Point of No Return (9 page)

“I guess you have to have a Ph.D. to go to places like that,” Charles said. “You have to know about bugs or snakes or rubber, I suppose.”

Malcolm was regarding him in his old friendly, detached way, as though he were examining a strange human specimen.

“Yes,” Malcolm said. “It's better to have a Ph.D., but it's more important to think of a project. Then you sell that project to somebody and they give you the money and you go. That's why I'm going to New Guinea tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Charles said, “are you going to New Guinea?”

“Yes,” Malcolm said, “for the Pacific Investigation Institute. They had to have an anthropologist. Walter Sykes was going—you know, Sykes at the Peabody, who did that work on the Micronesians. He's overrated, if you want my personal opinion, and he keeps harping on the Haynes method. His kidneys gave out last week and so they went around to the Birch Foundation and the Birch found me.”

“Oh,” Charles said. It was like groping in the dark in an unfamiliar room that was filled with odd odors and awkward pieces of furniture. “You mean you just pack up and go?”

“It isn't any problem,” Malcolm said. “I have an assistant. He's doing all the work. The only thing that is going to be interesting is the circumcision rite. All the rest has been pretty well covered, but I hope to get in on that. You see, it's about the proper time of year.” He stopped, as though he took it for granted that Charles understood everything he was saying.

“Oh,” Charles said. “Do they like strangers to see things like that?”

Malcolm looked at his glass and set it back on the bar.

“It all depends on how you handle the head men,” he said, “and head men are all about alike. Well, I suppose we ought to have some lunch. What is it, son?”

One of the club attendants had interrupted them. It was a telephone call for Mr. Bryant.

“Oh,” Malcolm said. “I'm sorry, Charley. That will be about the penicillin. Just wait for me in the other room, will you? I won't be a minute.”

Charles walked into the other room and sat down in a red leather chair. The snatches of talk he heard were reassuring and a part of his own language. No one, in this other room, was talking of head men or of circumcision, but about the weather and the news from Washington. Charles drew a deep breath and opened the book which Malcolm Bryant had given him. It was published, he saw, by a university press, but even university presses had bright accounts of their books' contents inside the dust wrapper.

“
Yankee Persepolis
” Charles read, “appears as the final and considered summation of part of a study made some years ago of a typical New England town, its culture, and its social implications. This volume has been written by Malcolm Bryant, in general charge of the survey. Mr. Bryant, fresh from the study of the Zambesis of Central Africa, has applied, in broad principle, the methods of research which he developed and perfected there. The result of this, his concluding volume, is a brilliant and exhaustive case history which can serve as an adequate text …” Charles's attention had wavered. His eye traveled without reading down to the last paragraph. “Malcolm Bryant, though stemming from the Middle West, took his doctorate at Harvard University, is at present a Fellow of the Birch Foundation, and is widely recognized through his papers in scientific journals and as a lecturer.”

That was all there was about Malcolm Bryant and it conveyed very little to Charles. The book, as he glanced at it, was written in an abstruse and awkward way, adding up to something that he could not possibly read continuously, though he knew the book was about Clyde. The first chapter was entitled “Yankee Persepolis, Its Geography and Population” and the second “Social Structure,” with a number of charts and drawings which Charles could not understand. Turning the pages hastily, Charles could see the names of streets and neighborhoods and buildings, thin and inartistic parodies of real names. Johnson Street was called Mason Street, the North End was called Hill Town, Dock Street was called River Street, and so it went, down to the names of families. The Lovells were obviously called the Johnsons and the Thomases were called the Hopewells, in a chapter entitled “Family Sketches.” It was not difficult to perceive, in spite of these clumsy concealments, that Clyde was Yankee Persepolis. It was like looking at Clyde through a distorted lens or seeing Clyde through rippling water, with small things assuming portentous shapes.

“For the purposes of distinction,” Charles read, “it will be well arbitrarily to define the very definite and crystallized social strata of Yankee Persepolis as upper, middle, and lower. These will be subdivided into upper-upper, middle-upper, and lower-upper, and the same subdivisions will be used for middle and lower classes.”

Charles turned to the middle of the book. Even that quick perusal brought him back to the time when Malcolm Bryant had been studying Yankee Persepolis. He could remember Malcolm's voice and Malcolm's alien figure on the main street, but it was curiously shocking to find that period preserved in print.

“Typical of a lower-upper family,” Charles was reading, “are the Henry Smiths—father, mother, son and daughter. Like other lower-upper families, they dwell on a side street (‘side streeters'), yet are received on Mason Street. Mr. Smith, with investment interests in Boston, whose father owned stock in the Pierce Mill, is a member of the Sibley Club, also the Country Club, but is not a member of the Fortnightly Reading Club, belonging only to its lower counterpart, the Thursday Club. Though a member, he has never been an officer of the Historical Society or a Library trustee. His wife, Mrs. Smith, was Miss Jones, a physician's daughter (middle-upper). She runs their home in the lower-upper manner, with the aid of one maid (middle-lower) coming in daily from outside. The son Tom, a likable young graduate of Dartmouth, works ambitiously in the office of the Pax Company and is thinking of leaving for a job in Boston. He and his sister Hannah are received by the upper-upper but are not members of the committee for the Winter Assembly. They are, however, in a position to move by marriage to middle-upper or possibly upper-upper status. There is even talk that in time Tom may be taken into the Fortnightly and he is on friendly terms with the daughter of Mr. Johnson (upper-upper) though there is little prospect of more than friendship. Hannah is occasionally squired by Arthur Hopewell (upper-upper) but here, too, the prospect of marriage both recognize as small.…”

Charles felt his face redden, because it was easy enough to read between the lines. It was his own family there in black and white, starkly indecent, without trimming or charity. He was Tom, that likable young graduate from Dartmouth. It was indecent and infuriating, but he still read further.

“Let us examine a typical day in the Smith family (lower-upper). The rising hour is seven. Tom starts the coal fire in the kitchen range. Mrs. Smith arises to prepare breakfast, the maid Martha Brud (middle-lower) not appearing until eight. Hannah does not assist at this function because of a parental effort, very marked in the lower-upper and continuing through the middle group, for social advancement, especially of the marriageable daughter. The distinction in this regard between son and daughter seems definitely marked.”

There it was in black and white, devoid of tone and shading, but Charles could see the rest between the lines. He could remember Malcolm coming in to call and talking of the Orinoco River and even helping with the dishes and giving his father an Overland cigar. He might have called it pacifying the head man, and he must have rushed to his notebook before he could forget.

“The ancestral motif is as marked in this group as it is in the upper-upper. The same importance is attached to the preservation of the heirloom and the decoration of the grave. Thus over the mantel of the Smith parlor is jealously guarded a primitive oil painting of a sailing vessel captained by the Smiths' ancestor, Jacob Smith.”

He could clearly recall Malcolm's interest in that picture and the satisfaction in his mother's voice as she had explained it to him. He himself owned the picture now and every word he read seemed to him a crude breach of hospitality. His eye was still on the page when he heard Malcolm Bryant's voice.

“All right, Charley,” Malcolm was saying. “Let's go in and have some lunch.” Malcolm was standing in front of him with his hands in the side pockets of his coat. “So you've been looking over the opus, have you?”

Charles stood up with the book under his arm and tried to look calmly placid, especially as he saw that Malcolm was regarding him with detached, scientific curiosity.

“Yes,” Charles said, “I was just glancing through it. It's funny I never heard of it before.”

“It's a professional sort of book,” Malcolm said. “Everybody has to publish something.”

“It's like all sociological books,” Charles said. “It's a little over my head. It has a queer style.”

“It isn't meant to have style,” Malcolm said. “Scholars suspect anything with style.”

“It has a lot of facts,” Charles said, “but it doesn't sound much like Clyde.”

They were already at the door of the long dining room and the clatter of dishes and voices were all about them so that Malcolm had to raise his voice.

“My God,” Malcolm said. “It isn't meant to be Clyde. It's only meant to represent a characteristic social unit. Let's not wait on ourselves. Let's get a table at the end.”

“All right,” Charles said. “You're paying for it. I can't. I'm a likable Dartmouth boy.”

Malcolm looked startled but he laughed.

“So you read that piece, did you?”

“I just glanced at it,” Charles said. “There wasn't much time to go over it.”

“It's funny—” Malcolm began, but he had no time to finish. The head-waiter was leading them to a table at the end of the room, and Charles was looking over the tables and faces of the diners because his training had taught him that it was worth while to recognize people. He smiled and waved his hand to a vice-president of the Guaranty Trust Company and he was back in his own life again—just out from the Stuyvesant for lunch with an unconventional acquaintance, an anthropologist who was going to New Guinea.

“You don't have to have the regular lunch,” Malcolm said. “Order anything you like.”

“Oh no,” Charles answered. “The regular lunch is fine, thanks. I haven't got much time.”

He unfolded his napkin and glanced out of the window at the traffic on Forty-fifth Street.

“That book—” Malcolm said, pointing at it—Charles had been carrying it and he had put it down on the table beside a small basket of rolls—“I thought everything was pretty well scrambled in that book, but you picked yourself out, didn't you?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “The Smith family.”

“I'm afraid it made you sore,” Malcolm said. “Get it out of your head that it's personal.”

Charles took a sip of water.

“I wouldn't say I was sore,” he said, “but of course it's personal and I can't say that I like the idea.”

“What idea?” Malcolm asked.

“The idea,” Charles said, “of someone like you coming there and treating us like guinea pigs. As far as I can remember, we were pretty nice to you in Clyde.”

“Now, listen, Charley,” Malcolm answered. “A social survey hasn't anything to do with friendship. Besides, it was twenty years ago.”

“That's right,” Charles said. “It was quite a while ago.”

“Just remember,” Malcolm said, and he looked hurt, “it hasn't got anything to do with friendship, Charley. I wish you'd get it into your head that I liked a lot of people there. I liked you, for instance, God knows why.”

“I used to like you, too,” Charles said. “God knows why, and up to a certain point.”

“What point?”

“Oh, never mind,” Charles said, “but I'll tell you something—” And then he stopped.

“Go ahead. What is it, Charley?”

“A year or two after you went away, I tried to look you up in New York but you weren't there.” He stopped again and fidgeted in his chair. “I thought you might get me on that trip you used to talk about, that one to South America.” It was something he had never told anyone, although he had nearly told it once to his son, and now the only thing to do was to laugh about it, and he laughed. “You have a lot of queer ideas when you're that age.”

“By God, I might have taken you,” Malcolm said. “That would have been funny.”

“Yes,” Charles said, “it would have been,” and he straightened his shoulders and took another sip of water. The sounds of the room came back, the voices and the gentle clatter of china. Malcolm had lighted a cigarette and was blowing smoke through his nose.

“You might at least,” Charles said, “have put us in middle-upper instead of lower-upper.”

Then they were silent for a minute, but it was not a constrained silence.

“Did you ever get married?” Charles asked. “You were always talking about marriage.”

“Never mind it,” Malcolm said. “Women always forget me when I go away. What happened about you and Jessica?”

“Never mind it now,” Charles said.

“All right,” Malcolm said, “what's happened to you since? I mean since I used to know you.”

It was a blunt question but it offered opportunity, which came very seldom, of saying what you thought, to someone whom you would probably never see again.

“That's quite an order,” Charles said. “Why do you want to know?” It was exactly as if a blank questionnaire had been thrust in front of him.

“Because I always liked you, Charley,” Malcolm said, “and I'm interested in people, academically.”

“That's it,” Charles said. “Academically. But I don't believe you know very much about people. You know about custom and form and habit, but those are all results and not causes. I don't believe you know as much about people as I do.”