Point of No Return (33 page)

“Yes,” Charles answered, “most of the time.”

“That reminds me,” Elbridge said, “I dropped into Burch's antique shop and I saw a desk there. It's got a sort of a curved front. I was thinking of buying it for a Christmas present for Mother. I wish you'd look at it, Dorothea, and tell me if it's any good.”

There was a pleasant rustling sound and Charles saw that his father had lowered his newspaper.

“From my experience, Elbridge,” he said, “I conclude that most attractive fronts should curve.”

Then they all saw that the
Boston Evening Transcript
was open at the page of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange.

“The market's still going up, isn't it, Mr. Gray?” Elbridge said.

John Gray smiled faintly and his glance met Charles's for a moment and then he looked away.

“I suppose it is,” he answered, “but I only buy the
Transcript
for the Notes and Queries. Do you ever read them, Elbridge?”

“Why, no, Mr. Gray,” Elbridge said.

“You really ought to,” John Gray said. “Sometimes you encounter the most unworldly queries—and then there's the genealogical column, and the department called the Churchman Afield. That's a fine active name, isn't it? It always makes me think of clergymen running about in riding boots blowing horns. Esther, dear, is supper nearly ready?”

Yes, supper was nearly ready, but his father had not been reading the Notes and Queries. Charles knew it when he continued speaking.

“That phonograph,” he said. Dorothea had risen to put on another record. “It's about time, isn't it, that we changed it for a radio? I know what you're going to say, Dorothea. I know the house isn't wired for electricity but it ought to be. We ought to keep in touch with the times. Your Aunt Jane has had her house wired. Esther, we ought to get a radio for Jane.”

Charles saw his mother close her sewing basket and she also must have known what John Gray had been reading.

“John,” she asked, “have you been to see Gerald?”

“Gerald?” John Gray's forehead wrinkled. “Oh, yes. I had a nice talk with Gerald.”

“What did he say about Jane?”

She must have forgotten that Elbridge Sterne was there.

“He said Jane's heart is doing very well,” John Gray said. “He says we're all worrying too much about Jane.” He stopped and began folding the paper carefully, as though he hoped the noise might distract everyone.

Charles saw Dorothea glance up quickly and uncertainly and his own eyes met Dorothea's for an instant. Dorothea also knew what John Gray had been reading. In spite of what had been said at Gow Street that afternoon about trusting, Charles knew that nothing could change.

“What do you think of this holding company Electric Bond and Share, Mr. Gray?” Elbridge asked. “The way the market's going, I don't see any use in keeping money in the bank.”

John Gray had rolled the paper into a neat and careful cylinder.

“Elbridge, I really wouldn't monkey with anything like that,” he said. His speech sounded elaborate and self-conscious and he went on with an unnatural haste. “Oh, by the way, Charley.”

“Yes, Father?” Charles said quickly.

“There's going to be a muster tomorrow afternoon,” and he must have noticed the blank look on Charles's face. “A muster, a firemen's muster. The Pine Trees will be there and there will be eight hand tubs and two hundred dollars in cash prizes. Why don't you watch me make a spectacle of myself, Charley? It's Saturday.” The tension in the room had eased. His father had tossed the paper on the floor. “They don't have firemen's musters in Kansas City, do they, Elbridge?”

“Exactly what is the purpose of a firemen's muster, Mr. Gray?” Elbridge asked him.

It often seemed to Charles that Elbridge knew nothing about anything except the composition of brass, but John Gray was very patient.

“The purpose of a muster, Elbridge,” he said, “aside from social relaxation, is to see which of these antiquated fire engines can squirt the longest stream of water from its tank—an athletic contest, Elbridge. You should come with Dorothea and see us, and, Charley, I want you particularly.”

“I don't know whether I can get away in time, Father,” Charles said.

“Charley,” his mother said, “if your father wants you to, of course you can.”

Charles could not understand why that homely conversation should have depressed him or why its humdrum quality should have made it so indelible. It had been as dull and quiet as everything in Clyde, and yet, when he was in his room that night, the words kept running back and forth in his mind and details kept cropping up with the words. He was again shaking hands with Elbridge Sterne, listening to Elbridge's anxious conversation, and again his mother was darning the sock and again he saw her half-startled look. He saw his father folding and rolling the
Boston Evening Transcript—
oh, no, he was not following the transactions of the financial page—he was only searching for Notes and Queries.

The door of Charles's bedroom was closed but it could not shut out those thoughts and every object in the room helped to give them emphasis. The framed picture of Sam in his uniform, standing on his bureau, was a part of them, and so was the silver cup he had won at freshman track in college and so were the books he had purchased, standing in the mission bookcase that he had brought from Hanover. The casual volumes from Everyman's Library, his copy of
Lord Jim,
his books on economics, his Channing's
History of the United States,
his Shakespeare, his
Oxford Book of English Verse,
and even the volumes of accounting and salesmanship—all of them were a part of what he was thinking.

At least everything in his room was neat, not like his father's room. When he hung his coat on the hanger in the narrow closet beside his extra suit and his evening clothes, it was a relief to see that his black pumps and his other shoes were in a straight and even row and that his blue suit of pajamas and his dressing gown were hanging tidily above them covering the illustrated list of morning physical exercises tacked inside the closet door. The Bible his mother had given him and a volume of Emerson's
Essays
lay on the candlestand beside his narrow spool bed. He could see all those objects suddenly as belonging to someone else and he could read the character of the person who owned them almost as though it had nothing to do with himself. It was a small, cold, narrow room, but at least it was not like his father's. When he thought of it afterwards, he knew it was a priggish room, an accurate reflection of early attitudes, but still it had shown something of which he was never ashamed. No bedroom of his was ever quite like it afterwards, never as simple, never as serene.

He had yet to buy T. S. Eliot's poems, and Adam from the Sistine Chapel was not yet hanging on the wall, and Pliny's doves in white marble sitting on the edge of their little yellow fountain were not yet on his bureau in front of Sam's picture, between two wood-backed military brushes. Jessica Lovell had not given them to him yet. There was no trace of Jessica in that room, no hint of lightness or humor, no sign at all of love.

7

When We Ran with the Old Machine

“Charley,” Jessica said to him once, “it was all so funny, wasn't it? You being there, and me, when we neither of us wanted to be there at all”—they were talking, of course, about the firemen's muster and it always seemed curious that neither of them had wanted to go there at all—“and if it had been anywhere else we'd have both been different. Do you remember the fife-and-drum corps?”

Of course Charles remembered.

“And your father in that red shirt,” Jessica said, “standing on top of the machine?”

Naturally Charles remembered his father, in his helmet and his red shirt with “Pine Tree” written on the front in white letters, in his blue trousers and his belt with its ornate brass buckle. For years Charles had been deeply embarrassed whenever his father had appeared in that make-believe fireman suit. To Jessica Lovell it was only another Currier and Ives print, an amusing rustic scene, while he was close enough to it to feel that his father's standing on the tub and giving orders had an indecorous, discordant quality. Jack Mason's father, for instance, would not have dreamed of being in the Pine Trees, but his father enjoyed the organization and persisted in speaking of it on unsuitable occasions.

“I don't see why Father likes it,” Charles said.

“Because he has a good time,” Jessica told him. “He was having a wonderful time.”

Charles never could understand the release of being dressed in an absurd costume and of pretending, even briefly, that he was not himself.

“And we had a good time too,” Jessica said. “We had a wonderful time.”

Still it was an impossible sort of time. He had not drunk hard cider in the Stevens bam and yet he had behaved as though he had.

“Charley, why did you get into that wrestling match?”

“You know why,” Charles said.

“I know, but tell me why.”

“Because you wanted me to. You shouldn't have been there in that crowd.”

“But I was,” Jessica said. “It couldn't have happened anywhere else, could it? It was all—” but she did not finish what she was saying …

Luncheon that Saturday afternoon had consisted only of a little cold meat and cracked cocoa and his father ate it hurriedly. He might not have been elected to the Clyde Fund but he had been elected captain of the Pine Trees, in a very close election, with Wesley Adams, the undertaker, running against him. As John Gray ate his cold meat he kept glancing critically at Charles and finally he told Charles that he had better put on some older clothes, that his business suit might get wet. He was really saying in a nice way, Charles knew, that Charles would look out of place if he came there all dressed up and in a white collar.

His mother was not going to the muster. If John had to pretend he was a fireman, she often said, he could go to those things alone. She had to draw the line somewhere. When Charles started upstairs to change his clothes, he heard them discussing the time-worn subject.

“I know, Esther,” he heard his father saying. “It's a weakness of mine and I appreciate your indulging me, but you miss a lot. It's always quite a sight.”

“I suppose it is,” his mother said, “if it's a sight to see tipsy men pretending they're boys, running around bellowing at each other, squirting water.”

Charles was wearing his gray flannel trousers, his old sneakers and his old tweed coat when he and John Gray walked out of the front yard and down Spruce Street. It was all very well to tell himself that everyone condoned his father's eccentricity, but nothing could reconcile Charles to the way his father's whole manner changed whenever he wore that red shirt and helmet. They turned him into a River Streeter. His father's voice had already assumed a nasal tone and he walked with a slight swagger that reminded Charles of members of the American Legion gathering for the Decoration Day parade. His father was glancing anxiously at the clear sky to gauge the breeze as it blew off occasional yellowing leaves from the elm trees.

“The wind's certainly calming down,” he said. Charles noticed that he said “calming” in a flat way that was more River Street than Spruce Street. “I don't want any downdraft blowing the spray sideways before it hits the paper.”

On one occasion some years ago, his father said, when he was pumping with the Pine Trees, right out on the old training field where the tubs were going to pump today, a puff of wind caught the spray and though the Pine Trees had never pumped a longer stream, that puff blew it sideways and the Eureka tub from Salem beat them. It was a fluke, because the Eureka tub was never as good as the old Pine Tree. Its stroke was too short.

It was going to be a small muster this afternoon but the Eurekas would be there and the Excelsiors from Smith's Common, and the Nonpareils were bringing their machine down from north of Kittery. They were already at the training field, and so was the old Blairtown pumper. There would be eight machines, and they had better hurry because the Pine Trees always pulled the old machine themselves. They didn't depend on a truck like the Lions and they ended up in a run, with the bell going.

As his father walked he continued worrying about the weather and the wind, as he always did on muster days. He had been to the training field already to see where the stand for the tubs would be placed. He and Wesley Adams had selected the spots for the tall bamboo flagpoles. The elms on the edge of the training field made a tricky downdraft, a draft that you had to watch on those wind flags before you gave the boys at the brakes the signal to turn it on and let her go. They had watched the long strips of paper being laid in the roped-off enclosure on which the stream from the hose would fall. He hoped that the crowd would not get too near the paper. That summer they had lost to the Haviland Protectors at the July muster because, he suspected, Haviland backers spat upon the paper, thus making the furthest drops appear to have come from the Protectors' hose.

Then he discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the hand engine that the Pine Trees owned—the old Pine Tree tub. Charles knew she was a beautiful machine, made by Button in 1878. He knew, or at least he had been told, that the Button machines were better than the Borgs or the Lyles. The tub had a new coat of paint and a new pressure gauge and the ropes for pulling her had been stitched with clean white canvas. Everyone always recognized the Pine Tree tub right away at musters.

The Pine Tree firehouse was the same shed which had sheltered the machine when Clyde actually relied on volunteers and hand pumps to put out fires. It stood on the water side of River Street in a vacant, weedy lot, not far from the gas tank and the coal pocket and the mill. Behind it was a good view of the old wharves and warehouses of Clyde. It was a shabby building outside but the Pine Trees had fixed it inside into a pretty comfortable clubhouse. A “salamander” stove warmed up the shed nicely in winter and there were tables and benches for cards and checkers and a big sandbox. The most striking feature of the firehouse was the rows of buckets hung on pegs along the walls, the decorated fire buckets which pre-Revolutionary Clyde firemen had once kept handy in their houses, with the dates and names of their former owners painted on them. The old shed was an amazing survival, but Charles had always accepted its history automatically because Clyde was full of other survivals. He was only wondering why the Pine Trees still enjoyed being Pine Trees and persisted in being Pine Trees when their usefulness was over.