Point of No Return (12 page)

Roger Blakesley was over by the front windows, his chair pulled close to the president's desk, talking very earnestly. Charles could not forget what Nancy had said that morning—that he could go to Tony Burton and put his cards on the table. Even though he dismissed it as just the thing a woman would suggest, still Nancy had good judgment. She understood as well as he did the routine and jealousies and discipline of an office, and besides there was the question of personal dignity. It was humiliating, considering his position, to sit, day after day, waiting for Tony Burton to tell him what was on his mind, when he had probably made his choice already. It was humiliating to have one's life and a good part of one's future depend on one man's eccentricity, but that was the way it always was.

Charles had often thought that it was fortunate for Tony Burton that he seldom needed to make quick decisions. Tony Burton had told him himself that he liked to mull over problems and fuss with them, particularly problems of personnel, but he usually did what he decided in the first place, from sheer intuition and instinct tempered by training and experience. All his talk of mulling and weighing and balancing was vacillation, if you wanted to use a harsh word for it. There were also the qualms that always surrounded a definite negative. That probably was what was delaying Tony Burton—the certainty that no matter what he did someone would be hurt.

It would obviously have ruined everything if Charles had endeavored to end the suspense by talking it over with Tony Burton. It was against all convention and Tony would instantly have put him in his place, but still it was possible to consider such an impossible scene. He could even frame just what he would say.

“Listen, Tony,” he would say, “let's face the facts. Maybe you're removed from office politics, but everybody here in the bank knows that you are considering proposing either Blakesley or me for this vice-presidency. Maybe you don't know, but you ought to, that they're making bets on it in the washroom. It isn't dignified. It isn't fair to Roger or me to keep us waiting. We're both of us making monkeys of ourselves running around and polishing apples. You know everything about me, Tony. I've been around here long enough. Of course, I was out in the war, but you approved my going, or you said you did, and I'm about the same as I ever was in spite of it. I know it's hard to step on somebody's face, but this thing has been going on for months, ever since Arthur was killed, and I'm tired of staying awake at night, and Nancy's getting tired, too. How about it, Tony?”

It was not a bad speech, either, even though it was out of his usual line and beyond the realms of discipline. In fact the words were so vivid in his mind that he seemed to be saying them right now at the far corner by the window, but of course he would never say them. He was at his desk and out of the corner of his eye he saw that Roger Blakesley was back again, leafing through a pile of papers with his left hand while he scribbled with his right on a memorandum pad. It may have been that Roger also had been dreaming of a talk with Tony. He could even make a savage, unkind parody of Roger's possible speech, which Roger would have called an “approach.”

“Listen, Tony,” Roger would have said (that is if he had said anything), “how about you and me doing a little mind reading? You've got one of the best poker faces I've ever seen. I love your inscrutability, but let's unscrute, shall we? That's a pretty good word, what? I always knew I should have been an English professor and not just a poor dumb bank boy.… Well, to get back to it, Tony. I know you're hot and bothered, and I don't want to bother you and I know old Charley doesn't. Why, Charley's the grandest guy I know. You and I don't want to hurt old Charley, especially after the war, and you don't want to hurt me, but you couldn't hurt me, Tony, the way I feel about you. It's just a little matter, Tony, and Charley and I can take it, though maybe Charley's more brittle than I am. I never take things hard, Tony. Let's help each other out and let's get an extra on the street …” That was the way Roger would do it, because Roger had the sales technique. If it made Charles impatient sometimes, he was broad-minded enough to know that a lot of people liked it.

The shades on the front door were drawn already, showing that the bank was closed to depositors, and there was the inevitable air of relaxation now that they were no longer on public display. Voices were louder. There was a snatch of laughter. People were assuming more comfortable positions and far in the back of the room, in that region where there was not so much to gain or lose, he saw some of the boys moving toward the washroom to smoke a cigarette. If he had wished to have that talk with Tony Burton, now would have been the time, but he still sat at his desk with the trust accounts in front of him. The tension was beginning to undermine his judgment and self-control but if they wanted to keep him waiting, he was not going to show that it bothered him. Just then his desk telephone rang with its specially contrived device to avoid undue noise. It was Miss Sumner, Tony Burton's secretary.

“Oh, Mr. Gray,” Miss Sumner said. Her voice was sweet with the assured authority of being the dean of all secretaries, the repository of all secrets. “Mr. Burton wants to know if you can see him for a moment.”

There were some reactions you could not control and in spite of himself his heart was beating faster. He deliberately finished the page of his report before he rose, and when he was on his feet he looked at Roger Blakesley.

“Yes, Sugar,” Roger was saying over his own telephone, which meant that Roger was speaking to his wife. “I'll be there on the five-thirty, Sug. Yes, I'll pick up the prescription.”

Roger's concentration on his conversation was not misleading. Charles was sure that Roger knew exactly why Tony Burton wanted to see him for a moment.

Tony Burton looked very fit, in spite of his white hair and his roll-top desk which both conspired to place him in another generation. For years Charles had accepted him as a model willingly, even though he realized that everyone else above a certain salary rating also used Tony Burton as a perfect sartorial example, and he was pretty sure that Tony himself was conscious of it. Charles never rebelled against this convention because Tony had everything one should expect to find in a president of a first-rate bank. It was amusing but not ridiculous to observe that all the minor executives in the Stuyvesant, as well as the more ambitious clerks, wore conservative double-breasted suits like Tony Burton's, at the same time allowing undue rigidity to break out into pin stripes and herringbones, just like Tony Burton's. They all visited the barber once a week. They all had taken up golf, whether they liked it or not, and most of them wore the same square type of wrist watch and the same stainless-steel strap. They had adopted Tony Burton's posture and his brisk, quick step and even the gently vibrant inflection of his voice. In fact once at one of those annual dinners for officers and junior executives when everyone said a few words and got off a few local jokes about the bank, Charles had brought the matter up when he had been called upon to speak. Speaking was always an unpleasant ordeal with which he had finally learned to cope successfully largely from imitating Tony. He remembered standing up and waiting for silence, just as Tony waited, with the same faint smile and the same deliberate gaze.

“I should like to drink a toast,” he had said, “not to our president but to everyone who tries to look like him. When I walk, I always walk like Tony, because Tony knows just how to walk; and when I talk, I always talk like Tony, because Tony knows just how to talk; and when I dress, I always dress like Tony, in a double-breasted suit. But no matter how I try, I cannot be like Tony. I can never make myself sufficiently astute.”

It was the one time in the year, at that annual dinner, when you could let yourself go, within certain limits, and Tony Burton had loved it. He had stood up and waited for the laughter to die down and then he had spoken easily, with just the right pause and cadence. He had said that there were always little surprises at these dinners. He had never realized, for instance, that there could be a poet in the trust department, but poetry had its place. Poetry could teach lessons that transcended pedestrian prose.

“And I'm not too old to learn,” Tony Burton had said, “and I'm humbly glad to learn. Sometimes on a starlit night I've wondered what my function was in the Stuyvesant. I'm very glad to know it is that of a clothing dummy. It's a patriotic duty. It's what they want us to be, in Washington.”

That was back in 1941, but Tony Burton still had the same spring to his step, the same unlined, almost youthful face, and the same florid complexion; and he had the same three pictures on his desk, the first of Mrs. Burton in their garden, the second of their three girls standing in profile, like a flight of stairs, and the third of his sixty-foot schooner, the
Wanderlust
(the boat you were invited on once every summer), with Tony Burton in his yachting cap standing at the wheel. Time had marched on. All of the girls had come out and all were married, and the
Wanderlust
had been returned by the navy in deplorable condition, but Tony Burton had no superficial scars.

No matter how well Charles might know him, in that half-intimate, half-formal business relationship, he still had a slight feeling of diffidence and constraint. It was the same feeling that one had toward generals in wartime or perhaps toward anyone with power over one. There was always a vestige of a subservient desire to please and to be careful. You had to know how far to go, how long to laugh, and how to measure every speech.

Tony Burton looked up and smiled and waved his hand with the circular motion at the wrist that everyone had tried to imitate.

“Sit down, Charley,” he said. “Have a cigarette and relax.”

No matter how much you might pretend, it was no time for relaxing, and Tony Burton must have known it. It must have been a little hard for Tony, trying to be friends and always being faced by that line of demarcation. It might have been different, Charles was thinking, if he had inherited money of his own instead of being dependent on a job. It might have been different, even, if he had received some attractive offer lately, if he had known that there was something waiting for him elsewhere with the same salary, instead of knowing that times were tight and uncertain.

Everything was uncertain and there was nothing to do but to wait. He shook his head when Tony Burton offered him a club cigarette from his gold case. There was the unwritten rule of no smoking on the banking floor—even though Tony Burton suggested it be broken.

“What's on your mind, Tony?” he asked. There was nothing to do but wait, while Tony Burton laid his cigarette case on the desk in front of him. From where he sat Charles could read the engraving on its gold surface, done in script in three different specimens of girlish handwriting. “To America's most representative daddy, Gladys, Olivia, Babs.”

“The girls gave it to me on Father's Day,” Tony Burton said. “I didn't know I was a representative dad.”

“I didn't know you were either,” Charles answered, “but it must be nice to know.”

There was nothing to do but wait, but it was clear already that they were not going to talk about the future or they would not have begun with the cigarette case. At the same time, it was also clear that Tony Burton did have something on his mind. Charles glanced at his cool and placid features, set in assured, easy lines etched by a career in which everything had always worked out right. From the very beginning Tony Burton could have had no doubts about anything. From the very beginning he must have known that he would end where he was sitting.

“I don't like being representative of anything,” Tony Burton said.

“I don't see how you can help it very well,” Charles said.

“How do you mean, I can't help it?” Tony Burton asked.

“Sitting where you are,” Charles said, “you've got to represent. That's all I mean.”

“Well, I was thinking the other day,” Tony Burton said, “that you're pretty representative yourself.”

“I hope I am, Tony,” Charles answered. “I try to be, in business hours.” He did not like the conversation because he did not know where it was leading, although he understood that this was all a part of Tony's technique.

“We ought to call this place the House of Representatives,” Tony Burton said, “but it isn't a bad shop, is it?”

“No,” Charles answered, “it isn't. I'm glad to be back in it, Tony,” and Tony Burton smiled at him, almost as though they were friends.

“Well,” Tony said, “speaking of representatives—” and he paused and Charles sat motionless. For a second he thought that he had been wrong and that they were coming to the point at last, but only for a second. “How did you represent things to Selig?”

“I told him he would be happier elsewhere,” Charles said. “I told him there were too many complications.”

“Why didn't you tell him that we'd have room for him in the quite near future?”

“Because he wouldn't have believed it,” Charles said. “He had to know, not that he hadn't guessed already.”

“Did he take it?”

“Yes,” Charles said, “he took it.”

Tony Burton leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.

“He has a lot of good connections. That's the trouble with life these days. There's no pattern. You don't know where you're at any more. The girls keep going to La Casita. It's a damn funny world, isn't it? It's getting curiouser and curiouser.”

“A man told me at lunch today,” Charles said, “that no matter what the world is doing, man remains the same.”

Tony Burton unclasped his hands from behind his head and placed them on the arms of his chair.

“Well, let's forget it, Charley. There's one other thing.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said. He knew it was the other thing that Tony Burton wanted to talk about and he knew that informality was over. It was time to be a bright young man again and to call Tony Burton “sir.”