Point of No Return (37 page)

“Go and answer it, Charley,” Dorothea said.

“It will only be for you,” Charles told her. “It always is.”

“I don't know why it should be,” Dorothea said, “at this time of night.”

The telephone was under the stairs in front of a line of coat hooks and it was necessary to bend one's head when one took the receiver off the hook.

“Is that you, Charley?” It was Jessica's voice. “You haven't gone to bed yet, have you?”

“Why, no,” Charley answered. “It's only nine o'clock,” and he heard Jessica laugh.

“Everybody's gone here except Father, and he's asleep in the library. Charley, would you mind coming over for a few minutes? I won't keep you any time at all.”

It was only a step to Johnson Street. It was the most natural thing in the world, he was telling himself, for Jessica suddenly to ask him to come to see her at nine o'clock. He only thought of it as peculiar when he came back into the parlor with his overcoat to say he was going out.

“But why are you going out?” Dorothea asked. “Who called you up? Was it Jackie Mason?”

“It was Jessica Lovell,” Charles said. “She just wants me to come over for a few minutes.”

“Now?” Dorothea said. “At nine o'clock? I didn't know that you knew Jessica Lovell as well as that.”

“I don't see why it shows that I know her very well,” he answered.

“Oh, doesn't it?” Dorothea said, and she and Elbridge smiled at each other and his father looked up from Boswell's
Life of Johnson.

“Now that I think of it,” he said, “Jessica has been gracious to me lately. She stopped me in the street and asked me about fire engines. Her looks have improved, too. Her chin is still a little long and her eyebrows are too heavy, but she's improved.”

When Charles walked up Spruce Street, the clear coldness of the December night air reminded him of new dark ice on a pond, just frozen thick enough to bear one's weight. His pulses danced with a strange elation, not because Jessica Lovell had called him up, certainly not because of that, but because of the beauty of the evening and the nearness of the stars. He seemed to have Clyde entirely to himself. The house lights were already going out on Spruce Street. It was absurd, he was thinking, for Dorothea to have made any comments when Jessica had called him up. It only showed that he and Jessica Lovell were not bowed down by small stupidities.

Jessica must have been waiting for him because she opened the front door herself and his idea that it was natural to be dropping in there at nine o'clock was contradicted by the soft tones of her voice and by the gentle way she closed the door.

“We'll have to sit in the wallpaper room,” she said, as Charles was taking off his overcoat. “The library's the only comfortable place but Father's asleep in it. There's a little room upstairs—” She sighed. Of course they could not go to a little room upstairs. “We'll have to sit and look at the Chinese junks.”

She asked Charles to put a new log on the dying embers of the fire and then she curled up on a corner of the Hepplewhite sofa. She was wearing a very simple, purplish woolen dress that fell just below her knees. She gave it a careless pull over her silk stockings and then she pushed her dark hair away from her forehead with both hands. His father may have been right in his remarks about Jessica. Her eyebrows were too heavy and her chin was too long and so were her legs, but she looked very well in the wallpaper room. She had none of the self-consciousness of other girls he knew, no fear that her hair looked untidy and she made no fluttering efforts to conceal her knees.

“Charley,” she began, “the most awful thing has happened. I've got to join the Clyde Players. Father says I have to,” and she let her hands drop helplessly on her lap.

“Oh,” Charles said, “has Mrs. Smythe Leigh been to see you?”

“She just went away,” Jessica said. “Who is she, Charley?”

It showed how little Jessica really knew about Clyde that she had never heard anything about Mrs. Smythe Leigh.

“She's pretty energetic,” Charles told her. “She likes art and she's one of those people who like to run things.”

“Charley, give me a cigarette,” and she pointed to a box on the table. “Light it for me, will you?” He leaned close to her as he lighted her cigarette, and she pointed at the table where the cigarette box had stood. “Look at that thing, Charley, look at it.”

“What thing?” Charles asked.

“That thing,” she repeated. “That play. Tell me, how did she ever find it, Charley?”

She was pointing to a small volume covered with yellow paper and Charles picked it up. It was entitled
Lord Bottomly Decides, a Farce-Comedy.

“Did she leave it here?” Charles asked.

“Of course she left it here,” Jessica said.

“Well,” Charles said, “it's just one of her ideas,” and then he told Jessica about Mrs. Smythe Leigh.

Mrs. Smythe Leigh had come to Clyde about ten years before and she lived on Gow Street and was very active in women's organizations. Mrs. Smythe Leigh—she did not like being called plain Mrs. Leigh—had organized the Women's Club pageant in 1920 and she coached in dramatics at the high school and she sometimes even hinted that she had been on the stage herself. She had also organized the Clyde Players, and there were a number of people who liked that sort of thing. Dr. Bush, who was the osteopath, liked it, and so did Mr. and Mrs. Knowles, and there were always a few people who liked to paint scenery. It was not strange at all that Mrs. Smythe Leigh had asked Jessica to take part in a play. She was always asking everybody. All that you had to do was to say that you could not do it and then she would ask someone else.

“But Father says I ought to do it,” Jessica said. “I know it's silly, but things like that make me sick.”

She was serious about it—the whole idea really frightened her. She was saying that once she had tried to be in a play at school and that she had begun walking in her sleep. She had tried again at Vassar and she had been taken ill.

“Look at me, Charley,” she said. “I'm all arms and legs and I trip all over myself and it's such a God-awful play.”

It was one of those plays that started with a monologue by the engaging British hero. He was in a most frightful fix. His aunt, Lady Ponsonby, had made him her heir but just this morning she said she would cut him off with a shilling if he did not marry a hideous girl whom she deemed a suitable match instead of allowing him to marry lovely Lucy Clive, the curate's daughter, whom he loved to distraction. He was in a terrible fix.

“Father's making such a point of it and look at me, Charley,” Jessica said. “Do I look like lovely Lucy Clive?”

She was wretchedly unhappy, curled up there on the corner of the sofa, and no consolation, only austere disapproval, came from the wallpaper room.

“Why don't you tell him you really don't want to?” Charles asked.

“Oh, Charley,” she answered, “I can't do that. I simply can't.”

“Why can't you?” he asked. “Why not just tell him how you feel?”

She passed the back of her hand across her forehead and she looked as though she were about to cry.

“Oh, Charley,” she said, “nobody understands about Father and me. I can't.”

Charles could only sit there baffled. He wanted to touch her hair softly and tell her that it was all right. He wanted to put his arm around her and draw her close to him, but the idea still seemed preposterous.

“Jessica,” he said, “it isn't going to be as bad as all that.”

“I don't know what you'll think of me,” she said. “I haven't any right to ask you, but if I have to be in this thing, will you be in it too?”

He could still view it all aloofly. He had never until that moment thought that Jessica Lovell might need him for anything.

“All right,” Charles said, “if you want me to, Jessica.”

Then she smoothed her dress carefully over her knees and her voice had changed. She was Jessica Lovell again, back in the wallpaper room.

“Thanks ever so much,” she said, and suddenly everything was completely settled, and he was saying that it was about time to be getting back home. He rose and put the paper-covered play back on the table.

“I wish you didn't have to go,” Jessica answered.

When he was in the front hall, getting into his overcoat, he could hear the tall clock ticking on the landing; and when he saw Jessica glance behind her, toward the closed door of Mr. Lovell's library, his call suddenly became a clandestine meeting. Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper and he was sure that she was very anxious to have him on the other side of the great front door, walking down the path. When he put his hand on the heavy bronze latch and turned to say good night, she pulled his hand away.

“Let me do it,” she whispered. “Don't wake up Father,” and she opened the front door very gently. It was clear to him that she did not want Mr. Lovell to know that she had asked him to be in the Clyde Players.

When he arrived at Gow Street a few nights later for what Mrs. Smythe Leigh called a preliminary get-together of the group, Charles knew by the number of hats and coats in the hall that he was late. He had hardly seen Mrs. Smythe Leigh since his senior class in high school had done
Officer 666
and then Charles had only helped take in tickets. Now Mrs. Smythe Leigh squeezed his hand, holding it tight in both of hers. She was wearing a flowing gown of green velvet and on her right wrist was a Navajo bracelet.

“Why, Charley Gray,” she said. “I hardly dared think that you would join us. Come right into the living room. Everybody's here.”

The scene in Mrs. Smythe Leigh's living room, Charles sometimes thought afterwards, was one which must have repeated itself continuously in other places. Mrs. Smythe Leigh's living room was an intellectual fortress and it stood for the larger world. As Mrs. Smythe Leigh told him later, there was no reason to get in a rut because one lived in Clyde. Clyde was a dear, poky place, full of dear people, but one could always open one's windows to the world. One could bring something new to Clyde, and this was what she always tried to do … a few reproductions of modern pictures, a bit of Chinese brocade, a few records of Kreisler and Caruso, and the
American Mercury
and the
New Republic
and of course
Harper's
and the
Atlantic,
and the
New Statesman
and
L'Illustration.
All one had to do was open one's windows to the outer world—and the surprising thing was the number of congenial spirits who gathered if you did it. Sometimes, frankly, she had thought of giving up the Clyde Players. There was always the inertia, but the old guard, Dr. Bush and Katie Rowell, always rallied around her and would not
let
her give up. Once you had the smell of grease paint in your nostrils, you could never get away from it, and there was always that joy of getting out of oneself by interpreting character on the stage. Charles was a newcomer, but someday he might be the old guard, too.

The newcomers and the old guard were all seated in the living room. There were not enough chairs so some were seated on the floor.

“This is Charley Gray,” Mrs. Smythe Leigh said, “but then of course everybody knows everybody”—and of course everybody did, in a certain way.

“And of course,” Mrs. Smythe Leigh said, “you know Jessica Lovell?”

She obviously asked the question because she was not quite sure. Jessica was sitting on a piano stool and her face had the same strained, self-conscious look of all the other faces, but she smiled at Charles in a friendly, distant way.

“You'll have to sit on the floor, Charley Gray,” Mrs. Smythe Leigh said. “It's your punishment for being late,” and everyone laughed politely. “And now I'm going to begin by giving my usual little talk. It's an orientation talk. Some of us know it already but perhaps it won't hurt to hear it again.”

When the first meeting was over and Charles took Jessica home, this was something everyone understood, including Mr. Lovell. In fact, when Jessica asked him in, Mr. Lovell seemed pleased to see him. As they stood in the front hall, they could hear voices from the library and Jessica put her hand on his arm.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Let's see who it is.” Then she recognized the Midwestern voice, that sounded almost foreign at the Lovells'.

“It's Malcolm Bryant,” she whispered. “He always keeps dropping in,” and she gave her head an exasperated shake. It occurred to Charles that he had heard other people saying lately that Mr. Bryant kept dropping in on them unexpectedly, and he should have known better since no one ever made sudden descents on anyone in Clyde. By this time, everyone in Clyde knew who Malcolm Bryant was. He was the professor who was writing some sort of book and he had rented two rooms from old Mrs. Mooney in Fanning Street, where he stayed when he wasn't in Boston and Cambridge, and he had his meals at Mrs. Bronson's boardinghouse. It was time he knew better than to be dropping in suddenly on people.

“Oh dear,” Jessica whispered, “Father's telling him about the family again,” and they stood for a minute side by side listening.

“I'd like to get this straight, Mr. Lovell,” they could hear Malcolm Bryant saying. “It's a way of life that has just the continuity I'm looking for. Now when was it that your great-grandfather lived on River Street?”

“That was before he built the house here,” they could hear Mr. Lovell saying. “Of course, River Street was different then. Johnson Street was hardly opened. My great-great-grandfather, Ezra Lovell, built and improved the house on River Street, before the Revolutionary War. The land ran down to the river, approximately where the gas company is now. There's nothing left but one of the old warehouses. Webley's blacksmith shop is in it now, and of course the wharf is gone.”