Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “We really ought to have a man here to pass us things. We ought to have a couple to look after us, a nice woman who’s a good cook and her husband. What we really need is two Filipinos, but I’m afraid your mother wouldn’t like them. Perhaps we’d better look for a French couple and have some French cooking and a little wine at dinner. There’s no reason to have these old Irishwomen in by the day. Mary Callahan when she comes in is more like my nurse than a maid. We’ll have to find a couple.”

  His cigar cutter made a sharp incisive sound, and he struck a match.

  “The devil of it is, we’ll need another bathroom if we have a couple. We need more bathrooms at any rate. We can put two of them up on the third floor, one for the couple and one for you, and I suppose Dorothea ought to have one, too, but then she’s going to marry Elbridge. Still, we could use it for a guest bathroom, couldn’t we?—but then if you get married there will be another vacant bathroom. Well, we’ll get three new bathrooms. I’ll get Sid Stevens in here to measure them up tomorrow. There’s always plenty of room for them in an old house. Now, how did my mind get on plumbing?”

  “You were talking about a couple,” Charles said.

  “Oh, yes. I wonder how many bathrooms the Lovells have.”

  “I don’t know,” Charles said.

  As he had told Jessica, if you were the tail of a kite you had to follow the kite. His father was glancing again at the papers on which he had been working.

  “I always wonder why I’m doing so well, Charley, until I remember this is the first time I’ve had any real working capital,” he said, and he puffed on his cigar and blew a cloud of that heavy, permeating smoke of expensive Havana tobacco. Charles would always associate cigar smoke with brokerage accounts and working capital. “You see, I’m pretty well up in the system now. Just between you and me—don’t tell the women yet, it will only make them nervous—as of today there’s three hundred and fifty thousand in the kitty.”

  “I don’t like being out at sea in a canoe with just one paddle,” Charles said. “When will you have enough, Father?”

  John Gray’s thoughts must have been winging happily over broader fields and it must have annoyed him to be brought up short.

  “Dear me,” he said. “There we are again. Don’t you know, Charley, that once you’re up in the system you have leverage? They’ll find it hard to shake me down.”

  “Who are They?” Charles asked.

  His father picked up a pencil and tapped it on the paper.

  “I’m damned if I know who, but somebody’s running this show.”

  “It isn’t somebody,” Charles said, “it’s everybody. Why don’t you call your system a common state of mind?”

  Later he was to read the debates and the dogma of economists and weigh the theories of the orthodox against those of the disciples of John Maynard Keynes. Those people with their set conventions always reminded him more of theologians than philosophers. They were the high priests of materialism, constantly trying to establish their creeds and trying to give unbreakable definitions to acquisitive forces, and yet in the end it was nothing more or less than what he had said that night at Spruce Street.

  “Maybe you’re right,” his father said. “Maybe it is a state of mind, but states of mind change, don’t they? You know—I’m going to say something that may relieve you, Charley. I’ve been seriously thinking that there’s an end to everything—you can’t carry a good thing too far, can you? You know, I really think that perhaps I ought to make a limit. I think I’ll stop all this and cash in—when I have a million dollars.” It was the ultimate end, the mathematical symbol for security and happiness. “Well … good night, Charley.”

  19

  “Give Crowns and Pounds and Guineas, but Not Your Heart Away”

  —A. E. HOUSMAN

  There was once good thing about Clyde. People there might know everything about you but they still had respect for individual privacy. No one, except his immediate family, ever asked Charles directly about Jessica Lovell. If you lived in a place like Clyde, you were keenly conscious of public approval or disapproval. Though Charles was too busy most of the time that winter to go around much, as the expression went, he still realized that he was a figure of interest. At the railroad station or when he went to the post office or to the news store or to Walters’s drugstore, he could perceive an atmosphere of veiled expectancy. Jackie Mason, he thought, was always waiting for him to say something and he seemed hurt when Charles did not allude to his private affairs. The girls he knew had grown sedulously impersonal, as though he were no longer a part of any of their plans. They would smile at him brightly and say, “Why, hello, Charley. You’re quite a stranger these days”; and friends of his, like Earl Wilkins and the Meaders, would say, “Hi, Charley. How’s everything going, Charley?”

  It was what one always said, but when they asked the question it seemed to him that other people would turn and look and listen for his answer. Everyone, of course, must have been talking about the Grays that winter, including Mr. and Mrs. Meader and the Masons and all the family’s particular friends. They would all say when they met him, “Why, Charley, we haven’t seen you for a long while. I suppose they’re keeping you busy in Boston”—but they were not thinking about Boston. They were thinking of what was keeping him busy in Clyde. They were saying, in private, that he was “attentive” to Jessica Lovell and his own friends must have been saying that he was “crazy about” Jessica Lovell and down on River Street they were probably saying that Charley Gray was “going with” Jessica Lovell.

  Everyone was watching the Lovells, too, and someone must have heard the Thomases and the Stanleys and other people on Johnson Street say that Mr. Lovell did not like it. He wanted Jessica to do better. After all, she had come out in Boston and the Lovells were always down on the Shore, but then he could not do much about it if Jessica liked Charley Gray. The Grays were doing very well. They had a couple working for them and a Cadillac and the house on Spruce Street had been redecorated and they had put in three new bathrooms and Wallace Brooks, who had done the painting for them, had said that the interior decorator himself had come from Boston to hang the drapes, and Mary Callahan, who now did the cleaning, said that Esther Gray had bought the loveliest new china and new sheets and blankets and candlewick bedspreads, and that Elbridge Sterne did look plain beside Miss Dorothea in her new dresses and her fur coat. The Grays were doing very well. Besides, Charley was getting on well, too, in Boston. Mr. Stanley had said that he had the makings of a businessman and that he wished he had him back in Wright-Sherwin. There was nothing that Mr. Lovell could do about it, and Jessica might have done worse.

  This was what everyone must have been saying and Charles did not mind whatever repercussions he sensed of it because he was almost sure it was all said in a kindly, friendly way. Those rumors about himself and Jessica Lovell gave everyone a vicarious sort of satisfaction for it looked as though Jessica might marry a Clyde boy who did not live on Johnson Street and Mr. Lovell, in spite of all his talk about the Lovells and Clyde, thought the Lovells were too good for Clyde.

  No one could say anything definite. The Grays had not been asked to the Lovells’ for a meal and Laurence Lovell and Miss Georgianna had not been to call on the Grays, but then Clyde was never a hospitable place. However, when his mother finally asked her, Jessica Lovell did go to supper at Spruce Street, in spite of implications, and there was nothing Mr. Lovell could have done to prevent it.

  Charles had somehow been reluctant to talk things over with his mother because he had felt that she knew enough of what was happening without his having to explain it. She knew that he and Jessica were always calling each other up and she knew how often he went to see her, and she had seen the marble Pliny doves on his bureau and the photograph of Adam from the Sistine Chapel and later a pair of silver-backed military brushes. He had told his mother immediately when she asked about the brushes that Jessica had given them to him and his mother had said they were perfectly
lovely brushes and that Jessica had very good taste. A curious sort of pride had prevented his saying anything more to anyone until it could be more definite, but one December evening when he came home from Rush & Company, his mother and Dorothea were waiting in the parlor and something in their expressions told him that they were waiting for him particularly.

  “Where’s Father?” he asked, because his father had not gone into Boston.

  “Just where he always is—upstairs reading the papers,” Dorothea said.

  “You can see him later, dear,” his mother said. “Why don’t you just sit down and talk to us?”

  “Is anything the matter?” Charles asked. His mother and Dorothea exchanged a meaning glance.

  “I don’t know why you’re so nervous lately, dear. Why should anything be the matter? Dorothea and I just like to visit, now that we don’t have to get supper. It’s awfully queer to sit here in the afternoon and have Axel and Hulda doing everything. Did Axel press your other suit nicely, Charley?”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “Axel’s all right.”

  “I can’t get used to having a man in the house in the daytime,” his mother said, “and Dorothea was just saying Axel’s lazy. He makes Hulda do his work and he sits in his room all afternoon reading True Love Stories.”

  “True Love Stories?” Charles repeated.

  “Yes,” Dorothea said. “There are such things as true love stories, in case you haven’t realized it.”

  “Well,” Charles said, “you ought to know. Where’s Elbridge?”

  “You ought to know, too, and never mind about Elbridge.”

  “Charley”—his mother smiled at him very sweetly—“Dorothea and I have just thought of something that we think might be nice. Don’t you think now that we have the couple, Charley, it might be nice to ask Jessica Lovell for supper on Saturday?” The expectant way they watched him explained the uneasiness he had felt the moment he entered the parlor.

  “I don’t see any particular reason for it,” he said. “Why should you suddenly ask her to supper?”

  “But she’s never been inside the house, dear, after all this time.”

  “After all what time?” Charles asked.

  “Oh, Charley,” his mother said, and she looked hurt.

  “We know about these things better than you,” Dorothea said. “It looks queer not having her. Don’t you know that everybody’s talking?”

  “If anybody so much as looks at a girl around here,” Charles said, “everybody starts talking.”

  “Now, really, Charley,” Dorothea said, “have you only just been looking at Jessica Lovell?”

  Charles felt his face grow beet-red.

  “Oh, Charley”—his mother still looked hurt—“don’t you see it looks as though you were ashamed of us? You’re not ashamed, are you, Charley?”

  “I didn’t say I was ashamed of anyone,” Charles said. “I just don’t see any reason to underline things.”

  “Charley, dear,” his mother said, “there’s nothing to be so upset about. We all think she’s a very nice girl and we’re all very happy about it.”

  “I’m not upset about anything at all, Mother,” Charles began. “I only think—”

  “Then don’t you think, dear”—she was speaking in a soothing tone she had used when he was much younger—“that it would be nice to have her for supper on Saturday night, just so we could all see each other? I’d love to ask her myself.”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, all right,” he said, “if you have to have her, if you all want to look at her, why go ahead and ask her.” He did not mean to sound ungracious but he hated to think how it would be, with the family knowing everything and yet not saying anything.

  As a matter of fact, it was not nearly as bad as it might have been. Everyone tried to behave as though it were the most natural thing in the world for Jessica Lovell to come to supper. The new silver candlesticks and a new Canton china dinner set were on the table—his father loved Canton china—but there was no reason for Jessica to have thought that a special effort was being made. In fact, it was almost like a family meal—just the family, Esther Gray had told Jessica over the telephone, just a family supper.

  The worst of it was waiting for Jessica. Elbridge Sterne was there, just to even out things, as Dorothea said, and everyone gathered in the front parlor, which looked very well with its fresh curtains and with the new furniture from Gow Street. Everyone tried to talk about ordinary things, but his mother and Dorothea, in their dresses from Hollander’s in Boston, kept moving about straightening ornaments or going out to the dining room to take a last look at the table. Elbridge Sterne was kind to him, almost like an elder brother. His father had a bland, noncommittal look.

  “I’m sure Jessica won’t mind if Axel brings in the cocktails,” John Gray said, and then he went into the hall and called loudly. “Oh, Axel.” He always loved to call to Axel, and Axel and Hulda were always saying what a fine gentleman Mr. Gray was. John Gray seated himself on one of the Martha Washington chairs from Gow Street and examined complacently his new shoes which had been made to order in London.

  “I’ve just been rereading Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis” he said. “Have you ever read it, Elbridge?”

  “No,” Elbridge answered. “What’s Atlantis?”

  “Oh, dear me,” John Gray said. “That’s another hiatus in a Kansas education, Elbridge. I know they only teach useful things in Kansas and Atlantis is perfectly useless—a mythological concept based on a geological fact. A body of land somewhere near the mouth of the Mediterranean actually did sink beneath the sea in the tertiary epoch and the rumor is that it was the cradle of civilization with beautiful cities and palaces, a dream world, perhaps the basis for the universal flood legend. Oh, here come the cocktails. Thank you, Axel.”

  “Now, Father,” Dorothea said, “there’s no reason to give us a free lecture. Why should Elbridge know anything about Atlantis?”

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t give one while we’re waiting, Dorothea,” John Gray said, “and it’s very good for Elbridge, and Charles too. Ignatius Donnelly, though brilliant, is doubtless inaccurate, but think of Atlantis, the cradle of beauty and wisdom, and then a slight quiver of the earth’s crust and then in comes the sea. Only the Azores are left, according to Mr. Donnelly. You know, I don’t see why we shouldn’t go to the Azores sometime. They have wild canaries in the Azores.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “It must be Jessica,” John Gray said. “You’d better let her in, Charley.”

  Her cheeks were glowing from the cold and she spoke a little breathlessly, saying she hoped she was not late. She must have been hoping, too, that she did not look nervous and that everyone would like her. She wore a new green dress, and he wished she had not walked into the parlor as though she were going to a formal dinner, but actually everything went very well. At first, Charles had a sinking feeling, but when she stood beside him in the parlor he suddenly felt proud and happy and glad that she had come.

  “Would you like a Martini, Jessica?” John Gray said. “We were just talking about Atlantis.”

  “Oh,” Jessica said, “the book about the lost continent?”

  “Yes, Jessica,” John Gray said. “I always keep it beside the Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. Atlantis is really a state of mind. Everybody is always on his own Atlantis sometime. We must learn to jump when the earth shakes. I suppose Charley talks to you about states of mind.”

  Jessica shook her head, the way she did when her hair blew across her forehead.

  “I wish he would talk about Atlantis instead,” she answered.

  “Well,” John Gray said, “here’s to Atlantis, Jessica.”

  It was just as though he had said, Here’s to Jessica and Charles. Everyone knew that they belonged to each other, as they stood side by side in the parlor.

  “What is it, Axel?” his mother said. Axel was standing silent in the doorway to the dining room. S
he never could get entirely used to Axel’s announcing supper.

  It was something he would always remember, the dining room and everyone around the table. There was an irony to his father’s having mentioned Atlantis, for the waves were to flow over all of that era and it was buried long ago, fathoms deep—but echoes of it were still with him, like the church bell that rang beneath the sea.

  “Your father and I don’t see as much of each other as we ought to, Jessica,” his father said, as he carved the leg of lamb, “but we know each other very well. Did he ever tell you that we studied together for our entrance examinations before we went to Harvard? I was a very bad boy. I didn’t last there long.”

  Then he was telling what things had been like in those days and about his sisters and the Judge.

  “Esther, do you remember the first time I ever called on you? I’d just been excused from Harvard.”

  “I don’t know why you should think of that now,” Esther Gray said.

  “It just passed through my mind,” John Gray said. “If I hadn’t come to call, if I hadn’t quoted Shakespeare—” He stopped and looked at the carving knife. “Do you know what I wish?” He stopped, but no one answered. “I wish Sam were here.”

  It must have been years since his father had mentioned Sam and it was strange that he should have spoken of him with Jessica there.

  “Charley has told me about him,” she said. “Do you remember that time you told me about making whistles, Charley?”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “I never could make one, could I?”

  “When did you two try to make whistles?” Dorothea asked, and Jessica laughed.

  “Oh, that was a long time ago,” she said. “Well, it was only last April, but it seems like a long time ago.”

  When he walked home with her, she said she loved the family. She loved his mother; she was so pretty and she seemed to be so happy. The whole place was so alive, she said, and she liked the way he and Dorothea kept arguing, without ever really getting angry. He would never know, she said, how lonely it was to be an only child. She liked Elbridge Steme, too, though he had not said much.