Point of No Return (29 page)

“You play better,” Charles said. “I like it a whole lot better.”

“Oh, Charley, you know I don't,” May said, and she laughed. “I don't do anything very well. Where's Sam?”

“I don't know,” Charles said, “but he wanted me to give you this,” and he pulled the note out of his pocket.

“Oh,” May said, and she snatched it out of his hand and tore open the envelope, and then she put her hand on his arm. “Don't go away, Charley. Please stay here while I read it.”

As she read it, with her head turned away from him, he felt the warm grasp of her fingers on his arm and he wished she were his sister. Standing there beside her, so close that her shoulder touched his, he could have read the note if he had wanted, but he never knew what Sam had written. He only knew that May was crying. She had dropped the note. She had drawn him toward her as she still sat there on the piano stool. Her head was pressed against him and she was crying. He was still very shy with girls, particularly with girls of May's age, and besides he was madly in love with Miss Jenks, who had been his teacher in the seventh grade.

“May,” he said, “don't cry.”

“Oh, Charley,” May said, “I'm just crying because I'm so happy. Tell Sam,” she held him closer, “tell Sam it's all right.”

He was relieved when May found her handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

“I guess I'd better go and see Jackie,” he said.

“All right,” May said, “but bend your head down,” and before he knew what she was going to do, her arms were around his neck and she had kissed him.

“Charley,” she said, “you didn't mind it, did you?” He had no idea what Sam had written or why any note of Sam's should have made May Mason cry.

Out in the woodshed, Jackie was splitting kindlings in a languid way. When he saw Charles he dropped his ax and sat down on the chopping block.

“I don't know why an American boy has to split kindlings,” Jack said.

“Oh, go on and split them,” Charles told him. “Didn't Henry Ford split them?”

“I'll bet Henry Ford had a machine to do it,” Jack said. “There ought to be a machine.”

“Go on,” Charles said. “Didn't Andrew Carnegie split them?”

“No,” Jack said, “he had peat or something. He lived in Scotland.”

“Well, hurry up and finish,” Charles said, “and let's go over to Meaders'.”

Jack pushed himself up slowly from the chopping block and pushed his hair from his forehead. He needed a haircut. He had yellow hair with a wave in it like May's.

“Are you going to the Lovells' party?” he asked.

Charles did not understand the question, until Jack explained. It seemed that Jessicia Lovell was having a birthday party and Jack had been invited that morning and the Meaders were going.

“I thought everyone was asked,” Jack said.

“Well, I'm not,” Charles answered.

“Well, that's funny,” Jack said. “I don't see why they asked me and not you.”

Clearly Jackie was pleased that he had been asked and Charles not, but Charles was not worried in the least, in those days, about the Lovells or about Andrew Carnegie or about meeting the right people. He was still thinking of May Mason and Sam and he felt proud and pleased. He knew she was Sam's girl, and he always thought of her afterwards as Sam's girl. She was still Sam's girl when she finally married Jeffrey Meader. It was a secret which they always held in common. He knew and she knew that she would have married Sam if Sam had lived.

Memory had an erratic way of leaving some things clear and others blank. Those were the figures, the reference points, of his childhood. Somehow other people and things that he thought he would always remember were laid away in the partially open, dusty drawer of forgetfulness, but not those figures. There was a time when he had been out in a rowboat with the Meaders and the boat had been swamped in a squall and they had nearly been drowned in the river. He had once fought with a boy in grammar school whose name was Slavin and it must have been of great immediate importance and a full dress affair for it took place on Cedar Hill beyond the water tank, where one customarily went for serious fighting. No events like these, however, carried into the present as did the changing figures of those few people nearest him, his father, his mother, his Aunt Jane, Dorothea, and the Masons, and of them all Sam was by far the clearest, because he was a finished memory, distinct and beyond future alteration.

He always associated Sam with the end of childhood. When the music of World War I played, Sam was always there. It was a long way to Tipperary, and while you had a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that's the style, I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier to shoot some other mother's boy. Sam always came back with those tunes, still not in uniform, but Sam had enlisted in the National Guard and was waiting to be called.

Sam was sitting in the City Hall auditorium where Charles's class at the Webster Grammar School was undergoing its graduation exercises. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, smile, boys, that's the style. This must have been at the end of Sam's first year at Dartmouth. At any rate, he could still sometimes see Sam, in a suit he must have bought at Hanover—John Gray or someone must have done something about his clothes—winking at him from the audience, twisting the whole left side of his face, as Charles sat on the platform in the second row, behind the girls.

Martin J. Gifford, who was going to run that fall for the state legislature, was delivering the speech customarily made to a Clyde graduating class. It was a speech containing all the doctrines on which Charles Gray and his comtemporaries had been brought up and which so many of them tried in vain to reconcile with what they experienced later.

Martin J. Gifford was speaking in tender tones, in keeping with the tender age of his audience, but his discourse was keyed, too, to the mores of their parents, relatives and friends.

“Luck,” Mr. Gifford was saying, in a quavering voice, “is a word that makes me laugh. Don't let anyone tell you, my young friends, that there is any such thing as luck. Do you think that you are here today, on the threshold of higher education, because of luck? No!”

At that moment Sam caught his eye and winked again. The faces of Dorothea, his mother, and Aunt Jane were blurred, but not Sam's.

“No, no,” Mr. Gifford was saying. “You are here because of the sacrifices of your parents and the work of every citizen and the very fine achievements of the wonderful ladies and gentlemen on your school committee, your teachers, and of your great mayor, my dear old friend, Francis X. Flynn.”

He did not intone the name of Clyde's great mayor but ended it in a shout, and then he waited for the fluttering of applause.

“And what made it possible for them to give you these advantages and to make their sacrifices and their dreams for you come true?” Mr. Gifford was asking. “Was it accident? Was it luck? No! I'll tell you what made it possible.” And he walked to the edge of the platform before he told them. “It was possible because you live in the greatest country in the world, in the United States of America, where all men, I thank God, are free and equal, living in the frame of freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, where each of us can look the other in the eye and say, ‘I am as free as you are; no matter how rich you may be, I have the same chance as you, because this great land of ours is the land of freedom.'”

Mr. Gifford mopped his forehead before he went on with the credo of Clyde.

“Oh, no—there is no such thing as luck, my dear young friends, not for American boys and girls. As you sit here, not so far from entering the contest for life's prizes, you are all starting even because this is America, no matter what may be your religion or race or bank account. There is no grease for palms in America. The only grease is elbow grease. Look at our greatest men, born on small farms in small houses, boys without a cent to their names. Did they get there by luck? Oh, no. They got there by making the most of opportunities which are open, thank God, to every American boy and girl.”

This credo was all a part of the air one breathed in Clyde. Later, if it did not jibe with experience, you still believed. If you heard it often enough, it became an implicit, indestructible foundation for future conduct. Even when Sam had winked at him, Charles was sure that Sam believed.

Charles was still sure that Sam believed when they were out on the sidewalk afterwards and when Sam clapped him on the shoulder. It was wonderful to be there with his older brother, who was in a fraternity at Dartmouth and who had been the captain of the football team at Clyde. It was wonderful to be walking down the street with Sam, where everyone could see.

“It was the same old bushwa, kid,” Sam said. “He certainly could fork it out”—but Charles was sure that Sam believed.

The words of that speech were a tide that had carried him out of his childhood and there was no logical reason for associating them with his brother Sam but his memory always did. Johnny, get your gun on the run, we won't forget the memory of brave Lafayette, the Yanks are coming over there, you've got to get up in the morning. A long, long trail was winding to the land of my dreams, and how could you keep them down on the farm after they'd seen Paree. Sam had seen Paree one night, but there was no problem of keeping Sam down on the farm. He was going but he was not gone yet. Before the Twenty-sixth Division sailed, he had walked the streets of Clyde on leave from Framingham, in a uniform that was too tight around the neck. He had taken Charles with him to Winton & Low's jewelry store and he had bought a ring for May. It was getting close to autumn then, the year when Charles would enter high school. That was the year when he was first called Master Gray, and he was already madly in love with a girl named Doris Wormser, whose father was a foreman at Wright-Sherwin and who later married Willie Woodbury, when he got the farm machinery agency. Charles's head was already even with Sam's shoulder when they went in to Winton & Low's.

“She isn't going to wear it yet,” Sam had said, “but she can tie it around her neck.”

It seemed like a very good idea. Sometime he might buy a ring for Doris Wormser to wear around her neck.

“Let me know how May's getting on, sometimes, will you?” Sam had said.

He was getting almost old enough to be a friend of Sam's, right there at the end. That was almost the last of Sam, but he was always back with Charles whenever anyone played those tunes.

5

The Youth Replies,
I Can

—
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Charles was through Dartmouth and he was working at Wright-Sherwin before he began to realize that no human problems are unique. He must always, though he only half knew it, have shared his father's discontent with what he had. He was very sure that success and happiness were the same thing, when he was twenty-three, and yet he could already see that different people had different ideas of success. It was a subject which he and Jack Mason discussed very often, for Jack had gone to work in Wright-Sherwin too, after he had graduated from Amherst. Naturally, they each would bring up personal examples, and this was the beauty of living in a place like Clyde, where the lives and careers of everyone were known to everyone else. Charles, who only knew Mr. Lovell academically then, did not consider Mr. Lovell a successful person, but Jackie said he was the most successful man in Clyde. Mr. Lovell knew the right people, not only in Clyde but along the North Shore and in Boston, and that was what success meant; but Charles said Mr. Lovell could not run Wright-Sherwin.

“That's exactly what I mean,” Jack said. “He doesn't have to. He has everything that running Wright-Sherwin could give him.”

There was a blind spot, Charles realized later, in everyone's line of reasoning. He could see that living on Johnson Street was not the end of everything and his nebulous ambitions were already larger than Jack Mason's. If you wanted to pick a successful man in Clyde, you could take Old Man Stanley, who ran Wright-Sherwin. He knew all the right people, too, because it was worth their while to know him. He was a director of the Clyde Fund, a trustee of the Old Ground Cemetery, a director of the Dock Street Savings Bank and a director of the West India Insurance Company without ever having belonged in Clyde originally. He was in everything because of his ability and not because he lived on Johnson Street. He had taken over Wright-Sherwin when it was nothing but an unsuccessful brass foundry and now it made parts for the best precision instruments in the country.

Then, if you wanted, you could go on to Mr. Thomas, who was president of the Dock Street Savings Bank. He belonged in Clyde; his father had been head of the bank before him, but Mr. Thomas knew his business besides living on Johnson Street. The Dock Street Bank might be in a queer-looking building, but it was as sound as any in Massachusetts—or you could take Mr. Sullivan, who ran his contracting business and owned shares in a dozen small enterprises—or Mr. Levine, whose father had owned Levine's drygoods store and who suddenly had bought the shoeshop. Mr. Levine and Mr. Sullivan did not know the right people except in a business way, but it seemed to Charles that they had done pretty well in spite of what Jack Mason said.

From this gallery of Clyde's great men, Charles could turn to his own father, who, by contrast, was an habitual failure, though actually there were many like him in Clyde who were much worse off. If John Gray did not know when to stop when he started, at least he had his own ideas of when not to start, and there was no use starting, he wanted Charles to understand, unless you had some capital. In the summer of 1916 and the next winter, when he had inherited his share of Aunt Mathilda's estate, he would have succeeded if Hugh Blashfield had not doled out the money by degrees, a thousand dollars at a time. He could never feel afterwards that Hugh Blashfield had been a friend of his, not that he wanted to mention this to anyone but Charles. If Hugh Blashfield had let him have the whole twenty-five thousand dollars as he had asked, instead of handing it out to him in little driblets, the whole story might have been different, because you had to have capital. He had tried it once with the five thousand that was left him out of trust at the time of the Judge's death and he had tried it again with the thirty thousand which had come to the family from Dr. Marchby, but this was something that Charles only learned later from his mother. Then he had tried it a third time with Aunt Mathilda's legacy. If Hugh Blashfield had not tried to stop it, it would have been a different story, but Hugh Blashfield had no imagination. Hugh was nothing but a small-town lawyer.