Point of No Return (68 page)

“Do you want to see Mr. Jessup,” she asked, “or do you want to leave something for him?”

“I'm from the Stuyvesant Bank,” Charles said, and that was the first thing he ever said to Nancy. “They sent me over with some papers. I'm supposed to hand them to Mr. Jessup.”

“You're supposed to,” Nancy repeated, and she sounded as though she were faintly amused but there was no way of telling. “What are they about?”

“They didn't tell me,” Charles said. “They don't tell me much up there.”

“Well, Mr. Jessup's busy now,” Nancy said. “You can leave them with me and I'll see that he gets them.”

“I'm afraid I'd better wait,” Charles said.

“Haven't you got anything else to do back at that bank?” Nancy asked. “I'll see he gets them. I'm pretty good at handing people papers.”

“So am I,” Charles said, and he smiled.

“Mr. Jessup's in conference,” Nancy said, “and he won't be free for half an hour.”

“I'm supposed to give them to him personally,” Charles said.

“What are you in that bank, a messenger?” Nancy asked.

“No,” Charles said. “I'm in the statistical department.”

“Have you been there long?”

“Of course I haven't,” Charles said, “or they wouldn't be sending me on errands. This is the first important job that's been offered me.”

Then she smiled. It was the first time he ever saw her smile.

“Well,” she said, “take off your overcoat and sit down, if you want to waste your time.”

She was much further along than he was then. She was Mr. Jessup's executive secretary and she was being paid forty-five dollars a week and they could never have been married if she had not kept that job.

“If I bother you waiting here,” Charles said, “I can wait outside.”

“You don't bother me,” Nancy said. “This is my last letter.”

He never bothered her, she always said, right from the beginning, and most men did. There were a great many maladjusted junior partners in that office.

“You didn't seem to have me on your mind,” she told him once. “We just sat there and talked. And sex didn't seem to enter into it, but I suppose it did. It was all perfectly natural. God knows why it was so natural”—but then everything always was with him and Nancy.

PART THREE

1

Please Leave No Articles

The cars on the subsidiary line that led to Clyde were always antiquated, relegated to the branch for their final tour of duty. As they rocked and rattled on the uneven roadbed, you could tell from the sounds exactly where the train was, especially as it was approaching Clyde. There was a stifled roar as the train passed through the cut that came just before Brainard's Crossing. Then came the hollow rumble of the trestle that spanned Whiting's Creek. After the train crossed the low farmlands just outside of Clyde there came the louder roar of the short tunnel and with it an instant of darkness, always startling no matter how often one had experienced it, and the brakeman's voice mingled with the roar and the darkness.

“Clyde,” he always shouted. “Clyde”; and if it was the three-thirty train out of Boston he always added, “Please leave no articles in the car,” an admonition that was never heard, as far as Charles could remember, on any other train.

Charles had taken the three-thirty because he had stopped for a while in Boston to do what Roger Blakesley would have called sweetening certain contacts. It was an expression which especially revolted him, but he recognized it as an essential part of business to drop in, now that he was in Boston, on a few old graduates of Rush & Company and on other acquaintances. He always did so on his rare visits there because you never could tell when it might help to have a working relationship with someone on State or Congress or Milk Street. Besides he was the only executive in the Stuyvesant with much of a firsthand knowledge of Boston. When any Boston problem came up at the Stuyvesant, as it did occasionally, Charles was always called in to help with it. It was only recently that Roger Blakesley, too, had been making himself helpful with Boston problems, and in the last few months Roger seemed to have considered himself something of an authority, going so far as to tell a few of those quaint stories about Boston trustees that always went so well in New York and even giving the impression of knowing the subjects of those anecdotes.

It occurred to Charles that in his talk with Tony Burton and Stephen Merry when he got back he might say casually that he had dropped in on Tommy Sage at the First National, that they had known each other since those days at Rush & Company, and that some of the boys at the Boston Safe Deposit had been talking about United Fruit and that he had asked Bill Jenkins at the Old Colony about United Shoe. Bill was an old Rush & Company graduate who was a director. It would be possible to make these allusions without any undue emphasis. As a matter of fact, his hours in Boston had been very useful in a business way.

When he stopped by at Rush & Company, old Lawrence Stoker had been surprisingly glad to see him and had asked him to lunch at the Union Club. Everybody had been glad to see him and everybody had regarded him in that polite, embarrassed way that they often reserved for old friends who had done well in New York and who must therefore be very prosperous. As always there was a suspicion about prosperity that came too easily.

It would not hurt at all to tell Tony Burton about his lunch at the Union Club with Mr. Stoker. The invitation in itself made Charles realize the long distance he had traveled since the old days. Though Mr. Stoker called him Charley and he still called Mr. Stoker mister, they were almost on an equal basis because of the Stuyvesant Bank. He was both an assistant vice-president of the Stuyvesant and a bright graduate back on the college campus. They had old-fashioned cocktails, and this in itself showed that Lawrence Stoker felt that the occasion demanded a special effort. There was a warm, mellow glow about their meeting and they spoke first of old times at Rush & Company and then edged gradually into the present.

“You boys who go away to New York,” Lawrence Stoker said, and he looked across the table at Charles as though he were someone who had lived for a long while in a foreign country, “you go and you never want to come back.” Charles believed that Mr. Stoker's words had a tentative, suggestive note. “Of course, we can't offer you enough to get you back. You boys get used to high living in New York.”

“And low thinking,” Charles said, and he laughed. He wondered how much Mr. Stoker thought he was earning. Obviously, Mr. Stoker was judging from appearances, as they always did in Boston.

“Of course,” Mr. Stoker said, “money doesn't go as far in New York as it does here.”

“It doesn't go far anywhere if you have a wife and two children,” Charles said.

“Two? I didn't know you had two, Charley,” Mr. Stoker said. “I thought you only had a boy. That boy must be growing up.”

“Yes,” Charles said, “Bill's getting to be a big boy now.”

“Where's he going to school?” That was a question they always asked in Boston.

“He's going to one of those suburban country day schools now,” Charles said, “but he wants to go to Exeter.”

“It doesn't matter so much where he goes if you're going to send him to Dartmouth,” Mr. Stoker said. “I hope you're not going to send that boy to Dartmouth.”

You were always placed in Boston by your beginnings and Mr. Stoker had never forgotten that Charles had gone to Dartmouth.

“But you never acted like a Dartmouth man,” Mr. Stoker said. “Moulton always said so. He always said he shouldn't have let you go.”

If he had stayed there would have been nothing much for him at Rush & Company and both of them must have known it, but it was very reassuring to be there at lunch with Mr. Stoker toying with the impossible.

“You wouldn't have wanted me, you know,” Charles said. “I couldn't have been a partner.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Mr. Stoker said. “The war would have made a difference.”

His having gone to the war would have been a gesture that could have erased the educational stigma. It would have been almost as good as having been on a Harvard team.

“Three boys from the office were killed,” Mr. Stoker said.

“I was just on an air strip,” Charles said. “I should have stayed at the bank.”

“Well,” Mr. Stoker said, “it wouldn't have hurt you one damn bit at Rush & Company. It's too bad about Arthur Slade. Are they going to move you up?”

He had not thought that Mr. Stoker knew enough about him to connect him with Arthur Slade. He sounded as though he were asking Charles if there had been an injury on the football field and if the coach were going to call him from the bench.

“Of course I hope so,” Charles said. “You never can tell what's going to happen, can you?” Sitting with Mr. Stoker in the Union Club looking at the bare trees of Boston Common, it was pleasant to conjecture that he might actually become a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank.

“Mr. Stoker,” he said, “have you ever heard of anything over-the-counter called the Nickerson Cordage Company? They sent me up here to ask about it. The company's in Clyde. I'm going to take the three-thirty train down there. It's funny, isn't it, to be going back to Clyde.” He wished he had not said it was funny going back to Clyde …

“Clyde,” the brakeman was calling. “Clyde. Kindly leave no articles in the car.”

He had been looking out of the window. He had seen the sodden April brown of the fields. He had seen the muddy banks and the low tide of Whiting's Creek. He had put on his overcoat and had pulled his suitcase from the rack above him. In a way it was just as though he were coming back from Boston after a day at E. P. Rush & Company and yet he was startled when the name was called. Even when he saw the drab station and the platform and the baggage trucks and the river and the old houses and the lunch-room across the street from the station, he could only half believe he was in Clyde again. It was all so entirely unchanged. It seemed only to have been waiting for him through a long hard winter instead of for almost twenty years.

He had always been as sure as one could be of anything that someday he would return to Clyde. It was an assurance based on a sense of dramatic fitness and a suspicion, that must always have been in the back of his mind, that something there needed to be finished and that he must finish it some day. For years he had not avoided thinking of it. He often spoke of Clyde to Nancy and rather enjoyed it, and Bill and Evelyn often asked him to tell stories about the Webster Grammar School and the Meaders and the Masons and old Miss Sarah Hewitt and Grandmama and Aunt Dorothea and his older brother, Sam. He had never brought them to Clyde but at least they knew its folklore. It never hurt him to tell about it. He even told Evelyn about Jessica Lovell, a little girl with filmy dresses and patent leather shoes who lived in a fantastic house with a widow's walk and a cupola and who played in a garden with box-bordered edges and flower beds stamped out in amusing shapes like cookies out of dough. He felt no pain any longer. He was completely free of Clyde. It was deep beneath the waters of experience.

His thoughts of returning to Clyde had usually been in the form of fantasies. His stay in Clyde was always brief, in these fantasies. He might be motoring north with Nancy during his summer vacation from the bank on their way to spend a few days together in Maine. They would be driving up from Boston in a new convertible with red leather seats and curiously enough the car would always be a Cadillac and he would say to Nancy, as though the idea had struck him suddenly:

“Let's turn off Route 1 and drive through Clyde.”

Nancy would be wearing a new tailored broadcloth suit, the color of which was never definite, and Nancy would say:

“Why not, if we're going past it?”

They would drive down Johnson Street very slowly and they would never once get out of the car in that fantasy, but he would actually stop the car in front of the Lovell house and they would sit there commenting on it, as strangers often did who motored through Clyde.

“That's where she lived,” he would say. “It's perfect Federalist architecture, but it's sterile, isn't it?” And she would say:

“Sterile as a test tube. Maybe she's in there now.” And he would say:

“Possibly, but it isn't as bad as those Currier and Ives temples in upstate New York.” And Nancy would say:

“You're the one who said it was sterile. All right, I've seen it. Check”—and she would tap the road map with her finger. She always loved to read the road map—“We can't stay here all day if we're going to spend the night at Poland Spring. What else is there to see?” And he would say:

“Well, there's the Webster Grammar School and the courthouse and the cemetery.” And she would say:

“Let's skip the courthouse and the cemetery.”

Then he would start the car and they would go down Dock Street and up Spruce Street so that she could see where he had lived and she would say when she saw the house:

“What, haven't they got a bronze plaque on it?”—and if there was time he would show her the Judge's house on Gow Street, and she would say:

“Yes, dear. Light a cigarette for me, will you? I know why you're so peculiar now. I'll tell you what you can do. You can give them a tower someday with chimes in it. What's the best way back to Route 1?”

Then they would be leaving. He would toss away his cigarette and pull down his Panama hat. Somehow in this fantasy he always thought of himself in a Panama hat.

When he was in England he had often daydreamed his way through another fantasy. In this one he would find himself traveling on Route 1 in an army car with the Air Corps insignia on the door. He would be alone in the back seat, just home from overseas, and a technical sergeant would be driving, and he would say, just on the spur of the moment: