Point of No Return (2 page)

“All right,” he said, “I'm not forgetting.” There was no way to forget, since most of his life had been spent polishing some apple or other. If you had to earn your living, life was a series of apples.

“And don't forget,” and Nancy shook his shoulder, “to put two hundred into the housekeeping account. It's down to twenty dollars and I'm going to draw on it today.”

“What,” Charles asked, “again?”

“Yes,” Nancy said, “again and again and again. I thought you'd like some cheerful news, darling.”

“All right,” Charles said. “It's a hell of a morning, isn't it?”

“And don't forget that herringbone,” Nancy said, “and don't take that thing out of the buttonhole. No matter how well Roger Blakesley looks, he hasn't got a duck.”

“No,” Charles said, “that's right. He was too bright to get one.”

“And remember we're going to the Burtons' Friday night,” Nancy said. “Don't forget to tell Mr. Burton you're looking forward to it when you see him.” Nancy was good at putting details into useful order.

When Charles was in the bathroom shaving he disassociated himself from the activities of the moment and though he had always heard people say that you had your best thoughts while shaving, all that he usually thought about at such a time was that he was in a hurry. Now that he looked in the plate-glass mirror in the baked-enamel medicine cabinet—the expensive cabinet that Nancy had induced the architect to install instead of a cheaper fixture—the brushless cream on his face, the battered safety razor he was holding, and in fact the entire bathroom gave him a transient feeling. He had been moving about in the last few years from one set of plumbing appliances to another, in Pullmans, hotels, in ships' heads and in Quonset huts, but he was still paying for this unfamiliar bathroom.

The house had been a thirty-thousand-dollar house before the war, not including extras and there had been a number of extras. It had been more than they could possibly afford, but then the house itself had never looked expensive. Nancy had wanted everything to be right and she had always dreamed about the right sort of bathroom. Those were the days when there was no shortage in materials and when there were all sorts of catalogues. You could have fixtures in colors and you could select from a dozen built-in showers. You could have it done in tile or any way you wanted—and then there were all those waterproof wallpapers. Charles had wanted the one with fishes but Nancy had wanted the one with sailboats and after all he was doing it for Nancy and the children.

He should have felt at home in that bathroom because the architect had drawn and redrawn it, and he and Nancy had quarreled over it twice; but now, although the building of the house and the bathroom and all those struggles with copper pipes and automatic gas heaters were a part of the comparatively recent past, the memories seemed as hazy as those of childhood. The whole house now seemed to belong to him only vaguely. It was the same way with the branches of the oak tree that he saw outside the window.

It was, as he had said, a hell of a morning. The sky was leaden and the air was full of the pervasive, persistent sort of rain of early spring. The water was soaking into the frostless ground and was dripping from the bare twigs of the oak tree, giving them a purplish silver tinge, and the buds on the branches were already swelling. He was thinking of the family bathroom in Clyde, Massachusetts, which everyone had used before his father had added others in 1928. He was thinking of its white walls, its varnished floor and its golden-oak-framed mirror—not a specially designed bathroom but one that had been installed in what must have been a small bedroom once at the end of the second-story hall. For a second this recollection had been so vivid that the tree and the rain had not seemed right. Trees and the rain were different in Clyde, particularly at that season in the year. April rain was colder in Clyde. It generally came with the east wind, so it would beat hard on the windows; and the house, in spite of the hot-air furnace, was always damp and chilly. There were more elms than oaks in Clyde, and in April there was hardly a hint of spring.

His herringbone suit had a slight benzine odor which showed it was just fresh from the cleaners. He had worn it very little though it was four years old and now it was tight in the waist and shoulders, but not too tight. It was not a bad-looking suit at all and in fact it made him look rather like one of those suburban husbands you often saw in advertising illustrations, a whimsically comical man who peeked naïvely out of the corners of his eyes at his jolly and amazed little wife who was making that new kind of beaten biscuits.

There were ten minutes left for breakfast and it was important to keep his mind on the immediate present, yet when he went downstairs that memory of Clyde hung over him in a curiously persistent way, almost like a guilty secret, not to be discussed. Clyde had always bored Nancy and he could not blame her much. Nancy had come from upstate New York and he seldom wanted to hear about her home town either.

“Darling,” Nancy used to say, “we never saw each other in either of those places, and thank God we didn't.”

She was absolutely right. Thank God they hadn't, or they might have misunderstood each other. He had first seen Nancy in a partner's outer office in a law firm downtown on Pine Street, the firm of Burrell, Jessup and Cockburn. He could remember the exact, uncompromising way that she sat behind her typewriter and the exact amount of attention she had given him, not a bit more than was necessary and that was not very much.

“Mr. Jessup's in conference and he won't be free for half an hour,” Nancy had said. Nancy was always able to keep track of time as readily as a railroad conductor. That was the way he and Nancy had met and that was all there had been to their meeting.

“You needed a haircut,” Nancy told him later, “but not very badly, and the way you held your brief case showed you weren't one of those bond boys, and you didn't have a handkerchief in your breast pocket.”

“Well,” he had told her later, “you didn't look so lovable either.”

“Darling,” Nancy said, “that's one of the nicest things you've ever told me. I spent a long time cultivating just that look.”

When he came down to the dining room, Nancy was sitting in much the same posture, very straight in her bleached oak chair. Instead of a typewriter she was manipulating a toaster and an electric percolator, and there was a child on either side of her—their children.

“Don't trip over the extension cords,” Nancy said. “Billy—”

His son Bill rose from the table and pulled out his chair for him, a respectful attention on which Nancy insisted and which always made Charles nervous.

“Well, well,” Charles said. “Good morning, everybody. Hasn't the school bus come by yet?”

“It's not the school bus,” his daughter Evelyn said. “It's the school car. Why do you always call it a bus?”

“It ought to be a bus,” Charles said. “You kids ought to be going to a public school.”

Nancy was looking at him critically as she always did before he went to town.

“You've forgotten your handkerchief,” she said.

That idea of hers that every well-dressed man should have a corner of a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket he often thought must have been a hangover from Nancy's earlier days, but then perhaps every woman had her own peculiar ideas about male dress.

“Now listen, Nance,” he said, “never mind about the handkerchief.”

It surprised him that she let it pass.

“Evelyn, pass your father his coffee,” she said.

“And don't look cute when you're doing it,” Bill said.

“Mother,” Evelyn said, “won't you tell Bill to stop that, please?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “Stop, Bill, and go out in the kitchen. Put the eggs in and watch the clock.”

There was no necessity for listening carefully to the voices of Nancy and the children. He could go on with his orange juice, toast, and coffee as though the conversation were a background of words issuing from a radio. He had heard the program again and again.

“You've got to leave in five minutes,” Nancy said. “The roads will be slippery.”

Charles pulled his watch from his vest pocket, the one that Nancy had given him just before they were married, and glanced at it.

“And remember,” Nancy said, “you'll have to go and get the Buick out. Something seems to be wrong with the automatic choke.”

“Didn't you send it down to be fixed?” Charles asked.

“Yes,” Nancy answered, “but you know what they're like at that service station. They just look at the carburetor and don't do anything. I wish you'd go to that new Acme place.”

“Acme. I wonder what acme means exactly,” Charles said.

“Why, Daddy,” Evelyn said. “Don't you know what acme means? It means the top of everything.”

It startled him to have Evelyn tell him something which he should have known himself and which, of course, he would have known if he had put his mind on it. The trouble was that he had not been back long enough for broken links of habit to be wholly mended, and everything at home still seemed to have sprung ready-made out of nowhere. There was something in Berkeley's theory of philosophy—as he had learned it at Dartmouth—that there was no proof that anything existed except in the radius of one's consciousness.

Before the war, Bill had been nine and Evelyn had been six, and now Evelyn was able to look up acme in the dictionary. He was in a ready-made dining room, though he had been responsible for its having been built in 1940. He and Nancy had bought the bleached chairs and table and sideboard and had agreed that the walls should be done in pickled pine because they had wanted it to look light and modern. The glazed chintz draperies still had their original luster and the begonias and ivy and geraniums in the bow window looked as though they had just come from the florist, because Nancy had made an intensive study of the care and feeding of household plants. There were no finger marks or smudges on the table or the chairs and the light carpet was just back from the cleaners without a smudge on it either. It was amazing how beautifully Nancy could keep a house with only one maid to help her.

“You'd better get the Buick now,” Nancy said. “There's no use killing ourselves getting to the train.”

The rain gave the blue gravel near the garage a metallic sheen. The water on the lightly whitened brick of the house—he believed it had been called Southern Brick—made the variegated color look like new plastic, and the leaves of the rhododendrons and the firs near the front door glistened like dark cold water.

The Buick started easily enough, though it was a 1940 car. It reminded him of a well-preserved old gentleman with an independent income, cared for by a valet, and he did not see how Nancy could have kept it looking so well considering all the bundles and the children it had carried.

“Move over,” Nancy said. “I'll drive down.”

She adjusted a little cushion against the small of her back and took the wheel. She had on one of those transparent, greenish rain capes over her greenish tweed suit. She pulled her gloves deliberately over her engagement and wedding rings, but then she had fixed it so there was plenty of time. She had always said that she was never going to have any man of hers get ulcers running for the train.

When they were out of the drive and safely through the gates marked Sycamore Park, he glanced at her profile. The rain had made her hair, where it showed at the edges of her green felt hat, moist and curly. They always seemed much more at peace when she took him to the station than at any other time and for some reason it was always the friendliest moment of the day. He and Nancy were alone together, undisturbed by all the rest of the world.

“You didn't forget your reports, did you?” Nancy asked.

“No,” he said. “I've got them.”

“Have you still got that headache? There's an aspirin in the glove compartment.”

“It's all right,” he said. “It's gone.”

“Well, that's good,” she said. “Darling?”

“What?” he asked.

“It's nice driving you to the train again. It's sort of like coming back to where we started.”

He looked at her again. She was looking straight ahead of her, but she was smiling.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” he said. “It's funny, when I came down there to breakfast this morning the whole place seemed ready-made.”

“Ready-made?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said. “Just as though I'd never done anything about it.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm too efficient.”

“That isn't what I mean,” he said.

“It's all right,” she answered, “as long as you don't mind.”

He was never nervous when she was driving. She had a peculiar gift of being able to divide her concentration, which permitted her to drive and at the same time balance the household budget or quarrel artistically or give intelligent answers to the children's questions about God and the life hereafter. The casual way in which she spoke told him that she was thinking very carefully about what she was saying.

“I wish I could stop coaching from the sidelines, but I can't help it, can I?”

There was no use answering because of course she knew what he would say, but still he answered.

“Hell, no,” he said. “Of course you can't.”

“Someday you're going to say you don't like it. I'm afraid of that.”

There were drawbacks, he was thinking, to knowing anyone too well, and yet there was no way to avoid this. There was no actual chance for decent concealment when you knew someone's voice as well as he did hers. It was all part of the relationship that was known as love, which was quite different from being in love because love had a larger and more embracing connotation. It was a shadowy sort of edifice built by habit, without any very good architecture, but still occasionally you could get enough impression of its form to wonder how it had been built.