Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  It was possible at length to begin deliberately forgetting a great deal of what had happened there, not all but a great deal. It was better to make a clean break and to leave regrets behind, and feelings of hidden guilt, and thoughts of how one might have said and done things differently. There was not much he had consciously avoided. He had not run away from anything. There was nothing left to run away from except memory by the time he had left Clyde, and of course he had taken unavoidable elements of it with him. Yet even so his memory of that time was singularly devoid of pain. Something in that morning seemed to have killed desire or some capacity for feeling and he had been shaken by deep emotion only once or twice. His self-control was with him through all of it, perhaps because it was starkly obvious what everyone would say and do after his father’s death.

  Neither Charles nor his uncle ever spoke again of that moment when they had stood at the head of the bed inside his father’s room; and as far as he knew no one ever heard anything about it. No one ever heard, but certain people must have guessed. At least he was sure that his mother and Dorothea had never learned the truth. His father had died of a heart attack, brought on by strain and worry, and perhaps it was just as well. He never liked to think of his father trying to face what was left.

  A note came from Jessica that same morning. It was delivered by old Mr. Fogarty, who still sometimes did a little work in the Lovells’ garden, and Charles could still remember the heavy blue paper.

  “Charles, dear, I feel so sick and sorry for what you must be going through, and please come and see me, dear, as soon as you feel you can.”

  He telephoned her himself that afternoon and told her the family needed him and he knew she would understand. His mother and Dorothea were not seeing anyone just yet.

  The doorbell was beginning to ring. He never forgot the sound of the doorbell. He never forgot the hours in that room of his father’s with Mr. Blashfield and Elbridge Steme, the closed door, the opening of drawers, and the stacks of papers. There was no way of keeping Elbridge out of it and he was glad he had not gone through with it alone with Mr. Blashfield.

  When he called up Boston, he said he would come in at once with his father’s lawyer, but even before they left, they had some idea of the figures and realized that the fewer people who knew, the better. They might already be saying that John Gray had left his affairs in a mess.

  “Charley,” Elbridge said, “I don’t see why he did it.”

  “He couldn’t help it.” That answer explained everything, but excused nothing. “And no one must ever know.”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to stop it,” Elbridge said. He was hopelessly at sea. Elbridge may have known all about brasses and bronzes but he always was confused when he had to separate liabilities from assets.

  Of course, there was one way to stop a part of that inevitable talk. He could put his own government bonds into the assets. He would have to tell Hugh Blashfield and he would have to tell the Lovells and Elbridge would know, but there was no reason why it should go any further. There was no reason why his mother and Dorothea need ever hear of it. He could never give himself much credit for his decision, because it was the best way out and it was something he owed to the family.

  “I’ll get along all right, Elbridge,” he heard himself saying. “Mother will have to have something and we can get her to put it into a trust.”

  All he wanted, all he could do, was to have everything look as well as possible. His father had said that he was being conservative and careful and he had expressed that conservatism by protecting himself with what he considered a ridiculously large margin. When he had been sold out at the market the previous day the account had come close to breaking even. It was even possible that it might be slightly in the black when the final figuring was completed, but even so there was almost nothing left.

  Mr. Crewe had come to call. Charles could still see himself sometimes talking to Mr. Crewe in that upstairs room of his father’s, which already was losing its character. Though it was a parochial duty, Charles was sure that Mr. Crewe was conscious of inadequacy. He could not draw upon ritual or upon The Book of Common Prayer and he must have known that John Gray had never liked his sermons. He said he had come to call, not to discuss the details of the service, because they could talk of that later. He had come as a friend, in the hope that he might be of some help in an hour of deep bereavement, and he looked very helpless when he said it, a thin, pale little man, struggling with abstract periods.

  “I feel deeply for your mother and sister and you too, Charles,” he said. “I wish there were something I could say which would bring comfort. Do you remember that ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you’?”

  Charles remembered. The word “mansion” always made him think of lawns and a driveway and of a white-pillared portico. His father would love to dwell in such a mansion. Mr. Crewe’s glance had moved to the papers on the table and to the private telephone and Charles was sure that he wished to express the hope that his father had left his affairs in order.

  “I knew him for a long while,” Mr. Crewe said. “I’ve always admired the richness of his mind. We always depended on his spirit at the Confessional Club to lift us over hard places. You would be touched to know how many people have spoken of him to me today, many different sorts of people. There is a broad sense of loss, the loss of a generous friend.”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “Everyone always liked Father.”

  “And memory continues much longer than life,” Mr. Crewe said, “so very much longer. He is living still in memory. Your father was very proud of you, although he never expressed it in a conventional way, perhaps.”

  “I hope he was,” Charles said. “No, Father was never conventional.”

  “At a time like this,” Mr. Crewe said, and he glanced at Charles and then stared at the floor, “one feels, doesn’t one, very keenly the presence of an outside power, of a guiding spirit, of—of God. I’m sure you feel it, Charles.”

  Mr. Crewe was doing the best he could, because it was his duty, and Charles felt anxious to help him.

  “I know what you mean,” he said, “but right now I don’t seem to feel much of anything. I only know it’s there.”

  Mr. Crewe coughed.

  “A great deal has been said and written about the efficacy of prayer,” he said. “I sometimes feel we speak too little of it. I think it might help us both if we prayed, that is if you don’t mind.”

  “No, sir,” Charles said. “It’s very kind of you to think of it, Mr. Crewe. You’re being very kind.”

  He had not anticipated Mr. Crewe’s suggestion. It was a very awkward moment when Mr. Crewe left his chair, one of the old Windsor chairs, and sank abruptly to his knees upon the new green carpet. It was awkward, yet there was something that was beyond grotesqueness. For once that day everything was simple.

  “I think we will both feel better for it,” Mr. Crewe said before he began, and they shook hands when the prayer was over.

  “Thank you very much, Charles,” Mr. Crewe said, “and please remember that I’m always here to help.”

  He called on Jessica that night, just for a few minutes, because he did not want to leave his mother or Dorothea too long. When he reached Johnson Street it was late and he was glad that Mr. Lovell had retired. Somehow all the day was still with him and there was still so much to do that he felt strangely impersonal when he kissed her. It was what he had said to Mr. Crewe—that it was hard to feel anything, but he hoped that he said the things he had to say properly. She knew, of course, how he had felt about his father but he hoped that she did not think that he sounded cold and practical. He might have put off until later telling her about adding his bonds to his father’s estate but it seemed to him that she should know right away.

  “You see, don’t you?” he remembered saying. “It’s the only thing to do.”

  “Oh, Charley dear, of course it is,” she said, and they did not spe
ak for a while. They sat there in the wallpaper room, holding hands.

  “You and I can get on,” he said. “We can be married just the same.”

  “Darling,” she said, “of course we can. I’ll never marry anyone but you.”

  “I’m awfully glad you’re with me,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Of course I’m with you, dear,” she said. “I’ll always be with you.”

  “You see why I don’t want anyone to know,” he said, “but I suppose you ought to tell your father.”

  They kissed again in the front hall before he opened the door, and it never occurred to him—there was no possible way he could have told—that he would only see Jessica Lovell once again.

  His mother and Dorothea were in the parlor when he reached home and Elbridge Steme was with them and his mother said it was time they faced things. She could not stay in Spruce Street alone. There were too many memories in Spruce Street, and she could not go on alone in Clyde.

  “Charley,” she said, as she said so often afterwards, “why didn’t he ever tell us he wasn’t well—but it was just like him, wasn’t it? He never wanted any of us to worry.”

  Then for some reason she asked him if he remembered that paper she had read long ago at the Historical Society about Alice Ruskin Lyte. Charles was only a little boy then but he must remember. Did he remember those evenings they worked over it together? John had been so patient and he always had loved words so, and Sam was alive. She could not live in Spruce Street any longer and Dorothea and Elbridge wanted her to go with them to Kansas City.

  He had never thought of Clyde without his mother. It was only later that he was glad she felt as she had. It was better that she had left before the Cadillac and the house and the furniture were sold. It was better that she had gone to Kansas City instead of living on in Clyde. If she had stayed, he would have had to stay himself and that would scarcely have been possible with Jessica still there.

  23

  I Think That Frankness Has Been the Basis of Our Previous Relationship

  —MR. LAURENCE LOVELL

  Once, as a step in that long process of advancement at the Stuyvesant Bank, Arthur Slade had asked Charles if he could arrange to come out for the week end to his summer place on the beach at Wainscott, Long Island. Everyone knew that there were going to be some changes in the trust department and this obviously was the reason for the invitation. It was a week end in the summer of 1937 and Charles had said he would be glad to go if things were all right at home in Larchmont.

  Arthur Slade had met Nancy but it was too early even to consider whether Nancy would be a help or a detriment as the wife of an officer at the Stuyvesant. It was only a question of the trust department upstairs. He had told Charles that they would love to have his wife too, but Charles had refused for Nancy because obviously there was no place to leave the children.

  “I hate to ask you without her,” Arthur Slade said, “but I hope you can manage to come yourself. I feel like sitting on the beach and talking.”

  Nancy understood perfectly what the invitation meant.

  “He wants to see how you use your knife and fork and whether you’re housebroken,” she said. “They don’t care whether I chew gum or not yet, but if you go and behave yourself, around next year they’ll begin to care.”

  Nancy helped him pack his suitcase. She pressed his dinner coat. She brushed his tweed jacket. She made him take both white flannels and gray slacks, and his new crepe-soled shoes and the pullover sweater that went with his tweed jacket and four soft shirts and four assorted ties. She checked and double-checked everything in the suitcase.

  “Don’t let them get you into any games,” she said. “You’re rotten at golf and tennis, but play bridge if you want to. You’re not bad at bridge.”

  “I wish you were going,” Charles said. “It isn’t fair to leave you.”

  “It’s life,” Nancy told him. “Drink two cocktails before dinner and don’t drink anything afterwards unless you have to, and you’d better take a good book along. Take Mathematics for the Million. It will show them that you think.”

  He knew that Arthur Slade wanted to see how he would act on Long Island but he had not been self-conscious. He was devoted to Arthur Slade and he knew that Arthur liked him. When Arthur Slade had asked him if he would like to play golf, Charles told him he had better not. He had once taken a few lessons from a professional at the Shore Club north of Boston but he had never been good at golf. He had always worked too hard—no time for golf and no time for any bad habits either. He was not much at athletics. He had played a little football once. He had gone out for track at Dartmouth and he had been on the wrestling team, but that was all quite a while ago.

  On Saturday evening there was a buffet supper, ten or a dozen people, a lawyer and his wife and some men from downtown who reminded him of Rush & Company. There were two tables of bridge afterwards and he played at a table with Elsie Slade and a couple named Murchison and when the rubber was over Elsie Slade sat with him on the steps of the piazza. They drank ginger ale, because, he told her, Nancy had warned him not to drink anything after dinner unless he had to. He told her about Nancy and about life in Larchmont, where they had moved because of the children instead of staying in town, and Elsie Slade talked about her two boys who were away at camp and she called him Charley because she felt she knew him very well. Arthur had said so much about him.

  Obviously Arthur Slade had asked her to talk to him—certainly he wanted her reaction—but Charles did not mind in the least. In fact he found it surprisingly easy to talk about himself. Once, she said, Arthur had told her that he had met his father for just a second, in Boston at the Parker House.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “I remember. Father was a big-time operator then.”

  He found himself speaking of it lightly, aware that it fitted well with the evening party and the cottage on the dunes and the cool air from the ocean. He told her about the Cadillac and the Shore Club and the Zaza.

  “It was quite an adjustment for me,” he said. “You see, I was a small-town boy. I’m still basically small-town.”

  Then Arthur Slade came out of the dark, manifestly to see how they were getting on. He sat on the steps beside them for a moment and asked Charles if he wouldn’t like some Scotch.

  “Don’t ask him,” Elsie said. “Nancy doesn’t like him to drink after dinner.”

  Elsie Slade must have liked him or she would not have referred to Nancy by her first name, never having met her. He said he would like a thin drink of Scotch after all, as long as it was Saturday night, but it was not because of this, it was because he felt she was genuinely interested, that he told Elsie Slade about Clyde. It sounded like an amusing place, as he described it that evening.

  She said that she had always lived in New York, except in the summer; her family had always spent their summers on Long Island, right here in Wainscott. She had met Arthur at a debutante party and here they were, still in Wainscott. It was a small-town life in itself, she said, but of course in a different way; and then she asked him the inevitable question. Why had he ever left Clyde? It sounded like a wonderful place.

  He took a swallow of his thin drink of Scotch. Those days were so far away that he could see their amusing side, at least he could that evening sitting on the steps by the beach.

  “It’s a small-town story,” he said. “It’s the difference between Spruce Street and Johnson Street. I should have remembered we were Spruce Streeters. Both Father and I should have remembered.”

  He had never told Arthur Slade about Jessica Lovell but he did not in the least mind telling Elsie Slade that night. They had first really become acquainted, he told her, at a firemen’s muster. She had never even heard of a firemen’s muster so he told her about his father and the Pine Trees. It was the difference between Spruce Street and Johnson Street. They used to meet surreptitiously by the courthouse and go riding in her car—and then he had left Wright-Sherwin and gone t
o work in Rush & Company.

  “Her father never did approve of it,” he said, “but then why should he? He was always trying to break it up, and he did, when my father died. It was a strain for her, you see, divided loyalty, Spruce Street, Johnson Street. She couldn’t go on with it. Her father took her away to forget.”

  He took another swallow of his whiskey. It was just what he had called it, a small-town story. All one had to do was change its emphasis to make it humorous.

  “And what did you do?” Elsie Slade asked.

  “Why, I left too,” he said. “I was hurt, but it made me ambitious.”

  “Are you still ambitious?” she asked.

  This made him laugh. He had never realized until then how little Jessica and the struggle for Jessica meant to him any longer.

  “Of course I am,” he said, “or I wouldn’t be here now, Mrs. Slade.”

  “Aren’t you going to call me Elsie?” she asked.

  This made him laugh again. It was wonderful to be so wholly free from Clyde and he was thinking of Nancy and the suitcase and the four neckties and the crepe-soled shoes.

  “No,” he said, “not yet, but I love to have you call me Charley. Please don’t stop. And I’d love to call you Elsie someday, when I’m a little further ahead at the bank, but not right now. You see, I know the difference between Spruce and Johnson streets.”

  Then Arthur Slade was back again.

  “Arthur,” Elsie Slade was saying, “Charley won’t call me Elsie, but he’d love to sometime later. He’s made a very favorable impression on me, Arthur, and you must be sure to get him to tell you the difference between Johnson Street and Spruce Street.”

  The Lovells were at the funeral but they sat in the back of the church, not near the family, and Charles had no opportunity to speak to them afterwards. After the service at the grave at the old North Cemetery, Jessica sent him another note by Mr. Fogarty. Her father was going away to New York for a few days, she told him, and he especially wanted her to go with him and she really felt she should. They would be back on Monday or Tuesday. She would call him the minute they were back and she would be thinking of him all the time.