Point of No Return (73 page)

“I'm glad you brought up Jessica,” he said. There was nothing revealing in his voice. It had just the right note of friendly interest—exactly as he wished it. “I've been meaning to ask about her. How is Jessica?”

“Oh, she's very well,” Jackie said. “Very well and busy. She has that same interest in things, but then you know Jessica.”

“I don't know her now,” Charles said, and he smiled agreeably at Jackie and everything he said was just as he wanted it. “I've been pretty busy, too.”

“I know how you feel,” Jackie said. “I don't want to bring up any painful memories.”

“Oh, my God,” Charles said. Jackie's manner made him impatient. “Don't call them painful memories, Jackie. They're too old.”

“I'm awfully glad you take it this way,” Jackie said, “but of course I know how you must feel.”

“No, you don't,” Charles said, “because I don't feel anything,” and he smiled. He was saying just what he wanted to say. “I hope Jessica's well and happy and I'm glad we didn't get married because it wouldn't have worked—and that's all there is to it, except I always supposed she'd find someone else. Why didn't she ever marry?”

Jackie looked at him reproachfully as though he had not assumed the serious attitude the circumstances demanded.

“She just never did, Charley,” he said, and his voice was reproachful, too.

Charles rubbed his hands softly on his knees and he had an absurd notion that Jackie Mason was blaming him for Jessica's being unmarried. It was like those stories of old Clyde spinsters keeping a night light always burning in the spare-room window for lovers who had disappeared at sea.

“Well, I don't see why she didn't,” he said, “unless it was her father again.”

“No,” Jackie said, and he sighed. It seemed to Charles an elaborate, over-dramatized sigh. “I don't think it was entirely that.”

Charles did not answer. Instead he stared at the yellow maple bed with its bright chintz cover. The conversation was reminiscent of a weeping willow above a suitably inscribed tombstone in an old memorial print.

“I think she always hoped that you'd come back sometime.”

He could see that Jackie Mason believed it and he almost believed it too, because at one time she must have thought of him often—but it was not the way things were. There were no lights nowadays burning in lonely windows. The room was very hot and there was still that draft on the back of his neck.

“Maybe she did for a year or two,” Charles said. “She knew I'd married, didn't she?”

“Yes,” Jackie said. “Jessica's a wonderful girl. She's always wanted you to be happy, Charley. She's always wanted to hear about you.”

“Well,” Charles said, “I think I'll have another drink.”

When Charles went into the bathroom to fill his glass with tap water he glanced at himself in the mirror above the washbasin, as he did usually at the bank. His tie was straight, his soft collar was smooth. He looked as he should have, like someone from New York, and suddenly he realized as sure as fate that he could have come back to Clyde, he could have married Jessica Lovell. Her father could not have stopped them, nothing could have stopped them if he had come back, but until this moment the idea had never crossed his mind. He walked out of the bathroom holding his glass and sat down again in the uncomfortable chair.

“Well,” he said, “I never did come back.”

He never would have. He would have been too proud.

“I thought I ought to tell you, Charley,” Jackie said. “I thought you ought to know.” He still could not understand why Jackie thought he ought to know except that Jackie had always found it hard to keep things to himself.

“Did Jessica tell you this?” he asked. “It doesn't sound like Jessica”—and for a moment he had a proprietary feeling, as though Jessica still belonged to him.

“Well, you see—” Jackie Mason looked too large for the small upholstered chair in which he sat. His face looked moist and he pulled out a neat handkerchief from his breast pocket. “It's awfully hot in here, isn't it, but it will cool off given time.… You see, Jessica had to talk to someone and I suppose I was elected—just because I knew you. She still talks a lot about you, Charley. Jessica was in love with you for years. She really was.”

“I wonder if I could have another of your cigarettes?” Charles asked. He did not want to consider Jessica Lovell's having been in love with him for years.

“Oh, excuse me,” Jackie said, and he snapped open his silver cigarette case. “You know, there's something about women—” his face was redder—“I think that women seem to stay in love longer than men, once they fall in love.”

“Maybe they do,” Charles said. “It's possible.”

It was possible but not probable. Jessica Lovell, as Jackie Mason saw her, was an unreal character. Girls did not stay in love indefinitely unless there was some outside compulsion. He was glad that he was able to tell himself that this was so.

“You see”—Jackie was still speaking—“I thought you ought to know this so that you won't misunderstand Jessica.”

“My God, Jackie,” Charles said, “I don't misunderstand Jessica. It's all over and, I told you, I'm glad I didn't marry her and that's all there is to it”; but Jackie was going on.

“I'm glad you take it this way, Charley. You see, I've been seeing a lot of Jessica.” He laughed deprecatingly. “I guess Mr. Lovell thought I was pretty harmless, but things can't help changing and that's what I want to tell you. I want to tell you that Jessica and I are engaged and are going to be married in June.”

Somehow Charles had thought of everything else but not of that. He was reconciled to Jackie's being a library trustee, a director of the bank, a member of the Tuesday Club, but he had never thought of his marrying Jessica Lovell. He could not think that he resented it or that it was jealousy he felt, or envy. He was mainly disturbed because of something in the whole picture that was malformed, something that should not have been. He was thinking of what Jessica used to say about Jackie Mason, but as Jackie said, things changed if you saw someone long enough—and it had taken a long, long time. It was all as dry as dust, almost repellent, and for once he did not say the proper thing.

“Why, Jackie,” he said, “it looks as though you have everything,” and he heard Jackie's nervous laugh.

“Oh, I wouldn't put it that way,” Jackie said, “and I know that Jessica and I are a little old to take this step, but then we've known each other so long.”

The radiator hissed again and Charles still did not know how he felt.

“I wish you'd tell me,” he asked, “how Mr. Lovell took it.”

“Well, I was a little surprised,” Jackie said. “He didn't seem to mind. It's funny, when I had my talk with him, he kept calling me Charles. Of course, his mind isn't what it was before he was ill last winter, but he's really a grand old gentleman, and we'll all be living there together. He couldn't live without Jessica.”

At last Charles said the right thing. He said he thought it was splendid and he knew they would be happy.

“I'm awfully glad you think so, Charley,” Jackie Mason said, “and now there's one thing more. I hope you'll call on Jessica tomorrow. She knows you're here, you know.”

Charles picked up his glass and was surprised to find it empty. He set it carefully back on the writing table and rose.

“No,” he said. “No, I don't think so, Jack. It—” His voice was unexpectedly hoarse. “It wouldn't help anything.”

“But, Charley”—Jackie looked deeply hurt—“I wish you'd think of Jessica. Everyone will know you didn't see her.”

It was that old phrase again, everyone would know, but it was something he could not do, something he would not do, even though everyone would know.

“I can't,” he said, and his voice was still hoarse. “I suppose I ought to, but I can't … I'm sorry, Jackie.”

No matter what Jackie Mason said, he would not go to the Lovells'. Jackie Mason was still his friend and Jackie was always loyal, but he did not have to see Jessica or Mr. Lovell or the Lovell house again.

“Why, Charley,” he said, “if you really feel that way … But just think it over and we'll talk about it again tomorrow.”

“All right,” Charles said.

“And now I'd better be going. It's getting awfully late.”

“Wait a minute,” Charles said, and his mind was back to where it should have been. “Just a minute before you go, Jackie. There's something I've been meaning to ask you. What do you know about the Nickerson Cordage Company?”

His voice at last sounded the way it should have through all that conversation.

For a minute or two after Jackie Mason closed the door and after the sound of footfalls disappeared, Charles Gray had the illusion that he was in a hotel room somewhere else and that Jackie Mason had appeared unsubstantially and that their conversation had been still another fantasy. Although the place had the impersonality peculiar to any hotel room and though the presence of people who had occupied it could be erased from it as one wiped chalk off the surface of a blackboard, the imprint of Jack Mason's posterior was still visible upon the cushion of the small upholstered chair. The bottle of rye was gone, because he had insisted that Jack Mason take it back with him, under his overcoat if necessary, but the two bathroom glasses were on the table—his own empty and the other only faintly colored and still three quarters full, showing that Jackie Mason very seldom did that sort of thing.

Charles took his thin gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, the unnecessarily expensive watch that Nancy had given him just before they were married. Nancy had never liked wrist watches in an office because, without meaning to, you always glanced at them. It was very late for Clyde, almost half past eleven o'clock. He picked up the two glasses automatically and walked into the bathroom, where he rinsed them out carefully, but rinsing glasses could not change his frame of mind. He could not get his thoughts away from Jack Mason and the career of Jack Mason. A sense of emptiness and futility hung darkly over him. It was late, but he wanted to call up Nancy. He had never wanted so much to speak to anyone and he felt better already when he had given the number at Sycamore Park.

“Ring me when you get it, will you, please?” he said.

Then he walked to the single window and opened it wider and stood breathing the cool night air. There was the sound of a train in the distance. It would be the eleven-thirty going north to Portland. The timetable had not changed. It was a dark, cloudy night but the sky was lighter than the earth and he could see the blurred shapes of the elms and the houses on Fanning Street. The town was asleep but it was still alive and as full of blind instinct as a beehive. Malcolm Bryant had perceived this once and he had tried clumsily to translate it into the pages of Yankee Persepolis, so named because the Persians had worshiped memories there.

He thought again of Jackie Mason, beset by this instinct and wanting to get on according to the rules, and he had seen the result that night, a preordained and sterile ending. The worst of it was that it partially reminded him of his own career. He had been living carefully according to other rules. Someday he might be a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank in New York City, and Jackie Mason was engaged to Jessica Lovell. He wished that the night were not so dark. He wished that everything were not so deathly still. There was not even a sigh of wind in the branches of the trees.

The sharp ring of the telephone broke into those thoughts and he was relieved to hear the low and sleepy sound of Nancy's voice.

“What are you doing? Where are you?” she asked.

“I'm here in the hotel in Clyde,” he said, and it sounded like the beginning of a letter—Clyde Inn, Clyde, Massachusetts. “Did I wake you up?”

“Yes, you did,” Nancy said. “Never mind it. Are you all right?”

Nancy always hated wasting money talking aimlessly on the long distance and he disliked it too, but nothing could have made him stop talking.

“I'm fine,” he said. “Are you all right? Are the children all right?”

“There's no perceptible change,” Nancy said. “Molly Blakesley came to call.”

“Oh,” he said. “What did Molly Blakesley want?”

“She didn't want anything, damn her.”

“Molly's all right,” he said. “What else has happened?”

“Well, Bill cut his lip. A baseball hit him. And that man you called to see about the roof, he never came.”

“Well, never mind,” Charles said. “How about the Buick?”

“Why do you want to know about the Buick?”

“I don't know,” Charles said. “I'm just feeling lonely for you and the Buick.”

“It's a nice association of ideas,” Nancy said. “How lonely are you?”

“Very lonely,” he answered. “There are too many ghosts up here.”

“Well, when are you getting back?”

“The midnight tomorrow,” he said.

“What about that company?”

“I'm attending to it tomorrow.”

“Well, what have you been doing?”

“Just talking,” he said. “I had supper at the Masons'.”

“Oh,” she said. “The Masons—those people who lived next door?”

“Yes, they're the ones,” he answered.

“Well, what about that Lovell girl?” He knew that Nancy would ask about the Lovell girl. “Have you seen her yet?”

“No,” he said. “She's going to marry Jackie Mason. What do you think of that?”

“You mean the boy next door is marrying the girl in the big house?” Nancy said. “I've never seen him, so how should I know what to think?” It was wonderful to hear the indifference in Nancy's voice. “Now wait a minute. Is that why you're lonely?”