Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  It showed a lack of personal resource, John Gray always said, and women, too, as well as men, were infected by the germ. No one ever really learned anything from these intellectual outpourings, but everyone wished to try to be improved, during the long winter months. The Women’s Club continually met to hear lectures on French fans or on Mount Vesuvius, and the ladies of the Garden Club were always gathering to learn about cutworms or means of eradicating poison ivy. The Knights of Columbus kept listening to travelogues, the Rotary Club would hang on the words of someone who told about sewage disposal. The only organization, John Gray said, that had never wanted to be improved was the Pine Tree Association of Veteran Firemen.

  Think of the geysers of words, John Gray used to say, that were spouted forth each winter in Clyde. Every two weeks the Monday Club had met, since 1787, and the Thursday Club had met every two weeks since it had broken away from the Monday Club before the Civil War. He could not imagine, he said, why he had ever joined the Confessional Club, unless because of local contagion. Why had the Confessional Club ever started? It had started thirty years ago because of hurt feelings and merely because there were certain people who were not included in the Monday Club and the Thursday Club; and now two more groups of men who could not get into these three clubs had formed other clubs, and they all met every two weeks in winter and some member always read a paper.

  Think of the papers, John Gray said, to which he had been compelled to listen in the Confessional Club alone. Fortunately most of them went in one ear and out the other, but there were details in some which had an adhesive quality that awakened him at night and gave him nervous indigestion. There was the gallstone, for instance, which was removed from the interior of Samuel Pepys, the subject of a paper by Gerald Marchby. Gerald had read it ten years ago but it was very fresh in John Gray’s memory. Then there was “The Story of the Mammoth,” a paper which had been read by Willard Godfrey. The juvenile quality of this paper had caused John Gray to consult reference books in the public library and to discover that the whole thing had been cribbed from a children’s encyclopedia. He might also mention that scholarly work entitled “Certain Old Teaspoons” written by Mr. Norton Swing, a retired official of the Wright-Sherwin Company. This was a double-header, because you not only had to hear about the certain old teaspoons but you had to examine them afterwards one by one. He could go further. If he wanted, he could describe that hour-and-a-half long paper by Hugh Blashfield entitled “Certain Personages in Bench and Bar of Massachusetts,” but he was not even going to think of it. He would never even consider the hours of common suffering in the Confessional Club except with the belief that they may have drawn its members together into a sort of perverse bond of friendship.

  Nevertheless, whenever it was John Gray’s turn to entertain the Confessional Club, he appeared to forget the bitter things he had previously said. He wanted to have as good food as anyone else. The members could wait on themselves, but he wanted tables arranged on which they could eat comfortably and he always provided cocktails made by mixing medical alcohol procured from Gerald Marchby with distilled water and juniper. The main thing was to be sure that the members all had enough cocktails so they could endure the paper but not so many cocktails that they would become noisy or fall asleep during the paper’s progress.

  “Now, Esther,” he said, “I’m not at all sure that you and Dorothea and Mary Callahan can do everything in the kitchen.”

  “Don’t start worrying already, John,” she told him. “Jane isn’t well enough to let Mary come over, but all sorts of people like to come in and help. They like to sit at the top of the stairs, you know, and listen.”

  This was exactly what John Gray meant, he told them, when he said everyone wanted to be improved in Clyde.

  “And don’t forget to get the Wedgwood plates and the silver from Jane,” he said, “and glasses. Plenty of glasses.”

  There was no reason to worry about it. Everyone in the house understood about the Confessional Club.

  “And you can come, of course, Charles,” John Gray said. “Someday you may be in the club yourself, if you don’t get gallstones first. It’s something to live for.”

  Then Dorothea asked if he was not going to ask Elbridge Sterne, and John Gray said that it would be unwise to ask Elbridge Sterne, that he might never come to the house again.

  “But I am asking that professor,” he said, “the one who’s writing the book. He says he knows you, Charles.”

  “The one who says, ‘My God, this is a wonderful town’?” Charles asked.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” John Gray said. “I took him over to the Pine Trees. He kept talking about the aborigines in Borneo, and then we went to see the cemetery.”

  “Why did he want to see the cemetery?”

  “We were talking about the cult of the dead,” John Gray said. “He has some interesting ideas, but I’m afraid he has the unselective curiosity that goes with a closed mind. I don’t know why people who know too much already are the only ones who keep trying to learn more.”

  Malcolm Bryant arrived at Spruce Street early. John Gray was still arranging cocktail glasses and struggling with the top of the large shaker he had borrowed from Dr. Marchby. Malcolm stood by the open fire examining the room and stealing glances into the dining room, where everything was on the table except the hot dishes.

  John Gray poured the contents of a bottle into the cocktail shaker and gave it a few brisk shakes.

  “Try some of this, will you,” he said, “and tell me how it tastes?”

  “There should either be liquor at a social function,” Malcolm Bryant said, “or a few men beating drums. You’d be surprised—good drumming has nearly the same effect. Now a year or two ago I happened to be out with the Ojibways in the lake region of Ontario. I went out with Clarence Spinner from the Sykes Foundation. I don’t suppose you’ve read his papers on the Ojibways. He has the gift of tongues, but he exaggerates.”

  Charles could see his father straighten up alertly. He always liked something new.

  “It was a very unspoiled tribe,” Malcolm Bryant went on. “Beautiful birch-bark wigwams and very fine canoes. They were completely out of liquor, but one evening they began beating a drum—four or five delightful old gentlemen around a big drum, beating with a quick syncopation that was more subtle than the African, I think, and singing a soft falsetto chorus. Just after sundown all of us began dancing in a circle, men, women, and children, quite slowly. Thank you, Charley.” Malcolm Bryant held out his glass and Charles poured him another cocktail but he held it absent-mindedly without drinking it. “There was a compulsion in that drumming, a mass, hysterical compulsion. By God, it was a wonderful group. I’ve seen the same thing in Africa but not as well expressed. Oh yes, it was a beautiful exhibition. That drumming made you forget who you were. We danced until two in the morning. We all loved each other at two in the morning.”

  “Really,” John Gray said, “it must have been a delightful party. I wish you’d brought a drum.”

  The paper that evening was read by Mr. Virgil Mason and Charles knew from Jackie that Mr. Mason had been working on it for weeks. It was entitled “Old Streetcar Lines in Clyde.” Mr. Mason read it haltingly after supper, perspiring freely. He dealt with the river line that used to run up Johnson Street and with the Dock Street line that used to go to the beach. Instead of listening attentively, Charles found himself glancing at Malcolm Bryant, wondering what he might be thinking as he sat with his heavy hands clasped about his right knee staring fixedly at a corner of the room.

  When the paper was over Dr. Marchby announced the reading time. It had taken Mr. Mason exactly twenty-seven and a half minutes to finish the paper and John Gray said it was a delightful paper. All of them there remembered when the first electric cars had come to Clyde and most of them remembered the horsecar lines that had preceded them. Then John Gray spoke of various motormen and conductors, dealing with their eccentricities. Mr. Blashfield, who followed him, said it was
a delightful paper, too, but he was sure that Moses Wilkins had never been a motorman on the old Beach line, but on the other hand Dr. Marchby was sure that he had been, and when Mr. Crewe said he was sure he had not been, everyone said that Mr. Crewe had not been in Clyde long enough to remember. The argument became more heated as other motormen were discussed, but every member had said his say by ten-fifteen and it was time to be going home.

  “Charley,” Malcolm Bryant said, after he had thanked Mr. Mason for letting him hear the paper and after he had thanked John Gray for allowing him to be there, “why don’t you walk back with me? It’s still pretty early.”

  Actually Charles was glad to be asked and he could see that his father was glad that Malcolm Bryant had asked him, for obviously his father wanted very much to know what Malcolm Bryant might say about the Confessional Club.

  There had been a heavy snowfall two days before and Charles could remember the walls of snow on either side of the cleared path, as they walked up Dock Street, and the penetrating chill that came from the ground. Though they spoke very little on the way Charles did not mind the silence.

  “I’m trying to get it straight in my mind,” Malcolm Bryant said after Charles asked him what he thought of the evening.

  “I don’t see what there is to get straight,” Charles said. “There were just a lot of old men there, talking about streetcars.”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Charley. There’s a great deal for me to get straight. It was a wonderful occasion, a very wonderful occasion.”

  “Why was it wonderful?”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Charley. You’re wonderful and none of you know what you’re living in. By God, this is a wonderful town. Its crystallization is nearly perfect.”

  They passed the dark façade of the public library, and the barred windows of the Dock Street Bank with its single night light burning, before Malcolm Bryant spoke again.

  “These male groups are always the same,” he said. “They are simply the projection of the old men’s council. They have the same taboos and the same drawing-together habits. Now out there with the head-hunters there were three councils. They all discussed their tribal exploits, just like the streetcars, exactly like the streetcars.”

  “I don’t see how the head-hunters in Borneo have anything to do with the Confessional Club,” Charles said.

  “They have everything to do with it,” Malcolm Bryant told him, “but you’re too involved with this locale to understand. Actually I wish I could take time off someday to belong to a social group. It’s just one thing after another with me, the Zambesis in those beehive huts in Africa—the elongated skull Zambesis, not the Pygmy offshoot—and then the head-hunters, and then this job, and next the upper Orinoco, that is if I can get old Smythe in the Foundation sold on the idea of sending me to the Orinoco. It’s just one damn thing after another.”

  “Are you really going to the Orinoco?” Charles asked him.

  “Oh, I suppose so,” Malcolm Bryant said. “There’s been very little first-class work in the area. There’s a rumor that they have a very interesting way of getting rid of old people there, but not a line of documented investigation. These damned explorers are all exhibitionists. Thank God, I’m not an explorer.” Malcolm Bryant was walking more rapidly. “Now the women were hidden tonight, weren’t they? It’s a characteristic pattern, that hiding of the women.”

  “What women?” Charles asked.

  “It’s the same with the Sicilian peasants,” Malcolm Bryant said. “I mean your women.”

  “My women?”

  “Your mother and your sister.” Malcolm Bryant was speaking patiently. “I saw them flitting about but they didn’t dare to show their faces, Charley, not before the old men’s council, and they ate in the women’s hut. It’s always the same thing.”

  “It wasn’t a hut,” Charles said, and he laughed. “They were eating in the kitchen. Where else would they eat?”

  “Nowhere else,” Malcolm Bryant said. “It was absolutely perfect. Now don’t interrupt me, Charley.”

  They did not speak again until they came to the rooms that Malcolm Bryant had rented on Fanning Street and then Malcolm Bryant only repeated himself.

  “I wish I could give it up and be in a group,” he said.

  He had rented a bedroom and a sitting room on the second floor of Mrs. Mooney’s house. The rooms were plainly furnished and Malcolm Bryant had done little to improve them. He had only brought in a draftsman’s trestle table and two battered army lock trunks. When he turned on the light Charles saw that a blueprint map of Clyde, marked with colored crayons, was tacked on the drafting table and that there was a large pile of yellow paper beside the blueprint.

  “Just a few notes,” Malcolm Bryant said as he took off his overcoat and dropped it in a corner of the room. “All the real work is in the Boston office.”

  Malcolm opened a tobacco jar, filled a pipe and lighted it. Then he took off his jacket and unbuttoned his vest and began pacing up and down the room while Charles sat down in a rickety rocking chair and watched him.

  “You know, I’m just beginning to get this town straight,” he said. “I’m just beginning to get a pattern. That’s the first thing you have to do on a job like this, create a procedural pattern, and once you get it everything fits into it.”

  “I don’t exactly know what you’re talking about,” Charles said.

  “Of course you don’t,” Malcolm Bryant answered. “There are only a very few people who can understand what I’m talking about.”

  “Then why did you ask me up here?” Charles asked.

  “Because you interest me, Charley.” Malcolm Bryant put his hands in his pockets. “You’re in tune to the beating of the drums.”

  Charles leaned back in the creaking rocker. He had a picture of himself and everyone else in Clyde dancing to a tune that Malcolm Bryant was playing.

  “All right,” Charles said, “what is your procedural pattern?” He was not as much interested in the idea as he was in Malcolm Bryant himself, and Malcolm went on slowly, patiently, from the platform of his erudition.

  “I am managing to get this whole town into a grouping,” he said, “and to separate the cliques and classes. It’s a wonderful town because its structural cleavages are so distinct and undisturbed and so unconsciously accepted. You see, it goes this way”—Malcolm Bryant raised his hand and began counting on his fingers: “there are three distinct social groups, the upper class, the middle class and the lower class, but each of these can be divided into thirds—the upper-upper, the middle-upper, and the lower-upper; the same way with the middle class—the upper-middle, the middle-middle, and the lower-middle; and the same way with the lower class—the same three categories. Everyone in Clyde falls into one of them. That’s the procedural pattern.”

  “Well, I don’t see why it’s so remarkable. I could have told you that myself,” Charles said, and then Malcolm Bryant became a kindly instructor in a lecture hall.

  “Of course it doesn’t seem remarkable to you, because you’re integrated in the group. Look at yourself, Charley—not that you can possibly see. You have a suitable education, you understand your taboos and your rituals, you’re working happily under an almost immobile system, and the beauty of it is you’re perfectly happy.”

  The assumption that he was happy annoyed Charles.

  “How do you know I am?” he asked.

  “Of course you are,” Malcolm Bryant said. “You’ve got to be. You have the greatest happiness vouchsafed any human being, you’re an integrated, contented part of a group. You don’t know how I envy you. You see—I’m personally not contented, Charley.”

  “Why aren’t you?” Charles asked him. “You can go anywhere you want and you must like what you’re doing.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Malcolm Bryant said. “I’m tired of moving. By God, I might settle down and do a little quiet writing and give up this Orinoco thing. Don’t try to move away, Charley. Don’t break out of your group.” />
  Charles had not been sure of Malcolm Bryant’s seriousness before, but now he was obviously saying that he was lonely and that he wanted friends. Charles heard the bell of the Baptist Church striking.

  “Well,” Charles said, “I guess I’d better be going. It’s getting pretty late,” and it occurred to him that this was what he was always saying in Clyde.

  Malcolm had pushed himself from the table and was standing up again in his shirt sleeves and open vest and he looked uncertain.

  “Wait a minute, Charley,” he said. “There’s something I want to say to you. As a human being, not as a social entity … frankly, just how interested are you in Jessica Lovell?”

  Charles felt his back stiffen and his face grow red. The question was impertinent and a cold wave of caution descended on him.

  “I don’t know how much I am,” he said, and his voice sounded hoarse and awkward. “I’ve told you that I don’t really know Jessica Lovell very well.”

  “You don’t?” Malcolm Bryant repeated, and he pulled his hands out of his pockets. “Well, that’s fine. It makes everything easier. This is a sort of hard thing for me to say, but I believe in being honest, Charley. I’ve had the damnedest thing happen to me. Let’s put it down squarely as a biological fact. Frankly, I’ve fallen in love with Jessica Lovell.”

  Malcolm looked at Charles questioningly as though he wanted Charles’s opinion of the biological fact and for a moment Charles’s mind was as vacant as his face must have been. It did not seem possible to him that Malcolm Bryant could have said such a thing and yet he had heard the words distinctly, and now Malcolm Bryant was going on more rapidly.

  “I don’t know how in hell it ever happened and I may say it comes at a damned inconvenient time and I’m afraid any sort of adjustment is going to interfere with my work, but there it is, and I thought I ought to tell you, Charley.”