruce Street. Yet Charles could never understand why Jack worried because his grandfather had been a druggist and why he was always complaining about the Mason house and the furniture. He was always reading magazine articles about successful men. It didn’t matter where you started—even if your grandfather had been a druggist—it was a question of working hard, Jack said, and of meeting the right people. Jack had won the composition prize in the seventh grade by writing a composition on the boyhood of Andrew Carnegie, and his mind was always on success. For example, he was deeply interested in the career of Mr. Sullivan, who had bought the house across the street, because Mr. Sullivan had started out as a laboring man and now he was in the contracting business, making a lot of money.
“The only thing wrong,” Jack said, “is that he doesn’t know the right people.”
It was Saturday afternoon when Charles went over to the Mason house with Sam’s note in his pocket, and he opened the front door without knocking because he was Jack’s best friend, Mrs. Mason had said, and he could go out and come in any time he wanted. When he was in the hall, he heard Mr. and Mrs. Mason talking in the front parlor.
“It’s the way he is,” Mr. Mason was saying, “and it’s none of my business, Margaret. There’s no use arguing when it’s the way he is.”
“It’s so hard on poor Esther,” he heard Mrs. Mason say just before he reached the parlor doorway.
Mrs. Mason was darning a pair of Jack’s stockings and Mr. Mason was in his shirt sleeves, sitting in front of a table covered with newspapers, mending a Canton china plate. His glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose and his heavy reddish face shone with perspiration and he held the broken pieces of china very carefully. It was remarkable that his heavy hands could do such delicate things.
“Oh,” Mrs. Mason said, and she looked startled. “Why, hello, Charley.”
“Hello,” Charles said. “Is May anywhere around?”
“My, my,” Mr. Mason said, “aren’t you pretty young to be looking around for May?” and he smiled and pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose.
“Why, May’s in the back
room practicing, dear,” Mrs. Mason said, and then Charles could hear the notes of the Masons’ old upright piano, “and Jack’s out in the shed splitting kindling, and there’s some lemonade in the kitchen.”
That was the way it always was at the Masons’, lemonade, and everyone was happy. As he moved toward the back room, he heard May playing a waltz from The Pink Lady, not well, but he could recognize it, and he wished that Dorothea would ever play anything on the piano that he could understand. May’s yellow hair was gathered up in a knot and she was wearing what Charles knew was her third-best dress, but still she looked very pretty. It might have been a perishable, Dresden china prettiness, but Charles was not aware of such things then. He never forgot May, sitting straight on the piano stool, her hands pounding the keys conscientiously. He remembered the curve of her white neck and though her head was turned away from him, he already had an impression of her blue eyes and her red, half-parted lips.
“Why, Charley,” she said, “I didn’t know you were there. You sneaked in like an Indian.”
“I was making a lot of noise,” Charles said, “but you were making more.”
“It isn’t nice to call it noise,” May said. “I wish I played as well as Dorothea.”
“You play better,” Charles said. “I like it a whole lot better.”
“Oh, Charley, you know I don’t,” May said, and she laughed. “I don’t do anything very well. Where’s Sam?”
“I don’t know,” Charles said, “but he wanted me to give you this,” and he pulled the note out of his pocket.
“Oh,” May said, and she snatched it out of his hand and tore open the envelope, and then she put her hand on his arm. “Don’t go away, Charley. Please stay here while I read it.”
As she read it, with her head turned away from him, he felt the warm grasp of her fingers on his arm and he wished she were his sister. Standing there beside her, so close that her shoulder touched his, he could have read the note if he had wanted, but he never knew what Sam had written. He only knew that May was crying. She had dropped the note. She had drawn him toward her as she still sat there on the piano stool. Her head was pressed against him and she was crying. He was still very shy with girls, particularly with girls of May’s age, and besides he was madly in love with Miss Jenks, who had been his teacher in the seventh grade.
“May,” he said, “don’t cry.”
“Oh, Charley,” May said, “I’m just crying because I’m so happy. Tell Sam,” she held him closer, “tell Sam it’s all right.”
He was relieved when May found her handkerchief and wiped her eyes.
“I guess I’d better go and see Jackie,” he said.
“All right,” May said, “but bend your head down,” and before he knew what she was going to do, her arms were around his neck and she had kissed him.
“Charley,” she said, “you didn’t mind it, did you?” He had no idea what Sam had written or why any note of Sam’s should have made May Mason cry.
Out in the woodshed, Jackie was splitting kindlings in a languid way. When he saw Charles he dropped his ax and sat down on the chopping block.
“I don’t know why an American boy has to split kindlings,” Jack said.
“Oh, go on and split them,” Charles told him. “Didn’t Henry Ford split them?”
“I’ll bet Henry Ford had a machine to do it,” Jack said. “There ought to be a machine.”
“Go on,” Charles said. “Didn’t Andrew Carnegie split them?”
“No,” Jack said, “he had peat or something. He lived in Scotland.”
“Well, hurry up and finish,” Charles said, “and let’s go over to Meaders’.”
Jack pushed himself up slowly from the chopping block and pushed his hair from his forehead. He needed a haircut. He had yellow hair with a wave in it like May’s.
“Are you going to the Lovells’ party?” he asked.
Charles did not understand the question, until Jack explained. It seemed that Jessicia Lovell was having a birthday party and Jack had been invited that morning and the Meaders were going.
“I thought everyone was asked,” Jack said.
“Well, I’m not,” Charles answered.
“Well, that’s funny,” Jack said. “I don’t see why they asked me and not you.”
Clearly Jackie was pleased that he had been asked and Charles not, but Charles was not worried in the least, in those days, about the Lovells or about Andrew Carnegie or about meeting the right people. He was still thinking of May Mason and Sam and he felt proud and pleased. He knew she was Sam’s girl, and he always thought of her afterwards as Sam’s girl. She was still Sam’s girl when she finally married Jeffrey Meader. It was a secret which they always held in common. He knew and she knew that she would have married Sam if Sam had lived.
Memory had an erratic way of leaving some things clear and others blank. Those were the figures, the reference points, of his childhood. Somehow other people and things that he thought he would always remember were laid away in the partially open, dusty drawer of forgetfulness, but not those figures. There was a time when he had been out in a rowboat with the Meaders and the boat had been swamped in a squall and they had nearly been drowned in the river. He had once fought with a boy in grammar school whose name was Slavin and it must have been of great immediate importance and a full dress affair for it took place on Cedar Hill beyond the water tank, where one customarily went for serious fighting. No events like these, however, carried into the present as did the changing figures of those few people nearest him, his father, his mother, his Aunt Jane, Dorothea, and the Masons, and of them all Sam was by far the clearest, because he was a finished memory, distinct and beyond future alteration.
He always associated Sam with the end of childhood. When the music of World War I played, Sam was always there. It was a long way to Tipperary, and while you had a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style, I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier to shoot some other mother’s boy. Sam always came back with those tunes, still not in uniform, but Sam had enlisted in the National Guard and was waiting to be called.
Sam was sitting in the City Hall auditorium where Charles’s class at the Webster Grammar School was undergoing its graduation exercises. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, smile, boys, that’s the style. This must have been at the end of Sam’s first year at Dartmouth. At any rate, he could still sometimes see Sam, in a suit he must have bought at Hanover—John Gray or someone must have done something about his clothes—winking at him from the audience, twisting the whole left side of his face, as Charles sat on the platform in the second row, behind the girls.
Martin J. Gifford, who was going to run that fall for the state legislature, was delivering the speech customarily made to a Clyde graduating class. It was a speech containing all the doctrines on which Charles Gray and his comtemporaries had been brought up and which so many of them tried in vain to reconcile with what they experienced later.
Martin J. Gifford was speaking in tender tones, in keeping with the tender age of his audience, but his discourse was keyed, too, to the mores of their parents, relatives and friends.
“Luck,” Mr. Gifford was saying, in a quavering voice, “is a word that makes me laugh. Don’t let anyone tell you, my young friends, that there is any such thing as luck. Do you think that you are here today, on the threshold of higher education, because of luck? No!”
At that moment Sam caught his eye and winked again. The faces of Dorothea, his mother, and Aunt Jane were blurred, but not Sam’s.
“No, no,” Mr. Gifford was saying. “You are here because of the sacrifices of your parents and the work of every citizen and the very fine achievements of the wonderful ladies and gentlemen on your school committee, your teachers, and of your great mayor, my dear old friend, Francis X. Flynn.”
He did not intone the name of Clyde’s great mayor but ended it in a shout, and then he waited for the fluttering of applause.
“And what made it po
ssible for them to give you these advantages and to make their sacrifices and their dreams for you come true?” Mr. Gifford was asking. “Was it accident? Was it luck? No! I’ll tell you what made it possible.” And he walked to the edge of the platform before he told them. “It was possible because you live in the greatest country in the world, in the United States of America, where all men, I thank God, are free and equal, living in the frame of freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, where each of us can look the other in the eye and say, ‘I am as free as you are; no matter how rich you may be, I have the same chance as you, because this great land of ours is the land of freedom.’”
Mr. Gifford mopped his forehead before he went on with the credo of Clyde.
“Oh, no—there is no such thing as luck, my dear young friends, not for American boys and girls. As you sit here, not so far from entering the contest for life’s prizes, you are all starting even because this is America, no matter what may be your religion or race or bank account. There is no grease for palms in America. The only grease is elbow grease. Look at our greatest men, born on small farms in small houses, boys without a cent to their names. Did they get there by luck? Oh, no. They got there by making the most of opportunities which are open, thank God, to every American boy and girl.”
This credo was all a part of the air one breathed in Clyde. Later, if it did not jibe with experience, you still believed. If you heard it often enough, it became an implicit, indestructible foundation for future conduct. Even when Sam had winked at him, Charles was sure that Sam believed.
Charles was still sure that Sam believed when they were out on the sidewalk afterwards and when Sam clapped him on the shoulder. It was wonderful to be there with his older brother, who was in a fraternity at Dartmouth and who had been the captain of the football team at Clyde. It was wonderful to be walking down the street with Sam, where everyone could see.
“It was the same old bushwa, kid,” Sam said. “He certainly could fork it out”—but Charles was sure that Sam believed.
The words of that speech were a tide that had carried him out of his childhood and there was no logical reason for associating them with his brother Sam but his memory always did. Johnny, get your gun on the run, we won’t forget the memory of brave Lafayette, the Yanks are coming over there, you’ve got to get up in the morning. A long, long trail was winding to the land of my dreams, and how could you keep them down on the farm after they’d seen Paree. Sam had seen Paree one night, but there was no problem of keeping Sam down on the farm. He was going but he was not gone yet. Before the Twenty-sixth Division sailed, he had walked the streets of Clyde on leave from Framingham, in a uniform that was too tight around the neck. He had taken Charles with him to Winton & Low’s jewelry store and he had bought a ring for May. It was getting close to autumn then, the year when Charles would enter high school. That was the year when he was first called Master Gray, and he was already madly in love with a girl named Doris Wormser, whose father was a foreman at Wright-Sherwin and who later married Willie Woodbury, when he got the farm machinery agency. Charles’s head was already even with Sam’s shoulder when they went in to Winton & Low’s.
Point of No Return Page 22