Point of No Return (62 page)

They often loved to sit without talking, and they were not talking when Mr. Lovell called to them from the house.

“Oh, Jessica, are you and Charles out there?”

“Yes, Father,” Jessica answered. “Don't you want to come out with us?”

“No, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said, “but I wonder whether you and Charles would mind coming in. I'd like to speak to you both for a minute.”

Mr. Lovell led the way to the library, which meant that he had something serious to say. Though Charles was gradually beginning to discover that Mr. Lovell had never read and probably never would read many of the old leather-bound English editions on the shelves, Mr. Lovell seemed to draw from the physical presence of Fielding, Steme and George Eliot, Maria Edgeworth, the British poets and all the rest of them, a vicarious and genuinely deceptive erudition. Perhaps they all gave him an assurance which he may have lacked in other places. Perhaps they afforded him the background for being the person he wanted to be but never could be—the man of cultivated taste and tradition, who, through fortunate circumstances, had ample leisure in which to gratify those tastes. He did not possess, Charles was beginning to learn, the energy, the persistence, or the curiosity ever to become what he thought he was, but then few people like him ever did, outside of the novels of Jane Austen, and besides Charles admitted that he was overcritical of Mr. Lovell. As he stood with the books behind him Charles had an idea that Mr. Lovell must have been rehearsing what he was going to say while they were sitting in the summerhouse.

“Jessie, dear, I wish you'd sit down, and you too, Charles,” Mr. Lovell said. “You're so used to my habits, aren't you, Jessie, that you won't mind my standing up? Jessie dear, the time has come—I did hope it wouldn't come so soon—to talk seriously about you and Charles.”

“Oh, Father,” Jessica said, “has anyone said anything?”

Mr. Lovell seemed surprised that Jessica should have guessed. He nodded and cleared his throat again and raised his voice.

“Yesterday afternoon I happened to run into Francis Stanley on Dock Street when I was on my way to the library meeting and he asked me, out of a clear sky”—Mr. Lovell lowered his voice—“if I were to be congratulated. Of course, I've always known Francis Stanley—I've always known the Stanleys were not real friends of ours, in spite of the amenities—but there you are.”

“But Father,” Jessica said, and she laughed feebly, “I don't see anything so bad in that. It's just the way Mr. Stanley always says everything.”

“I suppose it is,” Mr. Lovell said. “I know Francis Stanley very well, Jessica, and I've never been impressed by him or the Stanley money. He's a good businessman, but there are other things besides business, Charles. Now don't”—Mr. Lovell raised his hand “—don't interrupt me, Jessie. Let me make my point. It does show where we have drifted. If Francis Stanley felt himself free, and he did feel himself free, to ask me such a question even jokingly, it shows what other people must be saying. I don't mind about myself, Jessie, but I can't have your name becoming a byword.”

Mr. Lovell paused and seemed to be looking back over what he had said.

“Now this is every bit as embarrassing and as difficult for me as it is for you, more so because this involves my daughter, my only daughter. I can see by your expression, Charles, that you think I'm overemphasizing this, but perhaps your friends and family have a different view. I'm sure I don't know.”

As always he was facing the situation honestly and fairly.

“In the first place, Charles—and I must address this to you rather than to Jessica, because I have never thought that any of this, well, this imbroglio, was ever primarily your fault, Jessie dear. It is the man who takes the initiative—well, in the first place, I feel in justice to myself—and I do think I have to be considered—that I should say frankly and without malice that none of this is my fault, any more than it was yours, Jessie dear. If I had been consulted in time, we would not have this problem. Instead, I had to condone it, because it was an accomplished fact. I had hoped if you were thrown together you both might have seen some of the things that are so painfully obvious to me … but no. This is where we've drifted.” Mr. Lovell's face had reddened. He pulled a fresh white handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose.

“Father dear,” Jessica said, and her voice broke a little, “I've told you and I've told you you won't lose me. Charles doesn't want to take me away from you. Don't be so unhappy, dear. It makes us all so miserable, just when we all ought to be so happy. Don't you see?”

“I know, Jessie darling,” Mr. Lovell said softly, “and I'm sorry if I've said too much. I'm trying to face the situation and it can't go on the way it is much longer.” Mr. Lovell blew his nose again. “There's only one thing to do. Jessie, if you feel by the middle of, well, November as you feel now, I'm afraid a formal announcement will be necessary, a tea or something. This will have to be clarified somehow.”

Mr. Lovell had a stricken expression. He folded his handkerchief and put it carefully back in his pocket.

“Father dear,” Jessica said, “you're awfully sweet,” and she threw her arms around him. It made Charles feel like an intruder when Mr. Lovell kissed Jessica's forehead gravely and softly.

“I'm glad if you're happy, dear,” Mr. Lovell said, “and, Charles, I'm glad we've had this talk. Shall you and I shake hands?” It was hard to be elated in the face of Mr. Lovell's deep sorrow but he honestly tried to put himself in Mr. Lovell's position when he shook hands.

“And now, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said, “why don't you take Charles out to the garden again? I'd like to be alone, just for a little while.”

Jessica closed the door softly and tenderly behind her, leaving Mr. Lovell standing on the hearthrug, resigned, head bent, alone with no company but his shattered dreams. If it seemed to Charles overtheatrical, it was not his place to say so. Instead he owed it to Jessica to show a decent, measured sympathy.

“Darling,” Jessica whispered, “it's so hard for him. I wish he didn't love me so much,” and then she began to cry.

“Don't, Jessica,” he said, and he put his arm around her and gave her his handkerchief.

“I wish everything wouldn't hurt him so,” she sobbed. “I wish he had ten children and every one of them a girl … Charley, he wasn't nice to you at all.”

“He can't help it,” Charles said. “I don't mind as long as you love me, Jessica.”

“Darling, if I didn't I couldn't stand it,” she said. “Do you still love me?”

“Of course I do,” he said.

“In spite of everything?”

“All the more.”

“That's why it's so terrible,” she said.

“I don't see why you say it's terrible,” he told her.

“I don't know why I did either. I didn't mean it,” she said. “And, Charley, it won't be so long till November, will it?”

It would not be long. The goldenrod was out and they could hear the crickets and soon it would be time for the asters, the small white ones and the large purple ones. There was nothing but security, now that she had stopped crying. If their engagement was announced in the middle of November it would not be a long engagement. That was what Jessica was saying. There would be no reason for it. As soon as their engagement was announced they could buy the Pritchard house. They could start doing everything they were talking about. They could really start doing it now—almost.

22

That Gale I Well Remember …

—
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

During all of his later business experience, many otherwise reasonable people kept resurrecting the details of the crash of 1929. They discussed it, apparently, for the same reason that old ladies enjoyed describing surgical operations and sessions with their dentists. There was a snob value in boasting of old pain. Instead of wishing to forget, they kept struggling to remember. The older men would talk about Black Friday in the nineties and the more technical panic of 1907 as though all these debacles were just alike and sanctimonious members of the Securities and Exchange Commission who had had nothing to do with that market would discuss the immoralities of the moneychangers in the temple and cast sharp aspersions on entrenched greed. There were even people, who should have known better, who seemed to be imbued with the fixed idea that the crash of 1929 caused the depression. They could no longer see it as a symptom or as an extreme example of mass hysteria. Only unattractively strong individuals should have been allowed to dabble in that market.

Most people never seemed to see what Charles saw in the crash—a sordidly ugly exhibition of the basest of human fears. They had forgotten the desperation that made cowards and thieves out of previously respectable people, and the fear evolved from greed which had no decency or dignity. Instead, they always harked back to the spectacular—the confusion, the lights in downtown New York burning night after night while clerks were struggling to balance the brokerage accounts; and sooner or later they always asked Charles where he had been working then and whether he too had been long on the market on that particular day in October. He had learned long ago to answer accurately, with only part of the truth. He always said that he had been in Boston with E. P. Rush & Company and nothing much had happened to him. He had made some money out of the market the year before and had put it into government bonds. His mother was living on the income derived from her late husband's estate. His mother was living next door to his sister Dorothea in Kansas City. His sister had married a man, a metallurgical chemist, who had a very good job in Kansas City.

He never told the whole truth to anyone, except to Nancy and to Arthur Slade, and Arthur Slade may have told some of it to Tony Burton at the Stuyvesant Bank but Charles was never sure. Naturally his mother and Dorothea and Elbridge Sterne knew part of the truth, and Jessica Lovell knew some of it. There were some things which were better not told, and there was no use digging up what was so completely finished. His own illusions and everything he had planned had crashed in that common crash, but then millions of lives and plans had been crashing ever since. It did no good to imagine what he might have done to have prevented it. Actually he could have done nothing. Everything was what Mr. Lovell would have called an accomplished fact before Charles had been permitted to face it. He was always glad he did not have to blame himself, at least not very much.

When the drop occurred in September, that minor break which nearly everyone considered a normal readjustment considering the market's phenomenally unbroken rise, he had seen it for what it was—the first rumblings of a landslide, an ominous shift of stress and strain that would never strike a balance until the whole structure broke. He knew this was the beginning of a greater break even before Mr. Rush, after a partners' meeting, called him in to help compose a letter advising customers of Rush & Company to sell their holdings of common stocks. While he was waiting for the letter to be typed, Charles wandered over to the row of leather armchairs before the tickers and the board. Although Rush & Company was essentially an investment and not a brokerage office a large group was there, as there had been all that summer. He was just looking at the last quotation for Telephone when he heard his father call him and saw his father standing near the tickers with his hands in his pockets and with his felt hat pushed back from his forehead.

He was surprised to see his father because John Gray had never done his trading at Rush & Company. He had always said he liked a bigger office and a bigger board and besides Moulton Rush was always disapproving.

“I've been feeling a little lonely, Charley,” his father said. “I thought I would drop into the cloisters here. There's an atmosphere bordering on hysteria down the street. I'm seeking conservatism. There doesn't seem to be a rally yet, does there?”

“No, not yet,” Charles said. “I thought you were staying at home on the side lines.”

“I thought I was until I telephoned,” his father answered, “and then I got Will Stevens to drive me in, just to see the show. Is the ticker much behind?”

“I don't know,” Charles said. “I've only been here for a minute.” He was not a customers' man and he had given up all interest in the mechanics of the market.

“Well, well.” John Gray took his hands out of his pockets. “I think I'll see whether Moulton's busy. Willie can drive us back home if you'll be at Post Office Square around five o'clock.”

“Father,” Charles began.

“Don't say it,” his father said. “Don't say it. We'll talk about it driving home.” He walked away between the rows of chairs toward the ground-glass doors of the partners' offices.

Mr. Rush's door was open, as it usually was in the late afternoon, so Charles did not knock when he brought in the draft of the form letter half an hour later. Mr. Rush was using the bottom drawer of his roll-top desk as a footrest and he sat tilted back in his swivel chair. John Gray was still there with him.

“All right, Johnny,” Mr. Rush was saying. “I only know what I think. If you're out, stay out. Go home and read Boswell.”

“And three days from now it will be up again,” his father said. “Do you want to bet me, Moulton?”—and then Charles gave Mr. Rush the draft of the letter.

He never told anyone but Nancy what happened that afternoon and he only told her about it at the time of the bank closing, in 1933. She awoke at two in the morning and found him staring at the floor without any idea what time it was, and he had to tell her why to prevent her from worrying. He had been thinking about his father and about that afternoon at Rush & Company and about the ride home in the Cadillac.