Point of No Return (55 page)

“We'll find some next spring,” he told her.

“It was like playing hide-and-seek, wasn't it?” she said—“always pretending to hide what we thought about each other and yet not wanting to hide it, and now we don't have to hide anything any more.”

It was not exactly so, because no one would ever tell anyone else everything, but there was the illusion that there was no concealment. When you were in love, all the cards seemed to lie face upwards on the table.

After dinner, they walked out to the parking place where they had left the car. It was the only car there and they did not drive away for a long while.

“I never thought I'd be in just this place under just these circumstances,” she said.

“It's probably happened before,” he told her, “but then I wouldn't know.”

“Darling,” she said, “I'm so happy. I'm not sorry about any of it, except one thing, just one thing.”

“What one thing?”

He was not thinking attentively of what she was saying, because they had said so many other things, the things perhaps one always said when one was in a parked car when one was in love.

“It's Father,” she said. “Poor Father. You like him, don't you, darling?”

There were still things it was better to conceal. She had raised her head from his shoulder. She was looking at him, trying to see his face through the dark.

“I'm afraid he doesn't like me much,” he said, “but I don't blame him. Why should he?”

“He does.” It hurt him because she was no longer happy and he wished that Mr. Lovell had not come into it. “He likes you as much as he can anyone who likes me, don't you see?”

“Yes,” he said, “I guess I see.”

“It's my problem anyway,” she said. “You don't have to mind as long as you understand the way he feels. It's just waiting until he gets used to it.” She was always saying to wait until he got used to it. “I wish I weren't torn in two pieces whenever I see you both together … Darling?”

“Yes,” he said.

“He really does like you. At least, he tries to like you. He always says nice things about you, or at least he tries to. I've got to love you both at once. That's all I mean.”

It was a time when nothing was a problem. When one talked of cold facts at such a time, they were like the roseate clouds of a summer sunrise, drifting like gilded islands across one's thoughts. If they were so large that they temporarily obscured the sun, you knew that the sun would burn through them. There had to be a happy ending, or you could not be in love.

He put his foot on the starter of the Cadillac and at the same time he switched on the lights. The sound of the motor was strong and reassuring. He did not speak as he backed the car and started it down the drive because he still had to give the gears his full attention. The car moved deliberately and slowly until it was in second, and then it was in high and the crunching of the gravel beneath the wheels was louder than the sound of the motor.

“Jessica,” he said, “will you marry me? I wish you would.”

“Why, Charley,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice. “What made you think of that just now?”

Johnson Street and Spruce Street and all of Clyde seemed to be around him as he had proposed to Jessica Lovell.

“Why, I've been thinking about it all the time,” he said.

“Well, so have I,” and there was that catch in her voice again. “Oh, Charley, of course I will.”

He felt the blood rush to his cheeks. He could never have described everything he felt but relief must have been a part of it, deep relief that the waiting was over. It had been bound to happen and it was over and now they could go on from there, anywhere they wanted, he and Jessica Lovell.

“But we can't get married right away.”

“No,” he said, “not right away.”

“We wouldn't have anything to live on, would we? That's what Father keeps saying.”

“No,” he said, “not now, but we will have by spring.”

At least he had offered her everything once. He told her that he was only making thirty dollars a week at Rush & Company but he would get a raise on the first of the year. He might be getting fifty dollars a week by spring. Besides, there was the five thousand dollars his aunt had left him, and now it was twenty thousand. He would not be afraid to marry her now, if she were not afraid, but he hoped to have fifty thousand by spring and if he did he would stop. The income from fifty thousand dollars, safely invested at five per cent, would be twenty-five hundred dollars, and if he were making fifty dollars a week that would be five thousand dollars a year. The prospect had a desperate quality, but with Jessica there listening he could believe in it implicitly.

“And Father will give me an allowance,” she said.

“He doesn't have to,” Charles told her. “I can take care of you, Jessica.”

He could take care of her, now that his thoughts were moving on. He knew that he was doing well in Rush & Company. He might be a partner some day. He could see life stretching out before him like the dark road beneath the headlights.

“Of course, it won't be much to start with,” he said, “and we don't have to live in Clyde.” He must have known even then that they should get away from Clyde. Everything he was saying would be truer if they were somewhere else.

“Of course we have to live in Clyde,” she said. “All our families are there.”

They were already talking as though everything were settled.

“Charley,” she said, “you like children, don't you? We'll have the nicest children, two boys and two girls. No, three girls”; and then she laughed. “And we can buy one of those little houses by the river, and we can do it over … Why, we're talking as if it had already happened.”

When she said it, the house of cards fell down and for a moment he could see every fallacy of its flimsy structure.

“Well,” he said, “it's got to happen. Jessica, please go on and keep believing.”

“Of course I'll keep believing, but, darling,” and there was a doubtful sound in her voice, “we'd better not tell anyone—and certainly not Father yet. He might stop me from believing.”

By the time Charles had left the Cadillac in Rowell's Garage, the lights were out in the house on Spruce Street except in the front hall and in his father's room at the head of the stairs. The door to the upstairs room was half open and he could see his father sitting in front of his table adding a column of figures beneath the light of his old student lamp which had recently been wired for electricity. The sofa had been reupholstered in green velvet and there were glazed chintz curtains around the windows and a new green carpet, but no one had touched the books. Though the room was swept now and freshly painted, it was still like his father's mind, full of odds and ends for which he had never found a place.

“Oh, there you are, Charley,” his father said. “You didn't smash the car, did you?”

“No, sir,” Charles said, “nothing happened to the car.”

“How was Clarkson—and the Shore Club? Did you see Clarkson?”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said.

“You know, I rather like Clarkson. I'd like to have someone like him looking out for me. I'm tired of carrying my own clothes down to Dock Street to be pressed.”

John Gray leaned back in his chair and pushed away his papers and opened the mahogany humidor which he had recently purchased.

“We really ought to have a man here to pass us things. We ought to have a couple to look after us, a nice woman who's a good cook and her husband. What we really need is two Filipinos, but I'm afraid your mother wouldn't like them. Perhaps we'd better look for a French couple and have some French cooking and a little wine at dinner. There's no reason to have these old Irishwomen in by the day. Mary Callahan when she comes in is more like my nurse than a maid. We'll have to find a couple.”

His cigar cutter made a sharp incisive sound, and he struck a match.

“The devil of it is, we'll need another bathroom if we have a couple. We need more bathrooms at any rate. We can put two of them up on the third floor, one for the couple and one for you, and I suppose Dorothea ought to have one, too, but then she's going to marry Elbridge. Still, we could use it for a guest bathroom, couldn't we?—but then if you get married there will be another vacant bathroom. Well, we'll get three new bathrooms. I'll get Sid Stevens in here to measure them up tomorrow. There's always plenty of room for them in an old house. Now, how did my mind get on plumbing?”

“You were talking about a couple,” Charles said.

“Oh, yes. I wonder how many bathrooms the Lovells have.”

“I don't know,” Charles said.

As he had told Jessica, if you were the tail of a kite you had to follow the kite. His father was glancing again at the papers on which he had been working.

“I always wonder why I'm doing so well, Charley, until I remember this is the first time I've had any real working capital,” he said, and he puffed on his cigar and blew a cloud of that heavy, permeating smoke of expensive Havana tobacco. Charles would always associate cigar smoke with brokerage accounts and working capital. “You see, I'm pretty well up in the system now. Just between you and me—don't tell the women yet, it will only make them nervous—as of today there's three hundred and fifty thousand in the kitty.”

“I don't like being out at sea in a canoe with just one paddle,” Charles said. “When will you have enough, Father?”

John Gray's thoughts must have been winging happily over broader fields and it must have annoyed him to be brought up short.

“Dear me,” he said. “There we are again. Don't you know, Charley, that once you're up in the system you have leverage? They'll find it hard to shake me down.”

“Who are They?” Charles asked.

His father picked up a pencil and tapped it on the paper.

“I'm damned if I know who, but somebody's running this show.”

“It isn't somebody,” Charles said, “it's everybody. Why don't you call your system a common state of mind?”

Later he was to read the debates and the dogma of economists and weigh the theories of the orthodox against those of the disciples of John Maynard Keynes. Those people with their set conventions always reminded him more of theologians than philosophers. They were the high priests of materialism, constantly trying to establish their creeds and trying to give unbreakable definitions to acquisitive forces, and yet in the end it was nothing more or less than what he had said that night at Spruce Street.

“Maybe you're right,” his father said. “Maybe it is a state of mind, but states of mind change, don't they? You know—I'm going to say something that may relieve you, Charley. I've been seriously thinking that there's an end to everything—you can't carry a good thing too far, can you? You know, I really think that perhaps I ought to make a limit. I think I'll stop all this and cash in—when I have a million dollars.” It was the ultimate end, the mathematical symbol for security and happiness. “Well … good night, Charley.”

19

“
Give Crowns and Pounds and Guineas, but Not Your Heart Away
”

—
A
.
E
.
HOUSMAN

There was once good thing about Clyde. People there might know everything about you but they still had respect for individual privacy. No one, except his immediate family, ever asked Charles directly about Jessica Lovell. If you lived in a place like Clyde, you were keenly conscious of public approval or disapproval. Though Charles was too busy most of the time that winter to go around much, as the expression went, he still realized that he was a figure of interest. At the railroad station or when he went to the post office or to the news store or to Walters's drugstore, he could perceive an atmosphere of veiled expectancy. Jackie Mason, he thought, was always waiting for him to say something and he seemed hurt when Charles did not allude to his private affairs. The girls he knew had grown sedulously impersonal, as though he were no longer a part of any of their plans. They would smile at him brightly and say, “Why, hello, Charley. You're quite a stranger these days”; and friends of his, like Earl Wilkins and the Meaders, would say, “Hi, Charley. How's everything going, Charley?”

It was what one always said, but when they asked the question it seemed to him that other people would turn and look and listen for his answer. Everyone, of course, must have been talking about the Grays that winter, including Mr. and Mrs. Meader and the Masons and all the family's particular friends. They would all say when they met him, “Why, Charley, we haven't seen you for a long while. I suppose they're keeping you busy in Boston”—but they were not thinking about Boston. They were thinking of what was keeping him busy in Clyde. They were saying, in private, that he was “attentive” to Jessica Lovell and his own friends must have been saying that he was “crazy about” Jessica Lovell and down on River Street they were probably saying that Charley Gray was “going with” Jessica Lovell.

Everyone was watching the Lovells, too, and someone must have heard the Thomases and the Stanleys and other people on Johnson Street say that Mr. Lovell did not like it. He wanted Jessica to do better. After all, she had come out in Boston and the Lovells were always down on the Shore, but then he could not do much about it if Jessica liked Charley Gray. The Grays were doing very well. They had a couple working for them and a Cadillac and the house on Spruce Street had been redecorated and they had put in three new bathrooms and Wallace Brooks, who had done the painting for them, had said that the interior decorator himself had come from Boston to hang the drapes, and Mary Callahan, who now did the cleaning, said that Esther Gray had bought the loveliest new china and new sheets and blankets and candlewick bedspreads, and that Elbridge Sterne did look plain beside Miss Dorothea in her new dresses and her fur coat. The Grays were doing very well. Besides, Charley was getting on well, too, in Boston. Mr. Stanley had said that he had the makings of a businessman and that he wished he had him back in Wright-Sherwin. There was nothing that Mr. Lovell could do about it, and Jessica might have done worse.