Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  It was all right for Johnny Gray, though it would not have been for Virgil Mason or Melville Summers, to join the Pine Tree Fire Company and to help man the Pine Tree machine at firemen’s musters and to play poker at the Pine Tree firehouse, because everyone understood that he was different. He had been a wild boy but he was bright and he could have done anything he wanted if only he had put his mind on it. If only he had kept interested, he could have been a college professor or a lawyer. The trouble was, he was the only boy and the baby of the family and he had always been made too much of. Everything was too easy for Johnny Gray. He did not have to work hard, like other people, to get his learning. He could have gone through Harvard just as well as Laurence Lovell or Ralph Thomas. He was not a bad boy. He never got into a college-boy scrape, but he had not liked it there and after a year and a half the Judge had taken him out.

  The Grays had always been solid people, not shipowners or warehouse owners like the old Johnson Street people, but solid people, and the Judge owned stock in the Crawford Mill. When Johnny Gray was tired of Harvard, it was natural for the Judge to put him in the mill and wait for him to settle down. It looked as if he would do it, too, when he began calling on Esther Marchby, old Dr. Marchby’s daughter, and the Marchbys were good solid people, too. He was not getting on fast in the mill, but given time he would settle down. Yet perhaps the Judge himself was never sure. He had tied up Johnny Gray’s share of the mill stock in trust when he died, though he let the girls own theirs outright. It was hard to fool the Judge.

  Everyone knew who you were and what you were in Clyde and there was no need to guess. You always said kind things about everyone in the family and hastily dusted away discrepancies, but nothing was ever hidden because you could not help what other people said. Gossip always became in time a sort of mythology and lay before every inhabitant of Clyde like a long shadow on a summer afternoon. A word here, a word there, an embarrassed silence, a snatch of overheard conversation, an overelaborate explanation, an amusing anecdote—all those things finally could not help but make a picture. Everyone knew about John Gray, and so did Charles. Charles must have known when he was very young that John Gray was unstable, but he never could get to the bottom of this instability. When he tried to admire his father, even when he was a little boy, there was a gap somewhere, a total blank. The truth was, he often thought, that his father had been too busy with his own ideas, too involved with conflicting impulses, to have anything much left to give. John Gray was always too wrapped up in himself to have time for any of the children.

  It was not the fashion in Clyde for parents to discuss each other before their children, but it was possible to hear bits of talk.

  “It never does any good to nag John,” he heard his Aunt Jane say once. “Father always said so.”

  “I never do nag at John,” his mother answered. “I wouldn’t dream of doing it.”

  “You mustn’t ever let him see you’re disappointed,” his Aunt Jane said. “It’s just as bad as nagging and it only makes him sullen.”

  “I’m not disappointed,” his mother said. “I don’t see why you say I am.”

  “Well, I never could have married anyone like John,” his Aunt Jane said. “I couldn’t have stood it.”

  “Well, I can stand it, Jane,” his mother said, and she laughed in an exasperated way. “Maybe I like excitement, and you wait, John will do something someday. You wait, we’ll all be surprised. I know he’s planning to do something. Of course they don’t understand him at the mill.”

  “What’s he planning to do?” his Aunt Jane asked. “Whatever it is, don’t encourage him.”

  “Why, I haven’t any idea,” his mother answered, and then she laughed again. “And if he never does do anything, Jane, I shan’t mind. I love him just the way he is.”

  His father was the type of person whom women always loved. His mother was right, too, when Charles came to think of it later. John Gray finally did do something, and everyone was very much surprised.

  Charles could at any rate start with a sense of having belonged somewhere. He had, at least, something from which he could revolt, and no one could very well revolt from anything as plastic as life in Sycamore Park. Bill would never see anyone like Miss Sarah Hewitt because Miss Sarahs simply did not exist in Sycamore Parks, or if they did they must have been pushed into corners where no one saw them. There never were elder statesmen, dominating the local scene. Active old ladies of eighty like Miss Sarah only seemed to flourish in towns like Clyde where climate, local biological selection, struggle for survival, and local respect rendered them indestructible. If personality were only strong enough, Clyde was the place for it. There would never be a base in Bill’s background, Charles often thought, such as there had been in his own. The impermanence of a New York suburb with its shifting population of unrooted communities, with order that existed only on the surface, was as hard for a boy to grasp as it was for him to explain. He had been luckier than Bill in that in Clyde there had been so much to be accepted without argument.

  One morning at about half past nine a few days after the meeting of the Historical Society, Mrs. Garrity, who was now Miss Sarah Hewitt’s housekeeper and who had been in the Hewitt household ever since she had come to Clyde as a young girl from Ireland, pulled the glass knob of the front doorbell. The bell’s tinkle in the front hall interrupted Dorothea’s piano practice.

  “You go, Charley,” Dorothea said. “Someone’s at the front door.”

  “Why don’t you go?” Charles asked, and Dorothea tossed her head.

  “Because you’re not doing anything. You never do do anything.”

  Charles had been on the point of doing something. He had just made up his mind to see what Jack Mason was doing and to persuade him to go over to the Meaders’ and see what the Meaders were doing and to find out if they couldn’t go somewhere and do something together.

  “You’re not doing anything either,” Charles said. “You’re just drumming on that old piano.”

  “You go to the door,” said Dorothea, “or I’ll tell Mother,” and then before Charles could move she began telling Mother. “Mother,” she called, “Charley won’t answer the doorbell. Should Charley or I answer the doorbell?”

  Charles heard his mother’s quick steps on the floor above them and he moved slowly into the front hall.

  “You needn’t start yelling,” he called as he turned the brass knob of the front door. “I was going anyway.”

  Mrs. Garrity was standing on the doorstep, bareheaded, in her gingham dress but without her apron. She looked at him coolly but with kindness through her glasses.

  “Young man, is your mother in?” she asked.

  There was no need to answer. His mother was hurrying down the stairs.

  “Why, good morning, Mrs. Garrity,” she said.

  She did not call her Ellen because only people who lived on Johnson Street would have dreamed of calling Mrs. Garrity Ellen.

  “Good morning, Miss Esther,” Mrs. Garrity said, and she stepped deliberately into the hall and glanced critically at the oblong mirror and at the steel engraving of Franklin at the court of Louis the Sixteenth and then at the colored print of the Clyde waterfront. “Miss Sarah sent me to wish you good morning.” By calling his mother Miss Esther, Mrs. Garrity was obviously accepting her as a friend of Miss Sarah’s—not just a calling acquaintance.

  “I hope Miss Sarah is well, Mrs. Garrity,” his mother said.

  “Oh yes, she’s well,” Mrs. Garrity said, “and she wants to know if you would be at home this afternoon so that she might be dropping in for a cup of tea, Miss Esther, and to talk about the paper you’ve been reading.”

  “Why, tell her we’ll be delighted,” his mother answered in a new, bright voice. “Would she like to come at half past four?”

  “Four,” said Mrs. Garrity, “and she’ll bring her own tea, and give her thin bread and butter only.”

  “We’d love to have her at four,” his mother said, but Mrs. Garr
ity still stood in the doorway.

  “I suppose you’ll be getting Minnie Murphy in, Miss Esther.”

  “It isn’t her day here,” his mother said, “but yes, I’ll see if I can get Mrs. Murphy.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Mrs. Garrity said. “Minnie will come if I tell her. Minnie knows how to do it. It would be best to get Minnie.”

  When the door closed, his mother looked worried.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Dorothea, stop playing the piano. Miss Sarah’s coming to tea. Now let me see—Charles, I want you to go down to the mill and tell your father to be here at four o’clock, and then go and tell your Aunt Jane. Where’s Sam?”

  “He went fishing, off the breakwater,” Charles said.

  “Oh, dear,” his mother said. “I suppose he’ll come back all over fish. I think we’d better use the Canton tea set, don’t you, Dorothea? Now run along, Charley. I wish we had more time.”

  Charles was the boy carrying the burning cross saying, Excelsior! Miss Sarah is coming to tea. At the end of Spruce Street, he turned right, past Gow’s wharf and the coal pocket and then past the gasworks and then past the mill houses where River Street children were playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. The tide was low and he could see the black mud flats with their still pools of water. A humming came from the long brick mill building, a busy but drowsy sound that made him understand why Mr. Felch, the watchman, was dozing in the gatehouse. The windows of the smaller office building were wide open and so was the door, but inside everything was hot. The clerks behind the railings were in their shirt sleeves. He could see Mr. Stafford in his large private office reading papers and only Mr. Stafford wore his coat. Far down the hall, beyond the accounting department, his father sat in his small room, running over a column of figures.

  “Mother sent me,” Charles said. “Miss Sarah’s coming to tea at four o’clock.”

  “Well, well,” his father said, “if it isn’t one thing it’s another. Run along and tell her I’ll be there.”

  When he left the mill Charles turned up Gow Street, still carrying the burning cross. Beyond the small and shabby houses, Gow Street made a crooked turn, by French’s grocery store, and then widened and changed for the better the nearer one came to Johnson Street. His Aunt Mathilda and his Aunt Jane lived in the square yellow house with the plain picket fence in front and a small stable and garden. It had belonged to his grandfather and it still had his grandfather’s name on the silver plate on the dark door. He opened the door without knocking but he closed it carefully because his Aunt Mathilda was sick upstairs, and he walked softly down the hall into the dining room which was dusky and cool because the wooden shutters were drawn.

  “Where’s Aunt Jane?” he called into the kitchen to Mary Callahan, who was sitting at the table peeling potatoes.

  “Where would she be,” Mary Callahan said, “except upstairs reading with Miss Mathilda? But don’t go stamping on the stairs.”

  Even if he had stamped, the stair carpet with its heavily padded treads would have deadened the sound. In the upstairs hall everything was as dusky and cool as the dining room, with everything in its place and a place for everything. The brasses on the highboy shone in the faint light. Miss Trask, his Aunt Mathilda’s practical nurse, was sewing in the hall bedroom, and further down the hall, in the square corner room, he could hear his Aunt Jane reading poetry. She was reading it with pleasure because she loved declamation.

  “Shoal!” he heard her saying. “’Ware shoal! Not I!”

  His Aunt Mathilda was sitting in a Boston rocker and Aunt Jane sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair.

  “Why, Charley dear, where did you come from?” his Aunt Mathilda asked.

  Aunt Jane closed her book.

  “Charles, I wish you wouldn’t creep around,” she said.

  “You told him not to make any noise,” Aunt Mathilda said. “I heard you, Jane. Come here and kiss me, Charley.”

  He kissed her timidly because he knew that his Aunt Mathilda was very ill.

  “He doesn’t have to creep around,” his Aunt Jane said. “What is it, Charles?”—and then he gave the message again. Miss Sarah was coming to tea at four o’clock.

  “Oh, dear,” Aunt Mathilda said, and her thin white hands moved restlessly over her dressing gown. “Is she coming here?”

  “Of course she isn’t, Mathilda,” Aunt Jane told her. “She’s going there, to John’s house, and I’d better go to help Esther. You know how things are there, Mathilda.”

  “Charley, dear,” Aunt Mathilda said, “I think your mother had better get Minnie Murphy in. Tell her that I said so and we’ll send Mary Callahan over to help.”

  It was not the question of food, he remembered his mother saying, it was the desire to have everything look right that made her nervous. She was not going to have Miss Sarah Hewitt leave the house and tell the Lovells and Thomases and other people that Esther Gray had started as a careless, flighty girl and had not improved. When she had become engaged to John Gray, she knew very well that Miss Sarah had said that it was a mistake and a pity, that Esther was not the right wife for John Gray because she was absent-minded; and Charles’s mother did not want to have Miss Sarah saying this again. She had never liked to sit behind a tea tray, pouring hot water into cups and then pouring it into what was called a slop basin—a horrid term, a slop basin. She had to admit that she did not understand tea. She wished that Jane would pour but Jane said that it was Esther’s house. The main thing was to have the parlor and the hall picked up and to get rid of John’s canes and umbrellas and the boys’ fishing rods and John’s and the boys’ hats—and John’s books should be taken upstairs and not left in piles upon the floor.

  Charles had never seen the hall and parlor look so neat. Mrs. Murphy and Mary Callahan had washed the woodwork with soap and water. They had beaten the braided hall rug and the two parlor Persian carpets. They had washed the mirror; they had polished the Benares brass tray in the hall and the andirons and the fender in the parlor fireplace and the candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the two Staffordshire dogs had been washed. The picture of the brig Comet, which had been sailed around Cape Horn by Charles’s great-grandfather, had been taken down and Aunt Jane herself had wiped off the canvas. Cleanliness had transformed the parlor. Shine and polish made everything look almost new, and this was true also with the family.

  They were all there except Sam, who was still on the breakwater. Aunt Jane wore her plum-colored silk dress, with a cameo brooch. His mother wore her best afternoon gown, with old lace on it. Dorothea wore her embroidered shirtwaist and her new skirt and her hair was done in her Sunday way. Although it was a hot afternoon, John Gray had put on his blue serge suit and stiff collar, and Charles was again in a clean white shirt and a bow tie. A cloth of Italian lace was placed over the tea table that stood in front of the Victorian horsehair sofa, and the Canton tea set was already on it. A fresh antimacassar had been pinned on the wing chair, partially concealing its soiled upholstery, and a candlestand had been placed beside it.

  “Oh, dear,” John Gray said. “Oh, dear me.”

  “Don’t say, oh dear,” Charles’s mother snapped. “You haven’t done any of the work. What time is it?”

  She did not need to ask because she could see by the banjo clock, but John Gray took out his watch.

  “The clock is two minutes slow,” he said. “It’s exactly three minutes before four. She’ll be here in exactly three minutes. It’s amazing how rejuvenating this is. Don’t you feel young, Jane?”

  “No, I don’t,” Aunt Jane said, “and I hope you’re going to act your age.”

  “That’s exactly it,” John Gray answered. “I am. It’s an intimation of immortality.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t chatter, John,” Esther Gray said. “I don’t see why you like to talk when you’re nervous. I don’t.”

  John Gray sat down in one of the stiff ladder-backed chairs and folded his hands.

  “I’m too young to be nervous,” he sai
d. “I’ve been washed behind the ears, like Charles. I’m as young as Charles, and Charles and Dorothea aren’t born. They’re back in the land of the unborn children, and Esther is Dr. Marchby’s little girl and Jane is in pinafores.”

  It was difficult, sometimes, to understand his father. It gave Charles a very queer feeling when his father said he had not been born. When his father waved his hand slowly, as he did so often when he spoke, Charles could almost believe that he and Dorothea had been rendered invisible.

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so confusing, John,” his mother said. “No one understands you and there isn’t time to try.”

  John Gray sighed.

  “That’s true. No one understands me.” A church bell was beginning to strike four. The church clocks in Clyde had never been synchronized, any more than the religions they represented. Another bell was striking. “That’s the Baptist bell,” John Gray said. “You’ll notice it’s always behind the Congregationalist. Now, Dorothea.” Dorothea looked at him doubtfully. “You and Charles are going to have a remarkable experience. Try to think of yourself as moving backward. I envy you. I wish I hadn’t been born.”

  “Well, you are born,” Aunt Jane said, “and here she is.”

  The bell in the hall was tinkling and his father and mother hurried out while the rest of them waited and Charles could hear their voices in the hall.

  “Charley,” Dorothea whispered, “your shirt is coming out.” She seized him quickly, as though he were much younger.

  “Let me alone,” he whispered, and he was stuffing his shirt beneath his waistband when Miss Sarah Hewitt entered.

  Charles had seen her often, but now she looked strange to him because his father had fixed it so that nothing seemed quite real. She looked as cool as though it were not a hot day. She looked so old that no weather could disturb her. Her brown dress of stiff silk rustled like autumn leaves, and the sound gave the artificial flowers on her small hat an incongruous, waxlike appearance. Her lips were set in an amused, determined line. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her eyes looked old and faded. There was a tremor in her thin, blue-veined hands that made the beaded reticule she was holding shake, but still she had a deliberate, airy way of walking. Her voice, too, had a quaver in it, but it retained a plaintive, musical note like an echo of a younger voice.