Point of No Return (21 page)

When he came back from the day in Boston, he was invariably exuberant. He usually returned with a box of candy and some magazines, and generally he smelled strongly of bay rum, showing that he had been to the barbershop at the Parker House. Then he would begin to discuss scholarly subjects, especially the London of Samuel Johnson. He loved to re-create a world of coaches and sedan chairs and smoke-filled coffeehouses. You could never say that John Gray was not industrious or erudite. He could quote pages of Boswell, fitting them aptly into every occasion. Charles still winced at the sight of a Boswell's
Johnson,
and yet when he finally saw London for himself he knew many aspects of the city very well because of certain evenings back in Clyde.

“The Old Man's off again,” Sam used to say. “You can tell it as soon as he starts on Mrs. Thrale.”

Still it was not always a bad time when the Old Man was off again. It was a cultivated household for a while, after John Gray got back from Boston. There was no doubt that he was a delightful man.

“Your father might have been anything,” his mother used to say, “anything.”

The next week he would take another day off and go to Boston. This time he would return with a box of cigars and with a few French novels. The cigars were a definite part of a pattern, because John Gray usually smoked a pipe if he smoked at all. That was why Charles always hated Havana cigar smoke. At this period John Gray's thoughts would turn to Honoré de Balzac, his sleepless nights and his strange, frustrated love. Someday they must all go to Paris. It was ridiculous for Malcolm Bryant to have placed them in the lower-upper class. He should have seen John Gray when his brown mustache, usually dejected and drooping, was clipped like a British colonel's and when he had a new suit from Dunne's.

“By God,” Sam used to say, “now he's upstairs juggling figures,” and John Gray could do it, too. Charles had never seen anyone who could make mathematics as logical and simple. “He must be doing pretty well. Why doesn't the damn fool ever stop?”

Of course he never stopped. There would always be the last trip in the cycle, when John Gray came home from Boston with nothing to say at all. There would be a discreet silence in the house. There was nothing in the world quite like those silences.…

The library where Charles was sitting gave him a sense of not belonging anywhere. His mouth felt dry and his forehead felt moist and he was terribly alone.

“Charley.” It was Nancy calling softly from the top of the stairs so as not to wake the children. “Charley, aren't you coming up to bed?”

“Yes, in just a little while, Nance,” he answered. “I'm not sleepy.”

“Oh, Charley,” she called back, “please come up. It's after one o'clock.”

“In just a few minutes, Nance,” he said, and he opened the book he was holding.

Malcolm Bryant and his father had taken to each other from the very beginning and when Malcolm began dropping in at Spruce Street in the evenings years previously, Charles's mother was delighted. It was so good for Father, she said, to talk with an intelligent young man who could share Father's interests. They were interests which were boring to Charles because of constant exposure to them. To Charles, Samuel Johnson was a rude, untidy old gentleman with an itch, who had made a number of rash and not very brilliant statements, set down by an assiduous toady named Boswell, a snob who sucked up to the nobility and who had nothing better to do than to run after the old gentleman with a notebook. Charles could see nothing whatsoever in Johnson's heavy-handed prose. It was as slow as cold molasses, but now as he ran through the pages of
Yankee Persepolis,
he began to understand why Malcolm had been a Johnson addict and he understood at last what Malcolm had seen in his father. Malcolm had been attracted to John Gray not as an individual but as a social entity, an odd piece which he was trying to fit into the social puzzle of Clyde which had produced and tolerated him.

All at once it occurred to Charles that he was doing right now what his father had often succeeded in doing so magnificently. He was trying to forget the present by immersing himself in something else, by striving to identify himself with someone else. Instead of Samuel Johnson, he was using Malcolm Bryant. He did not care about Malcolm's ideas or his social worker's patter in themselves, except insofar as they took him away from his own ideas. If he could only concentrate on Malcolm, if he could only give him the attention that he had learned to give to papers at the bank, he could forget the bank altogether, he could forget the conference room and the antiseptic, oily smell of the vault, and Roger Blakesley and Tony Burton. He could forget the scene in the locker room and the queer, disturbing conversation by the window in the Whitakers' apartment, when that girl had made him think of Jessica Lovell. He could forget the knotty pine walls of the library which were enclosing him in impersonal mediocrity. Please, God, his mind was saying, get me out of this. Please get me out of this.

He was examining a chapter heading, “The Concepts behind This Survey.” The words were as heavy as Johnson's words, without any of their waxy Chippendale polish. Social scientists were usually involved writers, who continually tripped over a jargon of their own invention. He again remembered Malcolm as the brain behind an agency of social spies, with an office force and card catalogues back in Boston.

Two of Malcolm's assistants, he remembered, had appeared one hot night at open house day on Johnson Street, a girl with dry brown hair and hornrimmed spectacles, for whom he felt sorry because she was an outlander from the Middle West, and an undernourished man with an Adam's apple, who perspired beneath the armpits and only drank fruit punch. He never imagined that these two were a team of skillfully briefed probers who had been snooping innocuously through Clyde, standing away from it in a friendly way as though it were an ant hill, then worming their way deviously into the confidence of its inhabitants, sympathizing with frustrations, picking up gems of information, and rushing away secretively to an office to record those gems on charts of death and birth rates and of marriage incidence according to income groups. The investigative team operated according to scientific rules. They were directed to listen, when they buttonholed an individual, in a patient and friendly manner in order to discover the individual's approximate place in the society. They should only inject their own personalities in order to relieve fears or anxieties or to praise the interviewee. They should listen not only to what a person wanted to say but to what he did not say. All of this, according to Malcolm, demanded extreme flexibility. They must have done their work well, because Charles had seldom noticed it.

He remembered Malcolm Bryant and his team examining Clyde and occasionally descending to taste of its life, like minor gods and nymphs sporting with mortals. They were not interested in individuality, Malcolm was now explaining, but in social personality. It was clear now what Malcolm had been doing those evenings when he had called at Spruce Street and stayed for supper.

“Typical of a lower-upper family,” Charles read again, “are the Henry Smiths—father, mother, son and daughter. Like other lower-upper families, they dwell on a side street (‘side streeters'), yet are received on Mason Street. Mr. Smith, with investment interests in Boston …”

It was not fair to blame Malcolm, because it must have been confusing even for a god to know exactly what John Gray had been doing, but it was agreeable to remember that the god had fallen once.

“Charley.” It was Nancy calling again from the top of the stairs. “Aren't you ever coming to bed?”

“All right,” Charles called back. “I'll be up in just a minute, Nance, try to go to sleep.”

“What are you doing down there?”

“I'm reading.”

“Can't you read tomorrow?”

“I'll be up in just a minute,” Charles said. “You'll wake the children up. Try to go to sleep.”

His voice and Nancy's voice were only like the voices in a chorus. The interruption had not disturbed him.

“An upper-upper class family,” he was reading as he spoke, “may be typified by the Johnsons, who live on the upper side of Mason Street in one of those fine, three-storied Federalist houses, capped by the delicate balustrade of the widow's or captain's walk.”

Malcolm had let himself go at last. He was obviously describing the Lovells and their house on Johnson Street, studiously garbling the names, but as he had been writing, his memory of the Lovell house and of Mr. Laurence Lovell and Jessica must have blurred for an instant his concept of social personality.

“This gracious type of Federalist architecture is apparent here at its zenith. The gracious hallway of this mansion extends from front to rear, a fitting setting for the exquisite airy rising of its broad staircase …”

Yes, Malcolm Bryant for once had forgotten his social responsibility, now that he had turned from the Grays to the Lovells.

“A fitting place for the enshrinement of ancestral relics … a fitting frame for the rituals of the upper-upper class.… Mr. Johnson, a widower, suave and gracious, descendant of shipowners in the late eighteenth century, is a fitting head for the Johnson clan. Jacinth, his lovely only daughter, assisted by a maiden aunt, Miss Johnson, is eminently suited to give the family ritual an added charm. Her vivacity never quite conceals her seriousness or the impact of her social personality.”

Yes, Malcolm Bryant had felt the impact of Jessica Lovell's social personality. He had forgotten that he was a social anthropologist, as he had penned those words. He had tried in a brief interval to be a poet in prose. He had contrived, within the limits of his talent, to express emotion and desire. He had called her Jacinth instead of calling her Mary or Molly or Miss X. In Malcolm's memory, Jessica was still there in the hallway, looking him straight in the eyes. She would never be Desdemona again and Malcolm would never be Othello, speaking of the habits of the Borneo head-hunters and the Zambesis or about that trip he would take someday to the Orinoco.

“In the rear of the house,” Charles was reading, “on a gentle slope rises the hundred-and-fifty-year-old Johnson formal garden, a verdant shrine of ancestor worship in itself, crowned by a delicate latticed summerhouse known as a gazebo.” Malcolm Bryant would never sit in that gazebo again, but then neither would Charles Gray.

Malcolm Bryant had shown without his knowing it that he had been impressed by austere beauty, a foreign interloper who could never have wholly grasped it. Through his own enthusiastic inadvertence, he had invoked a vision of Johnson Street—fantastic and beautiful on a dusky summer evening. Charles could see the broad uneven sidewalks of worn brick, pushed gently upwards by the roots of the elms. He could see the tall white fences with their urns and pineapples, and the houses rising behind them, disdainful of newer houses. He could see the cornices and the fanlights and the cupolas. The mere recollection of Johnson Street on a summer evening made this effort of Malcolm Bryant's a gross impertinence. It was still an impertinence when he thought of Spruce Street with its plainer picket fences, and of the moldering houses nearer the river inhabited by what Malcolm called the lower-lower class, the shanty Irish, not the lace-curtain Irish, and the Greeks and Poles. Malcolm Bryant and his team had seen them all and had checked them against their diagrams, but he and his team did not know Johnson Street or any other street in Clyde …

Yet, as he continued to turn the pages he could feel that his resentment was flagging, because momentarily, at any rate, time had dulled emotion, so that he could see the outlines of the Clyde of Malcolm Bryant, as he could never have seen them when he had lived in Clyde. He could see the passionless exactness of that scientific picture, stripped of sentiment's flattering lights and shades. The Clyde of Malcolm Bryant was a complex of instinctive forces and behavior. Its inhabitants moved into a pattern like bees in a hive, or like the Spartans under King Lycurgus. There was the individual's unknowing surrender to the group, the unthinking desire for order. He could see the Grays on Spruce Street and the Lovells on Johnson Street through Malcolm Bryant's eyes, and it was hard to believe that he ever could have lived in this arbitrary frame, illustrated by curves and diagrams, and now he was living in another. He could almost see the Stuyvesant Bank and that evening at Oak Knoll in a new revealing light—almost, but not entirely.

In spite of the years that had passed, in spite of all he had done and thought, he was still the likable Smith boy in the Bryant
Yankee Persepolis
striving to move on from the lower-upper, and still in mortal danger of dropping, of going down instead of up. He was still Charley Gray gazing wistfully at Johnson Street.…

“Charley.” It was Nancy again. She was standing in the doorway in her quilted-silk wrapper. “It's two o'clock.”

Her tone was definite, telling him that really this nonsense must stop, and he was very glad that she was there. He closed the book and pushed himself out of the leather armchair.

“All right,” he said. “All right, Nance.”

“Come on,” Nancy said, “put out the light.”

When he snapped off the light by the chair everything was pitch black for a second and then he saw her shadow against the dim light from the hall.

“The Martins will think we've been having a fight,” Nancy said, “with a light on downstairs at two in the morning.”

“All right, Nance,” he said, and he put his arm around her and she raised her hand and touched his cheek.

“You shaved before the dance, didn't you? At least you won't need to shave again in the morning. If you're going to take that plane, I'll drive you to La Guardia.”

“It's a pretty long way,” Charles said.

“That's all right,” Nancy said. “I'm going to miss you.”