Point of No Return (69 page)

“Turn right at the next crossroad, Sergeant. I want to go through Clyde,” and when they reached the corner of Dock and Johnson streets he would say:

“Drive ahead, Sergeant, and I'll tell you when to stop. I want to get out for a minute. I haven't been here for quite a while.”

The army car would stop in front of Walters's Drugstore and he would get out and stand on the sidewalk and light a cigarette. No one would speak to him but there would be a group of three or four people a few yards away whom he had known once but whom he could not remember. He would glance toward them in pleasant half-recognition. Then he would toss away his cigarette and turn back to the waiting car, and he would hear someone say in a low voice:

“Isn't that Charley Gray—and isn't he a lieutenant colonel?”

He would give no sign of having heard.

“All right, Sergeant,” he would say, “let's go,” and the army car would be moving down Dock Street.

It was strange, in spite of those occasional rehearsals, that he was not prepared at all for what he saw when he got off the train. He must have thought of Clyde in terms of climax instead of anticlimax, but instead Clyde was like the churchyard in Gray's “Elegy.” When the train moved away from the station it was like the lowing herd winding o'er the lea.

He was standing on the platform holding his suitcase, an outlander now, a stranger, but at the same time nothing was strange to him at all. There was the same smell of coal smoke from the train, the same damp in the air, the same chill of frost in the ground and the same dull, forbidding April sky that he had known. It had been raining and the roofs were wet and the wind made tiny ripples in the puddles in the street and the clouds still hung sullenly over the town. It was going to rain again. The cars were parked about the station in the old disorderly way and a single car was waiting for passengers in the taxi space but everyone was walking home. The driver, a gangling boy of about seventeen, reminded Charles of Earl Wilkins but of course he was not Earl because he was too young to be.

“Taxi, sir?” he asked, and his voice sounded like Earl's.

It never occurred to Charles until he heard the driver's voice that he would not be walking home to Spruce Street, now that he was off the train. He had been thinking of himself and Clyde without ever planning what he would do when he arrived there. Now he did not know where to go and he did not want to go anywhere. He wanted to be alone but he could not stand there holding the suitcase.

“Taxi, sir,” the driver called again. The taxis at the station had always called strangers sir.

His cousin Jerry and his Aunt Ruth Marchby were in Clyde, as far as he knew, through his mother's letters from Kansas City. They might be hurt if he did not stay with them but it seemed abrupt and almost rude to appear unexpectedly when he should have telephoned that morning from Boston. No one ever dropped in suddenly on anyone in Clyde.

“Yes. Just a minute,” he said.

There were the Masons. He knew they still lived on Spruce Street, also from his mother's letters, and the Masons, too, might be hurt if he did not stay with them, but Mr. and Mrs. Mason would be very old and it might be upsetting to them.

“I guess I've got to go somewhere,” he said, and he found himself staring at the driver again. “Are you any relation to Earl Wilkins?”—and the driver said that he was Earl Wilkins's son.

“Let's see,” he said. “I haven't been here for quite a while. Is the Clyde Hotel still running?”

In all his years in Clyde he had hardly been inside the Clyde Hotel. It was where drummers stayed and visitors who came to do business with Wright-Sherwin and the mills.

“You mean the inn,” Earl Wilkins's son said. “They call it the Clyde Inn now.”

“Tell your father,” Charles began, and he felt self-conscious and unsure of himself, “tell him Charley Gray was asking for him. We used to go to school together.” He had never thought that he would have to introduce himself in Clyde. “I guess you'd better take my suitcase and take it up to the hotel, I mean the inn. Tell them at the inn I'll be along in a little while. I think I'll walk around.” He took a dollar out of his pocket though he felt awkward about tipping Earl Wilkins's son. “Just take the bag and keep the change.”

“Thanks,” Earl's son said. “Thanks a lot.”

“And don't forget to tell your father Charley Gray was asking for him.”

“I'll tell him all right,” Earl's son said, “and thanks a lot.” At least he no longer called him sir.

It was not at all like those stories he had read of persons returning to the scenes of their childhood. He was not Rip van Winkle after a twenty-year sleep. He was simply back in Clyde on an earlier train than usual.

There were a few places that he did not want to see—the part of Johnson Street where the Lovell home stood, the Judge's house on Gow Street, and Spruce Street; so he walked up Fillmore Street from the station, not along Chestnut, as he would have if he had been going to Dock Street and then home. First there were the shabby rooming houses near the station, where the workers in the shoeshops and Wright-Sherwin lived, and then came the larger houses as Fillmore approached the northern end of Johnson Street, but he was not thinking of the street. The wind and the dampness of the air were so characteristic of reluctant spring that he might have been waiting in front of the courthouse again for Jessica to come by, just by accident, in her Dodge car. It was too late for snowdrops already but in a flower bed with a southern exposure blue grape hyacinths and a few crocuses might be blooming, flaming orange, white and blue. He saw none and he did not look for them but he was as certain that they would be there as that there would be robins in the budding branches of the lilacs. The willow branches would be turning yellow and on some wooded slope beneath fallen oak leaves there might even be hepaticas. Spring was like autumn, except that everything was coming to life instead of dying. In the country the peeper frogs would be singing in the puddles that could not yet soak through the sodden, frosty ground. Clyde, unhindered by its ghosts, was approaching its annual resurrection.

The Episcopal Church, with the flat tombs in its small churchyard, was on the corner of Fillmore and Johnson streets. He did not look up at its steeple and its cross but he remembered that his Aunt Jane always said as she passed it that she was glad she was a Unitarian. She had said so on the hot summer's day when he had walked past it with her and Dorothea on their way to the Historical Society to hear his mother read her paper. He was walking in the same direction now and soon the Historical Society was in front of him, behind its cast-iron fence on its moist brown lawn, but there were no groups of people waiting for a meeting. “Clyde Historical Society,” a new sign by the old brass cannon read. “Open weekdays, 2
P.M.
to 5
P.M.
, except Saturdays.” It was a quarter before five.

A bell clanged when he opened the front door, like an old shop bell. There was the same disorder in the hall, the same two antique settles he remembered, and the flintlock muskets, the fire buckets and the blunderbuss. The light in the hall was gray but somehow strong, because the days were growing longer.

The custodian of the Historical Society, he remembered, had always been Miss Smythe, but it was a Miss Smythe of the present who appeared to answer the bell. She had the same grim, watchful expression—she was just the age Miss Smythe had been—and she wore a shabby buttoned sweater because the place was cold. She was looking at him with Miss Smythe's lack of welcome and he would not have been surprised if she had told him to run along as Miss Smythe had when he and Jackie Mason had called there once.

“We close at five o'clock,” she said.

“Yes,” Charles said, “I know. I just wanted to look around for a few minutes.”

“There won't be time to see much before five o'clock,” she said.

“Yes,” Charles said again. “I just wanted to look around.” He was simply another of the objects in that indiscriminate mixture of things in the Historical Society which all belonged somewhere else and to some other age.

“The admission is twenty-five cents,” the custodian was saying. “The South Sea ornaments and the ship models are in the room to the left and there are collections upstairs, too, but we close at five o'clock.”

The white bone ship still stood in the center of the room to the left. The Chinese pagoda with its wind bells and the sextants were still on the tables and the ship pictures were still on the walls, still plowing under full sail through their conventional canvas seas. The chairs were in rows in the assembly room, facing the same stage on which his mother had stood, and he could almost hear his mother's voice. He could still remember the opening of that paper.

“Every one of us here, I am sure, has seen a certain gray stone house with a mansard roof … As Longfellow, Miss Lyte's old friend, expressed it so beautifully once—‘the beauty and mystery of the ships, and the magic of the sea.'”

Nothing was ever entirely over.

“I'm sure we are all most grateful to Mrs. Gray for a charming paper and a delightful afternoon,” he could hear Mr. Lovell saying.

Nothing was ever entirely over, but he still wondered why anyone should have brought a suit of samurai armor from Japan and why it should be resting upstairs now in the Historical Society, meaninglessly and yet with some hidden meaning.

Before he left he walked to the lawn in back where tea had been served that summer afternoon. He knew the exact place where he had stood with his mother and father and he remembered exactly where Mr. Lovell had knelt on the grass and had thrown his arms around Jessica. He could almost hear the locusts in the elm trees.

“Pa,” Jessica was saying, and he could see her lacy white dress and her white socks and her patent leather slippers, “can't we go home now, please?”

The clock in the Episcopal Church was striking and then he heard the other bells. He remembered the deeper timbre of the Baptist Church and the almost nasal ring of the Unitarian bell. It was five o'clock and the Historical Society closed at exactly five.

2

Home Free

It was still too early in the season for raking up front yards and too early for ball-playing by the courthouse. Though the stores on Dock Street were open until six, everyone was hurrying home without lingering on the corners. There were a good many people on Dock Street but for some time Charles recognized no one, though they all had types of features he remembered, and the whole appearance of the street was just the same. The Dock Street Bank had its old grim, evening look. There was a display of seeds and gardening tools in the hardware store, a promise for the future that did not apply to the present. The North End bus was moving up the street and a few mud-spattered cars were following it. There was the same slow sound of traffic that he had always known, and the gentle, splashing sound of overshoes upon the wet brick sidewalks. All of Clyde was going home to supper.

It was just the time in the evening when everyone used to gather in the Meaders' back yard. The light was much the same as Charles remembered it. The shadows would be deeper downstairs in the bam and behind the carriage shed and you could run and hide behind the cordwood or behind the pung in the corner of the bam while the voice of whoever might be It counted five hundred by fives. You would hide where you could watch Home, which was the Meaders' back porch, or else you would sneak around the carriage house and wait until the coast was clear. There was always that uncertain moment for deciding whether to risk everything and run or whether to wait longer and risk being seen. Then there was that dash across the yard and the sharp, triumphant moment when you touched the steps of the Meaders' back porch first and shouted, “Home Free!”

In a way, Charles thought, Dock Street was like the Meaders' yard, now that he was walking down it. He was back at the start of everything, among the hidden reasons for everything, but he was not yet home. He saw the window display in Walters's Drugstore that had always been created for April, pyramids of bottles containing assorted spring tonics—Beef, Iron and Wine, Sulphur and Molasses, and also remedies that were guaranteed to break up a cold in twenty-four hours, all connected together by paper streamers which led to a colored cardboard cross section of the human nose and throat.

Beyond the bottles he could see the soda fountain and the booths, all newer than they had been but in exactly the same position. He could see a boy, wearing a Clyde High School sweater, and a girl, with a scarf tied over her head and wearing a green-and-white mackinaw, standing by the fountain. He should have known who they were, but of course he did not. He had stopped in front of Walters's Drugstore without realizing that he had stopped.

A woman was walking toward him holding a bag of groceries and it seemed to him that he should have known her, too, though there was nothing distinctive about her except that her face belonged to Clyde. He remembered thinking that she was too old to be wearing one of those silk scarves tied over her head and that it was not becoming. The scarf was too bright for her gray coat and its worn fur collar and for her blue mittens. Suddenly Charles recognized her—when the light from the drugstore window struck her face, making it look less worn and tired. They had been to Walters's Drugstore together. They had stood by the fountain just as that boy and girl were standing now, and he had often worn a maroon sweater with “CHS” lettered on it. It was Doris Wormser. Her yellow hair was darker, there were deep lines on her face, but it was Doris Wormser, and she recognized him, too, at almost the same moment.

“Why, Charley Gray,” she said, and her voice was high and nasal, although he remembered that it had sounded delightfully musical once.

“Why, hello, Doris,” he said.