Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “You boys who go away to New York,” Lawrence Stoker said, and he looked across the table at Charles as though he were someone who had lived for a long while in a foreign country, “you go and you never want to come back.” Charles believed that Mr. Stoker’s words had a tentative, suggestive note. “Of course, we can’t offer you enough to get you back. You boys get used to high living in New York.”

  “And low thinking,” Charles said, and he laughed. He wondered how much Mr. Stoker thought he was earning. Obviously, Mr. Stoker was judging from appearances, as they always did in Boston.

  “Of course,” Mr. Stoker said, “money doesn’t go as far in New York as it does here.”

  “It doesn’t go far anywhere if you have a wife and two children,” Charles said.

  “Two? I didn’t know you had two, Charley,” Mr. Stoker said. “I thought you only had a boy. That boy must be growing up.”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “Bill’s getting to be a big boy now.”

  “Where’s he going to school?” That was a question they always asked in Boston.

  “He’s going to one of those suburban country day schools now,” Charles said, “but he wants to go to Exeter.”

  “It doesn’t matter so much where he goes if you’re going to send him to Dartmouth,” Mr. Stoker said. “I hope you’re not going to send that boy to Dartmouth.”

  You were always placed in Boston by your beginnings and Mr. Stoker had never forgotten that Charles had gone to Dartmouth.

  “But you never acted like a Dartmouth man,” Mr. Stoker said. “Moulton always said so. He always said he shouldn’t have let you go.”

  If he had stayed there would have been nothing much for him at Rush & Company and both of them must have known it, but it was very reassuring to be there at lunch with Mr. Stoker toying with the impossible.

  “You wouldn’t have wanted me, you know,” Charles said. “I couldn’t have been a partner.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Mr. Stoker said. “The war would have made a difference.”

  His having gone to the war would have been a gesture that could have erased the educational stigma. It would have been almost as good as having been on a Harvard team.

  “Three boys from the office were killed,” Mr. Stoker said.

  “I was just on an air strip,” Charles said. “I should have stayed at the bank.”

  “Well,” Mr. Stoker said, “it wouldn’t have hurt you one damn bit at Rush & Company. It’s too bad about Arthur Slade. Are they going to move you up?”

  He had not thought that Mr. Stoker knew enough about him to connect him with Arthur Slade. He sounded as though he were asking Charles if there had been an injury on the football field and if the coach were going to call him from the bench.

  “Of course I hope so,” Charles said. “You never can tell what’s going to happen, can you?” Sitting with Mr. Stoker in the Union Club looking at the bare trees of Boston Common, it was pleasant to conjecture that he might actually become a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank.

  “Mr. Stoker,” he said, “have you ever heard of anything over-the-counter called the Nickerson Cordage Company? They sent me up here to ask about it. The company’s in Clyde. I’m going to take the three-thirty train down there. It’s funny, isn’t it, to be going back to Clyde.” He wished he had not said it was funny going back to Clyde …

  “Clyde,” the brakeman was calling. “Clyde. Kindly leave no articles in the car.”

  He had been looking out of the window. He had seen the sodden April brown of the fields. He had seen the muddy banks and the low tide of Whiting’s Creek. He had put on his overcoat and had pulled his suitcase from the rack above him. In a way it was just as though he were coming back from Boston after a day at E. P. Rush & Company and yet he was startled when the name was called. Even when he saw the drab station and the platform and the baggage trucks and the river and the old houses and the lunch-room across the street from the station, he could only half believe he was in Clyde again. It was all so entirely unchanged. It seemed only to have been waiting for him through a long hard winter instead of for almost twenty years.

  He had always been as sure as one could be of anything that someday he would return to Clyde. It was an assurance based on a sense of dramatic fitness and a suspicion, that must always have been in the back of his mind, that something there needed to be finished and that he must finish it some day. For years he had not avoided thinking of it. He often spoke of Clyde to Nancy and rather enjoyed it, and Bill and Evelyn often asked him to tell stories about the Webster Grammar School and the Meaders and the Masons and old Miss Sarah Hewitt and Grandmama and Aunt Dorothea and his older brother, Sam. He had never brought them to Clyde but at least they knew its folklore. It never hurt him to tell about it. He even told Evelyn about Jessica Lovell, a little girl with filmy dresses and patent leather shoes who lived in a fantastic house with a widow’s walk and a cupola and who played in a garden with box-bordered edges and flower beds stamped out in amusing shapes like cookies out of dough. He felt no pain any longer. He was completely free of Clyde. It was deep beneath the waters of experience.

  His thoughts of returning to Clyde had usually been in the form of fantasies. His stay in Clyde was always brief, in these fantasies. He might be motoring north with Nancy during his summer vacation from the bank on their way to spend a few days together in Maine. They would be driving up from Boston in a new convertible with red leather seats and curiously enough the car would always be a Cadillac and he would say to Nancy, as though the idea had struck him suddenly:

  “Let’s turn off Route 1 and drive through Clyde.”

  Nancy would be wearing a new tailored broadcloth suit, the color of which was never definite, and Nancy would say:

  “Why not, if we’re going past it?”

  They would drive down Johnson Street very slowly and they would never once get out of the car in that fantasy, but he would actually stop the car in front of the Lovell house and they would sit there commenting on it, as strangers often did who motored through Clyde.

  “That’s where she lived,” he would say. “It’s perfect Federalist architecture, but it’s sterile, isn’t it?” And she would say:

  “Sterile as a test tube. Maybe she’s in there now.” And he would say:

  “Possibly, but it isn’t as bad as those Currier and Ives temples in upstate New York.” And Nancy would say:

  “You’re the one who said it was sterile. All right, I’ve seen it. Check”—and she would tap the road map with her finger. She always loved to read the road map—“We can’t stay here all day if we’re going to spend the night at Poland Spring. What else is there to see?” And he would say:

  “Well, there’s the Webster Grammar School and the courthouse and the cemetery.” And she would say:

  “Let’s skip the courthouse and the cemetery.”

  Then he would start the car and they would go down Dock Street and up Spruce Street so that she could see where he had lived and she would say when she saw the house:

  “What, haven’t they got a bronze plaque on it?”—and if there was time he would show her the Judge’s house on Gow Street, and she would say:

  “Yes, dear. Light a cigarette for me, will you? I know why you’re so peculiar now. I’ll tell you what you can do. You can give them a tower someday with chimes in it. What’s the best way back to Route 1?”

  Then they would be leaving. He would toss away his cigarette and pull down his Panama hat. Somehow in this fantasy he always thought of himself in a Panama hat.

  When he was in England he had often daydreamed his way through another fantasy. In this one he would find himself traveling on Route 1 in an army car with the Air Corps insignia on the door. He would be alone in the back seat, just home from overseas, and a technical sergeant would be driving, and he would say, just on the spur of the moment:

  “Turn right at the next crossroad, Sergeant. I want to go through Clyde,” and when they reached the corne
r of Dock and Johnson streets he would say:

  “Drive ahead, Sergeant, and I’ll tell you when to stop. I want to get out for a minute. I haven’t been here for quite a while.”

  The army car would stop in front of Walters’s Drugstore and he would get out and stand on the sidewalk and light a cigarette. No one would speak to him but there would be a group of three or four people a few yards away whom he had known once but whom he could not remember. He would glance toward them in pleasant half-recognition. Then he would toss away his cigarette and turn back to the waiting car, and he would hear someone say in a low voice:

  “Isn’t that Charley Gray—and isn’t he a lieutenant colonel?”

  He would give no sign of having heard.

  “All right, Sergeant,” he would say, “let’s go,” and the army car would be moving down Dock Street.

  It was strange, in spite of those occasional rehearsals, that he was not prepared at all for what he saw when he got off the train. He must have thought of Clyde in terms of climax instead of anticlimax, but instead Clyde was like the churchyard in Gray’s “Elegy.” When the train moved away from the station it was like the lowing herd winding o’er the lea.

  He was standing on the platform holding his suitcase, an outlander now, a stranger, but at the same time nothing was strange to him at all. There was the same smell of coal smoke from the train, the same damp in the air, the same chill of frost in the ground and the same dull, forbidding April sky that he had known. It had been raining and the roofs were wet and the wind made tiny ripples in the puddles in the street and the clouds still hung sullenly over the town. It was going to rain again. The cars were parked about the station in the old disorderly way and a single car was waiting for passengers in the taxi space but everyone was walking home. The driver, a gangling boy of about seventeen, reminded Charles of Earl Wilkins but of course he was not Earl because he was too young to be.

  “Taxi, sir?” he asked, and his voice sounded like Earl’s.

  It never occurred to Charles until he heard the driver’s voice that he would not be walking home to Spruce Street, now that he was off the train. He had been thinking of himself and Clyde without ever planning what he would do when he arrived there. Now he did not know where to go and he did not want to go anywhere. He wanted to be alone but he could not stand there holding the suitcase.

  “Taxi, sir,” the driver called again. The taxis at the station had always called strangers sir.

  His cousin Jerry and his Aunt Ruth Marchby were in Clyde, as far as he knew, through his mother’s letters from Kansas City. They might be hurt if he did not stay with them but it seemed abrupt and almost rude to appear unexpectedly when he should have telephoned that morning from Boston. No one ever dropped in suddenly on anyone in Clyde.

  “Yes. Just a minute,” he said.

  There were the Masons. He knew they still lived on Spruce Street, also from his mother’s letters, and the Masons, too, might be hurt if he did not stay with them, but Mr. and Mrs. Mason would be very old and it might be upsetting to them.

  “I guess I’ve got to go somewhere,” he said, and he found himself staring at the driver again. “Are you any relation to Earl Wilkins?”—and the driver said that he was Earl Wilkins’s son.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “I haven’t been here for quite a while. Is the Clyde Hotel still running?”

  In all his years in Clyde he had hardly been inside the Clyde Hotel. It was where drummers stayed and visitors who came to do business with Wright-Sherwin and the mills.

  “You mean the inn,” Earl Wilkins’s son said. “They call it the Clyde Inn now.”

  “Tell your father,” Charles began, and he felt self-conscious and unsure of himself, “tell him Charley Gray was asking for him. We used to go to school together.” He had never thought that he would have to introduce himself in Clyde. “I guess you’d better take my suitcase and take it up to the hotel, I mean the inn. Tell them at the inn I’ll be along in a little while. I think I’ll walk around.” He took a dollar out of his pocket though he felt awkward about tipping Earl Wilkins’s son. “Just take the bag and keep the change.”

  “Thanks,” Earl’s son said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “And don’t forget to tell your father Charley Gray was asking for him.”

  “I’ll tell him all right,” Earl’s son said, “and thanks a lot.” At least he no longer called him sir.

  It was not at all like those stories he had read of persons returning to the scenes of their childhood. He was not Rip van Winkle after a twenty-year sleep. He was simply back in Clyde on an earlier train than usual.

  There were a few places that he did not want to see—the part of Johnson Street where the Lovell home stood, the Judge’s house on Gow Street, and Spruce Street; so he walked up Fillmore Street from the station, not along Chestnut, as he would have if he had been going to Dock Street and then home. First there were the shabby rooming houses near the station, where the workers in the shoeshops and Wright-Sherwin lived, and then came the larger houses as Fillmore approached the northern end of Johnson Street, but he was not thinking of the street. The wind and the dampness of the air were so characteristic of reluctant spring that he might have been waiting in front of the courthouse again for Jessica to come by, just by accident, in her Dodge car. It was too late for snowdrops already but in a flower bed with a southern exposure blue grape hyacinths and a few crocuses might be blooming, flaming orange, white and blue. He saw none and he did not look for them but he was as certain that they would be there as that there would be robins in the budding branches of the lilacs. The willow branches would be turning yellow and on some wooded slope beneath fallen oak leaves there might even be hepaticas. Spring was like autumn, except that everything was coming to life instead of dying. In the country the peeper frogs would be singing in the puddles that could not yet soak through the sodden, frosty ground. Clyde, unhindered by its ghosts, was approaching its annual resurrection.

  The Episcopal Church, with the flat tombs in its small churchyard, was on the corner of Fillmore and Johnson streets. He did not look up at its steeple and its cross but he remembered that his Aunt Jane always said as she passed it that she was glad she was a Unitarian. She had said so on the hot summer’s day when he had walked past it with her and Dorothea on their way to the Historical Society to hear his mother read her paper. He was walking in the same direction now and soon the Historical Society was in front of him, behind its cast-iron fence on its moist brown lawn, but there were no groups of people waiting for a meeting. “Clyde Historical Society,” a new sign by the old brass cannon read. “Open weekdays, 2 P.M. to 5 P.M., except Saturdays.” It was a quarter before five.

  A bell clanged when he opened the front door, like an old shop bell. There was the same disorder in the hall, the same two antique settles he remembered, and the flintlock muskets, the fire buckets and the blunderbuss. The light in the hall was gray but somehow strong, because the days were growing longer.

  The custodian of the Historical Society, he remembered, had always been Miss Smythe, but it was a Miss Smythe of the present who appeared to answer the bell. She had the same grim, watchful expression—she was just the age Miss Smythe had been—and she wore a shabby buttoned sweater because the place was cold. She was looking at him with Miss Smythe’s lack of welcome and he would not have been surprised if she had told him to run along as Miss Smythe had when he and Jackie Mason had called there once.

  “We close at five o’clock,” she said.

  “Yes,” Charles said, “I know. I just wanted to look around for a few minutes.”

  “There won’t be time to see much before five o’clock,” she said.

  “Yes,” Charles said again. “I just wanted to look around.” He was simply another of the objects in that indiscriminate mixture of things in the Historical Society which all belonged somewhere else and to some other age.

  “The admission is twenty-five cents,” the custodian was saying. “The South S
ea ornaments and the ship models are in the room to the left and there are collections upstairs, too, but we close at five o’clock.”

  The white bone ship still stood in the center of the room to the left. The Chinese pagoda with its wind bells and the sextants were still on the tables and the ship pictures were still on the walls, still plowing under full sail through their conventional canvas seas. The chairs were in rows in the assembly room, facing the same stage on which his mother had stood, and he could almost hear his mother’s voice. He could still remember the opening of that paper.

  “Every one of us here, I am sure, has seen a certain gray stone house with a mansard roof … As Longfellow, Miss Lyte’s old friend, expressed it so beautifully once—‘the beauty and mystery of the ships, and the magic of the sea.’”

  Nothing was ever entirely over.

  “I’m sure we are all most grateful to Mrs. Gray for a charming paper and a delightful afternoon,” he could hear Mr. Lovell saying.

  Nothing was ever entirely over, but he still wondered why anyone should have brought a suit of samurai armor from Japan and why it should be resting upstairs now in the Historical Society, meaninglessly and yet with some hidden meaning.

  Before he left he walked to the lawn in back where tea had been served that summer afternoon. He knew the exact place where he had stood with his mother and father and he remembered exactly where Mr. Lovell had knelt on the grass and had thrown his arms around Jessica. He could almost hear the locusts in the elm trees.

  “Pa,” Jessica was saying, and he could see her lacy white dress and her white socks and her patent leather slippers, “can’t we go home now, please?”