Point of No Return (76 page)

There must have been something in his voice, but then they knew each other too well for either of them to conceal anything.

“Oh, God,” he said, “I wish everything weren't so contrived.”

They were right back where they had been that morning when she had taken him to the station.

“Contrived?” she repeated. “How do you mean, contrived?”

“I mean what I say.” He had not intended to sound so bitter. “I mean it's all so superficial. The bank president and the big job, and what will happen to Junior, and whether a boiled shirt will help. The values of it are childish. It hasn't any values at all.”

“I know.” Her voice was softer. “You've said it before.”

“Nance,” he said, “I wish you wouldn't be so tense. This isn't as important as all that.”

“Charley.” She sounded steady and controlled, a great deal too controlled. “Don't say it. I can't stand it if you say it.”

“Don't say what? What do you think I'm going to say?” he asked.

“Don't say—” her voice became harsh and strident—“don't say we have each other. We
have
got each other but I don't want to hear it and you're just getting ready to say that, aren't you? It's been in your mind all afternoon. I knew it when you were out there on the lawn being sweet to the children. Say it later but don't say it now.”

“Nance,” he said, and his own voice was edgy, “I've done everything I can. Let's change the subject.”

“You're acting licked already,” she said. “I hate it when you act that way.”

“All right,” he said, “maybe I'm licked, and maybe I don't give a damn.”

“I suppose you're going to say I've always been pushing you because I want us to get on,” she said.

“I wish you'd stop telling me what I'm going to say,” he answered.

They were through the underpass and now that they were approaching the Sound the places were growing older and larger. Houses with mansard roofs and newer Colonials were standing on broad lawns.

“You shouldn't have gone to that damned war.”

It seemed to him that he was driving too fast and he glanced at the speedometer but the speed was only thirty miles an hour.

“Yes, you told me so at the time,” he said. “You were right, but at least—”

“At least what?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Let's not talk about it now.”

“Can't we talk about anything?”

“No,” he said, “let's not talk about anything.”

It had been a long while since his nerves had been so on edge but even so they were almost at Roger's Point. He could see where the public road ended at a wooden booth where a watchman stood to exclude unwanted visitors. It was like entering a military installation when you went to dinner with the Burtons.

“I don't see what they see in him. Any fool ought to know you're ten times as good as he is.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Blakesley. I wish you'd listen to me. Blakesley.”

“Oh, yes. Well, Roger's pretty quick on his feet,” he said.

“Charley, if—” She stopped and started again. “If … what are you going to do?”

He did not answer. He felt as though everything were hanging on a few threads and as though anything might break them. They were passing walls of dressed granite and carefully raked driveways. He and Nancy did not belong there. They were like intruders in a larger world.

“Haven't you even thought what you're going to do?”

“My God,” he said, “I'm sick of thinking.”

The threads had broken and he saw that she was crying. It was the worst possible time for this to have happened, just as they were approaching the private road to Roger's Point. He stopped the car.

“It isn't fair,” she sobbed. “It isn't fair.”

“Never mind, Nance,” he said, and he put his arm around her. “We've got lots of time and it doesn't matter if we're late.”

She was already opening her beaded bag.

“I'm all right now,” she said. “I didn't mean to let you down.”

“You haven't let me down,” he said.

“I'm all right now,” she said. “Start up the car. This wouldn't have happened if I'd been driving. Don't look at me, don't say anything, and to hell with everybody.”

5

Fate Gave, What Chance Shall Not Control …

—
MATTHEW ARNOLD

It was good business to learn unobtrusively all one could about one's superiors and through his years at the Stuyvesant Bank Charles had collected a considerable amount of information about Mr. Anthony Burton and his background. He had picked this up gradually, a little here and there from occasional remarks that Mr. Burton had made when there was general conversation, and more from Arthur Slade. In the course of time, Charles had been able to sift fact from gossip and to make his own evaluations, until now, if necessary, he could have written from memory a biographical character sketch of Tony Burton, and he could have filled in any gaps from his own firsthand observations of Tony Burton's habits. He knew that Tony Burton was both typical and exceptional—a rich man's son with inherited ability and with ambition that had somehow not been dulled by his having always been presented with what he had wanted. Though Charles knew that he would always observe Tony Burton from a distance, it was fascinating to speculate upon his drives and problems.

His life and Tony Burton's were actually two complete and separate circles, touching at just one point, and they were circles that would never coincide. Though they each could make certain ideas comprehensible to the other, the very words they used had different meanings for each of them. Security, work, worry, future, position, and society, capital and government, all had diverging meanings. Charles could understand the Burton meanings and could interpret them efficiently and accurately, but only in an objective, not in an emotional, way, in the same manner he might have interpreted the meanings of a Russian commissar or a Chinese mandarin. He could admire aspects of Tony Burton, he could even like him, but they could only understand each other theoretically.

When Tony Burton said, for instance, as he was recently fond of saying, that the neighborhood where he lived on Roger's Point was running down, it was not what Charles would have meant if he had made the statement. Tony Burton did not mean that any place on Roger's Point was growing shabby or that crude parvenus had pushed in on Roger's Point. He only meant that several places during the war had changed hands rather suddenly—nothing along the shore, of course, but in back. He did not mean that the new owners of these places were financially unstable or made noises when they ate their food. He only meant that one of the owners was the president of an advertising agency and that another controlled the stock of a depilatory preparation. Though these people were agreeable and wanted to do better, their having been allowed to buy into Roger's Point indicated that the general morale was running low. It would not have happened, for instance, when Mr. Burton, Senior, was alive. That was all he meant.

This did not sound serious to Charles, but it was to Tony Burton and Charles could understand it, intellectually. What was more, Tony Burton must have known he understood it, for he discussed the situation quite frankly with Charles, just as though Charles owned property on Roger's Point—not on the inside but on the water side. Yet they both obviously knew that Charles could never afford to live there. A backlog of inherited wealth was required to live there, unless one made a killing on the stock market or invented a laxative or a depilatory. There was no way of telling what might happen to Roger's Point. Anyone might live there in time, and Tony Burton could laugh ironically about it, and Charles, too, could laugh, sympathetically and intellectually, without ever fully savoring the suffering behind Tony Burton's mirth.

Tony Burton's father, Sanford Burton, had bought all of Roger's Point in 1886, when there were no houses there, and he had built the Burton house in 1888. He had already formed the brokerage firm of Burton and Fall, and the Point had been a profitable real estate investment. It had not been difficult to sell off parts of it around the turn of the century to the proper sort of person. Simpkins, a director of U. S. Steel, had bought the cove, and the Marshalls, the Erie Railroad Marshalls, had bought the place next, and the Crawfords, the Appellate Justice Crawfords, were there also. Charles could remember most of the owners' names. It was good business to know them as many of them had accounts at the Stuyvesant Bank. In fact Charles knew the names as well as did the watchman at the beginning of the private road.

“I'm going to Mr. Anthony Burton's,” he said, and he could even employ the proper tone, intellectually. “Mr. Burton is expecting me for dinner.”

“You needn't have told him all the family history,” Nancy said. “Why didn't you tell him you're forty-three years old and show him our wedding certificate?” She was telling him indirectly that she was feeling better, that she was all right now.

“Oh, my God,” she said, “here it is, and they've put on the lights.”

She was referring to lights in the trees along the drive, a recent innovation of Tony Burton's, inspired by a winter's visit at the place of a friend of his in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. If they could have lights in coconut palms, Tony Burton said, there was no reason for not having them in the copper beeches at Roger's Point, but those new lights did not go so well with the house. Lampposts and gaslight would have fitted the whole scene better. The building had been designed by Richardson, the Romanesque architect—another fact that Charles had learned and filed away. It was too dark to see the detail of the slate roof, the brick walls and the arched doors and windows trimmed with old red sandstone, but its vague outline still looked indestructible. The light beneath the brick and sandstone porte-cochere shone on the iron and glass front door and on the potted hothouse azaleas in rows beside the steps.

The doors had swung open already and Jeffreys, the Burton butler, had stepped outside—but not as far down as the lower step—and was saying good evening.

“You go in, Nancy,” Charles said. “I'd better put the car somewhere.”

“There's no need to move it, Mr. Gray,” Tony Burton's butler said. He was wearing a dinner coat with a stiff shirt. “There's no one else this evening.”

“Oh,” Charles said, “if you're sure it's all right.” He had never been able to speak even an intellectual language with Tony Burton's butler. “It's a beautiful evening, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir,” Tony Burton's butler said. “It's balmy for this time of year,” and then Charles saw that a maid was behind him, relieving Nancy of her cloak.

It was impossible to forget Tony Burton's house once you had been inside it. In summer or winter the air in the hall was balmy like the evening and fragrant with the scent of hothouse flowers. It was a huge oak-paneled hall, with a double staircase and a gallery and a Romanesque fireplace. For a second he and Nancy stood in the shaded light of the hall almost indecisively. There was an especial feeling of timidity when one went there, a furtive sense of not belonging. Yet in another way he was perfectly at ease for at those semiannual dinners Tony Burton had always made them feel most welcome. Besides, each summer there was always that all-day party for everyone at the bank, with three-legged races and potato races and pingpong and bridge for the wives. Mrs. Burton, too, always made the bank wives feel comfortable. The bright light from the open parlor door shone across the dusky hall and Tony Burton was already in the oblong of light, a white carnation in the lapel of his dinner coat, holding out both hands, one for Nancy and one for him.

“Home is the sailor, home from sea,” Tony Burton said, “and the hunter home from the hill. I wish you wouldn't always surprise me, Nancy my dear. Why are you more beautiful every time I see you, or do I just forget?”

“It might be that you just forget, mightn't it?” Nancy asked.

Tony Burton laughed. He had a delightful laugh.

“We've really got to do something about seeing each other more often,” he said. “It's been too long, much too long. Why don't you come to work some morning instead of Charley? I'm getting pretty sick of seeing Charles around.” He laughed again and slapped Charles on the back and they walked behind Nancy into the drawing room.

Charles knew all about Tony Burton's drawing room, too, both from Tony Burton and from Arthur Slade. Mrs. Burton and the girls, before the girls had been married, had made Tony Burton do it entirely over. The enormous Persian carpet had come from the Anderson Gallery and so had the two Waterford chandeliers. Charles remembered them very well because Tony Burton had sent him to the auction to bid them in on one of the first occasions that Tony had ever paid any attention to him, and this did not seem so long ago. He also remembered the huge canvas of a mass of square-rigged ships—the British fleet at anchor. Mrs. Burton was always buying new things for the living room and besides Tony always loved boats. The cup he had won in one of the Bermuda races was standing on the concert grand piano. You could roll up the carpet and clear out all the furniture. It had been a great place for dancing before the girls had married.

“Althea,” Tony Burton said, “I told you Nancy Gray would be wearing a long dress.”

“Oh, my dear,” Mrs. Burton said, “I should have called you up. Tony's getting so absent-minded lately. He spoke of it as supper. There should be set rules for short and long. Now just the other evening at the Drexels' the same thing happened to me. I thought it was dinner and it was supper. But the men thought this up. We didn't, did we?”

“Charles should have told me,” Nancy said. “Why didn't you tell me it was supper, Charley?”