Point of No Return (43 page)

“Well,” John Gray said, “the river isn't what it was. It's better to sit on the shores and weep.” He sighed and stared up at the ceiling. “Now downstairs your mother is polishing the Marchby spoons, while I sit up here blowing the dust from the pages of my lexicon of youth.”

“Are you writing about tugboats?” Charles asked.

“No, no,” John Gray said. “About the river, and the fish, and the boys who used to swim in it, and the golden plover, and, frankly, it's too good for the Confessional Club. Frankly, I'm too good for it too, Charles. I'm a little depressed this afternoon—and now you'd better not interrupt me any longer. Just run along and close the door behind you without stumbling over the books. I want to sit beside the river and weep.”

“But I wanted to ask you a question,” Charles said.

John Gray pushed his chair forward until its front legs came in contact with the floor.

“I was thinking of getting a job somewhere in Boston. I don't believe I'm going to get anywhere if I stay at Wright-Sherwin, not for years and years.”

“You mean, Charley,” John Gray asked softly, “that there isn't enough hay in the bundle?”

“The truth is,” Charles said, “I'd like a chance to make some money.”

John Gray said nothing for a moment.

“Why, Charley,” he said, “you couldn't be thinking of a brokerage office or a bond house, could you?”

“As a matter of fact,” Charles began, “I was just thinking that if you know anyone—if you wouldn't mind speaking to someone—”

“Why, Charley,” his father said, and Charles had never seen him look so pleased, “I never thought our minds could ever work in the same way. It's about time you realized you can't get anywhere without money. It's queer that so few people ever see it clearly. It's the sophistries that catch them, the opiates.”

The words had an ugly, materialistic sound and it was not fair to bring his thoughts of Jessica and all the ideas that were confusing him down to such unattractive terms.

“I didn't mean that money's everything,” he said.

John Gray's forehead wrinkled and he shook his head slowly.

“Oh dear,” he said softly. “Oh dear me, of course it isn't, but this is what always happens if you fall back on maxims. That was the trouble with Marcus Aurelius. He meditated in maxims. Naturally, money isn't everything, but money, it seems to me, helps most situations. Perhaps you can look down on it when you have it, but let's admit it does help, Charley, and let's try not to live by maxims.”

There was no doubt that it helped but he hated to admit that it did. He did not want to have his mind work like his father's and he was fighting against the thought that it ever might.

“I don't want to get anything for nothing,” he said. “If I make any money, I want to earn it.”

John Gray sighed and shook his head again.

“Oh dear, there we go again,” he said. “Those maxims. I don't blame you, Charley, but do you think anyone who's accumulated a large sum of money has ever actually earned it? I doubt it, in the literal sense. It's so much easier when one faces facts, but then all life is largely based on an avoidance of fact, and I admit I try to avoid them. I try to turn them and twist them. Everybody does. I suppose you're implying that I have occasionally tried to get something for nothing.” John Gray raised his eyebrows and waited for Charles to answer.

“I was just saying that I don't see how I can get ahead at Wright-Sherwin.” Charles was speaking more loudly than he had intended, almost impatiently. “I was just asking you if I couldn't get something to do in Boston, and I don't know much about Marcus Aurelius.”

He rose from his Windsor chair but his father was looking at him in a level, disconcerting way.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Charley? How did this idea ever get into your head?”

Charles looked straight at his father and tried to speak casually. “It just came over me.”

“It couldn't have anything to do with Jessica Lovell, could it?”

“How did you know?” Charles asked. “Yes, it does have something to do with her.”

“And you're in love with her?”

“Yes,” Charles said.

John Gray pushed his chair back from the table.

“Well now, this really does me a lot of good. I wonder what Laurence Lovell will say,” he said. “You and I have certainly got to do something about this, Charley. We had certainly better go up to Boston on Monday.”

“Not Monday,” Charles said. “I'd better tell them I'm through at Wright-Sherwin on Monday, but I guess they'll let me take the day off Tuesday.”

“Do you want to do that before you get another job? I never thought you'd do a thing like that, Charley.”

“I'll find something else,” Charles said.

He was through with Wright-Sherwin but he had no way of knowing that the whole course of his life was changing, and his father's too—what was left of it. He had no way of knowing that they were both moving for good out of that dusty room.

“Charley,” John Gray said, and put his hand on his shoulder. “If you want her, I'll see you get her, Charley.” John Gray walked to the sofa and picked up his coat. “And now I think I'll go downtown and get the
Transcript.
It ought to be in now.”

“Charley?” He heard his mother's voice calling from the hall downstairs. “Where are you?”

John Gray opened the door.

“It's that Mr. Bryant, Charley. He wants you on the telephone.”

Malcolm wanted him to come over at eight o'clock that night.

“Tonight,” Charles said. “Let's see.” He disliked using the telephone as an offensive or defensive weapon.

“I wish you'd come as a special favor,” Malcolm said. “I want you to meet the team.”

“What team?”

“My team, of course.” Malcolm's voice sounded sharper. “My investigatory team. They're starting in on Clyde on Monday. We're just talking over the field and I'd like to show them one firsthand exhibit.” Suddenly Malcolm's voice was placating and exuding charm. “You don't mind co-operating, do you, Charley? Now don't argue over the telephone but come on over at eight o'clock and meet the team.”

It was a relief that Malcolm did not want to talk about Jessica Lovell, such a relief that he was glad to go, and besides he was curious to see Malcolm in his own environment.

There were eight or ten people in Malcolm's room that night who all looked somewhat like Malcolm. Their faces were sharp with eager perspicacity and at the same time complacent with hidden knowledge. It was the peculiar look, of course, of the professional investigator which, he often thought later, was worn by people trained to interfere in other people's business, whether they were social workers, bank examiners or income tax examiners.

Malcolm Bryant's team sat on the couch and on Malcolm's trunk and on chairs which must have been brought from Mrs. Mooney's kitchen. Malcolm himself was perched on the drawing table with two glass gallon jugs of sacramental wine beside him and all the members of the team were holding cups and glasses.

“Well, here he is,” Malcolm said. “Thanks for coming, Charley. This is Charley Gray, everybody, and I think Charley will be as much of a help to you tonight as he's been to me. This is Evangeline Scroll. Evangeline's back from Yucatán. And here's Bill Horsley. You've heard me talk about Bill.”

As Malcolm mentioned the names of the team he waved his arm at each one but Charles did not remember them distinctly because he was not trained to associate names and faces then. Malcolm and all the rest of them, he imagined, were trying to put their subject at ease, but he could see them anxiously making mental notes of his skull, of his tweed coat and his flannel trousers. They made him feel as a Polynesian on an atoll must have felt when he suddenly encountered a boatload of strangers from a whaling ship. He remembered what Malcolm had said, that it was hard to fall in love with girls who were anthropologists, and he agreed with Malcolm as he gazed at Evangeline Scroll, fresh from Yucatán.

“Sit down in the rocking chair,” Malcolm said, “where everyone can see you, and have a drink,” and Malcolm raised his voice. “Now, my idea is for you and me to talk as though no one else were here. It's a new method, but you don't mind it, do you Charley?” Malcolm smiled at him ingratiatingly and Charles sipped his glass of sacramental wine.

“No,” he said, “I guess I don't mind it.”

Everyone laughed in a way which indicated that they had all been waiting for something to laugh at. It only showed again that Malcolm had a lot of good ideas but did not understand people.

“Let's think of Clyde,” Malcolm said, “as a big aquarium, and, by God, it's a wonderful aquarium, and I scooped you out and put you in a globe to show the team.”

“I hope the team likes it,” Charles said, and again everyone laughed.

“Now, Charley, here, lives on Spruce Street. Spruce Street runs into Johnson Street and yet Charley is not a side streeter, in the broader sense of the term. He has an upward and downward mobility that is very interesting. He is able to touch, without belonging to, the cliques on Johnson Street, and yet at the same time he can move downward. His societal mobility is emphasized because he was brought up in the Clyde public school system. He has rubbed shoulders with all the groupings. He may not have the middle class mobility but he has mobility, the downward trend of which has been checked somewhat by a college education. The first time I laid eyes on him I knew he was a beautifully conditioned type.”

Malcolm Bryant paused and Charles sat there staring blankly at the team.

“I think Mr. Gray is a very nice type,” Miss Scroll said. “Don't let Malc disturb you, Mr. Gray.”

Charles's face flushed and he looked around him uneasily. “Well,” he said, “what do you want me to do for you—sing a song?”

“Nothing,” Malcolm said. “That's the beauty of it, Charley. I just want the team to see you react. You're being a great help, Charley.”

“Give him another drink,” Miss Scroll said. “I think Charley's wonderful. You don't mind if I call you Charley, do you, Mr. Gray?”

“No,” Charles said, “not if it makes you feel any better.”

They laughed again in the same hearty, mirthless way, and their curiosity was too impersonal to be unpleasant. He was a Greek letter in a quadratic equation representing Clyde. He could even forget Jessica Lovell and his other problems as he sat there, because he was a part of Clyde. They were strangers invading his town and all at once he was anxious to have them understand it. It may have been the second glass of wine he drank that made him want to speak.

“All right,” he said, “I'll tell you something about Clyde. I'm pretty tired of all this talk about classes and about Johnson Street and Spruce Street. It doesn't matter. Nobody thinks about classes because everyone in Clyde knows he's as good as everyone else. This is a free country and Clyde's a free town.”

He was surprised at himself for having said so much. His words were like those of that grammar school commencement speaker.

“Listen to him,” he heard Malcolm say. “You see he has great mobility.”

He did not care what Malcolm Bryant said. He could see all of Clyde in one piece. Johnson Street, Spruce Street, Dock Street, River Street, the North End, the South End. You could pull it apart and classify it, as these preposterous strangers would try to do, but all of it fitted together and it fitted beautifully and there was no reason to disturb it. Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything.

“You ought to be here,” he said, “for Decoration Day. It's coming pretty soon. And for the Fourth of July. That's when you'll see what I mean. Everyone's as good as everyone else.”

“You see,” Malcolm said. “The feast days—the mingling of the classes.”

“But it isn't the classes,” Charles said. “Everybody knows everybody else.”

“There you are,” Malcolm said. “It's beautiful conditioning. But you wouldn't marry a North Ender, would you, Charley?”

His thoughts went back to high school and Doris Wormser. She was surprisingly clear in his memory. He could see her as she walked in ahead of him in the assembly room in high school.

“No, not at the moment,” he said.

“You see what I mean,” Malcolm said. “By God, this is a wonderful town.”

That evening in Malcolm's room was a most peculiar ending for a peculiar day. Charles had never thought of himself as convertible into diagrams and geometric curves and a mass of static, regimented fact. What was the social position of the Grays—in Clyde in the eighteenth century? In the nineteenth century? How often did he go to church? Were there cliques in the Clyde High School, and to what extent did the cliques mingle? A part of the survey, and a very important part, would cover the lives of the minority and racial groups that had found lodgment, as Malcolm put it, in the growth of that predominantly Anglo-Saxon community. Did Charles know any who had worked their way into the upper-middle? What about the politically-minded Irish-Catholic group? Did the French-Canadians exhibit adaptive capacities?

As time went on and as they continued drinking sacramental wine, the team itself began dividing into groups and cliques, arguing about charts and graphs and questionnaires and methods of cataloguing. None of them was thinking of him as a person, except possibly Evangeline Scroll, who asked him to sit next her on the couch. She was a thin girl, with straight, short hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. As they talked, her knee inadvertently kept touching his. Once when he saw Malcolm Bryant looking at them curiously, he was quite sure that Evangeline Scroll was not thinking of him wholly in a scientific way but he could not keep his mind on her, he had too much to think about.