Point of No Return (42 page)

Charles could occasionally see himself through the perspective of elapsed time. His mind still worked in much the same way as that of the Charles Gray who must have existed that spring in Clyde. He still had a desire to accept what was around him and to develop according to established rules. Not even in those days, he realized, did he wish to change the rules, although he could see their unfairness. He had never been a revolutionary, he had never possessed the reformer's urge, but still that spring he could perceive in himself undercurrents of discontent. He was acutely conscious of his own deficiencies and of his inexperience, but it was a healthy sort of discontent and at least he knew what he lacked and what he wanted. He wanted, of course, to be more like Jessica Lovell. He studied, that spring, as well as one could in the Clyde library, the Italian primitives and Del Sarto and Da Vinci. He read the autobiography of Cellini. He learned the difference between Gothic and baroque architecture and he read Hare's
Walks in Rome
and
Florence.
It was probably Jessica Lovell who stopped him from being a small-town boy, Jessica Lovell and possibly Malcolm Bryant. He never attempted to conceal his cultural deficiencies from Malcolm Bryant. In fact he must have felt instinctively that Malcolm presented intellectual opportunity.

“Listen,” Malcolm said, one evening in May, “why are you always picking my brains about Europe? You wouldn't like it if you got there. You want to learn to cultivate contentment, Charley. It's a wonderful thing, contentment. Look at me.”

“Why are you contented?” Charles asked.

“I'll tell you,” Malcolm said. “If you want a frank answer, I think I'm doing better with Jessica. I used to have the idea that she didn't like to have me around, but now all of a sudden she really does.”

There was a maddeningly inartistic lack of reticence in Malcolm's discussion of Jessica. He could not understand, Malcolm often said, what there was about her that attracted him in such a blind, irrational manner. Sometimes he could see very clearly that he was on the verge of making a fool of himself. It was a problem, he admitted, of his own emotional instability aggravated by the forces of biological selection. Did the things he seemed to see in Jessica exist in fact or were they manufactured out of his own imagination? Love was a biological disease, Malcolm said, and once you contracted it you could never be sure of facts. This was hard for anyone who believed in the empirical approach.

He liked to think, quite frankly, that he was a trained, scientific observer—and quite frankly he was a very good one. His training showed him what was wrong with the Lovells—wealth and tribal ritual had a limiting effect that ended in atrophy. He had never previously been in a position to observe such ritual, aside from the South Sea taboos, and the Lovells were what he termed
kapu ali'i,
meaning that ritual removed them completely from reality. They lived in a world of antiquities and were actuated by ancestor worship and cultism of the dead. He could see this with painful clarity, only to forget it whenever he saw Jessica. It was emotion triumphing over reason. And what would he do with Jessica Lovell if he ever got her? It would have been amusing to tell Malcolm Bryant that he need not bother to worry, but of course Charles never did and actually he could agree in principle with many of the things that Malcolm Bryant said.

Charles, too, could see that the Lovells were shut off from most of the rest of Clyde by their own elaborations, but this was not strange because Clyde had made them what they were. Furthermore, he could see that though Jessica Lovell was touchable she was still unattainable, because they had different positions in the plan of Clyde. Though their clandestine meetings that spring had occurred in fact, they still held elements of the unreal and consequently their moments together were the more vivid. He also knew that this situation was bound to change eventually and that the reticences between them would have to break.

This happened on a warm day in May when the trees were all a soft green. They had driven along the Spring Road again to the same pasture and they had left the car and had walked up the same hill. They had spoken much as they had before as they walked across the pasture, shyly and uncertainly as though neither of them could be sure of what would happen when they reached the woods.

“It's been such a late spring, hasn't it?” Jessica said. “I was afraid it was going to rain today.”

“So was I,” Charles said.

“But if it had, we could have driven in the rain.”

“Yes,” he said, “of course we could have driven in the rain.”

That meaningless conversation carried them across the pasture and into the woods.

“I like that coat of yours,” she said. “It's old but it looks nice.” It was the old tweed coat, he remembered, that he had worn at the firemen's muster. “You always look so nice, so self-possessed.”

“So do you,” he said. “You always do.”

It did not seem possible that the same thing might happen again that had now happened several times before. It did not seem possible that he had ever touched her, because she was unattainable.

“I'm getting pretty good at walking up this hill,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “but it's good exercise”—and then the same thing happened, the same impossible thing.

“Darling,” she whispered, when he held her in his arms, “darling,” and then he told her that he loved her. He could not have said it if she had not spoken first.

“Yes,” she said, “I know.”

It was still too immense to talk about intelligently, but suddenly it was fact, now that they had put it into words.

“Oh, Charley,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“I don't know,” he said, “but I don't mind right now.”

“I always wondered what would happen if we said it,” she said. “Do you still love me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Darling,” she said, “everybody's going to find out.”

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose they will.”

“I wish they'd let us alone.” She stopped and rested her head on his shoulder. “Charley,” she asked him, “are you happy?”

Yes, he had never been so happy.

“It's so different,” she said, “from the first time.”

“It's because we said it.”

“Well, let's not think about anything else.”

“What else?” he asked.

“Oh, everything. What we're going to do next. All those silly things.”

“Everything's going to be all right,” he said, but all sorts of things that should not have mattered were already gathering around them when they walked back down the hill.

“I don't think Father will mind so much,” she said, “if he gets to know it gradually and not all at once.”

“You mean your father won't like it,” he said. “I don't suppose he will.”

“I wish he could just see more of you without its disturbing him. You're not cross, are you, Charley?”

“No,” Charles said, “I'm not cross.”

“Charley, don't look so unhappy.” She took his arm and pressed it tight against her. “If we had only met each other somewhere else. Do you see what I mean?”

She was saying, of course, that everything would have been all right if he had only lived on Johnson Street. She was saying, without saying it, that everything would have been all right if the Grays had been better off or even if he had not been a Clyde boy, and it made him angry. It might have been better if his name had been Marchby, but at the same time he was Judge Gray's grandson. He was thinking that if Jessica had been Priscilla Meader or one of the Latham girls everything would have been all right.

“Oh, Charley,” she was saying. “Charley, please.”

He had forgotten until she spoke that she was still close beside him.

“Oh, Charley, I don't care what anyone's going to say.”

“If you think I'm as bad as all that,” he began, “why did you ever have anything to do with me?”

“Oh, Charley,” she said, and they stood there in the pasture and she began to cry. It made him feel hopeless and desperate but there was nothing he could do about it. “I only said I didn't care.”

“Then don't say it again,” he said.

They stood there without speaking, and Jessica Lovell was still crying.

“Lend me your handkerchief,” she said. “I haven't got a handkerchief.”

“All right,” Charles said. “Just stop crying, Jessica. It's going to be all right,” and then something made him laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked.

He was laughing, he told her, because it might have been Jackie Mason and what would she have done then, or it might have been one of the Meader boys, he was saying, or it might have been a North Ender. She should not have been allowed to wander around so much.

“You see what happens,” he told her.

It was then that the idea came to him that changed so much of his life. It came to him suddenly, but perhaps it had been back of his mind for a long while.

“Jessica,” he said, “I guess I'd better make some money.”

He was thinking of Mr. Howell, who had been all his life at Wright-Sherwin and now was almost ready to retire, but Jessica still thought of Mr. Lovell.

“He'll like you, darling,” she said, “if he only gets used to you little by little.” She did not say how Mr. Lovell would get used to him little by little but she stopped the car about a half mile from the third bridge. “Aren't you going to kiss me again,” she asked, “before we get into Clyde?”

When Charles arrived at Spruce Street, his mother was in the dining room in her oldest gingham apron polishing the flat silver. Charles wished he had never heard Malcolm speak of women in Clyde going through various phases of household ritual. The spoons and forks had come from the Marchby family. They had been the wedding silver of his Great-grandfather Marchby, and now his mother referred to them as “the Marchby Silver.” The spoons were plain and very thin, each with a Spencerian
M
faintly engraved upon it. The forks were equally plain and their tines were worn and rounded from nearly a century of family use, but for his mother, and for Dorothea too, they had a spiritual value that made them rare and beautiful. They were The Marchby Silver. His mother was bending over the spoons now, handling each one gently, rubbing it lovingly with a soft cloth. Her hands were gray from dried silver polish and drops of it had fallen on her apron.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “Where have you been all afternoon?” He remembered telling Dorothea that he was going to mow the lawn on Saturday and Dorothea had an uncanny ability for getting to the bottom of everything, but his mother only asked him curiously, not sharply or attentively.

“Oh,” Charles said, “I've been for a walk in the country. Where's Father?”

His father was upstairs working on the paper which he was to read at the next meeting of the Confessional Club.

“He always puts it off,” his mother said, “and now I suppose he'll have to work all night and all day Sunday. He wants coffee for supper instead of cocoa.”

“Do you want me to help you?” Charles asked.

“No,” she said. “I love to do the silver. Run along, dear.” Children were always told to run along. It was just as though he were ten and could run along to the back yard and look for Jackie Mason.

Though he knew his father disliked being interrupted when he was writing a paper for the Confessional Club, Charles went upstairs to see him. John Gray had pulled up the leaf of the table that stood behind the dilapidated sofa and he had pushed off the books which usually stood on it. He was sitting in shirt sleeves and suspenders, writing with a pencil on sheets of yellow paper.

“Well, well,” he said, “what's the matter? Are you lonely, Charley?”

His dropping in was so unusual that Charles realized how seldom there had been anything he had wanted from his father.

“Oh, no,” Charles said. “It's just a question about something I'm thinking of doing.”

His father tilted back in his chair and stroked his closely clipped mustache.

“In my experience,” John Gray said “—not that my experience isn't almost completely without validity—it's usually a great deal better to think of doing something than to do it. Sit down on one of the Windsor chairs. They're uncomfortable and you'll have to leave soon. Now take this paper for this confounded Confessional Club. It was much better thinking about it. It's the action that's painful. Do you know how many tug boats there used to be in Clyde in the year 1902?”

“No,” Charles said, “why should I?”

“Not the slightest reason,” John Gray said. “But actually there used to be four tugboats tied up between the Nickerson Cordage Company and the old coal pocket in the year 1902, and their names were”—John Gray folded his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling—“the
Lizzie K. Simpkins,
named, I think, after the wife of Captain Simpkins who ran her, although he was living with another lady at the time, the
H. M. Boadley
, the
Indian Chief
, and the
Neptune.
Well, they're all gone now and the coal barges and the lumber schooners they used to tow are gone and I don't suppose you remember any of them.”

“No,” Charles said, “I don't remember.”

“I don't know why it is,” John Gray sighed, “I really don't know why, you and your generation care nothing about the river. When I was your age I was on it all the time in my catboat, and if I wasn't in my catboat I was in my canoe. I knew every rock in the river.”

“I never had the chance,” Charles said. “You were always going to buy a catboat and teach me to sail and you never did.”

“That's true. I was,” John Gray said. “Why didn't you ask me more often?”

“I asked you and asked you,” Charles told him, “but you never got around to it.”