Point of No Return (65 page)

“A great deal has been said and written about the efficacy of prayer,” he said. “I sometimes feel we speak too little of it. I think it might help us both if we prayed, that is if you don't mind.”

“No, sir,” Charles said. “It's very kind of you to think of it, Mr. Crewe. You're being very kind.”

He had not anticipated Mr. Crewe's suggestion. It was a very awkward moment when Mr. Crewe left his chair, one of the old Windsor chairs, and sank abruptly to his knees upon the new green carpet. It was awkward, yet there was something that was beyond grotesqueness. For once that day everything was simple.

“I think we will both feel better for it,” Mr. Crewe said before he began, and they shook hands when the prayer was over.

“Thank you very much, Charles,” Mr. Crewe said, “and please remember that I'm always here to help.”

He called on Jessica that night, just for a few minutes, because he did not want to leave his mother or Dorothea too long. When he reached Johnson Street it was late and he was glad that Mr. Lovell had retired. Somehow all the day was still with him and there was still so much to do that he felt strangely impersonal when he kissed her. It was what he had said to Mr. Crewe—that it was hard to feel anything, but he hoped that he said the things he had to say properly. She knew, of course, how he had felt about his father but he hoped that she did not think that he sounded cold and practical. He might have put off until later telling her about adding his bonds to his father's estate but it seemed to him that she should know right away.

“You see, don't you?” he remembered saying. “It's the only thing to do.”

“Oh, Charley dear, of course it is,” she said, and they did not speak for a while. They sat there in the wallpaper room, holding hands.

“You and I can get on,” he said. “We can be married just the same.”

“Darling,” she said, “of course we can. I'll never marry anyone but you.”

“I'm awfully glad you're with me,” he said. “I don't know what I'd do without you.”

“Of course I'm with you, dear,” she said. “I'll always be with you.”

“You see why I don't want anyone to know,” he said, “but I suppose you ought to tell your father.”

They kissed again in the front hall before he opened the door, and it never occurred to him—there was no possible way he could have told—that he would only see Jessica Lovell once again.

His mother and Dorothea were in the parlor when he reached home and Elbridge Steme was with them and his mother said it was time they faced things. She could not stay in Spruce Street alone. There were too many memories in Spruce Street, and she could not go on alone in Clyde.

“Charley,” she said, as she said so often afterwards, “why didn't he ever tell us he wasn't well—but it was just like him, wasn't it? He never wanted any of us to worry.”

Then for some reason she asked him if he remembered that paper she had read long ago at the Historical Society about Alice Ruskin Lyte. Charles was only a little boy then but he must remember. Did he remember those evenings they worked over it together? John had been so patient and he always had loved words so, and Sam was alive. She could not live in Spruce Street any longer and Dorothea and Elbridge wanted her to go with them to Kansas City.

He had never thought of Clyde without his mother. It was only later that he was glad she felt as she had. It was better that she had left before the Cadillac and the house and the furniture were sold. It was better that she had gone to Kansas City instead of living on in Clyde. If she had stayed, he would have had to stay himself and that would scarcely have been possible with Jessica still there.

23

I Think That Frankness Has Been the Basis of Our Previous Relationship

—
MR
.
LAURENCE LOVELL

Once, as a step in that long process of advancement at the Stuyvesant Bank, Arthur Slade had asked Charles if he could arrange to come out for the week end to his summer place on the beach at Wainscott, Long Island. Everyone knew that there were going to be some changes in the trust department and this obviously was the reason for the invitation. It was a week end in the summer of 1937 and Charles had said he would be glad to go if things were all right at home in Larchmont.

Arthur Slade had met Nancy but it was too early even to consider whether Nancy would be a help or a detriment as the wife of an officer at the Stuyvesant. It was only a question of the trust department upstairs. He had told Charles that they would love to have his wife too, but Charles had refused for Nancy because obviously there was no place to leave the children.

“I hate to ask you without her,” Arthur Slade said, “but I hope you can manage to come yourself. I feel like sitting on the beach and talking.”

Nancy understood perfectly what the invitation meant.

“He wants to see how you use your knife and fork and whether you're housebroken,” she said. “They don't care whether I chew gum or not yet, but if you go and behave yourself, around next year they'll begin to care.”

Nancy helped him pack his suitcase. She pressed his dinner coat. She brushed his tweed jacket. She made him take both white flannels and gray slacks, and his new crepe-soled shoes and the pullover sweater that went with his tweed jacket and four soft shirts and four assorted ties. She checked and double-checked everything in the suitcase.

“Don't let them get you into any games,” she said. “You're rotten at golf and tennis, but play bridge if you want to. You're not bad at bridge.”

“I wish you were going,” Charles said. “It isn't fair to leave you.”

“It's life,” Nancy told him. “Drink two cocktails before dinner and don't drink anything afterwards unless you have to, and you'd better take a good book along. Take Mathematics for the Million. It will show them that you think.”

He knew that Arthur Slade wanted to see how he would act on Long Island but he had not been self-conscious. He was devoted to Arthur Slade and he knew that Arthur liked him. When Arthur Slade had asked him if he would like to play golf, Charles told him he had better not. He had once taken a few lessons from a professional at the Shore Club north of Boston but he had never been good at golf. He had always worked too hard—no time for golf and no time for any bad habits either. He was not much at athletics. He had played a little football once. He had gone out for track at Dartmouth and he had been on the wrestling team, but that was all quite a while ago.

On Saturday evening there was a buffet supper, ten or a dozen people, a lawyer and his wife and some men from downtown who reminded him of Rush & Company. There were two tables of bridge afterwards and he played at a table with Elsie Slade and a couple named Murchison and when the rubber was over Elsie Slade sat with him on the steps of the piazza. They drank ginger ale, because, he told her, Nancy had warned him not to drink anything after dinner unless he had to. He told her about Nancy and about life in Larchmont, where they had moved because of the children instead of staying in town, and Elsie Slade talked about her two boys who were away at camp and she called him Charley because she felt she knew him very well. Arthur had said so much about him.

Obviously Arthur Slade had asked her to talk to him—certainly he wanted her reaction—but Charles did not mind in the least. In fact he found it surprisingly easy to talk about himself. Once, she said, Arthur had told her that he had met his father for just a second, in Boston at the Parker House.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I remember. Father was a big-time operator then.”

He found himself speaking of it lightly, aware that it fitted well with the evening party and the cottage on the dunes and the cool air from the ocean. He told her about the Cadillac and the Shore Club and the Zaza.

“It was quite an adjustment for me,” he said. “You see, I was a small-town boy. I'm still basically small-town.”

Then Arthur Slade came out of the dark, manifestly to see how they were getting on. He sat on the steps beside them for a moment and asked Charles if he wouldn't like some Scotch.

“Don't ask him,” Elsie said. “Nancy doesn't like him to drink after dinner.”

Elsie Slade must have liked him or she would not have referred to Nancy by her first name, never having met her. He said he would like a thin drink of Scotch after all, as long as it was Saturday night, but it was not because of this, it was because he felt she was genuinely interested, that he told Elsie Slade about Clyde. It sounded like an amusing place, as he described it that evening.

She said that she had always lived in New York, except in the summer; her family had always spent their summers on Long Island, right here in Wainscott. She had met Arthur at a debutante party and here they were, still in Wainscott. It was a small-town life in itself, she said, but of course in a different way; and then she asked him the inevitable question. Why had he ever left Clyde? It sounded like a wonderful place.

He took a swallow of his thin drink of Scotch. Those days were so far away that he could see their amusing side, at least he could that evening sitting on the steps by the beach.

“It's a small-town story,” he said. “It's the difference between Spruce Street and Johnson Street. I should have remembered we were Spruce Streeters. Both Father and I should have remembered.”

He had never told Arthur Slade about Jessica Lovell but he did not in the least mind telling Elsie Slade that night. They had first really become acquainted, he told her, at a firemen's muster. She had never even heard of a firemen's muster so he told her about his father and the Pine Trees. It was the difference between Spruce Street and Johnson Street. They used to meet surreptitiously by the courthouse and go riding in her car—and then he had left Wright-Sherwin and gone to work in Rush & Company.

“Her father never did approve of it,” he said, “but then why should he? He was always trying to break it up, and he did, when my father died. It was a strain for her, you see, divided loyalty, Spruce Street, Johnson Street. She couldn't go on with it. Her father took her away to forget.”

He took another swallow of his whiskey. It was just what he had called it, a small-town story. All one had to do was change its emphasis to make it humorous.

“And what did you do?” Elsie Slade asked.

“Why, I left too,” he said. “I was hurt, but it made me ambitious.”

“Are you still ambitious?” she asked.

This made him laugh. He had never realized until then how little Jessica and the struggle for Jessica meant to him any longer.

“Of course I am,” he said, “or I wouldn't be here now, Mrs. Slade.”

“Aren't you going to call me Elsie?” she asked.

This made him laugh again. It was wonderful to be so wholly free from Clyde and he was thinking of Nancy and the suitcase and the four neckties and the crepe-soled shoes.

“No,” he said, “not yet, but I love to have you call me Charley. Please don't stop. And I'd love to call you Elsie someday, when I'm a little further ahead at the bank, but not right now. You see, I know the difference between Spruce and Johnson streets.”

Then Arthur Slade was back again.

“Arthur,” Elsie Slade was saying, “Charley won't call me Elsie, but he'd love to sometime later. He's made a very favorable impression on me, Arthur, and you must be sure to get him to tell you the difference between Johnson Street and Spruce Street.”

The Lovells were at the funeral but they sat in the back of the church, not near the family, and Charles had no opportunity to speak to them afterwards. After the service at the grave at the old North Cemetery, Jessica sent him another note by Mr. Fogarty. Her father was going away to New York for a few days, she told him, and he especially wanted her to go with him and she really felt she should. They would be back on Monday or Tuesday. She would call him the minute they were back and she would be thinking of him all the time.

He wished that he might have seen her before she left and he was as much surprised as one could be at such a time that she had not asked him to stop at Johnson Street instead of sending a note, but it was a very sensible thing for her to go away. There would have been no chance for them to be alone together. He was much too busy putting things in order.

Elbridge Steme had left Wright-Sherwin and the sooner they could all move to Kansas City the better, now that they had definitely made up their minds. Still there were all those final farewells and repeated explanations. His mother could not be expected to leave immediately. She could not cut the ties all at once, but Elbridge's job in Kansas City could not wait indefinitely. It was as though she were leaving the house to go on a visit and always returning for some odd object she had forgotten.

In the end Charles was the one who had to make the decisions. They confronted him in every waking moment and they plagued him through the nights. He never realized until later how tired he must have been though it was not a physical weariness. Mrs. Mason and all his mother's friends kept telling him they did not know what his mother and Dorothea would have done without him, and his mother and Dorothea were always saying the same thing. He was the head of the family and in every detail he had to represent the family. Besides Mr. Blashfield and a lawyer from Boston, who were always giving him papers to sign and wanting to see him for half an hour, there were all sorts of extraneous questions. There was the stone in the North Cemetery, what furniture his mother and Dorothea wanted to take to Kansas City and what was to be done with the rest. What was to be done about the Cadillac, and what about the couple and the bills and the donation his father had promised to give the hospital? His mother was so relieved that he had left enough so that she could have her independence. She wanted to give a little of it to the library as a John Gray Memorial Fund. The books that would be purchased from it could have a note in them saying that they were bought by the John Gray Memorial Fund, and the library could have all his books, except the ones Charles wanted.