Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “I don’t see what they see in him. Any fool ought to know you’re ten times as good as he is.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Blakesley. I wish you’d listen to me. Blakesley.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, Roger’s pretty quick on his feet,” he said.

  “Charley, if—” She stopped and started again. “If … what are you going to do?”

  He did not answer. He felt as though everything were hanging on a few threads and as though anything might break them. They were passing walls of dressed granite and carefully raked driveways. He and Nancy did not belong there. They were like intruders in a larger world.

  “Haven’t you even thought what you’re going to do?”

  “My God,” he said, “I’m sick of thinking.”

  The threads had broken and he saw that she was crying. It was the worst possible time for this to have happened, just as they were approaching the private road to Roger’s Point. He stopped the car.

  “It isn’t fair,” she sobbed. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Never mind, Nance,” he said, and he put his arm around her. “We’ve got lots of time and it doesn’t matter if we’re late.”

  She was already opening her beaded bag.

  “I’m all right now,” she said. “I didn’t mean to let you down.”

  “You haven’t let me down,” he said.

  “I’m all right now,” she said. “Start up the car. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been driving. Don’t look at me, don’t say anything, and to hell with everybody.”

  5

  Fate Gave, What Chance Shall Not Control …

  —MATTHEW ARNOLD

  It was good business to learn unobtrusively all one could about one’s superiors and through his years at the Stuyvesant Bank Charles had collected a considerable amount of information about Mr. Anthony Burton and his background. He had picked this up gradually, a little here and there from occasional remarks that Mr. Burton had made when there was general conversation, and more from Arthur Slade. In the course of time, Charles had been able to sift fact from gossip and to make his own evaluations, until now, if necessary, he could have written from memory a biographical character sketch of Tony Burton, and he could have filled in any gaps from his own firsthand observations of Tony Burton’s habits. He knew that Tony Burton was both typical and exceptional—a rich man’s son with inherited ability and with ambition that had somehow not been dulled by his having always been presented with what he had wanted. Though Charles knew that he would always observe Tony Burton from a distance, it was fascinating to speculate upon his drives and problems.

  His life and Tony Burton’s were actually two complete and separate circles, touching at just one point, and they were circles that would never coincide. Though they each could make certain ideas comprehensible to the other, the very words they used had different meanings for each of them. Security, work, worry, future, position, and society, capital and government, all had diverging meanings. Charles could understand the Burton meanings and could interpret them efficiently and accurately, but only in an objective, not in an emotional, way, in the same manner he might have interpreted the meanings of a Russian commissar or a Chinese mandarin. He could admire aspects of Tony Burton, he could even like him, but they could only understand each other theoretically.

  When Tony Burton said, for instance, as he was recently fond of saying, that the neighborhood where he lived on Roger’s Point was running down, it was not what Charles would have meant if he had made the statement. Tony Burton did not mean that any place on Roger’s Point was growing shabby or that crude parvenus had pushed in on Roger’s Point. He only meant that several places during the war had changed hands rather suddenly—nothing along the shore, of course, but in back. He did not mean that the new owners of these places were financially unstable or made noises when they ate their food. He only meant that one of the owners was the president of an advertising agency and that another controlled the stock of a depilatory preparation. Though these people were agreeable and wanted to do better, their having been allowed to buy into Roger’s Point indicated that the general morale was running low. It would not have happened, for instance, when Mr. Burton, Senior, was alive. That was all he meant.

  This did not sound serious to Charles, but it was to Tony Burton and Charles could understand it, intellectually. What was more, Tony Burton must have known he understood it, for he discussed the situation quite frankly with Charles, just as though Charles owned property on Roger’s Point—not on the inside but on the water side. Yet they both obviously knew that Charles could never afford to live there. A backlog of inherited wealth was required to live there, unless one made a killing on the stock market or invented a laxative or a depilatory. There was no way of telling what might happen to Roger’s Point. Anyone might live there in time, and Tony Burton could laugh ironically about it, and Charles, too, could laugh, sympathetically and intellectually, without ever fully savoring the suffering behind Tony Burton’s mirth.

  Tony Burton’s father, Sanford Burton, had bought all of Roger’s Point in 1886, when there were no houses there, and he had built the Burton house in 1888. He had already formed the brokerage firm of Burton and Fall, and the Point had been a profitable real estate investment. It had not been difficult to sell off parts of it around the turn of the century to the proper sort of person. Simpkins, a director of U. S. Steel, had bought the cove, and the Marshalls, the Erie Railroad Marshalls, had bought the place next, and the Crawfords, the Appellate Justice Crawfords, were there also. Charles could remember most of the owners’ names. It was good business to know them as many of them had accounts at the Stuyvesant Bank. In fact Charles knew the names as well as did the watchman at the beginning of the private road.

  “I’m going to Mr. Anthony Burton’s,” he said, and he could even employ the proper tone, intellectually. “Mr. Burton is expecting me for dinner.”

  “You needn’t have told him all the family history,” Nancy said. “Why didn’t you tell him you’re forty-three years old and show him our wedding certificate?” She was telling him indirectly that she was feeling better, that she was all right now.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, “here it is, and they’ve put on the lights.”

  She was referring to lights in the trees along the drive, a recent innovation of Tony Burton’s, inspired by a winter’s visit at the place of a friend of his in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. If they could have lights in coconut palms, Tony Burton said, there was no reason for not having them in the copper beeches at Roger’s Point, but those new lights did not go so well with the house. Lampposts and gaslight would have fitted the whole scene better. The building had been designed by Richardson, the Romanesque architect—another fact that Charles had learned and filed away. It was too dark to see the detail of the slate roof, the brick walls and the arched doors and windows trimmed with old red sandstone, but its vague outline still looked indestructible. The light beneath the brick and sandstone porte-cochere shone on the iron and glass front door and on the potted hothouse azaleas in rows beside the steps.

  The doors had swung open already and Jeffreys, the Burton butler, had stepped outside—but not as far down as the lower step—and was saying good evening.

  “You go in, Nancy,” Charles said. “I’d better put the car somewhere.”

  “There’s no need to move it, Mr. Gray,” Tony Burton’s butler said. He was wearing a dinner coat with a stiff shirt. “There’s no one else this evening.”

  “Oh,” Charles said, “if you’re sure it’s all right.” He had never been able to speak even an intellectual language with Tony Burton’s butler. “It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Tony Burton’s butler said. “It’s balmy for this time of year,” and then Charles saw that a maid was behind him, relieving Nancy of her cloak.

  It was impossible to forget Tony Burton’s house once you had been inside it. In summer or winter the air in the hall was balmy lik
e the evening and fragrant with the scent of hothouse flowers. It was a huge oak-paneled hall, with a double staircase and a gallery and a Romanesque fireplace. For a second he and Nancy stood in the shaded light of the hall almost indecisively. There was an especial feeling of timidity when one went there, a furtive sense of not belonging. Yet in another way he was perfectly at ease for at those semiannual dinners Tony Burton had always made them feel most welcome. Besides, each summer there was always that all-day party for everyone at the bank, with three-legged races and potato races and pingpong and bridge for the wives. Mrs. Burton, too, always made the bank wives feel comfortable. The bright light from the open parlor door shone across the dusky hall and Tony Burton was already in the oblong of light, a white carnation in the lapel of his dinner coat, holding out both hands, one for Nancy and one for him.

  “Home is the sailor, home from sea,” Tony Burton said, “and the hunter home from the hill. I wish you wouldn’t always surprise me, Nancy my dear. Why are you more beautiful every time I see you, or do I just forget?”

  “It might be that you just forget, mightn’t it?” Nancy asked.

  Tony Burton laughed. He had a delightful laugh.

  “We’ve really got to do something about seeing each other more often,” he said. “It’s been too long, much too long. Why don’t you come to work some morning instead of Charley? I’m getting pretty sick of seeing Charles around.” He laughed again and slapped Charles on the back and they walked behind Nancy into the drawing room.

  Charles knew all about Tony Burton’s drawing room, too, both from Tony Burton and from Arthur Slade. Mrs. Burton and the girls, before the girls had been married, had made Tony Burton do it entirely over. The enormous Persian carpet had come from the Anderson Gallery and so had the two Waterford chandeliers. Charles remembered them very well because Tony Burton had sent him to the auction to bid them in on one of the first occasions that Tony had ever paid any attention to him, and this did not seem so long ago. He also remembered the huge canvas of a mass of square-rigged ships—the British fleet at anchor. Mrs. Burton was always buying new things for the living room and besides Tony always loved boats. The cup he had won in one of the Bermuda races was standing on the concert grand piano. You could roll up the carpet and clear out all the furniture. It had been a great place for dancing before the girls had married.

  “Althea,” Tony Burton said, “I told you Nancy Gray would be wearing a long dress.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Mrs. Burton said, “I should have called you up. Tony’s getting so absent-minded lately. He spoke of it as supper. There should be set rules for short and long. Now just the other evening at the Drexels’ the same thing happened to me. I thought it was dinner and it was supper. But the men thought this up. We didn’t, did we?”

  “Charles should have told me,” Nancy said. “Why didn’t you tell me it was supper, Charley?”

  “It’s always some man’s fault, isn’t it, Charley?” Tony Burton said.

  “That’s one of the truest things you ever said, sweetheart,” Mrs. Burton said. “Everything that happens to a woman is always some man’s fault.”

  “Jeffreys can bring us almost anything,” Tony Burton said, “from sherry and a biscuit to Scotch on the rocks, but Charley and I will stick to dry Martinis, won’t we, Charley? What will you have, Nancy my dear?”

  “A Martini,” Nancy said, “and if I don’t like it I can blame it on the men.”

  “But not on Tony,” Mrs. Burton said. “Blame it on Jeffreys. Tony mixes terrible Martinis. Don’t you think so, Mr. Gray, or have you ever tried one of his Martinis?”

  It was characteristic of that relationship and perfectly suitable that Mrs. Burton should call him Mr. Gray. It meant that he was a business friend of Tony Burton’s, or associate might have been a better word, who had come to supper on business with his little wife. She knew how to put Tony’s business friends and associates at their ease, but there were certain limits and certain degrees of rank. They were not on a first-name basis yet and he was just as glad of it. It would have embarrassed him acutely, it would have seemed like a breach of etiquette, if he were to call Mrs. Burton Althea. He knew his place and they could meet on common ground by his calling Mr. Burton Tony and by Mrs. Burton’s referring to Nancy as “my dear.”

  “I’m not in a position to say what I think of Tony’s cocktails,” Charles said, “except that Tony is always right.”

  “You all lick his boots so,” Mrs. Burton said. “That’s why he’s so impossible when he comes home. Sherry, please, Jeffreys. Is Mr. Gray impossible when he comes home, my dear?”

  “Usually,” Nancy said. “Normally impossible.”

  “I wonder what they do at the bank,” Mrs. Burton said. “I have a few vague ideas. That blond secretary of Tony’s … we can compare notes after dinner.” The oil of small talk soothed the troubled waters, if there were troubled waters. Mrs. Tony Burton was putting Nancy at her ease. It was necessary business entertaining, household duty, and one of these suppers that must have helped in some vague way.

  Everything moved so smoothly that when Charles tried to discover anything revealing in Mrs. Burton’s voice or attitude, he could hit upon absolutely nothing. He could discover no new flicker of interest or no new warmth. She was simply being as nice as she could possibly be to one of the younger men whom Tony had to have around sometimes and to the little thing the younger man had married. She had even dressed thoughtfully for the occasion in an oldish gown, with no jewelry except a simple strand of pearls, yet you could not say that she was dressing down to Nancy. Charles remembered Arthur Slade’s saying that she was a good ten years younger than Tony, that she was one of the Philadelphia Brines, and Charles knew from the size of the Brine estate, which the bank was handling, that, like Tony Burton, she had always been free from want. He could tell it from the tilt of her head, from her confident happy mouth, and even from the tint of her hair. There was a single lock of gray in it and perhaps all of it should have been gray but he could not be quite sure.

  “I love that little house of yours, my dear,” she was saying, and he could see Nancy smiling at her with elaborate enthusiasm. “That whitewashed brick, and everything so compactly arranged. It must be a comfort to live in it instead of in a great barn, but Tony insists on the ancestral mansion.”

  “The only good thing about a small house,” Nancy said, “is when the maid leaves.”

  “We’ve been marvelously lucky,” Mrs. Burton said. “Ours keep staying on with us, I’m sure I don’t know why.”

  Jeffreys, the butler, was passing round pieces of toast with cream cheese and recumbent anchovies on them, and a maid followed Jeffreys carrying an icy bowl of celery, raw carrots and olives.

  “I hear that raw carrots are good for the eyesight,” Charles said to Tony Burton.

  “That’s one of those new ideas,” Tony said. He looked bright and alert as he always did before dinner. “It’s on a par with the one about alcohol being good for hardening of the arteries. Have you heard the new one about Truman?”

  Tony Burton always enjoyed those stories. Formerly it had been Franklin D. Roosevelt, though Tony was hardly what you would call a Roosevelt-hater, and now it was Truman.

  “I don’t know,” Charles said. “I’ve heard a good many new ones lately.” He had almost called Tony Burton sir but he had checked himself in time.

  “I know just what you mean, my dear,” he heard Mrs. Burton saying. “These country day schools are never quite right. Now when the girls were growing up—”

  “Always remember it might have been Wallace,” he said to Tony Burton. Everything considered, Tony was surprisingly tolerant about politics and politicians. To him politics was like the weather. You could make occasional forecasts but you could not control it.

  “I’d like to know what those playboys are going to try next,” he said. “And that’s a good name for them, playboys. Did you ever read the Van Bibber stories by Richard Harding Davis?”

 
; “The Van Bibber stories?” Charles repeated. “I’m afraid I must have missed them.”

  “Well,” Tony Burton said, “they belonged to my flight more than your flight, Charley.” This must once have been a shooting term, Charles thought, used when one foregathered in a gunroom after a hard day on the moors. “They typified a certain era—the period when I was a playboy myself. There used to be a fashionable character, believe it or not—the gay blade about town, the white tie, the silk hat, we won’t get home until morning. He’s an extinct type now, of course, a product of a different social scene. Dick Davis hit him off rather well in the Van Bibber stories. Dick Davis was quite a playboy himself. I used to try to model my conduct after his, in a small way. Here comes Jeffreys. How about another cocktail?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so, thanks,” Charles said. He did not want to refuse too quickly or too eagerly, and of course Tony Burton must have known that when urged he would take another.

  “It won’t hurt you to relax and tomorrow’s Saturday and I’m going to have another.”

  “Well, thanks,” Charles said, “if you are. They’re very good cocktails.”

  He wished that he could relax as Tony Burton suggested, instead of trying to read a meaning into every simple action. Tony Burton would never have taken a second Martini if they were going to talk of anything seriously after dinner. It meant that everything was settled in one way or another.

  “Now, Henry Wallace,” Tony Burton was saying, “and all the rest of the New Deal crowd are the playboy type. They have the same power and the same privileges expressed in different terms. They’re all Van Bibbers.”

  Tony smiled at him triumphantly but it was hard for Charles to discuss the subject intelligently, not being familiar with the works of Richard Harding Davis.