Point of No Return (35 page)

Jessica began to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked.

“It sounds so funny,” she said. “Wait a minute. Can you drive a car?”

“No,” Charles said. “We haven't got a car.”

“Well, I can,” she said. “We'll go driving tomorrow. Come around at three o'clock. Oh, hello, Mr. Bryant. What happened to you?”

Jessica Lovell was speaking to the stranger, an untidily dressed man in his middle thirties, with a bony face and deep-set eyes.

“This is Mr. Gray,” Jessica was saying, “Mr. Bryant.”

It seemed to Charles that Mr. Bryant looked like a teacher or a college professor. He had the stooping posture and the studious look, but his face was tanned and something in his manner was not entirely like that of a professor. It was sharper and more inquisitive.

“I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Gray,” he said, and his speech reminded Charles of Elbridge Sterne's. “Do you live here in Clyde?”

“Yes,” Charles said, “I live here.”

“Well, that's fine,” Mr. Bryant said. “Let me see now, you must be one of the Grays on Spruce Street.”

“Yes,” Charles said, “we live on Spruce Street.”

“I'm still trying to orient myself,” Mr. Bryant said. “It's a little hard to get the general structure straight. I suppose Miss Lovell's been telling you about me.”

“Why, no,” Charles said, “not much.”

“Well, you see we're considering doing a little job on this town,” Mr. Bryant said. “My God, it's a wonderful town, a beautiful, static, organized community.”

Charles looked questioningly at Jessica Lovell. He could not understand what Mr. Bryant meant and he wondered if she did.

“Mr. Bryant is doing a survey,” Jessica said. “I told you. Some sort of a social survey, and he's just back from Borneo.”

“That's right,” Mr. Bryant said, “just back from a call on the head-hunters.”

The fifes and drums began to play again and the Pine Trees were putting their backs in it to beat the Eurekas. “Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here,” the fifes and drums were playing.

“What are they like?” Charles asked.

“What are they like?” Mr. Bryant said. “They're people, just like you and me. All men are basically alike. What's your first name, Mr. Gray?”

“It's Charles,” Jessica told him. “Charley Gray.”

“Well, why don't we all get on a first-name basis?” Mr. Bryant asked. “I'm Malcolm, and you're Charley and Jessica. God, this is a wonderful town.”

“Charley and Jessica are awfully glad you like it,” Jessica said. “Aren't we, Charley?”

“And, my God, this thing”—Malcolm Bryant waved his arm in a gesture that embraced the training field—“this beautiful, tribal ritual. It's like the Maori war dance. I'm just beginning to get it straight. It doesn't include the whole tribe, does it?”

“Jessica and Charley don't know what you're talking about,” Jessica said.

“I mean it's a folk custom,” Malcolm Bryant said. “Of course, you think of it as a thing called a firemen's muster, but obviously, deep down inside, it's the survival of a tribal rite. But the whole community isn't in it, not all the classes. I mean your father wouldn't be in it, Jessica. It's more of a folk custom.”

“Charles's father is,” Jessica said. “He's right up there now on the machine.”

“My God.” Mr. Bryant turned around. The Pine Trees were pumping again. “That's interesting. Now let me get this straight. You're a college man, aren't you, Charley?”

“How did you know?” Charles asked.

“Because it's my business to know social groups.” Malcolm Bryant rubbed his hands together. “Look at Jessica. She has Smith written all over her.”

“Vassar,” Jessica said, “not Smith.”

“Is your father a college man, Charley?”

“He went to Harvard for a while,” Charles said.

“And there he is up there,” Malcolm Bryant said. “Now, that's very interesting. Up there and out of his group. It's going to take me quite a while to get this structure straight.”

“It's four o'clock,” Jessica said. “I'd better be going home. Are you coming back to the house, Mr. Bryant?”

“Well, if it's just the same to you,” Malcolm Bryant said, “I'd better stay right here. Somebody says there's going to be a raffling off and I'm just beginning to get a picture of the cliques. You don't mind, do you, Jessica?”

“No,” Jessica said, “I don't mind. Charley can take me home. He understands the cliques.”

“My God,” Malcolm Bryant said, “this is a wonderful town, and I certainly want to meet your father, Charley.”

“Well, have a good time,” Jessica said. “These head-hunters are going home. It's time to lock up the virgins. Come on, Charley.”

8

Not That I'm Not Very Glad You Found Him

It was four and Charles had left the Pine Tree clubhouse at one o'clock but the gap of time seemed much greater when Jessica Lovell and he turned off Training Street to Johnson Street. They had left the hose players and the balloons and the sounds of the crowd on the training field, but Charles Gray had left more than this behind him. He had left a part of his gaucheness and shyness and some of the bewilderments of youth. He had stepped across a boundary into another land. He had reached one of those turning points, those unperceived corners, which everyone rounds at some time or other without knowing that there has been a corner—but he was not conscious of any of this. His thoughts were moving to that refrain of Malcolm Bryant's. By God, it was a wonderful town.

All of Johnson Street looked on them kindly as he and Jessica Lovell walked along it. No earlier memories of the sunsets across the river, gilding Clyde's white church spires, no memories of the waves on the beach by the river mouth, could compare with his present receptiveness. The chilly autumn air and the clear northern sunlight and the color of the turning leaves gave all of Johnson Street a friendly brilliance, and the Federalist façades of its houses behind their delicate white fences were no longer austere or untouchable. He was a part owner of all of Clyde that afternoon, of Johnson Street and the side streets, of the courthouse and the elms and maples, of Dock Street with its shops, of River Street by the river. He was like his father, able to move anywhere and to understand anyone in Clyde. By God, it was a wonderful town.

Jessica was talking about Malcolm Bryant. He had just appeared in the house one day with a letter from someone. He was working for some kind of foundation, like the Rockefeller or the Carnegie. Something, she could not tell what, had made her father like him. It must have been because he liked foundations and societies. Then when he had heard that Malcolm Bryant was doing a survey which might be published in some sort of book, he seemed to feel that Malcolm Bryant was his personal responsibility.

“You see,” Jessica said, “Father feels he's the world's greatest living authority on Clyde.”

“My father's an authority, too,” Charles told her.

“Does he keep going on about it?” Jessica asked.

Yes, Charles said, he kept going on about it.

“Well, you and I don't have to, do we?” Jessica said.

They were at an age, of course, when they could condone kindly the errors of their elders. She was wondering what it was that made people in Clyde, especially as they got older, talk more and more about the place, as though it were the most remarkable town in the world. As Jessica wondered, she would occasionally turn her head toward him, giving him appraising little glances as though she hoped that he agreed with her. She was wondering whether he had noticed that living in Clyde made people different from other people. Whenever she was back from Westover or later from Vassar College, she was always very conscious of this. She always thought that people in Clyde were like bees in a beehive, concentrated on their own errands without knowing there were any other beehives. She wondered if Charles knew what she meant, and strangely enough Charles had never thought that anyone else had been bothered by those ideas, but then he had been away himself a good deal. She knew he had been, Jessica was saying. He wasn't all tied up, well, by invisible strings. He did not have any of the prejudices or any of the queer little, well, hesitations. Had he ever noticed that living in Clyde was like walking through spiderwebs without any spiders? There were always those invisible strings, getting around you, brushing across your face—and strangely enough Charles knew exactly what she meant.

There was a boy, she said, who knew Charles and who came to call on her sometimes and he was always all covered with spiderwebs. He never could be natural for a single minute and he made her feel, too, all spiderwebby. Charles knew whom she meant. His name was Jackie Mason. At least she always called him Jackie to herself.

“Now he's always worried,” Jessica said, “because his grandfather was a druggist. That's one of his spiderwebs.” If he had not kept alluding to it, she would not have given it a thought but now it worried her, too. “I'm sure,” she said, “he reads the book of etiquette.”

He wanted to do the right thing, Charles told her. It was wonderful that she did not put him in the same category with Jackie but with her on an emancipated plane.

“People ought to do the right things naturally,” she said, “without reading them in books.”

And this, too, was what he had often thought.

She could see how Clyde must look to an outsider, she said, because she was partly an outsider herself, and so was he, since they had both been away to college. She only hoped that Malcolm Bryant did not think that she and Charles were like the rest of the natives—and she was afraid he did.

“Did you notice the way he looked at us?” she asked. “It made me feel as though you and I were on a microscopic slide.”

Charles laughed, and then they both were laughing. He was sure that he was not like Jackie Mason.

“I suppose there's something eccentric about every family,” she said. “I suppose”—she hesitated and then looked at him as though she were telling him a secret—“I suppose some people think Father's a little eccentric.”

“Well,” Charles said, “so's mine, I guess.”

He had never dreamed of saying such a thing to anyone before, but Jessica Lovell's mind was on her father—not his father.

“Of course,” she was saying, “Father's the dearest person in the world. I love him because he's so shy.”

Charles had never met Mr. Lovell, except long ago at the Historical Society, but he had seen him often enough, walking down Dock Street to the bank or to the post office. He had never struck Charles as being shy. Jessica must have been preparing him for an inevitable meeting, but he was not concerned with it then.

“Do you know what I think sometimes?” Jessica was saying. “When anyone comes to see me, I think Father's a little jealous, not that he really knows he is.”

Charles had been so absorbed by the conversation that the dwellings on Johnson Street had passed by him in a pleasant blur—until he saw the pineapples on the wooden fence before the Lovells' house and the border of autumn chrysanthemums. The gate stood open and a brick path lay before them, leading to the Corinthian portico of the Lovells' front door, and he saw old Mr. Fogarty slowly and rheumatically raking leaves on the front lawn.

“Well,” he said, “I'll come around tomorrow if you haven't got anything better to do.”

“Aren't you coming in now?” she asked.

“I guess I'd better not,” Charles said. “It's getting pretty late.”

“Why, it isn't late at all. It's just time for tea.”

He heard the leaves scrape noisily together under Mr. Fogarty's rake.

“I look pretty shabby,” he said, “to go anywhere for tea.” As a matter of fact, those old clothes of his were exactly the ones he should have worn, because his tweed coat and baggy flannel trousers showed that he did not consider calling on the Lovells a great occasion.

When they were in the hall, Jessica closed the front door noisily behind her and it made a cheerful, booming sound that echoed along the length of the hall and up the broad, airy staircase. She had pulled off her red felt hat and tossed it on a Chippendale chair and now she stood before the dusky glass of a great gold hall mirror, giving her head a quick impatient shake and pushing her soft wavy dark hair from her forehead. He could see his own reflection as he stood behind her and their glances met in the dark glass.

“We look like the portraits, don't we?” she said. “That's the trouble with this mirror.”

He saw two portraits in the hall, dimly lighted by the arched window at the head of the staircase and by the fanlights above the front and back hall doors. It was true. The gold frame of the mirror was almost like the portraits' frames and for a moment they were both as still as portraits before he followed her down the hall.

Jessica was leading him, as Charles learned later, to what the Lovells called the wallpaper room. “This room,” he read later in one of the many architectural accounts of Clyde, “is a triumph of Federalist interior. The windows set in deep paneled reveals are fitted prettily with mahogany window seats. The dado is a wide, clear board of pine. The baseboard is high, contrasting nicely with the door architraves, descending plinthless to the floor. It is as though the room were consciously built to house its greatest treasure, a magnificent wallpaper from France, showing, through the eyes of a French artist, a romantic interpretation of European merchants visiting a Chinese waterfront. The ships, the pagodas, the pavilions, blend most happily with the mantel and the few pieces of Chinese Chippendale which fit in the room as if they, too, were built for it.” Charles read this later but he was only conscious then of the spaciousness the paper gave the room and of the dancing fire beneath the Chippendale mantel and of Jessica's aunt, Miss Lovell, who looked like his own Aunt Jane as she sat on a Hepplewhite sofa behind a low mahogany tea table, working on a panel of embroidery.