Point of No Return (15 page)

He was thinking, for no good reason, of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo as he had first seen it from the jeep that had brought him in from the army airfield in the desert. He remembered the beige façade and the robes and the red caps of the dragomans and the khaki shorts of the British and colonial officers crowding the terrace and their caps and tam-o'-shanters that somehow made them look like grown men pretending to be Boy Scouts at a children's party. It all made no particular sense, since neither he nor anyone at headquarters had ever found why he had been sent to Cairo. Then he thought of the field at Prestwick and of the uncompromising Scottish streets of Glasgow. Then he was thinking of the main street in Clyde, of the brick sidewalk and a display of elastic bandages and digestive powders in the windows of Walters's drugstore, and the tools and galvanized pails and hickory bushel baskets in front of Harrison's hardware store which was only a few doors further down the street, just before you came to Bates's grocery. There was no reason to think of Clyde and Shepheard's and of some dingy pub in Glasgow all at the same time, except that everything was closer together than it used to be.

He could hear the creaking, complaining sounds of the train and he was aware of the dim tunnel lights moving past the windows in an even sequence of light and dark that was punctuated now and then by a blue electric flash when some locomotive lost contact with the rail. Although his thoughts had no appreciable pattern, he knew that they were all symptoms of his own uncertainty.

The people he had seen that day and the things that he and they had said had no disturbing connotation in themselves. Taken separately, they were all elements that he might encounter in any working day. The trust conference, the interlude of lunch, the activities of Roger Blakesley, his words with Mr. Selig, his talk with Tony Burton and his conference with the Whitakers, were manifestations that he had encountered often in slightly different forms, yet taken all together they achieved a different stature. Even the question of competition, of his having been outmaneuvered, though he was keenly conscious of it, was not what disturbed him. There was something more in the sum of all of it that lay within himself.

For some reason Clyde kept coming into it, and for some reason he kept seeing events in terms of Clyde; and all the things he had done that day were like things he had done in Clyde, on a different projection and a wholly different scale. Actually he was not very different from what he had at one time been. But nicer. He remembered the word “nicer.” The train was out of the tunnel, moving by the lighted tenements of uptown New York whose unshaded windows gave abrupt glimpses into other people's lives.

When he had stood by that other New York window watching Dorothy Whitaker's tapering fingers with their brightly polished red nails as she held her half-empty glass, he might again have been calling on Jessica Lovell at the Lovell house in Clyde. Granted that Jessica was a wholly different person, there was that same indirect involvement. It was true that if you weren't tough enough, contact with other people wore you down.

“Tickets,” the conductor was saying. He had not noticed the conductor walking through the car. You had to have some sort of ticket for everything and it was generally one-way. Then he remembered that he had used up the last of his commutation ticket that morning.

“I'll have to pay you,” Charles said. He could not remember when he had last forgotten a ticket. “How much is it to Clyde? … I'm sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

Charles picked up the book from the top of the brief case and began to turn the pages.

“For the purposes of distinction,” he was reading again, “it will be well arbitrarily to define the very definite and crystallized social strata of Yankee Persepolis as upper, middle, and lower. These will be subdivided into upper-upper, middle-upper, and lower-upper …”

Since he was late, he had to take a taxi. The taxi starter, who sorted the clientele, putting those who were going in the same general direction into the same cab, was standing at the far end of the platform, a lay figure silhouetted against the headlights of the cars.

“Sycamore Park,” Charles said, and the starter called out his words above the rumbling of the train that was leaving.

“Sycamore Park. Anyone else going to Sycamore Park?”

The night air was fresher and it smelled of spring, and there was a vacancy of sound after the train had left. The train seemed to have carried away everything that Charles had been thinking. Everything connected with the city, Smith Chemical, Telephone, American Tobacco B, and short-term governments, was gone with the train. He was going home again, and no one else was going to Sycamore Park. He was returning to the basic reason for everything for which he had been working.

As he sat in the back seat of the taxicab he still thought about Clyde. They used to play hide-and-seek in the old back garden of the Meader yard in the spring, just when it was getting dusk—he and Melville Meader and Earl Wilkins and all the rest of the crowd along Spruce Street. There was a better chance of hiding, just when it was dusk. You could hide downstairs in the bam or back of the carriage shed or anywhere in the garden. There was always that indecision, that rushing about, until you heard “five hundred, coming, ready or not.” Then you tried to sneak back without being seen. The best way was to dodge around the carriage house and then to the corner of the bam where you could watch the back porch, which was home, until everything was clear. There was always an uncertainty, a wondering whether you could make it, and then that dash for home. If you got there safely, all the other incidents were behind you. There was a triumphant, out-of-breath feeling, a momentary impression that nothing else mattered, when you called out “Home Free!”

Sycamore Park had been developed in 1938 on the forty-acre grounds of an old estate and the subdivision had been excellently managed by the local real estate firm of Merton and Pease. As Mr. Merton had said, it was a natural, and he had never understood why someone had not dreamed it up long ago—not too far from the shopping center and the trains, and yet in the neighborhood of other larger places. Every place had its own acre, and no house was to be constructed for a cost of less than thirty thousand dollars. It would have been wiser, perhaps, never to have gone there but to have bought a smaller place.

It would have been wiser, easier, and much safer. He had not at that time been moved up in the trust department and in 1939 all he had was twenty thousand dollars in savings, part of which was in paid-up life insurance. He could never analyze all the urges that made him lay everything on the line in order to live on a scale he could not immediately afford, discounting the possibilities of illness or accident and relying on possibilities of promotion. He only remembered having had an irrational idea that time was of the essence, that he would always stay on a certain business level if he did not take some sort of action, and Nancy, too, had shared that feeling.

The sight of the house at Sycamore Park still gave him qualms of uneasiness. Its whitened brick, its bow windows, still reminded him of what might have happened and of what he would have done if things had turned out differently. Those worries were all top-secret between Nancy and himself, to be shared with no one else. Yet, no matter what, that house was his and hers, a tangible achievement of the past and a sort of promissory note for the future.

When he had paid the driver and the car had driven off, he stood for a while at the end of the flagstone path that led to the green front door. The light from the ground-floor windows sharpened the outlines of the ell and roof, and his imagination enabled him to put the rest of it together in the dark—the yard, the lawn and trees, the garage and the flagstone terrace by the windows of the library. Now they were even talking at odd moments about selling and getting something larger, but nothing would ever be the same as that particular house. No other house of theirs would ever have the sleepless nights, the hours of argument, spent over it. There was too much of him connected with the house ever to view it objectively. He was thinking of the copper gutters and of the way the conductors drained over a part of the lawn. It would be necessary to have a dry well dug for the conductors; and then there was the broken latch on the garage door, and the oil burner needed a new lining of firebrick; and then there was the weather stripping around the living room windows, and there was something still wrong with the gas water heater. Then there was the mortgage. Then there was the part of the cellar that he was going to turn into a workshop for himself and Bill, now that you could buy lathes and drills again. Those were the species of thoughts that came over him as he stood there by the door, and they were a relief after everything else.

The hall, when Charles entered, seemed what the architect had called gracious and welcoming. At the left came the dining room; the living room was opposite, then the stairs, and the pine-paneled library at the end. Once he had thought this ground plan was entirely original until, to his amazement, he had found it repeated in all the other houses at Sycamore Park. The hall furniture was what made it undeniably their own hall, for the furniture, though Nancy had kept changing it, came from other incarnations, from apartments in New York, from the little house in Larchmont. The four rush-bottomed chairs they had bought once on a vacation trip and on which no one could sit were good antiques that never fitted well with the reproductions that Nancy had bought before she knew better. They still stood, with the gilt mirror and the console table, like parts of older civilizations, waiting to be absorbed into another way of life.

It was strange the way a family developed habits. For instance, no one seemed to use the living room much, although it was the largest and most comfortable room in the house. The children as usual were in the library listening to the radio—no longer learning parchesi and reading the
Wizard of Oz.
Instead they had progressed imperceptibly to the outer edge of childhood, a strange, transient region. Bill was sprawled on the sofa in a manner which he must have copied from some older boys. He was wearing a pullover sweater and his gray flannel trousers had worked halfway up to his knees, showing stretches of bare shin, and garterless knitted socks that wrinkled above those laceless moccasins that all the boys were wearing. His face seemed to have outgrown itself, like his body, so that his nose looked too big for his eyes, and he had a crew cut which was very unbecoming.

Evelyn sat sideways in an armchair. Instead of being nervous, petulant, and slender, as she had been when she was seven and eight, Evelyn was almost fat. He could imagine she would be pretty someday for she had Nancy's tranquil features and Nancy's chin and mouth, yet it was hard to believe that Nancy, when she was thirteen, could have looked like Evelyn, that Nancy could have worn a little girl's plaid dress or that Nancy's light brown braids had ever been so untidy.

When they saw him they both jumped up, clumsily yet with a puzzling sort of co-ordination. There had been a time when he had taken it for granted that they were fond of him, but now he found it very reassuring to realize that they were still glad to see him, even though their feelings toward each other were undergoing some adolescent change. Evelyn still kissed him like a little girl, winding her arms tight around his neck, but Bill simply stood there grinning at him, with his wrists dangling out of the sleeves of his sweater.

“Hello,” Charles said. “How about turning that radio off?”

“It's going to be over in a minute, Daddy,” Evelyn said, “and then there's going to be Eddy Duchin.”

“Well, never mind Eddy Duchin,” Charles said. “Turn it off. I'm tired.”

Bill switched it off and there was a silence that was almost embarrassing to Charles. It was obviously incredible to both Bill and Evelyn that anyone could exist who could bear to miss Duchin.

“What's the matter?” Bill asked. “Don't you want to hear it, Pop?”

“Not right this minute,” Charles answered, and he put his arm around Evelyn's shoulders. “You're getting to be a big girl, aren't you?”

“Don't,” Evelyn said. “You tickle.”

“Where's Mother?” Charles asked.

“She's gone to the club,” Bill answered. “The Martins took her and she left the car. She said for you to go up there when you've had supper.”

“Your supper's in the oven,” Evelyn told him, “but I'll get it.”

“Why do you have to go out?” Bill asked. “Why don't you just stay here?”

“Because he's on the committee,” Evelyn said. “And don't forget to shave.”

She sounded just like Nancy.

“Don't worry,” Charles answered. “I'll put on a black tie and everything.”

“Mother laid your clothes out,” Evelyn told him. “Daddy, why don't you use lotion?”

“What?” Charles asked.

“After-shaving lotion. Don't you want to be like other people?”

Charles started to laugh, but a desperate, tragic note in her voice stopped him.

“Do you really think that would help?” he asked, and she nodded without speaking.

“All right,” Charles said, “I'll tell you what I'll do. If you really think so, I'll buy some of it tomorrow.”

It must have been worrying her, because she smiled the triumphant smile of someone who has been through a considerable ordeal and who has been brave enough to speak frank thoughts.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, “you don't have to do it if you don't want to.”

That expansive mood was still with Charles as he sat in the dining room eating warmed-over corned beef hash and string beans and drinking a cup of bitter, warmed-over coffee. Now that it was spring, he found himself saying, they would take the car some Saturday soon and drive away out in Connecticut for a picnic. It would be a cooking picnic, if they could find a place somewhere near a brook where they could light a fire. When he was their age, he was saying, they often went for picnics down on the beach and they always built a fire of driftwood because there was always a lot of dry wood on a beach. Bill was saying that he wished they had a sailboat, but Evelyn was saying that of course they couldn't afford a sailboat, and Charles said that perhaps they could sometime. Then Bill was saying that he had been with some of the boys to the airport that afternoon watching the Piper Cubs, and Charles said that maybe Bill could take flying lessons sometime, if he wanted, when he was seventeen or eighteen. This brought the conversation around to the war, and Charles was telling them again, as he had before, that he had not done anything much in the war and that a great many people in the Air Force were on the ground all the time, repairing the planes and briefing the crews who were going on missions. Then Bill was asking him if he had ever been on a mission, and Charles said that he had been, twice, but not doing anything, just there to see what it was like. He had never thought that their talk would end that way after beginning with shaving lotion.