Point of No Return (36 page)

“This is Charley Gray,” Jessica said. “I've brought him in to tea. You know Charley Gray, don't you, Aunt Georgianna?”

Miss Lovell inserted her needle in her embroidery and laid it down beside her and looked up at Charles. Her eyes, which were dark like Jessica's, gave her thin, pale face an expression of suspicious watchfulness.

“I don't know Charles,” she said, “but of course I know all about him,” and she held out her hand.

“Aunt Georgianna knows about everybody,” Jessica said.

“Ring the bell, Jessica,” Miss Lovell told her. “It's time for tea. You look as though you'd been walking.”

“Well, not exactly walking,” Jessica said. “We were at the firemen's muster.”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Lovell said. “What became of Mr. Bryant, Jessica? Did you get tired of him?”

“No,” Jessica said, “he got tired of me. He's down there still.”

“I'm sure I'd have been tired of him if I'd been you,” Miss Lovell said. “His voice goes right through my ears. How is your Aunt Jane, Charles? Did I ever tell you, Jessica, that Jane and I went to the academy together? We used to call her Lady Jane Gray.”

“Aunt Jane's pretty well, thank you,” Charles said.

“All we can be at our age is pretty well,” Miss Lovell said. “Jessica, I do wish you'd do something to your hair so it doesn't blow.”

The tea on a silver tray was being carried in by Mrs. Daniel Martin, an old friend of Mary Callahan's, whom Charles had often seen in his own aunt's kitchen, but Mrs. Martin looked unfamiliar to him now in a black dress and a white apron. In another day everyone on Johnson Street would know who had been to the Lovells' that afternoon.

“Hannah,” Miss Lovell said to Mrs. Martin, “will you please tell Mr. Lovell that tea is ready? How do you like your tea, Charles?”

“Oh,” Charles said, “why any way at all, thank you, Miss Lovell.”

Charles heard a footstep behind him and he turned to see Mr. Lovell, holding a folded newspaper.

“Well, well,” Mr. Lovell said, “I didn't know we were going to have company.”

“You know Charley Gray, don't you, Father?” Jessica asked him.

“Of course I know Charley Gray, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said, “or
of
Charley Gray. Where on earth did you find him, Jessie? Not that I'm not very glad you found him.”

Then Jessica was explaining again that she had found him at the firemen's muster.

“This is quite a coincidence,” Mr. Lovell said. “Only a day or two ago I heard Francis Stanley say that you are at Wright-Sherwin. Thank you, Georgianna,” and he took his cup of tea.

Charles could not see why Jessica had said that her father was shy. He looked very much as he had there at the Historical Society. His voice had the same high but agreeably resonant ring. He had the same careless way of standing, even when he held his teacup. The lines in his face were deeper and his hair was grayer, but that was all. He did not look shy at all, as he stood in the wallpaper room, raising his teacup to his thin, straight lips and glancing at Charles over the edge of it.

“That was not a happy remark of mine when I asked where Jessica found you,” he said. “I'm delighted to have a Gray in the house. Now let's see. You went to Dartmouth, didn't you? How's your father, Charles?”

“He's out on the training field with the Pine Trees,” Charles told him.

“When we were boys he was always running to fires. Jessica, what became of your other friend?”

And Jessica told again where Malcolm Bryant was.

“Well, he'll be back for supper, won't he?” Mr. Lovell said. “We always call it supper in Clyde, don't we, Charles? But Jessie likes to call it dinner.”

“Charley,” Jessica said, “have you ever seen the garden?”

Charles shook his head. He said he had never seen the garden but he would like to see it.

“What do you want to show him the garden for?” Mr. Lovell said. “It's October.”

“There's still the boxwood,” Jessica said, “and the chrysanthemums.”

“Well,” Mr. Lovell said. “Well. I'll say good-by to you now, Charles, in case I don't see you again, and give your father my regards.”

The wallpaper room was silent as Charles and Jessica walked down the hall together but before they reached the back hall door Charles heard Mr. Lovell's voice.

“Well,” Mr. Lovell was saying. “Well.”

“Come on, Charley,” Jessica said quickly, and they stepped outside onto a long path bordered with boxwood. The formal garden of the Lovells so often described in Garden Club lectures lay before them, rising gradually to the top of a gentle slope, with its box borders casting long shadows across the gravel paths in the setting sun.

“You know,” Jessica said, “I really think Father likes you.”

“I don't see why you think so,” Charles told her.

“Because he talked so much,” Jessica said, “and you didn't do anything wrong.”

He wondered exactly what she meant. They were following the path up to a summerhouse on top of the rise, past the terraced flower beds where everything was cut down ready for the winter. At any rate, nothing in the Lovell house had made him uneasy and perhaps that was what she had meant when she said he had done nothing wrong. Perhaps she had meant that he had been neither impressed nor disturbed by her aunt or father and that they had not seemed to him in any way extraordinary. He was even thinking that there was nothing so extraordinary about Jessica, either. He could still see her as she was, before whatever drew them together became too strong for him to see her in any true perspective. She was not strikingly beautiful. She was too tall and her chin and nose were both a little too long and her eyebrows were too black and heavy, but those defects were vanishing already as she walked beside him up the path. The open fire had made her cheeks glow and her eyes were bright and her lips, which were rather like her father's, were relaxed. Once they reached the summerhouse, it was cool and almost chilly in the shadows.

“Well,” she said, “there's the garden.”

They stood leaning on the summerhouse railing, gazing at the garden, which had been laid out by a French
émigré
more than a century before, and back at the house with its high-arched windows and its balustrade and cupola.

“You can see the harbor from the cupola,” she said, and then she said it was strange to think of staying at home with no more college and nothing to do but just be there.

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” she said, and Charles was telling her that there were all sorts of things to do in Clyde.

“Well,” she said, “I'm awfully glad you think so.” She had been moving her fingers idly, making little patterns on the summerhouse railing.

“Oh dear, here he comes. God, this is a wonderful town.” Malcolm Bryant was coming toward them up the path.

“Jessica,” Charles said, “you won't forget about tomorrow, will you?”

“No,” she said, “of course I won't,” and her hand touched his. “Good-by, Charley.”

9

All the World's a Stage

—
SHAKESPEARE

Charles knew there would be talk, because gossip always eddied through Clyde like smoke from the burning piles of autumn leaves, and it also usually assumed fantastic shapes. It was only to be expected that everyone would know by Monday of his encounter with Hughie Willis, but instead of looking on it critically people seemed in general to approve of his action. His father, when he mentioned it, appeared to be amused and only said that he must have had quite a time that afternoon at the muster. His mother, of course, was not amused. She had heard, both from Mrs. Mason and from Mrs. Gow, that Charles had got into a fight with a North Ender, and she could not understand why Charles had done such a thing, and it did no good to tell her and Dorothea that it was not a fight, because they could not understand the difference. Charles's main fear had been that someone would say that he and Hughie Willis had been fighting over Jessica, but he concluded that this was absurd.

As a matter of fact, his encounter with Hughie Willis did him no harm at all. Groups of his old school friends began calling to him in Dock Square with a new sort of familiarity. In fact there was a warmth about everything which made him imagine that people were saying that Charley Gray was not stuck-up because he had been to college. He had taken off his coat and pitched right into Hughie Willis. At Wright-Sherwin on Monday morning, it seemed to him that the girls in the accounting department smiled at him more brightly and nobody there appeared to disapprove, except possibly Mr. Howell who told him that it was Monday morning and time for fun was over, but even Mr. Howell was interested.

“That Willis was always a bad boy,” Mr. Howell said. “When he was a kid, he was always putting cannon crackers in my hedge.”

It even seemed to Charles that Mr. Stanley looked at him in a different way, when Charles met him in the hall.

“Good morning, Charley,” Mr. Stanley said. “How are you feeling this morning?” Mr. Stanley had never asked him before how he was feeling and it seemed to Charles that Mr. Stanley was examining his face for possible contusions—but even Mr. Stanley's manner was not disapproving.

Of course, Jackie Mason knew all about it. All morning Jack kept looking at him across the room, trying to catch his eye, and when they met at the water cooler around eleven o'clock Jackie immediately brought up the subject.

“Charley, you ought not to do that sort of thing,” he said.

“What sort of thing?” Charles asked.

“You know as well as I do, Charley, that someone always sees what you do around here—and wasn't it true that Jessica Lovell was there?” Jack Mason looked worried and his anxiety was friendly. “What I mean, Charley, is that a girl like Jessica Lovell won't forget a thing like that. It simply means she'll never have anything to do with you. What are you laughing at?”

“She never had anything to do with me anyway,” Charles said.

“But she might have,” Jack said. “She's going to be here all the time now and you've simply lost your chance of ever seeing anything of Jessica Lovell.”

Those remarks of Jack Mason's came as a great relief because they showed that perhaps after all everyone in Clyde did not know everything immediately, but someone would have seen Jessica's new Dodge phaeton, with its top down, as it crossed the intersection of Dock and Johnson streets on Sunday afternoon. There was no way of escaping facts in Clyde, and, indeed, he did not care much what anyone would say. He only felt concerned that the offices at Wright-Sherwin where he was earning his twenty-five dollars a week already seemed smaller since the firemen's muster and he was already beginning to realize that it would take years for him to get anywhere in Wright-Sherwin—years and years.

Before long it began to be recognized, of course, that he was seeing a good deal of Jessica Lovell, but on the whole it was an acceptable fact. The Grays did not live on Johnson Street as the Thomases or the Stanleys did, but his father was the son of old Judge Gray and had married Dr. Marchby's daughter and so it was not markedly unusual for Charles Gray to go around with Jessica Lovell.

“Going around” was the expression which was used in Clyde when a boy and girl saw a good deal of each other. It was not the same as the more vulgar expression “going with” or “keeping company” which was employed when speaking of River Street couples and which had a more definite connotation. It was not even the same as saying that Charles was “attentive” to Jessica Lovell, which was more serious. His relationship in those months might have been better expressed as one of being “seen around” with Jessica Lovell, which was not even quite as strong as “going around” with her.

Since Jessica was fourteen she had spent her summers in Maine and had been away to school at Westover and then at Vassar College, so that now she was really back in Clyde for the first time in years, and Mr. Lovell had told several people that he wanted very much to have Jessica “show herself” in Clyde. It was exactly, she told Charles once, as though her father wanted her to go trotting up and down Johnson Street every afternoon, but of course he really meant that she should take part in Clyde activities, such as attending the Harvest Supper at the Boat Club and the Boat Club monthly dance and Pound Day at the Episcopal Church.

Her father had also told her that he did not want her to act as though she were just at home poised for flight to somewhere else. He wanted Jessica to show herself, and if she had to show herself obviously she had to be seen. She was seen with Charles but she was also seen with Hewitt Thomas, when Hewitt was not busy somewhere else. She was occasionally seen with Lester Gow, who was studying at the Harvard Law School, and now and then with Jackie Mason. She was even seen once or twice with Melville Meader, but if Mr. Lovell discouraged this everyone could understand why. The Meader boys were nice boys but Mr. Meader's father had been in the grocery business and Mr. Meader, though he was in real estate, often worked, himself, with the plumbers and carpenters, improving the buildings he owned. Besides, Jessica Lovell also had young men from Boston as guests sometimes for the week end. Thus if she was seen with Charles it did not mean that they were going around together.

When Jessica joined the Clyde Players that winter, it was natural for Charles to take her home because the other members of the theater group were married, except Jackie Mason who was the property man and who had to stay after the others. There was no reason for anyone to know that Charles had joined the Clyde Players only because Jessica had asked him to. Everyone believed that Charles enjoyed amateur theatricals.

It must have been an evening early in December when Jessica called Charles up, something which she did very seldom in those days. His Aunt Jane had been ill for two weeks with the grippe and his mother had gone to Gow Street to see how she was doing. When the telephone in the hall rang, his father was reading Boswell by the fire and Dorothea and Elbridge Sterne were playing backgammon and Charles was looking over a catalogue of surveying instruments which he had brought home from the office. Everyone stopped to count since it was a party line.