Point of No Return (26 page)

“Why, no,” John Gray said. “He was dead long before I arrived, Miss Sarah. He married after he was fifty.”

“It's hard,” Miss Sarah said, “to remember everything, but I did especially want to mention Captain Tom. There are more ship captains' families left than shipowners', aren't there, but then of course there were more ship captains, and the owners have moved away.”

“Yes,” his father said. “Things are quieter along the river now.”

“It was the fire,” Miss Sarah said. “Grandfather always used to say that nothing was the same after the fire.”

“You don't mean the fire of 1820,” Aunt Jane asked, “when the waterfront burned down?”

“My dear,” Miss Sarah said, “what other fire has there ever been? I can almost remember it—almost. There was so much talk of it when I was a little girl that I was afraid of candles. It started in the Higgins boat yard, a careless Negro boy with turpentine. The poor Holts never recovered from it. The sparks blew up to Johnson Street. We have the buckets that we used in the barn, the Pine Tree fire buckets.”

“Have you really?” John Gray said. “I didn't know that.”

“It always made me afraid of Negroes,” Miss Sarah said, “even before the war. If it hadn't been for the fire those new people, the Stanleys, would never be in the Holt house. Nothing has been quite the same.”

“Charles,” his mother said, “will you please go out and ask Mrs. Murphy for some hot water?”

Mrs. Murphy herself was a creaky old woman with snow-white hair and a round, florid face. She was talking to Mary Callahan in the kitchen.

“Sure those were the days,” Mrs. Murphy was saying. “Sure the Lovells had six horses.”

“Six horses?” Mrs. Callahan said. “What would they do with them?”

“Six horses or ten horses,” Mrs. Murphy said. “The Lord knows how many, and my own husband was the coachman, God rest his soul. What is it, young man?”

“More hot water, please,” Charles said.

“Now see the manners of him,” Mrs. Murphy said. “He has the manners of anyone on Johnson Street.”

“And why shouldn't he have the manners, I want to know?” Mary Callahan asked. “The Grays are as good as all your people on Johnson Street.”

When he returned from his errand in the kitchen, Miss Sarah was sipping her tea, and her cup shook but nothing spilled.

“It's been a lovely tea party,” she said. “What else was it I was going to say? I'm sure there was something else. I told you, didn't I, about the cemetery?”

“Why, no, you didn't, Miss Sarah,” his mother said.

“Well, it doesn't matter at the moment. I remember what I wanted to say. That paper at the Historical Society—it reminded me so of dear Alice Lyte. She was such friends with the Marchby girls. Do you remember the colored woman?”

“What colored woman?” his mother asked.

“The one who was passing through to Canada before the war. She sewed a whole dress for Alice before they rowed her across the river, a whole dress in two days. She was very light colored. John?”

“Yes, Miss Sarah,” his father said.

“I'm sorry that things didn't go so well at Harvard. It was such a disappointment to Vernon.”

“So he told me,” John Gray said. “I've been trying to do better since, Miss Sarah.”

“And I know you will,” Miss Sarah said. “You'll get hold of yourself in time. Let me see, there's something else I wanted to say. Oh, yes, do you know what's happened? The Rose of Sharon bush is blooming again, the pink one. And now I really must be going.”

“Oh, please don't go,” his mother said.

“No, dear, I must be going, if you'll give me your hand. It's been such a nice tea party. One should move out of one's orbit sometimes.”

“May I walk back with you, Miss Sarah?” John Gray asked.

“Oh, no, Johnny,” she said. “I can make my way quite well alone, if you'll see me to the door.”

There was a silence after the front door had closed. The house was returning to its norm, but slowly, very slowly.

“Oh, dear me,” John Gray said. “It was more nautical than I thought it would be, wasn't it?”

“I don't see why she came,” Aunt Jane said.

“
Noblesse oblige,
” his father said. “She was calling on the Captain's family.”

“She's failing,” Aunt Jane said. “She isn't what she used to be.”

Charles's father stood up and moved about the room restlessly, but there were still echoes of Miss Sarah's voice.

“Nothing's the way it used to be,” he said. “Charley, did you ever have a telescope?”

“I don't see why you ask him that, just out of the blue,” his mother said.

“Because my father gave me one,” John Gray said, “a telescope or a spyglass. It's gone but it's around somewhere if I could only turn the clock back. It's back there in my mind, brand-new.” Then Charles saw that he was smiling at him. The shadows were going from the room.

“I'm going to get you a telescope, Charley. Every boy ought to have one.”

Charles did not want a telescope and it was just as well, because his father never kept those promises. Miss Sarah Hewitt was gone and the tea party was over.

3

Few Things Are Impossible to Diligence and Skill

—
SAMUEL JOHNSON

Malcolm Bryant, who had come to Clyde as a complete stranger with a scientific preoccupation and only his boyhood in a small Midwestern town as a basis for comparison, had called Clyde a ghost town, as though it were like an abandoned Colorado mining settlement. It was true that Clyde had not changed much since the sailing days, because its harbor was now useless for heavy shipping. It had no water power as the mill towns further up the river had and it had little to attract summer tourists. It was a place to be born in and a place to leave, but it was not a ghost town.

There was a curtain, translucent but not transparent, between the present and the past. When you were young you did not bother in the least about it because there was too much present, and thus you accepted the older people and you accepted their deaths very easily, because you were so occupied with living. They disappeared behind that translucent curtain, which moved forward a little every year to cover up the year before. Charles knew, for instance, that Aunt Mathilda was going to die and when she did everyone said it was a mercy and so much easier for her poor sister Jane. She was gone and life went on, and she was hard to remember. Dorothea was too worried about Frank Setchell to remember much, and Sam was too occupied with problems of revolt, and Charles still had too much to learn.

He had to learn the new steps at dancing school and new jokes from the Meader boys and
The Bells
by Edgar Allan Poe for the declamation contest in the seventh grade. He had to learn why certain people thought the Catholic Church was a political menace, and what was difficult about the Irish, and why the boys on Johnson Street, the Thomases and the Stanleys, went away to boarding school when he and his friends did not. He had to learn why couples sat in back of the courthouse at night. He had to learn why Washington Irving's
Sketch Book
was worth reading, and he had to learn the dates and facts in the school history of the United States. Besides he had to follow Sam around when Sam would let him, and when Sam would not he had to talk things over with Jack Mason. It was hard to understand why Sam should have been discontented because Sam could come and go as he wanted, he was on the high school football team, and May Mason, who was the prettiest girl at high school, liked him better than anyone else.

One's ideas about everything underwent perpetual change while one was growing up, such as ideas of God and immortality and of wealth and poverty, and even one's family was not a constant quantity. You knew them better than anyone else, but suddenly something would happen and they were not the people you had thought they were. This experience was like seeing the back of a house for the first time when you had always been familiar with its front. You knew the lawn and the front windows, but in back were the clothes yard, the garbage pail, the woodshed, and the weedy garden. Nevertheless, it was still the same house. That was the way it was with the family, Charles used to think. Sometimes they turned their fronts to you and sometimes they turned their backs.

That was the way it was with Sam and his father and with Dorothea and all the rest of them. The scene that Charles remembered most clearly, the one that changed his ideas about them most, must have occurred when he was twelve and when Sam was seventeen. Dorothea must have been having supper with Olive Haskell, who was her best friend then, because he could not remember her being there at Spruce Street. It was obviously some months after his Aunt Mathilda's death, but the scene was unique and too vital to be confused with this or that.

His father had been in Boston all that day and Charles had been aware for some time that certain things happened, or were apt to happen, when his father went to Boston. Since his father had taken him with him to Boston several times, Charles could imagine his father stepping off the train, walking past the panting locomotive into the old North Station and through the dingy waiting room out to that street with the elevated railway overhead into a sea of sound and faces.

“I'll take you again sometime, Charley,” his father used to say.

He was almost always too busy, but it was only fair to admit that those occasions on which his father had taken him to Boston must have represented a definite sacrifice, for they were antiseptic, useful and educational, consisting of a trip to the art museum or to the Old North Church, or a visit to the statue of the man who first used ether or to the brass letters on the sidewalk at the scene of the Boston Massacre. His father was conversant with all these conventional spectacles but Charles suspected, always, that when John Gray was alone he must have done other things.

“You're too young to understand what I have to do here, Charley,” was all he ever said. “I have a few investments that I have to look out for on Congress Street. It's a very good thing to go to Boston or New York occasionally. I don't want you to pin me down to it, but sometime you and I will certainly go down to New York—sometime when everything is going right.” It was only fair to remember, too, that John Gray did take him to New York, after Aunt Mathilda died.

It was a summer afternoon again and except for Mrs. Murphy in the kitchen no one else was in the house. Charles was reading
The House of the Seven Gables
in the parlor and had reached the eloquent passage where old Judge Pyncheon was sitting motionless in his chair. He heard the front door slam and then the sound of his father whistling in the hall. When his father entered the parlor, he was carrying a copy of the
Boston Evening Transcript
and the
Boston News Bureau
and the latest
Atlantic Monthly,
a box of cigars, and a pound box of candy.

“Well, well,” he said. “Where's Mother?”

“She's out,” Charles said. “I think she's at the Women's Club.”

“Well, well,” his father said. “So you're reading
The House of the Seven Gables.
Whoever thought it was a children's book was a very innocent person. Have you a knife in your pocket, Charley? That's right. A boy should always have a knife, to whittle things and carve his name. I think I'll open this cigar box.” He sat down in the wing chair and lighted a cigar and the smell of the cigar smoke mingled with his words. “I think it's time, Charley, or about time, that we had a talk about your education. Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, not to mention Irving and Harriet Beecher Stowe—they all have a place in the cosmos but it would be nice for you to know that there are other, better writers. These are only a twig on a great tree, but don't quote me as saying so, Charley.” He smiled, leaned back in the wing chair, and blew a puff of cigar smoke at the ceiling. “I'm afraid you're having a wretched education—not that I'm against our public school system but it is a school of life, not letters. I wonder how it would be if you went to Groton next year? You'd be old enough to enter the first or second form. I wish I had gone to Groton.”

There was no need for Charles to answer and he knew that his father did not want to be interrupted.

“I suppose Sam should have gone to Groton, but then the opportunity didn't exist for Sam. Well, suppose you did go to Groton, then a year at Harvard—I'd like you to meet Kittredge—and perhaps a year at Oxford.” He flipped the ash from his cigar into the empty fireplace. “I wish we could all go abroad, but it's difficult with the war, even with Wilson keeping us out of it.” He paused and looked at the smoke cloud above him. “If we can't go abroad, it might be a good idea for you to see a little of this country. We might take a trip in a week or two—Chicago, the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, San Francisco.” He paused again but his thoughts were moving in a swift, agreeable stream. “China. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to consider a little trip to China. You've never read Huc and Gabet, have you? Or Lafcadio Hearn?”

He stood up and began pacing about the room waving his cigar in broad arcs, not caring where the ashes fell. His freshly cut hair, the aura of bay rum and cigar smoke, his closely clipped mustache, made his face the face of a world traveler, unburdened by inadequate finance or by provincialism. It was unreal. Charles's common sense told him it was unreal.

“Have you read
Rasselas,
Charley? ‘Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.' Now the next time I'm in Boston, I'll stop in at the American Express.” Then they heard the front door open. “That must be your mother. Hello, Esther.”

“John,” his mother asked, “did you have a good day in Boston?” Charles always remembered her expression, both pleased and doubtful. “I wish you wouldn't drop those ashes on the floor.”