Point of No Return (67 page)

“You know,” he told her once, “you're really a Spruce Street girl.”

“I wish to God,” Nancy said, “you'd get over thinking about Spruce Street.”

But she really was a Spruce Street girl. It was always himself and Nancy against the world.

24

One Big, Happy Family

Charles came to New York early in January in 1930. He had taken the midnight from Boston and he had checked his suitcase in the parcel room at the Grand Central Station, the one beneath the stairs that led to Vanderbilt Avenue. He had eaten breakfast in the restaurant on the lower level, not at the counter but at a table, staying there as long as he decently could, reading the New York Times. He knew almost nothing about New York but he did not feel either lonely or confused. He felt that he was in a new country.

Outside the station, the streetcars and the traffic were already running in a steady stream under the ramp at Pershing Square. The shops on Forty-second Street, the drugstores, the optical stores and haberdasheries, were already opening for the day. When he reached Fifth Avenue the lions in front of the Public Library looked white and cold and those old buses with the seats on top were moving in lines on the Avenue, but New York was sleepy still. New York had the appearance of having been up very late, and everyone on the streets had a patient, complaining look of having been routed too early out of bed. As he walked up the Avenue the city seemed to him as impersonal as it always did later and he loved that impersonality. Now that he had left his bag at the parcel room there was nothing to tie him. The tides of the city moved past him and he was part of the tide. His own problems and his own personality merged with it.

The Stuyvesant Bank would not be open for two hours, so he walked up Fifth Avenue to the Eighties, then down Park Avenue and then along Madison. Looking in the shop windows there was like carelessly turning the pages in a book while waiting somewhere. The depression had not fully gripped New York as yet. There was still a sort of shining plenty. Soon the sun began to break through the morning cloudiness and a fresh cold wind blew through the cross streets.

His impression of the Stuyvesant Bank was not very different from all his later impressions except that the details had more depth and breadth than they ever had again—the converted brownstone front, the illusion of leisure, the small fire near the front door burning in the open grate. There was none of the untidiness of E. P. Rush & Company. Everything was spick-and-span in a polite, aggressive way, as offices were in New York. It all had something of the present, amply able to compete with new trends but the more confident because of an established, dignified past.

Gus, the doorman, looked younger then but he already presented the appearance of a trusted chauffeur in a wealthy but dignified family, as well he might. Until a few years before, Gus had driven the black limousine of Mr. Mortimer Waldron, one of the largest clients of the bank, and at Mr. Waldron's death the bank had administered Gus as it had the rest of the Waldron estate. As the vanguard of the Stuyvesant service, he felt responsible for anyone who turned from the sidewalk to the bank's front door.

“Morning, sir,” Gus said.

He was the first person who had said good morning to Charles in New York City and it had not been wholly necessary and this was undoubtedly the reason that Charles went to the hospital every few days to see Gus after Gus had slipped once on the icy sidewalk and had broken his hip while hurrying to open a car door for a depositor. The gesture had not hurt Charles because Tony Burton called at the hospital himself, and so had nearly everyone else, after Tony Burton went, but Charles had gone there first. He had never thought of any favorable impression it might make. He had gone because Gus had said good morning to him that first morning.

Joe was there, too, and Joe, too, looked younger. It was not long before that he had left the detective division of the police force, but Joe fitted there already. He was already part policeman, part greeter, and part club doorman.

“Are you looking for someone?” Joe did not call him sir but it was a polite, interested question. Joe was already classifying him and Joe never made a mistake, or hardly ever.

The gilded tellers' cages and the high tables with the pens and blotters and deposit slips only looked like additional ornaments in a large comfortable room. He saw the roll-top desks of the officers by the front windows and then the green carpet with the two large flat-top desks upon it and next the other smaller desks grouped more closely together on the uncarpeted floor. He saw the small marble staircase that descended unobtrusively to the vaults, and he saw Mr. Cheseborough at his inconspicuous desk in the comfortable nook near the open fire, ready to help old ladies with their checks and to lead them to the ladies' tellers. He saw all the Stuyvesant Bank just as he always saw it later.

“I wonder if I could see Mr. Arthur Slade,” he said, “if he's not too busy.”

He always remembered that Joe did not tell him to wait, or that he would see whether or not Mr. Slade would see him. Instead he walked with Charles across the room toward the edge of the green carpet. Arthur Slade was seated behind one of those two assistant vice-president desks, firmly on the green carpet—at the same desk which now belonged to Charles himself.

“I don't know whether you remember me or not,” Charles said, but Arthur Slade remembered him.

When Arthur Slade asked him if he would like to walk around upstairs and see the trust and the tax and the statistical departments, nothing had been said about his working at the Stuyvesant. Charles was already experienced enough to know that it was wise not to be too eager. When Arthur Slade introduced him to Walter Gibbs, who was one of the key men in the statistical department at the time, and then excused himself because there was something he had to attend to downstairs, still nothing definite had been said.

The statistical department occupied what had once been the rear bedroom on the second floor of the brownstone house, with more desks in the dressing room and more in the hall. It was a compliment, though he did not know it, to be left in the statistical department talking to Walter Gibbs, but even when Arthur Slade returned and took him back downstairs and introduced him to Mr. Burton and Mr. Merry nothing was said directly. The whole problem of personnel was handled in a rather haphazard manner in those days, except in the statistical department. Arthur Slade must have vouched for him because the conversations were all general and no one asked him anything definite about his previous experience. An hour must have elapsed before Charles said he must not take any more of Mr. Slade's time and thanked him for showing him around. It was only then that Arthur Slade asked him whether he would like to try it in the statistical department.

“You can't tell,” Arthur Slade said. “It might be worth trying. How much were you getting at Rush & Company?”

Of course they could not pay him what he had been getting at Rush & Company but there was a future in the statistical department. You were a part of the family. It was like E. P. Rush & Company again—one big happy family, as though all families were necessarily happy.

Yet the Stuyvesant may have been more like a family than many other business organizations. There were the same jealousies, the same incompetent poor relations, the same feuds. There was also a sort of loyalty, as much as there could be loyalty to as cool and grim an institution as a bank—but the Stuyvesant Bank was a force beyond the control of any individual or group. The president and officers might fix the rules and policies under the general advice of the directors' board but those rules and policies themselves had a way of changing in a manner no individual could anticipate. They were swayed by practices and theories of other vanished personalities, by economic laws of loan and interest that stretched into the hazy past of the goldsmith guilds in the Middle Ages.

The Stuyvesant was the aggregate of the character of many individuals, who merged a part of their personal strivings and ambitions into a common effort. It was like a head of living coral rising above the surf, a small outcropping of a greater reef. He only knew that in the end it was stronger than any one person. In the end, no matter what the rewards might be, a part of one's life remained built into that complicated structure. They were all asses following their bundles of hay, the clerks, the tellers, the department heads, the vice-presidents, the president and the directors, and Gus himself standing on the Avenue. They were all on an assembly line, but you could not blame the line. It was too cumbersome, too inhumanly human for anyone to blame. At least he and Nancy knew they were part of the blueprint. They would never have met if it had not been for the Stuyvesant Bank, not that the bank knew or cared. They would never have had the children. They would never have built the house at Sycamore Park.

They must have both been thinking of this one spring before the war just after they had moved to Sycamore Park. It was a Saturday afternoon and Charles was mowing the lawn. His son Bill was raking up the short grass in little piles and Nancy was sitting under a tree sewing and Evelyn was reading The Purple Fairy Book. He had just reached a difficult place near the recently planted rhododendron bushes when Nancy called him, and when the whirring sound of the mower stopped her voice sounded unusually distinct.

“Charley.”

“Yes,” he said, “what is it?”

“Why was it they sent you down there?”

“Down where?” he asked.

“Down to Pine Street. Down to Burrell, Jessup and Cockburn.”

He stared at her blankly before he understood what she had in mind.

“It had something to do with that fund,” he said, “that Burrell School fund and the trust report. It was the Burrell estate, wasn't it? I don't exactly remember.”

Nancy dropped the shirt she was mending.

“It's funny,” she said. “I can't remember either.”

They both must have been thinking that there would have been no lawn mowing or shirt mending or mortgage or Evelyn or Bill, they would never even have known each other, if it had not been for that trip downtown. It could not have been an important errand because he was new in the bank and yet they had not sent one of the regular messengers.

“It's funny,” Nancy said again, “we can't remember.”

That evening after supper when Nancy was upstairs hearing the children say their prayers, Charles did remember some of it by thinking but not trying too hard to think.

Charles had been like a mountain climber clinging to a precarious foothold up there in the statistical department. As there were no extra desks he had been stationed at a table in the corner of that converted bedroom, and one day Arthur Slade had come up from downstairs, which was unusual. He would not have noticed what Arthur Slade said to Mr. Gibbs if he had not felt at the time very dependent on Arthur Slade. Arthur Slade was a little like a commissioned officer that morning, entering the orderly room to speak to the sergeant major.

“Oh, Walter,” he said to Mr. Gibbs, “where's the analysis?” Charles was beginning to realize already that Walter Gibbs had lapses and moments of forgetfulness.

“I've just finished checking it,” Walter Gibbs said. “I was just going to send it down. I didn't know you wanted it in a hurry.”

“Where is it?” Arthur Slade asked. “Those lawyers are meeting us tomorrow. It should have been in the mail last night. That's all right, it's my fault. I should have told you.” It was probably not his fault because he never slipped up on things but Arthur Slade was always careful never to blame anyone when it was not necessary.

“Jessup's just been telephoning,” Arthur Slade said. “It ought to be given to him personally. Is there anyone here you could send down to Pine Street?”

“Why, yes,” Walter Gibbs said, “there's Gray.”

All law offices, particularly in New York, Charles often thought, had a self-conscious atmosphere, which was very much like their stationery. Their pictures and chairs and tables and the personnel of the outer offices were all selected to create an air of erudition, security and ponderous judicial calm. The boy who greeted Burrell, Jessup and Cockburn visitors noted Charles's name and that of the partner he wished to see on a memorandum pad. Then he rose slowly and walked down a corridor, leaving Charles seated by a round mahogany table with his brief case on his knees gazing at a steel engraving of Chief Justice Marshall. Charles found himself thinking of all the other people who must have sat in that waiting room, rearranging their thoughts. He felt as if he were in the hands of Burrell, Jessup and Cockburn and that he must tell the truth and nothing but the truth. The office boy came back and led the way down a corridor to the partners' offices.

“You can go right in,” the boy said.

It was obviously Mr. Jessup's office because his name was on the door, Clive W. Jessup, but when Charles opened the door he was in another outer office, lighted by a single window that looked across a few low roofs to the blank wall of a tall building. There was a new leather couch and a stiff armchair and a Burgundy-red carpet and behind a mahogany secretary's desk Nancy was sitting typing a letter.

Charles stood watching her because she did not look up when he came in. Her eyes were on her open shorthand book. Her fingers moved over the typewriter keys easily, almost contemptuously. She wore a plain silk shirtwaist. Her light brown hair was done up in a knot. Her lips were pressed in an even line and her whole face looked cool and aloof. Her skin was as clear as her white silk waist but there was a faint natural touch of color in her cheeks. There was no lipstick. Nancy never used it in business hours.

She did not look up until she had finished the paragraph she was typing and then she looked straight at him, but she did not smile. Her eyes were greenish-gray and they were wide, almost too wide, apart.