Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “Charley, do you believe in God Almighty?”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “I think I do. It may be early habit. Yes, I do, since you ask me.”

  Malcolm leaned his elbows on the table and Charles saw that his coat fitted him very badly.

  “Well, if you were to pin me down to it, so do I,” he said.

  It must have been the mention of God that made Charles think of time. He looked at his watch and it was a quarter after two.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, and suddenly he realized that he had found out nothing, or almost nothing, about Malcolm Bryant.

  “Don’t go,” Malcolm was saying. “We’ve only just begun to talk.”

  Charles pushed back his chair. “You’ve got to be taking off to New Guinea,” he said.

  They were both walking side by side between the tables and he was sorry that it was over.

  “I wish you hadn’t made me talk about myself all the time,” he said.

  They were out of the dining room and Charles had tossed his brass check on the coatroom counter when Malcolm put his hand on his arm.

  “Charley,” he said, “you’ve got a lot of guts.”

  “How do you mean, guts?” Charles asked.

  “Saying what you do,” Malcolm said, “doing what you do, takes guts. You’re a very nice boy, Charley.”

  “I wish,” Charles said, “you’d stop calling me a nice boy.”

  “Well, you are,” Malcolm said, “and it takes guts to be your type, these days. Good-by, good luck, Charley.”

  “Put me down in Category E,” Charles said. “Good luck, Malcolm, and thanks.”

  “Thanks for what?” Malcolm asked.

  “Since you ask me, I don’t exactly know,” Charles said, “but thanks.”

  5

  Everything Fits into Banking Somewhere

  Though common sense told Charles that he should hurry, some other inner impulse made him walk with perverse slowness, as you did when you tried to hurry in a dream. The sun had finally broken through the clouds and the sky was almost entirely blue and when he reached Fifth Avenue he came to a stop. He saw the sunlight hit the wings of a plane that must have risen from La Guardia Field just a minute or so before, and in spite of the noise on the Avenue he could hear the drumming of the motors. The green lights were on and he watched the steady flow of the traffic as though the sight were new to him—yellow cabs, green-and-white cabs, and the new buses, so different from the old ones with the open tops. The sun was still high enough to shine through some plate-glass windows on a display of men’s colored shirts—maroons, blues, salmon pinks and canary yellows. He still could not get used to colored shirts even though they were quite the thing now to wear at the country club on Sunday.

  Everything was changing and Fifth Avenue was changing too, in spite of all the efforts of the Fifth Avenue Association; but then Fifth Avenue had always been in a state of flux, with old buildings coming down and new ones going up, the old ones crumbling into rubble and being poured into the wreckers’ trucks. It was always changing, but the spirit of it was still as young, confident, and blatant as when Henry James had written of it long ago. It still conveyed the same message that it had when he had walked along it on that first visit with his father. The motion of it had the same strength and eagerness, so different from the more stately motion of Piccadilly and the Strand.

  “Easter Parade” by Irving Berlin … He had gone with Nancy to that musical show and it must have been in the winter of 1934 when they still lived in a walk-up apartment on West Eighteenth Street. They had paid Mrs. Sweeney, whose husband was a policeman, a dollar to sit listening for the baby, and they had not been to the theater once that year or the year before. ’Thirty-four had been bad enough, though nothing to ’thirty-three. They had gone to dinner in a small French restaurant and had taken the bus up Fifth Avenue and had walked across to Broadway. When the chorus had sung that song about Fifth Avenue he had been holding Nancy’s hand, just as he used to when he took her to the Capitol before they were married.… He must have been deathly tired because he had dozed off in the darkness in the middle of it and she had dug her elbow in his ribs and he still remembered her whisper.

  “Wake up. Don’t waste your money sleeping.”

  It had been quite a while, in fact not since he had been upstairs at the Stuyvesant, since anyone had made a remark to him about staying out too long at lunch; and there was never the slightest criticism now that he was downstairs, at a desk near the front window. There was still the inner compulsion never to be late, but at the same time it was your privilege. Tardiness could be excused on the assumption that you were having a business lunch with a client. Nevertheless, Charles knew that Miss Marble and Joe had been wondering where he had been, and it did not help to see that Roger Blakesley was busy at his desk already. Charles repressed an instinct to hurry and hang up his hat and coat but instead he walked slowly past the desks and stopped where Miss Marble was typing and asked her if there was anything new.

  “Nothing new,” Miss Marble said. “I called up Mrs. Gray and told her you couldn’t catch the five-thirty. She said to remember that you’re going to the country club tonight.”

  “It isn’t tonight, is it?” Charles asked.

  “You didn’t tell me to put it on the calendar,” Miss Marble said, “but Mrs. Gray said to remind you.”

  “Well, call her again and tell her I’ll meet her there,” Charles said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can, but I’ll be late.”

  He stopped in front of the washroom mirror to see that his tie was straight. His short, sandy hair was in order and he looked competent and carefree. It was time to put the luncheon out of his mind. Malcolm had said that he was a nice boy, Charley, and he was not a nice boy any longer. He did not look the way he had at Clyde, though even there his mother had always said that he had the Gray high cheekbones and the Gray pointed chin. The roundness had gone out of his face. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and his mouth was tighter but there was no gray in his hair. It was not the face that he used to have but it still looked young.

  “Charley,” he heard Malcolm Bryant saying, “it takes guts to be your type, these days. Good-by, good luck, Charley.”

  He was still not sure whether or not Malcolm Bryant had been laughing at him. Businessmen were not on the pinnacle they had once occupied. It was hard sometimes to tell the difference between strength of mind and habit.

  The tellers’ cages would close at three and already, as was usual in the afternoon, the pace was growing more leisurely. There were always new problems in the morning but these grew old by afternoon, fitting with still older problems into a symmetrical design so that you had a sense of everything running smoothly, a sense of teamwork, if you wanted to call it that, or what Mr. Burton called a meshing of the gears. You could think of the whole system of capital, of rates, discounts, markets and production, as running without interruption, like the traffic on the Avenue.

  Charles had devised a system that permitted him to examine every trust account personally at least once a month, and now Miss Marble brought to his cleared desk the ones which he was to review that day. As he thanked her and settled himself in his chair, he glanced across at Roger Blakesley. Roger’s desk was heaped with piles of papers. It was a habit of Roger’s to shove a great many papers around in the afternoon, especially toward closing time.

  “Hello there, Charley,” Roger said. “Everything’s backing up on me.”

  Charles knew this was not true but it gave the picture that Roger wanted, a picture of heavy and unremitting labor.

  “You’re back early,” Charles said. “I thought you were going to have lunch with Tony.”

  “He canceled it,” Roger said. “Something came up the last minute.” Roger took off his glasses and polished them. When his glasses were off, his blinking eyes gave him a vacant, guileless look. “Are you going to the country club tonight?”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “but I’m afraid I
’ll be late.”

  “Who was that bird you went to lunch with?”

  There was no privacy. Everyone heard everything, particularly Roger.

  “A man I used to know,” Charles said, and then some impulse made him explain it further. “He’s an anthropologist.”

  “A what?”

  Then Charles knew that it would have been better not to have mentioned it. It was just the sort of thing that Roger would remember.

  “An anthropologist.”

  “He looked like a teacher in business school,” Roger said. “One of those ‘if you can’t do, teach’ boys.”

  As far as Charles could tell, everything in Roger’s career had stemmed from his stay at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where business was the oldest of the arts but the newest of the professions. He had to admit that Roger used his academic background adroitly, extracting the last drop from it. Roger was always saying it was a great place, the Harvard Business School. When you studied under the Case system, you became aware of practicality and theories at the same time. It was a proving ground, the Harvard Business School, and it paid to keep up with it afterwards. If you were to ask Roger, but you did not have to ask him, this proving ground was directly accountable for the record he had made at the Guaranty before he had come to the Stuyvesant. He had been asked to come to the Stuyvesant and before accepting, of course, there had been certain reservations in his mind, but he had never regretted the step after taking it. There were fine fellows at the Stuyvesant, like Tony Burton and Steve Merry, and good boys like Charley Gray, fellows who always stuck together without getting out the old stiletto and inserting it between the shoulder blades.

  Charles began on the first account. It was the Burrell School for Negroes in Tennessee, founded by the late Charles Burrell, the moneys for which were administered by Mr. Burrell’s old bank, the Stuyvesant, in conjunction with Mr. Burrell’s old law firm, Burrell, Jessup and Cockburn. Charles would have to meet with Mr. Cockburn the first of the week and the meetings were never agreeable. The trouble with institutional accounts of late had been that all institutions were screaming for more income, although they continued demanding a margin of absolute safety. Mr. Cockburn always wanted to lower the bond holdings and to increase the higher-yielding preferred list. That million-dollar fund had been beautifully invested. Even in the depression, income had held up well, and now the market was considerably above the book value.

  Charles was in the middle of the security list when he realized that Miss Marble was waiting by his desk.

  “It’s twenty minutes to three,” Miss Marble said. “Mr. Selig is coming in at a quarter of—the one who wants to open an account. I thought you’d like to see the credit department memorandum.”

  “Selig?” Charles repeated, and his mind darted swiftly away from the investments of the Burrell School.

  “The matter that Mr. Burton asked you to take up,” Miss Marble said. An anticipatory quiver in her voice showed that Miss Marble was interested. He had been asked yesterday to do that job and now he understood why Tony Burton was not yet back from lunch. He always seemed to be the one who was picked for unpleasant interviews.

  “Thanks,” he said, and he took the memorandum. “Does Joe know I’m to see him? You’d better check again with Joe.”

  His eyes traveled over the memorandum. He had learned to read office memoranda quickly and to pick the salient details out of the dull verbiage.

  “Burt J. Selig,” he read, “is part owner of the Teddy Club and the La Casita night club, owns real estate at … and also in Miami, was indicted for income-tax fraud but indictment was quashed …”

  There was no use going any further because everything had been decided. It seemed to Charles that there was no reason for a personal interview and that the matter might have been settled as well by letter, except that Tony Burton had disapproved of anything as permanent as a letter. Charles’s desk had just been cleared except for a pile of Moody reports when he saw Joe moving from the door accompanied by a thin, dark man who wore a bluish-purple overcoat and a lightweight gray felt hat. Except for the shimmering sheen of the overcoat and the violently brilliant polish of his shoes, Mr. Selig was quietly dressed. His tie was dark, like his suit; his face was tanned, probably by the Miami sun, into a smooth meerschaum color. When he took off his hat, as he did when he approached the desk, Charles saw that his forehead was high and that his close-cropped dark hair was receding from his temples. His eyebrows, which might have been trimmed, formed a straight, almost Grecian line. His eyes were gray, his jaw was heavy, but there was nothing heavy about his step.

  “This is our Mr. Gray,” Joe said. “He will take care of you.”

  Mr. Selig held out a carefully manicured hand.

  “I’m happy to meet Mr. Gray,” he said. “My name’s Selig, Burt Selig.”

  “Yes, I know,” Charles said. “Mr. Burton asked me to see you and I have all the details. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Selig?”

  He wondered for an instant where Malcolm Bryant would have placed Mr. Selig in his social scale, for Mr. Selig must have moved fast from group to group in combinations more complicated than any in Clyde or New Guinea. His voice had undertones of lost accents. His face had a look of things written on it that had been partially erased and of preparation for new writing. It was a face of a type that Charles did not know, but it was as marked and distinctive as a soldier’s or a doctor’s—positive, alert and confident.

  “A nice little place you have here,” Mr. Selig said. “Very nice.”

  “It’s just a small bank,” Charles answered.

  “Yes,” Mr. Selig said. “That’s what draws me to it, Mr. Gray, particularly for Mrs. Selig. I know some lovely people banking here, some of my best friends. My friend Alf Fieldstone banks here. Do you know Alf?”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “I’ve met him.”

  “A very nice fellow, Alf,” Mr. Selig said. “He likes La Casita. Have you been to La Casita, Mr. Gray?”

  “I tried once,” Charles answered, “but there was a long line waiting.”

  “Well, any time,” Mr. Selig said, and smiled.

  “Thanks,” Charles said.

  “Well,” Mr. Selig said, “I suppose you’ve looked me over. I hope I’ve passed through the line-up by now.”

  He paused and smiled, but there was no need to give any answer.

  “I’m used to being looked over,” Mr. Selig said, “in my position.”

  “Well,” Charles said, “anyone in business always gets looked over.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Mr. Selig said. “How long have you been here, Mr. Gray?”

  “Quite a while.”

  “I suppose it takes time to work up anywhere in a business like this. Nothing can move fast.”

  “That’s right,” Charles said, “it takes time.”

  “I wouldn’t want any son of mine working in a bank,” Mr. Selig said. “So little action.”

  “It all depends on temperament,” Charles answered.

  “Yes,” Mr. Selig said. “Everybody has a different temperament. I ought to know.”

  The best way to hurry an interview was to wait, but he was sure that Mr. Selig ought to know.

  “Well,” Mr. Selig said, “what’s the story? Do you want my account or don’t you?”

  Many people believed that banking was a matter of dull routine but whatever it might be to the boys in back, up front you could never count on monotony or even on a restful moment. It was necessary, as soon as Mr. Selig asked that question, to change from an investment consultant into a man of the world. It was necessary to remember that he was in a very responsible position, representing in his own person the prestige and dignity of the Stuyvesant and at the same time protecting the inviolate sanctity of its officers. Suddenly, with hardly any time to prepare, he had to change from book values to diplomacy and to draw smoothly on a store of conventional phrases, which were deceitful but which had to stick.

  “
Our officers have been over that question very carefully,” Charles said, and the smoothness and the consoling tone of his voice reminded him of a hotel clerk saying nicely that there was no room for a certain guest. “We would value your account in a great many ways, Mr. Selig, but we really feel that you will be better off in another bank. You said yourself this is a small bank, and smallness has its difficulties.” Charles smiled at Mr. Selig and felt still more like a hotel clerk. “I hope you’ll understand, Mr. Selig, sorry as we are to turn away profitable business.” Charles smiled again. “Mr. Burton asked me to tell you personally that this is a purely business decision.”

  Of course he was using Mr. Burton’s name unofficially but still it had a soothing sound, even if it did not have the desired effect.

  “So the answer is no, is it?” Mr. Selig asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” Charles said, “for the time being. We’re very sorry.”

  Something made Charles sit up straighter and something made him feel that it would be unwise to shift his glance from Mr. Selig, for a film had seemed to drop over Mr. Selig’s eyes. It was as though Mr. Selig had tried to suppress an impulse which he had been unable to conceal and for a second Charles had a sense of something close to physical danger.

  “So I’m not a nice enough guy to play with you, is that it?” Mr. Selig said.

  Charles spoke slowly and very carefully. You had to go on with the act and make no rash statements. You had to be glib and still say nothing.

  “There’s nothing personal intended,” Charles said. “We often find the needs of some depositors are better filled by other banks.”

  “I’m not used to being given the run-around. Why didn’t they say that the first time I came in?” Mr. Selig asked. He had not raised his voice but there was a difference in his accent.

  “I’m sorry you put it that way,” Charles said. “Mr. Burton was very impressed by your references. We never like to disappoint our friends, Mr. Selig.”

  “So you’re fronting for the crowd, are you?” Mr. Selig asked.