Point of No Return (64 page)

“Why, John,” his mother said when she saw it, “you never told me about it.”

“I still like to surprise you, dear,” John Gray told her. “You always look so pretty when you're surprised. I hope you won't mind if I ask Axel for cocktails, and I've asked for champagne at supper.”

“I don't see why it should be a party,” his mother said. “It's just an ordinary supper.”

“Charley looks tired,” John Gray said. “You don't want to take these things too hard, Charley. Everything goes up and down.” Charles felt deathly tired that night but his father did not seem tired at all.

“John, dear,” his mother said, “I'm so glad you got all through with everything before this happened. Do you know what he's been doing all day, Charley? He's been at the library reading about the South Sea Bubble.

“You know, Esther,” John Gray said, “I think perhaps we made a mistake not going abroad this summer instead of chartering the schooner. It's funny neither you nor I have been abroad, but there's always next summer. We can stay at Claridge's in London and I really don't see why we shouldn't take the Cadillac with us, and perhaps Charley and Jessica can meet us over there and we can go over to France. That reminds me—I haven't bought Jessica an engagement present, Charley.… Do you think she would like pearls?”

Charles was always up by seven in the morning in order to be in time for the eight-three train and the family usually had breakfast together at twenty minutes past seven. His father always said that he never could sleep late, because of those years at the mill. His mother was already at the table and the coffee was there too, in the new silver coffeepot, when Charles came down next morning.

“Charles, dear,” his mother said, “I wonder whether you would mind going up and knocking on your father's door. He always likes to be with us at breakfast.”

“If he's asleep,” Charles said, “perhaps he'd like to sleep.”

“No,” his mother said. “You know he always likes to be down for breakfast.”

There was no sort of warning or premonition. The sunlight had begun to creep through the fanlight above the front door. As Charles walked upstairs he heard the sound of a horse's hoofs and the rattle of wheels on Spruce Street. It would be the ice company. The ice company still used horses.

For years his father had slept in the small room to the right of the stairs, because he liked to go to bed when he pleased without disturbing anyone. Charles remembered the freshly painted panels and the brass latch of the old thin door. The latch was brightly polished, because Axel liked to polish brass. When he knocked, the ice wagon was still rumbling down Spruce Street.

“Father,” he said, “are you awake?”

There was no sound on the other side of the door and he opened it instead of knocking again. The window was open and a cool breeze was blowing the new chintz curtains. His father was lying on his narrow spool bed. The bed had come from Gow Street and he had especially liked its hard mattress. His Bible was on the bedside table and beside the Bible was the bottle of sleeping pills which his brother-in-law had given him. There was nothing to explain the spasm of fear which shook Charles except his father's utter stillness. He was out in the hall again, closing the bedroom door very softly, before he faced the full realization that his father was dead.

A moment later he was in his father's study and he had closed the door behind him before he had consciously thought what to do next. His actions were automatic but at least they were correct. He could never admire himself for anything he did that day or the days following. He was only conscious of certain things he had to do and when he saw his father's private telephone he must have given the operator his Uncle Gerald Marchby's number from instinct rather than reason. It was still early and his uncle would be at home. He told him to come to Spruce Street as soon as he could, to open the door without ringing, and that he would be waiting in the hall.

Instinct again rather than reason told him that his mother had better not be in the house when Dr. Marchby called, that it was better for him and his uncle to be alone for a few minutes. There was that dreamlike feeling of hurrying without being able to hurry, but he called up the Masons' house and asked for Mrs. Mason. He wanted her to call up his mother and to think of some reason to ask her to come over and to please keep her there for a while. He must have said that something serious had happened and that he would tell her later. He may have said that his father had died suddenly, or that his father was very unwell. He was never sure. Then he walked downstairs to the dining room.

“Here's your coffee, dear,” his mother said, “and Axel will bring you your eggs right away. Was he asleep?”

Yes, he must have answered, he was asleep.

He remembered the taste of the coffee. He wanted to drink it in a gulp but instead he drank it slowly. He must have said something else, but he could not remember what. He had not finished the coffee when the telephone rang, and his mother said not to bother, that she would answer it.

“It's Margaret Mason,” she said. “I'm sure I don't know what she wants so early in the morning.”

“She probably wants to talk,” he heard himself saying, “but it is early, isn't it?”

He was waiting in the hall when his Uncle Gerald came. He was not aware of any lapse of time. He remembered his uncle's heavy, stooping figure and his baggy trousers.

“Father's dead,” he said.

“All right,” his uncle answered, “let's go up.”

Charles followed his uncle up the stairs but not into the room. He waited on the landing until his uncle called to him. Again he was aware of no lapse of time. He only knew that he had done the best he could and that the rest of it was up to his uncle.

“Charley, you can come in now,” his uncle said. His uncle was standing by the bed holding his black bag and the pill bottle on the table was gone.

“He died in his sleep,” his uncle said. “It was a heart attack. The Gray heart, Charley.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said.

“Where's your mother?”

“She's over at the Masons'.”

“Does she know?”

“Not yet,” Charles said.

“How did she get over there?”

His voice was hoarse when he answered.

“I asked Mrs. Mason to ask her.”

Their glances met and neither of them spoke for a moment.

“I'm glad you thought of that,” his uncle said. “I'll go and tell her. I guess you'd better call up Hugh Blashfield, Charley.”

“Yes,” Charles said. “I guess I'd better, Uncle Gerald.”

A time like that was a period of inevitable selflessness. Certain things which had to be done were cropping up successively and he was the only one who could possibly have done them. There was no time for deep subjective feeling. In all the rest of his days in Clyde, there was no time to think of himself and Jessica Lovell until the very end, no time to analyze his feelings about his father. It was only when he left Clyde that all the things he repressed and controlled came over him in dark, disorderly waves, and he could handle those moods by then, because he was away from Clyde. He was like someone who stood on the stem of a ship—by then—watching a vanishing cloudy shore line. Dreadful, half-believable things had occurred ashore. Those things had marked him, but now he was moving on, leaving the ruins of them behind.

It was possible at length to begin deliberately forgetting a great deal of what had happened there, not all but a great deal. It was better to make a clean break and to leave regrets behind, and feelings of hidden guilt, and thoughts of how one might have said and done things differently. There was not much he had consciously avoided. He had not run away from anything. There was nothing left to run away from except memory by the time he had left Clyde, and of course he had taken unavoidable elements of it with him. Yet even so his memory of that time was singularly devoid of pain. Something in that morning seemed to have killed desire or some capacity for feeling and he had been shaken by deep emotion only once or twice. His self-control was with him through all of it, perhaps because it was starkly obvious what everyone would say and do after his father's death.

Neither Charles nor his uncle ever spoke again of that moment when they had stood at the head of the bed inside his father's room; and as far as he knew no one ever heard anything about it. No one ever heard, but certain people must have guessed. At least he was sure that his mother and Dorothea had never learned the truth. His father had died of a heart attack, brought on by strain and worry, and perhaps it was just as well. He never liked to think of his father trying to face what was left.

A note came from Jessica that same morning. It was delivered by old Mr. Fogarty, who still sometimes did a little work in the Lovells' garden, and Charles could still remember the heavy blue paper.

“Charles, dear, I feel so sick and sorry for what you must be going through, and please come and see me, dear, as soon as you feel you can.”

He telephoned her himself that afternoon and told her the family needed him and he knew she would understand. His mother and Dorothea were not seeing anyone just yet.

The doorbell was beginning to ring. He never forgot the sound of the doorbell. He never forgot the hours in that room of his father's with Mr. Blashfield and Elbridge Steme, the closed door, the opening of drawers, and the stacks of papers. There was no way of keeping Elbridge out of it and he was glad he had not gone through with it alone with Mr. Blashfield.

When he called up Boston, he said he would come in at once with his father's lawyer, but even before they left, they had some idea of the figures and realized that the fewer people who knew, the better. They might already be saying that John Gray had left his affairs in a mess.

“Charley,” Elbridge said, “I don't see why he did it.”

“He couldn't help it.” That answer explained everything, but excused nothing. “And no one must ever know.”

“I don't see how you're going to stop it,” Elbridge said. He was hopelessly at sea. Elbridge may have known all about brasses and bronzes but he always was confused when he had to separate liabilities from assets.

Of course, there was one way to stop a part of that inevitable talk. He could put his own government bonds into the assets. He would have to tell Hugh Blashfield and he would have to tell the Lovells and Elbridge would know, but there was no reason why it should go any further. There was no reason why his mother and Dorothea need ever hear of it. He could never give himself much credit for his decision, because it was the best way out and it was something he owed to the family.

“I'll get along all right, Elbridge,” he heard himself saying. “Mother will have to have something and we can get her to put it into a trust.”

All he wanted, all he could do, was to have everything look as well as possible. His father had said that he was being conservative and careful and he had expressed that conservatism by protecting himself with what he considered a ridiculously large margin. When he had been sold out at the market the previous day the account had come close to breaking even. It was even possible that it might be slightly in the black when the final figuring was completed, but even so there was almost nothing left.

Mr. Crewe had come to call. Charles could still see himself sometimes talking to Mr. Crewe in that upstairs room of his father's, which already was losing its character. Though it was a parochial duty, Charles was sure that Mr. Crewe was conscious of inadequacy. He could not draw upon ritual or upon The Book of Common Prayer and he must have known that John Gray had never liked his sermons. He said he had come to call, not to discuss the details of the service, because they could talk of that later. He had come as a friend, in the hope that he might be of some help in an hour of deep bereavement, and he looked very helpless when he said it, a thin, pale little man, struggling with abstract periods.

“I feel deeply for your mother and sister and you too, Charles,” he said. “I wish there were something I could say which would bring comfort. Do you remember that ‘in my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you'?”

Charles remembered. The word “mansion” always made him think of lawns and a driveway and of a white-pillared portico. His father would love to dwell in such a mansion. Mr. Crewe's glance had moved to the papers on the table and to the private telephone and Charles was sure that he wished to express the hope that his father had left his affairs in order.

“I knew him for a long while,” Mr. Crewe said. “I've always admired the richness of his mind. We always depended on his spirit at the Confessional Club to lift us over hard places. You would be touched to know how many people have spoken of him to me today, many different sorts of people. There is a broad sense of loss, the loss of a generous friend.”

“Yes,” Charles said. “Everyone always liked Father.”

“And memory continues much longer than life,” Mr. Crewe said, “so very much longer. He is living still in memory. Your father was very proud of you, although he never expressed it in a conventional way, perhaps.”

“I hope he was,” Charles said. “No, Father was never conventional.”

“At a time like this,” Mr. Crewe said, and he glanced at Charles and then stared at the floor, “one feels, doesn't one, very keenly the presence of an outside power, of a guiding spirit, of—of God. I'm sure you feel it, Charles.”

Mr. Crewe was doing the best he could, because it was his duty, and Charles felt anxious to help him.

“I know what you mean,” he said, “but right now I don't seem to feel much of anything. I only know it's there.”

Mr. Crewe coughed.