Point of No Return (28 page)

“Sam,” his mother said. “Sam.”

No one spoke for a moment. The rhythm of the talk was broken. They could hear Mrs. Murphy clattering the dishes in the kitchen and the rattle of a wagon and the clap of a horse's hoofs on Spruce Street. John Gray was looking thoughtfully at Sam, and something made Charles sit taut and motionless.

“I know,” John Gray said slowly. “I'm sorry about that, Sammy.”

Sam looked slowly up from his plate.

“If you're sorry,” he said, “why do you go on with it?”

“Sam,” Esther Gray said sharply. “Sam.”

It was all new to Charles, new and unforgettable. Sam was not the person he thought he was, and neither was his father, as they sat there gazing at each other.

“Just exactly what do you mean,” John Gray asked, “by going on with it?” Charles wished that nothing that was going on had happened and Sam must have wished it too, because he hesitated before he answered.

“The same old guff,” Sam said. “That's all.”

“I think it might be just as well,” his father spoke very carefully, “if you were to leave the table, Sam.”

In the silence that followed, Sam pushed back his chair and rose. “Sure I'll leave the table,” Sam said.

“Sam,” his mother called, “come back here and apologize to your father.”

“Oh, never mind,” John Gray said. “Leave him alone, Esther,” and before he had finished speaking the front door slammed.

They were all intensely embarrassed. There was nothing left but the family responsibility for smoothing things over, for pretending that nothing had happened.

“Charley, do you know whether Sam is troubled about anything?” his mother asked. “I wonder whether he's been having some trouble with May Mason. Charles, will you go out and get the ice cream?” But before Charles could move, his father spoke.

“Esther,” he said, “I think if it's all the same to you I'll go upstairs and read awhile. It's been a fine supper, but Charley will eat my ice cream for me, won't you, Charley?” and he clapped Charles on the shoulder.

“Oh, John,” his mother began. “Sam didn't mean—”

“Oh, never mind it, Esther,” John Gray said, and he rose and walked to her end of the table and bent down and kissed her. “There are some things I want to figure out upstairs and I can do it better without ice cream.”

She followed him to the foot of the stairs.

“John,” she called, “we might go sometime and look at Lyte's Castle.”

Then he heard his father laugh.

“Well, perhaps not Lyte's Castle, Esther,” he answered. “Let's trim it down a little. Perhaps Sammy was right about Lyte's Castle.”

The house on Spruce Street was one of those two-and-a-half-story oblong dwellings which Charles came later to associate with New England seaport towns. It was plainer than anything on Johnson Street, but with the same architectural plan—the hallway running from front to back, the staircase with its landing, the spacious rooms on the second story and the lower-studded, smaller rooms above, hot in summer, cold in winter. Charles and Sam slept on the top floor, because there was not room for everyone downstairs, and the boys could do what they wanted with the rooms up there. They could use the spool beds and the old pine bureaus with the drawers that stuck. They could keep all their possessions upstairs, instead of leaving them in the rest of the house. They could pin pictures on the walls and arrange things in any way they wanted, but they had to make their own beds and look after the rooms themselves; and it was not such a bad idea, provided you had a sense of order.

When Charles went to bed that night, the moon was rising and the moon was large and yellow, almost full. He had been careful to move his bed so that the moonlight would not strike his face because Mrs. Murphy had told him that moonlight on your face when you slept made you crazy, but from the shadow where he lay he could see the rest of the room, looking not the least as it did in daylight but indefinite and larger, as though there were no walls. This must have been why, when he awoke suddenly, he had the unpleasant sensation of not knowing where he was until he saw the windows and the trees outside. Then he saw a shadow which did not belong there near his bed and he heard Sam's voice.

“Charley, I didn't mean to wake you up.”

“What is it?” Charles asked. “Is anything the matter?”

“I just looked in,” Sam said, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. His voice was the only thing that was like him. The rest of him was shadow.

“What time is it?” Charles asked, and the bed creaked under Sam's weight.

“I don't know. After eleven o'clock.”

“Where've you been?” Charles asked.

“Out, around,” Sam said. “Walking around, thinking.”

Neither of them spoke for a while and Charles knew that Sam did not want to be alone.

“If he hadn't shot his mush off,” Sam said, “I wouldn't have shot off mine.”

Again there was an interlude of wretched silence and Charles could hear the elm leaves rustle.

“I don't like him,” Sam said. “By God, I don't like him.”

Sam's voice sounded unreal and unpleasant in the moonlight.

“What's he ever done for us?” Sam said. “Not a goddam thing.”

It was very unpleasant in the moonlight and it was very unsettling to Charles because he had a deep respect for Sam's judgment.

“It's always the same damn thing,” Sam said. “First he shoots off his mush and then he ends by walking around his room like a squirrel, and it's never his fault when he's licked.” Again the room was filled with an uneasy, awful silence. “Whenever he gets his hands on money, he goes up to Boston and loses it.”

Charles did not know that Sam was discussing the eccentricities of a profit system or that it was his own first contact with a segment of living that he was later to know so well.

“How does he lose it?” he asked.

“You wouldn't understand it,” Sam said. “Never mind how he does. You wouldn't understand.”

There were a great many things about life that Charles did not understand but he could start with the assumption that his father was a highly intelligent man and that he must have known perfectly what the odds were. There was something which prevented men like him from stopping, something beyond the realms of ordinary reason.

“Listen, kid,” Sam said, “if you ever get to doing what he does, if you don't take a hitch in your pants and behave like other people, I'll beat the pants right off you.”

Sam still sat there and Charles could see his shadow as he leaned on his elbows with his chin in his hands.

“Charley.”

“Yes,” Charles said.

“If you're over at the Masons' tomorrow and you should happen to see May, I wish you'd give her this.” He was holding out a folded piece of paper.

“Why don't you give it to her yourself?” Charles asked.

“You give it to her,” Sam said. “That's a good kid, Charley.” Then Sam was gone and Charles lay staring at the moonlight, still wondering why his father acted as he did in Boston.

Once Charles did ask him why—long afterwards, the year when Charles had left Wright-Sherwin in Clyde to work in the Boston investment house of E. P. Rush & Company.

“Now don't preach to me, Charley,” his father had said. “I'm not going to stand any of your damn sanctimonious lectures.”

Charles said he was not preaching, he was only asking why he never stopped when he had a profit.

“There you go preaching,” John Gray said again. “All right, I'll tell you why—because I want everything or nothing.”

If you kept on wanting everything or nothing long enough, particularly if you became too anxious for it, perhaps you always ended with nothing.

4

Don't Let Anyone Tell You, My Young Friends, That There Is Any Such Thing as Luck …

Charles always thought of the Masons when things went wrong at home. In periods of bitterness and frustration he found himself wishing that Mr. Virgil Mason were his father and that the Grays could be happy like the Masons, living in a well-painted house with everything in order, even if Mr. Virgil Mason was not as bright as his father and never read much or talked about books. Mr. Mason's father had owned the drugstore on Lyford Street and had once compounded a toothache remedy which had sold well locally. Mr. Mason himself was in the insurance business in Boston and when he came home in the evening he liked to work in his small vegetable garden when there was light enough, a form of relaxation that John Gray hated. In the winter he liked to make things down cellar or do odd jobs around the house which were never done in the Gray house next door. Mr. Mason could make beautiful toy boats or little windmills and he liked having children around. Mrs. Mason, Charles realized, long before he was interested in such things, must once have been as pretty as May, but she was too stout now and did not worry any longer about her looks.

“Anyway,” he heard her say once, “I caught Virgil.”

His own mother was much prettier but he was sure she was not as happy as Mrs. Mason. At any rate, he always had a good time at the Masons'. May was pretty but she was not stuck-up about it and she did not correct him the way Dorothea did, and Jack was his best friend.

Charles could never discover why Jack was discontented, too. He used to think that Mr. Mason was the best sort of father one could imagine, but Jackie said once, in one of those long and confidential talks they used to have, that he wished his father were more like Charles's father.

“I don't see what's the matter with him,” Charles had said; but Jack had said there was plenty the matter with him. He was always in his shirt sleeves doing work that other people should do for him. On Sunday he would be hammering and sawing and tinkering outdoors where people could see him when they went to church. His father ought to go to church more often and not work on Sunday, even if it was only the Unitarian Church.

“But my father never goes,” Charles had told him; but Jack had said that all the rest of Charles's family did, even if it was only the Unitarian Church and not the Episcopalian.

“Besides,” Jackie had said, “my father never wants to do anything but sit around the house. He doesn't know the right people, and almost everybody likes your father.”

Charles agreed with Jackie Mason that they were both going to be very different from their fathers. They were going to make more money when they grew up, and they weren't going to live on Spruce Street. Yet Charles could never understand why Jack worried because his grandfather had been a druggist and why he was always complaining about the Mason house and the furniture. He was always reading magazine articles about successful men. It didn't matter where you started—even if your grandfather had been a druggist—it was a question of working hard, Jack said, and of meeting the right people. Jack had won the composition prize in the seventh grade by writing a composition on the boyhood of Andrew Carnegie, and his mind was always on success. For example, he was deeply interested in the career of Mr. Sullivan, who had bought the house across the street, because Mr. Sullivan had started out as a laboring man and now he was in the contracting business, making a lot of money.

“The only thing wrong,” Jack said, “is that he doesn't know the right people.”

It was Saturday afternoon when Charles went over to the Mason house with Sam's note in his pocket, and he opened the front door without knocking because he was Jack's best friend, Mrs. Mason had said, and he could go out and come in any time he wanted. When he was in the hall, he heard Mr. and Mrs. Mason talking in the front parlor.

“It's the way he is,” Mr. Mason was saying, “and it's none of my business, Margaret. There's no use arguing when it's the way he is.”

“It's so hard on poor Esther,” he heard Mrs. Mason say just before he reached the parlor doorway.

Mrs. Mason was darning a pair of Jack's stockings and Mr. Mason was in his shirt sleeves, sitting in front of a table covered with newspapers, mending a Canton china plate. His glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose and his heavy reddish face shone with perspiration and he held the broken pieces of china very carefully. It was remarkable that his heavy hands could do such delicate things.

“Oh,” Mrs. Mason said, and she looked startled. “Why, hello, Charley.”

“Hello,” Charles said. “Is May anywhere around?”

“My, my,” Mr. Mason said, “aren't you pretty young to be looking around for May?” and he smiled and pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose.

“Why, May's in the back room practicing, dear,” Mrs. Mason said, and then Charles could hear the notes of the Masons' old upright piano, “and Jack's out in the shed splitting kindling, and there's some lemonade in the kitchen.”

That was the way it always was at the Masons', lemonade, and everyone was happy. As he moved toward the back room, he heard May playing a waltz from
The Pink Lady,
not well, but he could recognize it, and he wished that Dorothea would ever play anything on the piano that he could understand. May's yellow hair was gathered up in a knot and she was wearing what Charles knew was her third-best dress, but still she looked very pretty. It might have been a perishable, Dresden china prettiness, but Charles was not aware of such things then. He never forgot May, sitting straight on the piano stool, her hands pounding the keys conscientiously. He remembered the curve of her white neck and though her head was turned away from him, he already had an impression of her blue eyes and her red, half-parted lips.

“Why, Charley,” she said, “I didn't know you were there. You sneaked in like an Indian.”

“I was making a lot of noise,” Charles said, “but you were making more.”

“It isn't nice to call it noise,” May said. “I wish I played as well as Dorothea.”