Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “Aunt Jane’s pretty well, thank you,” Charles said.

  “All we can be at our age is pretty well,” Miss Lovell said. “Jessica, I do wish you’d do something to your hair so it doesn’t blow.”

  The tea on a silver tray was being carried in by Mrs. Daniel Martin, an old friend of Mary Callahan’s, whom Charles had often seen in his own aunt’s kitchen, but Mrs. Martin looked unfamiliar to him now in a black dress and a white apron. In another day everyone on Johnson Street would know who had been to the Lovells’ that afternoon.

  “Hannah,” Miss Lovell said to Mrs. Martin, “will you please tell Mr. Lovell that tea is ready? How do you like your tea, Charles?”

  “Oh,” Charles said, “why any way at all, thank you, Miss Lovell.”

  Charles heard a footstep behind him and he turned to see Mr. Lovell, holding a folded newspaper.

  “Well, well,” Mr. Lovell said, “I didn’t know we were going to have company.”

  “You know Charley Gray, don’t you, Father?” Jessica asked him.

  “Of course I know Charley Gray, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said, “or of Charley Gray. Where on earth did you find him, Jessie? Not that I’m not very glad you found him.”

  Then Jessica was explaining again that she had found him at the firemen’s muster.

  “This is quite a coincidence,” Mr. Lovell said. “Only a day or two ago I heard Francis Stanley say that you are at Wright-Sherwin. Thank you, Georgianna,” and he took his cup of tea.

  Charles could not see why Jessica had said that her father was shy. He looked very much as he had there at the Historical Society. His voice had the same high but agreeably resonant ring. He had the same careless way of standing, even when he held his teacup. The lines in his face were deeper and his hair was grayer, but that was all. He did not look shy at all, as he stood in the wallpaper room, raising his teacup to his thin, straight lips and glancing at Charles over the edge of it.

  “That was not a happy remark of mine when I asked where Jessica found you,” he said. “I’m delighted to have a Gray in the house. Now let’s see. You went to Dartmouth, didn’t you? How’s your father, Charles?”

  “He’s out on the training field with the Pine Trees,” Charles told him.

  “When we were boys he was always running to fires. Jessica, what became of your other friend?”

  And Jessica told again where Malcolm Bryant was.

  “Well, he’ll be back for supper, won’t he?” Mr. Lovell said. “We always call it supper in Clyde, don’t we, Charles? But Jessie likes to call it dinner.”

  “Charley,” Jessica said, “have you ever seen the garden?”

  Charles shook his head. He said he had never seen the garden but he would like to see it.

  “What do you want to show him the garden for?” Mr. Lovell said. “It’s October.”

  “There’s still the boxwood,” Jessica said, “and the chrysanthemums.”

  “Well,” Mr. Lovell said. “Well. I’ll say good-by to you now, Charles, in case I don’t see you again, and give your father my regards.”

  The wallpaper room was silent as Charles and Jessica walked down the hall together but before they reached the back hall door Charles heard Mr. Lovell’s voice.

  “Well,” Mr. Lovell was saying. “Well.”

  “Come on, Charley,” Jessica said quickly, and they stepped outside onto a long path bordered with boxwood. The formal garden of the Lovells so often described in Garden Club lectures lay before them, rising gradually to the top of a gentle slope, with its box borders casting long shadows across the gravel paths in the setting sun.

  “You know,” Jessica said, “I really think Father likes you.”

  “I don’t see why you think so,” Charles told her.

  “Because he talked so much,” Jessica said, “and you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He wondered exactly what she meant. They were following the path up to a summerhouse on top of the rise, past the terraced flower beds where everything was cut down ready for the winter. At any rate, nothing in the Lovell house had made him uneasy and perhaps that was what she had meant when she said he had done nothing wrong. Perhaps she had meant that he had been neither impressed nor disturbed by her aunt or father and that they had not seemed to him in any way extraordinary. He was even thinking that there was nothing so extraordinary about Jessica, either. He could still see her as she was, before whatever drew them together became too strong for him to see her in any true perspective. She was not strikingly beautiful. She was too tall and her chin and nose were both a little too long and her eyebrows were too black and heavy, but those defects were vanishing already as she walked beside him up the path. The open fire had made her cheeks glow and her eyes were bright and her lips, which were rather like her father’s, were relaxed. Once they reached the summerhouse, it was cool and almost chilly in the shadows.

  “Well,” she said, “there’s the garden.”

  They stood leaning on the summerhouse railing, gazing at the garden, which had been laid out by a French émigré more than a century before, and back at the house with its high-arched windows and its balustrade and cupola.

  “You can see the harbor from the cupola,” she said, and then she said it was strange to think of staying at home with no more college and nothing to do but just be there.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, and Charles was telling her that there were all sorts of things to do in Clyde.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m awfully glad you think so.” She had been moving her fingers idly, making little patterns on the summerhouse railing.

  “Oh dear, here he comes. God, this is a wonderful town.” Malcolm Bryant was coming toward them up the path.

  “Jessica,” Charles said, “you won’t forget about tomorrow, will you?”

  “No,” she said, “of course I won’t,” and her hand touched his. “Good-by, Charley.”

  9

  All the World’s a Stage

  —SHAKESPEARE

  Charles knew there would be talk, because gossip always eddied through Clyde like smoke from the burning piles of autumn leaves, and it also usually assumed fantastic shapes. It was only to be expected that everyone would know by Monday of his encounter with Hughie Willis, but instead of looking on it critically people seemed in general to approve of his action. His father, when he mentioned it, appeared to be amused and only said that he must have had quite a time that afternoon at the muster. His mother, of course, was not amused. She had heard, both from Mrs. Mason and from Mrs. Gow, that Charles had got into a fight with a North Ender, and she could not understand why Charles had done such a thing, and it did no good to tell her and Dorothea that it was not a fight, because they could not understand the difference. Charles’s main fear had been that someone would say that he and Hughie Willis had been fighting over Jessica, but he concluded that this was absurd.

  As a matter of fact, his encounter with Hughie Willis did him no harm at all. Groups of his old school friends began calling to him in Dock Square with a new sort of familiarity. In fact there was a warmth about everything which made him imagine that people were saying that Charley Gray was not stuck-up because he had been to college. He had taken off his coat and pitched right into Hughie Willis. At Wright-Sherwin on Monday morning, it seemed to him that the girls in the accounting department smiled at him more brightly and nobody there appeared to disapprove, except possibly Mr. Howell who told him that it was Monday morning and time for fun was over, but even Mr. Howell was interested.

  “That Willis was always a bad boy,” Mr. Howell said. “When he was a kid, he was always putting cannon crackers in my hedge.”

  It even seemed to Charles that Mr. Stanley looked at him in a different way, when Charles met him in the hall.

  “Good morning, Charley,” Mr. Stanley said. “How are you feeling this morning?” Mr. Stanley had never asked him before how he was feeling and it seemed to Charles that Mr. Stanley was examining his face for pos
sible contusions—but even Mr. Stanley’s manner was not disapproving.

  Of course, Jackie Mason knew all about it. All morning Jack kept looking at him across the room, trying to catch his eye, and when they met at the water cooler around eleven o’clock Jackie immediately brought up the subject.

  “Charley, you ought not to do that sort of thing,” he said.

  “What sort of thing?” Charles asked.

  “You know as well as I do, Charley, that someone always sees what you do around here—and wasn’t it true that Jessica Lovell was there?” Jack Mason looked worried and his anxiety was friendly. “What I mean, Charley, is that a girl like Jessica Lovell won’t forget a thing like that. It simply means she’ll never have anything to do with you. What are you laughing at?”

  “She never had anything to do with me anyway,” Charles said.

  “But she might have,” Jack said. “She’s going to be here all the time now and you’ve simply lost your chance of ever seeing anything of Jessica Lovell.”

  Those remarks of Jack Mason’s came as a great relief because they showed that perhaps after all everyone in Clyde did not know everything immediately, but someone would have seen Jessica’s new Dodge phaeton, with its top down, as it crossed the intersection of Dock and Johnson streets on Sunday afternoon. There was no way of escaping facts in Clyde, and, indeed, he did not care much what anyone would say. He only felt concerned that the offices at Wright-Sherwin where he was earning his twenty-five dollars a week already seemed smaller since the firemen’s muster and he was already beginning to realize that it would take years for him to get anywhere in Wright-Sherwin—years and years.

  Before long it began to be recognized, of course, that he was seeing a good deal of Jessica Lovell, but on the whole it was an acceptable fact. The Grays did not live on Johnson Street as the Thomases or the Stanleys did, but his father was the son of old Judge Gray and had married Dr. Marchby’s daughter and so it was not markedly unusual for Charles Gray to go around with Jessica Lovell.

  “Going around” was the expression which was used in Clyde when a boy and girl saw a good deal of each other. It was not the same as the more vulgar expression “going with” or “keeping company” which was employed when speaking of River Street couples and which had a more definite connotation. It was not even the same as saying that Charles was “attentive” to Jessica Lovell, which was more serious. His relationship in those months might have been better expressed as one of being “seen around” with Jessica Lovell, which was not even quite as strong as “going around” with her.

  Since Jessica was fourteen she had spent her summers in Maine and had been away to school at Westover and then at Vassar College, so that now she was really back in Clyde for the first time in years, and Mr. Lovell had told several people that he wanted very much to have Jessica “show herself” in Clyde. It was exactly, she told Charles once, as though her father wanted her to go trotting up and down Johnson Street every afternoon, but of course he really meant that she should take part in Clyde activities, such as attending the Harvest Supper at the Boat Club and the Boat Club monthly dance and Pound Day at the Episcopal Church.

  Her father had also told her that he did not want her to act as though she were just at home poised for flight to somewhere else. He wanted Jessica to show herself, and if she had to show herself obviously she had to be seen. She was seen with Charles but she was also seen with Hewitt Thomas, when Hewitt was not busy somewhere else. She was occasionally seen with Lester Gow, who was studying at the Harvard Law School, and now and then with Jackie Mason. She was even seen once or twice with Melville Meader, but if Mr. Lovell discouraged this everyone could understand why. The Meader boys were nice boys but Mr. Meader’s father had been in the grocery business and Mr. Meader, though he was in real estate, often worked, himself, with the plumbers and carpenters, improving the buildings he owned. Besides, Jessica Lovell also had young men from Boston as guests sometimes for the week end. Thus if she was seen with Charles it did not mean that they were going around together.

  When Jessica joined the Clyde Players that winter, it was natural for Charles to take her home because the other members of the theater group were married, except Jackie Mason who was the property man and who had to stay after the others. There was no reason for anyone to know that Charles had joined the Clyde Players only because Jessica had asked him to. Everyone believed that Charles enjoyed amateur theatricals.

  It must have been an evening early in December when Jessica called Charles up, something which she did very seldom in those days. His Aunt Jane had been ill for two weeks with the grippe and his mother had gone to Gow Street to see how she was doing. When the telephone in the hall rang, his father was reading Boswell by the fire and Dorothea and Elbridge Sterne were playing backgammon and Charles was looking over a catalogue of surveying instruments which he had brought home from the office. Everyone stopped to count since it was a party line.

  “Go and answer it, Charley,” Dorothea said.

  “It will only be for you,” Charles told her. “It always is.”

  “I don’t know why it should be,” Dorothea said, “at this time of night.”

  The telephone was under the stairs in front of a line of coat hooks and it was necessary to bend one’s head when one took the receiver off the hook.

  “Is that you, Charley?” It was Jessica’s voice. “You haven’t gone to bed yet, have you?”

  “Why, no,” Charley answered. “It’s only nine o’clock,” and he heard Jessica laugh.

  “Everybody’s gone here except Father, and he’s asleep in the library. Charley, would you mind coming over for a few minutes? I won’t keep you any time at all.”

  It was only a step to Johnson Street. It was the most natural thing in the world, he was telling himself, for Jessica suddenly to ask him to come to see her at nine o’clock. He only thought of it as peculiar when he came back into the parlor with his overcoat to say he was going out.

  “But why are you going out?” Dorothea asked. “Who called you up? Was it Jackie Mason?”

  “It was Jessica Lovell,” Charles said. “She just wants me to come over for a few minutes.”

  “Now?” Dorothea said. “At nine o’clock? I didn’t know that you knew Jessica Lovell as well as that.”

  “I don’t see why it shows that I know her very well,” he answered.

  “Oh, doesn’t it?” Dorothea said, and she and Elbridge smiled at each other and his father looked up from Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

  “Now that I think of it,” he said, “Jessica has been gracious to me lately. She stopped me in the street and asked me about fire engines. Her looks have improved, too. Her chin is still a little long and her eyebrows are too heavy, but she’s improved.”

  When Charles walked up Spruce Street, the clear coldness of the December night air reminded him of new dark ice on a pond, just frozen thick enough to bear one’s weight. His pulses danced with a strange elation, not because Jessica Lovell had called him up, certainly not because of that, but because of the beauty of the evening and the nearness of the stars. He seemed to have Clyde entirely to himself. The house lights were already going out on Spruce Street. It was absurd, he was thinking, for Dorothea to have made any comments when Jessica had called him up. It only showed that he and Jessica Lovell were not bowed down by small stupidities.

  Jessica must have been waiting for him because she opened the front door herself and his idea that it was natural to be dropping in there at nine o’clock was contradicted by the soft tones of her voice and by the gentle way she closed the door.

  “We’ll have to sit in the wallpaper room,” she said, as Charles was taking off his overcoat. “The library’s the only comfortable place but Father’s asleep in it. There’s a little room upstairs—” She sighed. Of course they could not go to a little room upstairs. “We’ll have to sit and look at the Chinese junks.”

  She asked Charles to put a new log on the dying embers of the fire and th
en she curled up on a corner of the Hepplewhite sofa. She was wearing a very simple, purplish woolen dress that fell just below her knees. She gave it a careless pull over her silk stockings and then she pushed her dark hair away from her forehead with both hands. His father may have been right in his remarks about Jessica. Her eyebrows were too heavy and her chin was too long and so were her legs, but she looked very well in the wallpaper room. She had none of the self-consciousness of other girls he knew, no fear that her hair looked untidy and she made no fluttering efforts to conceal her knees.

  “Charley,” she began, “the most awful thing has happened. I’ve got to join the Clyde Players. Father says I have to,” and she let her hands drop helplessly on her lap.

  “Oh,” Charles said, “has Mrs. Smythe Leigh been to see you?”

  “She just went away,” Jessica said. “Who is she, Charley?”

  It showed how little Jessica really knew about Clyde that she had never heard anything about Mrs. Smythe Leigh.

  “She’s pretty energetic,” Charles told her. “She likes art and she’s one of those people who like to run things.”

  “Charley, give me a cigarette,” and she pointed to a box on the table. “Light it for me, will you?” He leaned close to her as he lighted her cigarette, and she pointed at the table where the cigarette box had stood. “Look at that thing, Charley, look at it.”

  “What thing?” Charles asked.

  “That thing,” she repeated. “That play. Tell me, how did she ever find it, Charley?”

  She was pointing to a small volume covered with yellow paper and Charles picked it up. It was entitled Lord Bottomly Decides, a Farce-Comedy.

  “Did she leave it here?” Charles asked.

  “Of course she left it here,” Jessica said.

  “Well,” Charles said, “it’s just one of her ideas,” and then he told Jessica about Mrs. Smythe Leigh.

  Mrs. Smythe Leigh had come to Clyde about ten years before and she lived on Gow Street and was very active in women’s organizations. Mrs. Smythe Leigh—she did not like being called plain Mrs. Leigh—had organized the Women’s Club pageant in 1920 and she coached in dramatics at the high school and she sometimes even hinted that she had been on the stage herself. She had also organized the Clyde Players, and there were a number of people who liked that sort of thing. Dr. Bush, who was the osteopath, liked it, and so did Mr. and Mrs. Knowles, and there were always a few people who liked to paint scenery. It was not strange at all that Mrs. Smythe Leigh had asked Jessica to take part in a play. She was always asking everybody. All that you had to do was to say that you could not do it and then she would ask someone else.