Point of No Return (32 page)

“But it's just as well it's in trust, isn't it?” Charles asked him. Somehow after that evening he could be as frank as that, and John Gray even seemed to enjoy it.

“But it ought not to be handled in Clyde, Charley,” John Gray said, “not by a small-minded lawyer in a small-minded town.”

If Clyde was a small-minded town, why had he stayed in Clyde? Had he not ever wanted to get out of it? Charles asked him, but he could never get a direct answer.

“The idea used to occur to me,” John Gray said, “but where else could I have gone? Perhaps I was afraid. I'm aware of my deficiencies, Charley.”

Being aware of his deficiencies, Charles sometimes thought, was a part of his stock in trade.

“I'll bet if you got your hands on some more money,” Charles said, “you'd try it all over again.”

His father was amazed, and not hurt at all.

“You know I never bet, Charley,” he answered, “and it isn't so. I'm completely, magnificently aware of my deficiencies. I've learned my little lesson, Charley, and that's all over now.” A part of his cloak was a garment of quiet puritanism, like so many other cloaks in Clyde. He was not an unregenerate figure of revolt with dangerous ideas. He voted a straight Republican ticket like everyone else in Clyde.

Dorothea was sure that he had learned his little lesson. As long as Charles could remember, Dorothea had been sure of everything. She had been sure that she would be a great concert pianist. She had been sure, when she had been sewing Butterick patterns, that she could be a successful dress designer; and now she was sure that she could tell Elbridge Sterne ways to advance himself at Wright-Sherwin. It may have been that sureness which had driven the other young men away, but Dorothea never admitted it. She was sure that Father was never going to do that again. She wished that Charles would not joke with him about it. No one had ever dreamed of speaking of it until Charles had and it was highly disrespectful. Charles ought to see that it hurt Mother to talk about bundles of hay.

His mother, too, was sure that Father would never do it again, but she did not think it was disrespectful to treat things as a joke as long as Father did not mind. It showed, she said, that Father was very fond of Charles. If he had not paid as much attention to Charles as he might have, one should remember that he had been so upset about Sam. Father always felt things very deeply. The main thing was to be kind and remember that he was a very remarkable person, quite different from other people. You could not judge him by other standards. For instance, when he joked with Charles about Wright-Sherwin he was really very proud of Charles. Father was beginning to depend on him just as she was and he was their only boy. They were all very proud of Charles, even Dorothea.

Aunt Jane was sure about it, too. Once she had harbored doubts but recently she had been sure that John had turned the corner. It was a little late, perhaps, but he had turned it. After all, he was only fifty-five and Michelangelo was still painting when he was ninety. She had deep faith in John Gray. She knew that he had been the spoiled baby of the family, twelve years younger than she and fourteen years younger than Mathilda—but at least he did not have what she called the Gray heart. The Judge had suffered with it and so had Mathilda and now she had it too. Yet, when his aunt spoke of the Gray heart, she always ended by treating it as a proud inheritance.

Charles could gather that the Grays did not have the past glories of certain other families in Clyde. They had only been country people, on the farm upriver, before the embargo of 1811, but they did have the Gray heart and it carried you off quickly when you had it. Gerald Marchby had told her so. Gerald's deafness was growing but he could hear her heart. It was because of the Gray heart and because he was deeply fond of her that Charles stopped to call on his aunt nearly every afternoon after leaving the office at Wright-Sherwin. Dr. Marchby had prescribed sherry for her, the only way you could get sherry in prohibition days, and she had arranged to obtain two quarts a week, one for her and one for Charles, because Charley ought to have something in return for coming to see her and the Judge had always liked sherry.

Those calls at the Judge's house on Gow Street were difficult to distinguish one from another, except for one on an afternoon not long after that talk with his father. There was a chill in the air in spite of the sunlight and the yellow elm leaves were beginning to drop on the sidewalks. When Charles opened the front door, his aunt was seated in her favorite bannister-back armchair in the Judge's study. Mary Callahan had already brought in the tea and the sherry decanter and had lighted a lump of cannel coal in the grate. His Aunt Jane had on her spectacles and was reading from a piece of foolscap written in the Spencerian penmanship which she had learned long ago at the female academy. Charles knew at once it was one of those lists of personal effects she was always making. For the last two years she had been arranging for their distribution but the arrangements were never final. She wanted everyone to have something and she did not want any friend of hers to be out of sorts when she was dead.

“I told Mary to light the fire to take the chill off,” Aunt Jane said. “Charley, I'm going to give Mary the Sheffield teapot and a thousand dollars.”

There was no use trying to deflect her from this subject because she liked it, and he had learned it was best to fall in with her mood.

“I thought you were going to let her have the tray,” Charles told her.

“I know,” she answered, “but I asked her this morning. She thinks Dorothea ought to have the tray.”

Of course, she had asked Mary Callahan. Mary had told him only the other day that she was going simply crazy being asked about every stick and plate in the house and being told about the Gray heart. In Mary's opinion, it was stuff and nonsense. Miss Jane, in Mary's opinion, was just as spry as ever she was, up and down stairs and all over the place, emptying out trunks and bureaus, her heart and all. In Mary's opinion Miss Jane was only being contrary to draw attention to herself, and Miss Jane had always been contrary.

Though his aunt's demise was a grim subject, Charles had grown used to it and somehow it was not as grim as it sounded in the Judge's study. He had never seen his grandfather but Charles could feel his presence in the room his grandfather had remodeled in the most unfortunate decorative period of the eighties. He could feel the Judge's precision and his love of order in the golden-oak bookcases and the shining brass about the black marble fireplace. He could feel that nothing was entirely gone, least of all his aunt, sitting as straight as she ever had, in the room's most uncomfortable chair.

Her mood usually changed for the better when she took her sherry. She always drank it in delicate sips and she always coughed.

“It's just as well I never touched it until now,” she said. “Charley, I hear you're doing very well.”

“Where did you hear that?” Charles asked.

“At the Women's Alliance.”

“Where?”

“You heard me,” Aunt Jane said, “and it's about time that someone in the family was successful. I think John would have got on if he had gone to Dartmouth instead of Harvard. Charley, do you think Dorothea's going to marry that factory man she brought in here, the one who squints?”

“Who?” Charles asked. “Elbridge Sterne?”

“Yes. He knows all about brass. He kept looking at the andirons. Is Dorothea going to marry him or isn't she?”

“I don't know,” Charles said. “She's never taken it up with me. She'll probably get discouraged with him. You know—after a certain time she always gets discouraged.”

“She's only particular like me,” Aunt Jane said. “Esther thinks she's going to marry him.”

“Mother always thinks she's going to marry someone,” Charles told her.

“If she does,” Aunt Jane said, “she can have the tea tray and the dining room chairs besides the five thousand dollars.”

The cannel coal snapped viciously and a piece of it fell on the carpet. Charles rose hastily and kicked it back on the hearth.

“Charley,” Aunt Jane said, “you look exactly like the Judge. Did I tell you I'm leaving you five thousand dollars?”

“Yes,” Charles said, “you did tell me.”

“Well, you might at least say thank you,” Aunt Jane said.

“But I have thanked you,” Charles told her, “and I've told you you ought not to do it after sending me through college.”

“Well, I'm going to,” Aunt Jane said, “and Esther's going to have ten thousand and the Queen Anne mirror and my bureau. It's time Esther had something. That's twenty thousand, isn't it? Charley, how do you think your father seems?”

“Why, Father's all right, I guess,” Charles said.

The door opened and Mary Callahan came in with a glass and a bottle of pills. It was six o'clock.

“Thank you, Mary,” Aunt Jane said, and she looked hard at her back and did not speak until the door closed softly. “Do you think she stands outside and listens, Charley?”

“No, Aunt Jane,” he said, “I don't really think she does.”

“Well, I don't want her to hear this,” Aunt Jane said. “Charley, I've been thinking about your father. You don't know him as well as I do. I'm worried about his self-respect.”

“His self-respect?” Charles repeated.

“Yes,” Aunt Jane said, “and I'm not going to leave the rest to him in trust. It will hurt his self-respect.”

The cannel coal snapped again with a sound that was like a punctuation mark. Charles had heard about the furniture and the silver and the rugs and about a bequest to the Unitarian Church, but she had never told him this before.

“I think it's a mistake, Aunt Jane,” Charles said.

“I'm not asking your opinion,” she answered, but of course she was asking his opinion. “I don't want to have anyone unhappy after I'm gone.”

He felt sorry for her because he knew that she only half believed what she was saying, but it did not seem possible to discuss the subject, when he was still so young that his loyalties were confused.

“Charley,” she asked, “aren't you going to say something?”

“No,” Charles said. “There isn't any more to say if that's the way you want it.”

She reached toward him and put her hand over his. “We have to trust him. He's your father, Charley,” and then there was a quaver in her voice. “Charley, I'm so proud of you. Now turn on the lights. Isn't it nice to have electric lights?”

Until he pressed the switch by the door, he had almost thought that his aunt was dead already, but when the ceiling light was on in the old gas chandelier the brillance of the room erased all that talk of death.

“Well,” she said, “that's settled. Charley, I wish you saw more girls.”

“Why, you're my only girl,” Charles said, and he laughed.

“I wish you saw some nice girls,” his Aunt Jane said again. “Why don't you ever see Jessica Lovell?”

“Jessica Lovell?” Charles repeated. “Why, I hardly know her.”

His aunt should have known he belonged in a different group from Jessica Lovell and that groups hardly ever mingled in Clyde.

When Charles arrived home after his talk with Aunt Jane on death and testaments, Dorothea was playing the phonograph. The family were sitting in the second-best parlor and Elbridge Sterne was with them, in an inconspicuous pepper-and-salt suit and a stiff collar. He had asked Dorothea if she would go to the movies that evening and if he could take her somewhere to supper, and Dorothea had asked him to come home to supper because there was no place to eat in Clyde, unless you wanted a sandwich and a soda at the Sweet Shoppe or a meal in a booth that smelled of fried clams in that restaurant of Nicky Demetrios's on Dock Street. A log fire was burning, which showed that Elbridge must have lugged the wood in from the shed outdoors, because Charles had not brought any in and his father disliked doing it. His father, he saw, was reading a newspaper by the big table lamp, not the
Clyde Herald
but the
Boston Evening Transcript,
and his mother was darning a sock. She had thrust her darning egg well up into the toe and she was bending over her work with an intent and puzzled look. She always said that she hated sewing.

“Hello, Charley,” Elbridge said. “You weren't in my part of the shop today, were you?”

Elbridge was exhibiting the classic desire, shared by all Dorothea's other callers, to be agreeable to the younger brother. When Charles shook hands with Elbridge he had the younger brother's conventional feeling of amusement and slight contempt for anyone so weak as to put himself in the situation of calling on Dorothea, and Dorothea was looking at him suspiciously, as though she were still afraid he would blurt out some crude remark or play some practical joke on her and Elbridge Sterne. Elbridge in many ways looked like a shipwrecked sailor among strange natives. His voice was heavy and Midwestern, and he had not lost the hopeful breeziness of more open spaces.

“That's right,” Charles said, “I was in the office all day.”

“Well, come out into the plant sometime and meet some of the fellows,” Elbridge said. “That's a fine crowd of fellows in Shed Two.”

“Elbridge could show you a lot about the plant,” Dorothea said, “if you'd only let him.”

“Who said I don't want to let him?” Charles asked. “But I'm not supposed to leave the office and be wandering around.”

“Well, as long as you know everything about everything,” Dorothea said.

His mother looked up from her darning.

“I wish you two would stop arguing for just a minute,” she said. “It can't be very interesting for Elbridge. How do you think Aunt Jane seemed, dear?”—and Charles said he thought she seemed very well.

“Was she still talking about the furniture?” Dorothea asked.