“Of course if I hadn’t been away at the war there wouldn’t be anything to it.”
“You never should have gone,” Nancy said. “I told you so.”
“Yes,” Charles said. “Yes. I remember.”
Nancy sighed and sat down again.
“Haven’t you any idea at all,” she asked, “which one of you he’s going to take?”
Then Charles felt a slight twinge of anger. It had been a long time since he had seen himself so clearly—tied down by little things. They were a steady accumulation of little things, innocuous in themselves, like the ropes the Lilliputians used to pin down Gulliver—the ship picture, the Islamic rug, the wax on the floor, the mortgage, the insurance policy, tiny half-forgotten decisions, words suddenly spoken.
“Charley,” Nancy asked, “what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Charles said.
“Charley, what’ll you do if he takes Roger?”
“Nance,” he said, “let’s not think about it now,” but of course both of them were thinking about it now. The irony of it was that after years of work one became specialized, used to the ways of just one organization, too old to start again in a new one. He had seen plenty of men his age looking for a job.
“Charley,” Nancy said, “if you’d ever done something about investing for yourself instead of for other people—”
“Nance, you know very well,” he answered, “you don’t do much of that when you’re working for a bank.”
Nancy sighed and stood up again.
“Well,” she said, “I guess we’d better go to bed.”
Charles stood up too.
“You go ahead,” he told her. “I’ll be up in a few minutes. Good night, Nance.”
After he had kissed her, she buried her head on his shoulder. She made no sound but he knew she was crying, and it always gave him a completely helpless feeling when she cried.
“Don’t, Nance,” he said. “The show isn’t over.”
“I’m sorry, Charley,” Nancy said. “I’m all right now. You always hate having me cry, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Charles said. “Go on up to bed, Nance. I’ll be up in just a minute.”
“Are you sorry you married me?”
“No,” Charles said, “of course not, Nancy.”
“I suppose I sort of made you marry me.”
“Why, Nance,” Charles said, “I never noticed that you did.”
“Are you sorry we had the children?”
“No, of course I’m not,” Charles said.
“They were my idea more than yours. Are you sorry we bought the house?”
“Listen, Nance,” Charles said, “it happened, like the children. Now go on up and go to sleep. I’ll be up in just a minute.”
“What are you going to do?” Nance asked. “Are you going to sit here and worry?”
“No, I’m not,” he told her. “I’m not sleepy. I’m going to read for a little while.”
“Because if you’re going to worry, we might as well do it together.”
“I’m going to read,” Charles said. “I’m pretty well worried out tonight. Good night, Nance”—and he kissed her again, and walked with her to the foot of the stairs. “I’ll be sitting in the library.”
“Don’t be long,” Nancy said. “I won’t be able to get to sleep till you come up.”
Yankee Persepolis—A Social Study was lying just where he had left it earlier in the evening on top of his brief case on the table in the hall. As Nancy went upstairs, he picked it up because it occurred to him that, considering his mood, something absolutely new was better to read than something he had read before.
All he could do was to recognize his present state of mind as a definite malady like a cold or a fever and tell himself that it would pass. He knew the symptoms well enough. First there was a period of general uneasiness about nothing in particular, and then a growing illusion of being hemmed in, followed by a desire to escape, and finally an indescribable sense of loneliness mingled with a sort of deep self-pity which he particularly hated. He wished he had not mentioned Jessica Lovell, as she was always a part of the shadows which surrounded him suddenly and swiftly when he was in that mood. The only thing to do was to tell himself to behave, that he would be better in a little while. It was also time to consider the dangers of inheritance, and to remember his father.
“Charley,” he could hear his mother saying, “don’t bother him. He’s in one of his spells again.”
Charles himself had never particularly noticed his father’s “spells” until the summer of 1916 but they must have been chronic because his brother Sam had often spoken of them as though they had been going on a long time.
There was always a brittle atmosphere in the house on those occasions. His father was usually in his room with his books, on the second floor, and the door would be locked. His mother and Dorothea would be talking in whispers in the kitchen. There used to be a tradition that everyone should ignore those periods of dejection, and all the family did, except Sam when he was alive. Sam never had any patience with them.
“We all know what the Old Man was doing up in Boston,” Sam had told him once, “and now he wants us to be sorry for him. He ought to have a good shoot in the tail.”
Sam was the only one who said such things and Charles believed him and he still could not escape that old impression that Sam had been a great man, although Sam could have only been about seventeen at the time.
“You can always tell when it’s coming,” Sam used to say. “It goes in a circle. It starts as soon as he gets a check.”
Their Aunt Mathilda Gray’s estate was being settled in 1916 and whenever a parcel of her real estate was sold, John Gray would get a check in the mail from Mr. Blashfield, the executor. First he would open the letter and look at the check, and then he would go down to the bank and deposit it in his special account, and then for a while a pleasant wave of prosperity descended on the household. He would come home each evening with a copy of the Boston Evening Transcript and everyone would watch him as he sat in the parlor after supper reading the Transcript’s financial page. First he would only glance at it. Then in a few evenings he would read it when he thought no one was looking. Then he would read it openly. Everyone knew what John Gray was going to do, even if he did not know himself, and he probably did not know, because he had promised on his word of honor never to touch those things again. He would be highly indignant if his wife or his sister Jane attempted to bring up the subject. It was better not to stir him up. Perhaps a week later he would say that he was going to take a day off and go up to Boston. He hadn’t seen Boston for a long while.
When he came back from the day in Boston, he was invariably exuberant. He usually returned with a box of candy and some magazines, and generally he smelled strongly of bay rum, showing that he had been to the barbershop at the Parker House. Then he would begin to discuss scholarly subjects, especially the London of Samuel Johnson. He loved to re-create a world of coaches and sedan chairs and smoke-filled coffeehouses. You could never say that John Gray was not industrious or erudite. He could quote pages of Boswell, fitting them aptly into every occasion. Charles still winced at the sight of a Boswell’s Johnson, and yet when he finally saw London for himself he knew many aspects of the city very well because of certain evenings back in Clyde.
“The Old Man’s off again,” Sam used to say. “You can tell it as soon as he starts on Mrs. Thrale.”
Still it was not always a bad time when the Old Man was off again. It was a cultivated household for a while, after John Gray got back from Boston. There was no doubt that he was a delightful man.
“Your father might have been anything,” his mother used to say, “anything.”
The next week he would take another day off and go to Boston. This time he would return with a box of cigars and with a few French novels. The cigars were a definite part of a pattern, because John Gray usually smoked a pipe if he smoked at all. That was why Charles always hat
ed Havana cigar smoke. At this period John Gray’s thoughts would turn to Honoré de Balzac, his sleepless nights and his strange, frustrated love. Someday they must all go to Paris. It was ridiculous for Malcolm Bryant to have placed them in the lower-upper class. He should have seen John Gray when his brown mustache, usually dejected and drooping, was clipped like a British colonel’s and when he had a new suit from Dunne’s.
“By God,” Sam used to say, “now he’s upstairs juggling figures,” and John Gray could do it, too. Charles had never seen anyone who could make mathematics as logical and simple. “He must be doing pretty well. Why doesn’t the damn fool ever stop?”
Of course he never stopped. There would always be the last trip in the cycle, when John Gray came home from Boston with nothing to say at all. There would be a discreet silence in the house. There was nothing in the world quite like those silences.…
The library where Charles was sitting gave him a sense of not belonging anywhere. His mouth felt dry and his forehead felt moist and he was terribly alone.
“Charley.” It was Nancy calling softly from the top of the stairs so as not to wake the children. “Charley, aren’t you coming up to bed?”
“Yes, in just a little while, Nance,” he answered. “I’m not sleepy.”
“Oh, Charley,” she called back, “please come up. It’s after one o’clock.”
“In just a few minutes, Nance,” he said, and he opened the book he was holding.
Malcolm Bryant and his father had taken to each other from the very beginning and when Malcolm began dropping in at Spruce Street in the evenings years previously, Charles’s mother was delighted. It was so good for Father, she said, to talk with an intelligent young man who could share Father’s interests. They were interests which were boring to Charles because of constant exposure to them. To Charles, Samuel Johnson was a rude, untidy old gentleman with an itch, who had made a number of rash and not very brilliant statements, set down by an assiduous toady named Boswell, a snob who sucked up to the nobility and who had nothing better to do than to run after the old gentleman with a notebook. Charles could see nothing whatsoever in Johnson’s heavy-handed prose. It was as slow as cold molasses, but now as he ran through the pages of Yankee Persepolis, he began to understand why Malcolm had been a Johnson addict and he understood at last what Malcolm had seen in his father. Malcolm had been attracted to John Gray not as an individual but as a social entity, an odd piece which he was trying to fit into the social puzzle of Clyde which had produced and tolerated him.
All at once it occurred to Charles that he was doing right now what his father had often succeeded in doing so magnificently. He was trying to forget the present by immersing himself in something else, by striving to identify himself with someone else. Instead of Samuel Johnson, he was using Malcolm Bryant. He did not care about Malcolm’s ideas or his social worker’s patter in themselves, except insofar as they took him away from his own ideas. If he could only concentrate on Malcolm, if he could only give him the attention that he had learned to give to papers at the bank, he could forget the bank altogether, he could forget the conference room and the antiseptic, oily smell of the vault, and Roger Blakesley and Tony Burton. He could forget the scene in the locker room and the queer, disturbing conversation by the window in the Whitakers’ apartment, when that girl had made him think of Jessica Lovell. He could forget the knotty pine walls of the library which were enclosing him in impersonal mediocrity. Please, God, his mind was saying, get me out of this. Please get me out of this.
He was examining a chapter heading, “The Concepts behind This Survey.” The words were as heavy as Johnson’s words, without any of their waxy Chippendale polish. Social scientists were usually involved writers, who continually tripped over a jargon of their own invention. He again remembered Malcolm as the brain behind an agency of social spies, with an office force and card catalogues back in Boston.
Two of Malcolm’s assistants, he remembered, had appeared one hot night at open house day on Johnson Street, a girl with dry brown hair and hornrimmed spectacles, for whom he felt sorry because she was an outlander from the Middle West, and an undernourished man with an Adam’s apple, who perspired beneath the armpits and only drank fruit punch. He never imagined that these two were a team of skillfully briefed probers who had been snooping innocuously through Clyde, standing away from it in a friendly way as though it were an ant hill, then worming their way deviously into the confidence of its inhabitants, sympathizing with frustrations, picking up gems of information, and rushing away secretively to an office to record those gems on charts of death and birth rates and of marriage incidence according to income groups. The investigative team operated according to scientific rules. They were directed to listen, when they buttonholed an individual, in a patient and friendly manner in order to discover the individual’s approximate place in the society. They should only inject their own personalities in order to relieve fears or anxieties or to praise the interviewee. They should listen not only to what a person wanted to say but to what he did not say. All of this, according to Malcolm, demanded extreme flexibility. They must have done their work well, because Charles had seldom noticed it.
He remembered Malcolm Bryant and his team examining Clyde and occasionally descending to taste of its life, like minor gods and nymphs sporting with mortals. They were not interested in individuality, Malcolm was now explaining, but in social personality. It was clear now what Malcolm had been doing those evenings when he had called at Spruce Street and stayed for supper.
“Typical of a lower-upper family,” Charles read again, “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 …”
It was not fair to blame Malcolm, because it must have been confusing even for a god to know exactly what John Gray had been doing, but it was agreeable to remember that the god had fallen once.
“Charley.” It was Nancy calling again from the top of the stairs. “Aren’t you ever coming to bed?”
“All right,” Charles called back. “I’ll be up in just a minute, Nance, try to go to sleep.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“I’m reading.”
“Can’t you read tomorrow?”
“I’ll be up in just a minute,” Charles said. “You’ll wake the children up. Try to go to sleep.”
His voice and Nancy’s voice were only like the voices in a chorus. The interruption had not disturbed him.
“An upper-upper class family,” he was reading as he spoke, “may be typified by the Johnsons, who live on the upper side of Mason Street in one of those fine, three-storied Federalist houses, capped by the delicate balustrade of the widow’s or captain’s walk.”
Malcolm had let himself go at last. He was obviously describing the Lovells and their house on Johnson Street, studiously garbling the names, but as he had been writing, his memory of the Lovell house and of Mr. Laurence Lovell and Jessica must have blurred for an instant his concept of social personality.
“This gracious type of Federalist architecture is apparent here at its zenith. The gracious hallway of this mansion extends from front to rear, a fitting setting for the exquisite airy rising of its broad staircase …”
Yes, Malcolm Bryant for once had forgotten his social responsibility, now that he had turned from the Grays to the Lovells.
“A fitting place for the enshrinement of ancestral relics … a fitting frame for the rituals of the upper-upper class.… Mr. Johnson, a widower, suave and gracious, descendant of shipowners in the late eighteenth century, is a fitting head for the Johnson clan. Jacinth, his lovely only daughter, assisted by a maiden aunt, Miss Johnson, is eminently suited to give the family ritual an added charm. Her vivacity never quite conceals her seriousness or the impact of her social personality.”
Yes, Malcolm Bryant had felt the impact of Jessica Lovell
’s social personality. He had forgotten that he was a social anthropologist, as he had penned those words. He had tried in a brief interval to be a poet in prose. He had contrived, within the limits of his talent, to express emotion and desire. He had called her Jacinth instead of calling her Mary or Molly or Miss X. In Malcolm’s memory, Jessica was still there in the hallway, looking him straight in the eyes. She would never be Desdemona again and Malcolm would never be Othello, speaking of the habits of the Borneo head-hunters and the Zambesis or about that trip he would take someday to the Orinoco.
“In the rear of the house,” Charles was reading, “on a gentle slope rises the hundred-and-fifty-year-old Johnson formal garden, a verdant shrine of ancestor worship in itself, crowned by a delicate latticed summerhouse known as a gazebo.” Malcolm Bryant would never sit in that gazebo again, but then neither would Charles Gray.
Malcolm Bryant had shown without his knowing it that he had been impressed by austere beauty, a foreign interloper who could never have wholly grasped it. Through his own enthusiastic inadvertence, he had invoked a vision of Johnson Street—fantastic and beautiful on a dusky summer evening. Charles could see the broad uneven sidewalks of worn brick, pushed gently upwards by the roots of the elms. He could see the tall white fences with their urns and pineapples, and the houses rising behind them, disdainful of newer houses. He could see the cornices and the fanlights and the cupolas. The mere recollection of Johnson Street on a summer evening made this effort of Malcolm Bryant’s a gross impertinence. It was still an impertinence when he thought of Spruce Street with its plainer picket fences, and of the moldering houses nearer the river inhabited by what Malcolm called the lower-lower class, the shanty Irish, not the lace-curtain Irish, and the Greeks and Poles. Malcolm Bryant and his team had seen them all and had checked them against their diagrams, but he and his team did not know Johnson Street or any other street in Clyde …
Yet, as he continued to turn the pages he could feel that his resentment was flagging, because momentarily, at any rate, time had dulled emotion, so that he could see the outlines of the Clyde of Malcolm Bryant, as he could never have seen them when he had lived in Clyde. He could see the passionless exactness of that scientific picture, stripped of sentiment’s flattering lights and shades. The Clyde of Malcolm Bryant was a complex of instinctive forces and behavior. Its inhabitants moved into a pattern like bees in a hive, or like the Spartans under King Lycurgus. There was the individual’s unknowing surrender to the group, the unthinking desire for order. He could see the Grays on Spruce Street and the Lovells on Johnson Street through Malcolm Bryant’s eyes, and it was hard to believe that he ever could have lived in this arbitrary frame, illustrated by curves and diagrams, and now he was living in another. He could almost see the Stuyvesant Bank and that evening at Oak Knoll in a new revealing light—almost, but not entirely.
Point of No Return Page 16
