Point of No Return (39 page)

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.”

Charles's mind was still a blank and the palms of his hands felt moist.

“Why did you think you ought to tell me?” he asked, and Malcolm moved his feet restively on the carpet.