Point of No Return (38 page)

“Oh dear,” Jessica whispered. “Why does he want to know about it?”

“Ezra Lovell was in the coastal trade,” Mr. Lovell was saying. “It was an old gambrel-roofed house, torn down after my grandfather sold the property. The countinghouse was in the ell, and then there were the slave quarters.”

“What?” Malcolm Bryant asked. “Did they have slaves?”

“Only in a small way, I think,” Mr. Lovell answered. “I came across a paper just the other day with Ezra Lovell's signature liberating a Negro he owned named Pomp, but that was before the Revolution.”

The Lovell library was a large, paneled room, with mahogany bookshelves all around it, designed by the order of Nathaniel Lovell. The same gold-tooled sets of books must have always been on the shelves, and now, though age was making their backs shaky, Charles could imagine that many of them had never been read. A celestial and a terrestrial globe stood on either side of the fireplace and above the books were more Lovell portraits and two pictures of Lovell ships and also the well-known engraving of the Clyde waterfront. There was a comfortable sofa in the library, as Jessica said, the only comfortable sofa in the house, and there were some reasonably modern leather armchairs. Mr. Lovell was seated in one of these with a stack of papers on the floor beside him, and Malcolm Bryant was seated opposite him with a notebook on his knee.

“Hello, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said, and he held out both his hands to her and Malcolm Bryant stood up. “Back so soon? Why, hello, Charles.”

Mr. Lovell gave him a questioning look, as though he could not understand his sudden appearance.

“Charley took me home,” she said. “Charley's in the Players.”

She gave a little exasperated laugh as though she were telling her father that there was no reason for her to explain everything.

“Why, of course, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said. “I'm delighted Charles is in the Players. I told you you'd find friends there. You know Mr. Malcolm Bryant, don't you, Charles? Jessie, why don't you bring us some milk and a little cake, or some crackers and cheese?”

“Oh, not for me, thanks,” Malcolm Bryant said. “Please don't bother.”

“No, please don't bother,” Charles said. “I've got to be going home.”

It seemed to him that Mr. Lovell looked relieved, although he said that it would be no trouble at all and that Jessica would love to get them something.

“Then how about a cigar?” Mr. Lovell asked. “Will you smoke a cigar, Charles?”

“Oh, no, thank you, sir,” Charles said.

“You know Charles can tell you a good deal about Clyde, Mr. Bryant,” Mr. Lovell said. “Charles is born and brought up a Clyde boy, aren't you, Charles? More of a Clyde boy than Jessica is a Clyde girl, I'm afraid. How were the Players, Jessica?”

“They were terrible,” Jessica said. “I told you they would be terrible.”

“Now let's see,” Malcolm Bryant said, “I must have missed the Clyde Players. Where do they fit in?”

“Fit in?” Mr. Lovell repeated.

“I mean in the general picture.”

“Don't you ever get tired of asking questions?” Jessica asked.

“Now, Jessie,” Mr. Lovell said, “Mr. Bryant is here to ask questions. I should say that the Clyde Players is an ordinary community effort. Jessica is in it, and she should be, and Charles is in it. Why did you join the group, Charles?”

“Because he must be weak-minded,” Jessica said quickly.

Malcolm Bryant was leaning back in his comfortable leather chair with his hands laced in back of his head. He was the outsider, enjoying that little scene and evaluating it, while his deep-set eyes kept shifting from Jessica to Charles and back to Mr. Lovell.

“And then there's Dr. Bush, the osteopath,” Mr. Lovell said. “I believe he's very active in it. That shows it's a cross section—Jessica and then an osteopath. I had a stiff shoulder once and I got Bush in and he fixed it, just by pulling.”

“Down in Borneo,” Malcolm Bryant said, “I had a stiff neck once and I was treated by a tribal doctor. He killed a bird and put it on my neck, after cutting it open with an obsidian knife. There was an interesting ritual connected with it.”

“Did it help your neck?” Mr. Lovell asked.

“I don't really remember.” Malcolm Bryant was smiling at Jessica. “But I have some pictures of it. I'd love to show them to you sometime. Charley Schwartz, one of my assistants, took the pictures. He's at Johns Hopkins now. Men are about the same everywhere.” Malcolm Bryant smiled again at Jessica. “Well, I mustn't keep you up too late. I always have a lot to think about after an evening here.”

“I wish I knew what you thought,” Jessica said.

Malcolm Bryant rose and Charles stood up too. It was time to be going.

“Grateful thoughts,” Malcolm Bryant said. “This has been a really challenging evening.”

“Good night,” Mr. Lovell said, “and good night, Charles. It's good news you're in the play. We all have to take part in things, don't we, and I'm glad there's someone to take Jessica home.”

Charles understood what Mr. Lovell meant—that it was better for him to take her home than for Dr. Bush. As long as they were both in the Players, engaged in a common community effort, there was no reason why he should not be seen with Jessica, no reason at all. In fact Charles could imagine later what Mr. Lovell must have said to Jessica.

“Jessie,” he must have said, “I think it's very nice that Charles Gray is in the Players, and it's very nice if you see something of Charles Gray, as long as you don't take him too seriously, Jessie. You'll remember, won't you, that a young man like Charles Gray has no prospects, or hardly any.”

Perhaps he spoke differently later, for there was a time, just for a little while, when he may have thought that Charles did have prospects—when John Gray bought a Cadillac car and when the market was going up.

By the time Charles and Malcolm Bryant left the Lovells' house that evening, the other houses on Johnson Street were dark except for an occasional light in their upper windows.

“By God,” Malcolm Bryant said, “this is a wonderful town. It all fits together without a blur in the pattern. By God, I was lucky to discover it. How well do you know the Lovells, Charley?” It was an impertinent question and Charles felt annoyed.

“Not very well,” he answered.

“Oh, I thought you did,” Malcolm Bryant said. “You seem to be great friends with Jessica.”

Charles caught his breath in astonishment, and then he was angry.

“Suppose you mind your own business,” he said, and he stopped walking and stood facing Malcolm Bryant. Malcolm Bryant had stopped too. They were only two dark shadows standing face to face on Johnson Street, but all at once Malcolm Bryant's voice was placating and soothing.

“That's just the right thing for you to say,” he said. “I had it coming to me. I'm sorry.”

“All right,” Charles said.

Charles could not understand why his resentment was ebbing but there was a disarming quality in Malcolm Bryant's voice.

“It was rotten investigative technique,” Malcolm Bryant was saying. “If one of my team had done that, I'd have fired him. I just forgot myself. Don't get mad, Charley. It wasn't a personal question. I was just thinking about your groups, and the Lovells aren't quite in your group—are they?”

“No,” Charles said, “I don't suppose they are.”

“Now, Charley.” Malcolm Bryant put a hand on his shoulder. “This is scientific—none of it is personal. Look at me as a father confessor—just an old man you can talk to. It won't go any further. You're not mad any more, are you?”

“No,” Charles said, “that's all right. Good night.”

Malcolm Bryant held out his hand and patted his shoulder again.

“Well, that's fine,” he said. “We'll be seeing a lot of each other, Charley. My God, this is a wonderful town.”

Malcolm Bryant walked whistling down the street of the wonderful town and Charles walked home, but Malcolm Bryant's hasty words were still running through his mind. He had never encountered anyone like Malcolm Bryant and he could not tell whether they were friends or not, but then perhaps a man like Malcolm Bryant never could be friends with anyone. Sometimes he was not sure that Malcolm Bryant had the same capacity for likes or dislikes that other people had. He was always thinking of everyone from a viewpoint which he called mass instinct. It was Charles's first contact with pedantries.

10

The Procedural Pattern

The Confessional Club, the men's club to which Charles's father belonged, met at the Grays' home that year in January. Annually each member of the Confessional Club entertained all the other members for supper and for the evening. Charles remembered the occasion especially, because Malcolm Bryant had been invited.

He had not known that his father knew Malcolm Bryant until a week before the meeting and already the house was in a turmoil, because John Gray always wanted to entertain the club properly. Until it was his turn to receive them, he was apt to make fun of the members of the Confessional Club and the club itself, although Charles was sure that he was proud to be in it. He used to say that the Confessional Club was only another of those blatant, self-conscious groups that had always cluttered up Clyde with preposterous, useless discussions. He used to say that those evening clubs were just like boys' clubs except that they were formed by men and that no one had anything to say in Clyde that was worth listening to for half an hour—yet people in Clyde always had wanted to gather around and listen to dull papers.

It showed a lack of personal resource, John Gray always said, and women, too, as well as men, were infected by the germ. No one ever really learned anything from these intellectual outpourings, but everyone wished to try to be improved, during the long winter months. The Women's Club continually met to hear lectures on French fans or on Mount Vesuvius, and the ladies of the Garden Club were always gathering to learn about cutworms or means of eradicating poison ivy. The Knights of Columbus kept listening to travelogues, the Rotary Club would hang on the words of someone who told about sewage disposal. The only organization, John Gray said, that had never wanted to be improved was the Pine Tree Association of Veteran Firemen.

Think of the geysers of words, John Gray used to say, that were spouted forth each winter in Clyde. Every two weeks the Monday Club had met, since 1787, and the Thursday Club had met every two weeks since it had broken away from the Monday Club before the Civil War. He could not imagine, he said, why he had ever joined the Confessional Club, unless because of local contagion. Why had the Confessional Club ever started? It had started thirty years ago because of hurt feelings and merely because there were certain people who were not included in the Monday Club and the Thursday Club; and now two more groups of men who could not get into these three clubs had formed other clubs, and they all met every two weeks in winter and some member always read a paper.

Think of the papers, John Gray said, to which he had been compelled to listen in the Confessional Club alone. Fortunately most of them went in one ear and out the other, but there were details in some which had an adhesive quality that awakened him at night and gave him nervous indigestion. There was the gallstone, for instance, which was removed from the interior of Samuel Pepys, the subject of a paper by Gerald Marchby. Gerald had read it ten years ago but it was very fresh in John Gray's memory. Then there was “The Story of the Mammoth,” a paper which had been read by Willard Godfrey. The juvenile quality of this paper had caused John Gray to consult reference books in the public library and to discover that the whole thing had been cribbed from a children's encyclopedia. He might also mention that scholarly work entitled “Certain Old Teaspoons” written by Mr. Norton Swing, a retired official of the Wright-Sherwin Company. This was a double-header, because you not only had to hear about the certain old teaspoons but you had to examine them afterwards one by one. He could go further. If he wanted, he could describe that hour-and-a-half long paper by Hugh Blashfield entitled “Certain Personages in Bench and Bar of Massachusetts,” but he was not even going to think of it. He would never even consider the hours of common suffering in the Confessional Club except with the belief that they may have drawn its members together into a sort of perverse bond of friendship.

Nevertheless, whenever it was John Gray's turn to entertain the Confessional Club, he appeared to forget the bitter things he had previously said. He wanted to have as good food as anyone else. The members could wait on themselves, but he wanted tables arranged on which they could eat comfortably and he always provided cocktails made by mixing medical alcohol procured from Gerald Marchby with distilled water and juniper. The main thing was to be sure that the members all had enough cocktails so they could endure the paper but not so many cocktails that they would become noisy or fall asleep during the paper's progress.

“Now, Esther,” he said, “I'm not at all sure that you and Dorothea and Mary Callahan can do everything in the kitchen.”

“Don't start worrying already, John,” she told him. “Jane isn't well enough to let Mary come over, but all sorts of people like to come in and help. They like to sit at the top of the stairs, you know, and listen.”

This was exactly what John Gray meant, he told them, when he said everyone wanted to be improved in Clyde.

“And don't forget to get the Wedgwood plates and the silver from Jane,” he said, “and glasses. Plenty of glasses.”

There was no reason to worry about it. Everyone in the house understood about the Confessional Club.

“And you can come, of course, Charles,” John Gray said. “Someday you may be in the club yourself, if you don't get gallstones first. It's something to live for.”