Point of No Return (40 page)

“Because I thought it was the honest thing to do. I know it sounds silly, and of course you're in no position to marry her. You're just a kid, but I thought you had a right to know.”

It sounded silly and yet at the same time Charles, in spite of a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, realized that not everyone would have been so honest.

“Who ever said I wanted to marry her?” he asked. “I've never thought of marrying her.”

It was true. He had never thought until that moment of marrying Jessica Lovell and now his mind was running on tribal customs and beating drums. The worried look had gone from Malcolm's face.

“Well, that's fine,” he said. “Of course, I haven't much to offer her but there's some talk about something in the museum at Harvard or there might be a permanent fellowship on the Sykes Foundation. I could give up that Orinoco thing. You know, I think I might make her quite happy.”

Charles found himself standing up without ever remembering that he had risen from the rocking chair. He knew that he was smiling because his face felt stiff and contorted.

“Of course, she may throw you down.”

“Oh, yes,” Malcolm Bryant said, “she may.”

“And of course”—his voice sounded louder—“I'll go on seeing her if I want to. Well, good night.”

11

And You End with a Barrel of Money

It did not definitely dawn on Charles until the spring of 1928 that he was in love with Jessica Lovell. Then suddenly he was so much in love that nothing else seemed to matter and everything seemed possible. When all the reticences of caution or barriers of common sense, or whatever you cared to call them, broke, it was plain that this situation must have been developing for a long while without either of them having consciously perceived it. The slow growth of such an involvement, he sometimes thought later, made it something that left a deeper scar than any sudden flowering of passion. Yet it was possible that he would never have fallen in love with Jessica or she with him if it had not been for the irritating stimulus of Malcolm Bryant.

Malcolm was dedicating his life to the study of social relationships but when it came to the people around him, he displayed the unskillful ignorance of most dwellers in academic ivory towers. On the one hand he was a dispassionate analyst, a synthetic recording angel, employed by a learned institution to classify the inhabitants of Clyde according to their incomes and their prejudices; on the other, he was an absent-minded professor who had been shielded from many ordinary drives of living. As soon as Malcolm Bryant had confessed his interest in Jessica—because it was an honest thing to do—every day or so he would drop in to call at Spruce Street or ask Charles up to his rooms at Mrs. Mooney's.

It was easy for Charles to converse with Malcolm Bryant because he was always more like a doctor or a lawyer than a friend. Charles found himself telling about Sam and how he had been killed in the war, and about Jackie Mason's worries about his grandfather's drugstore, and about his Aunt Jane and the Gray heart. He was no longer annoyed when Malcolm asked him questions. He was glad to tell about himself in return for learning more about Malcolm and before long Charles was familiar with Malcolm's complete dossier.

It seemed that some wealthy individual or some university or some institution had always supported Malcolm. Thus, although Malcolm worked hard for the support, he had never been obliged, except when he had sold papers while he was a high school student in Kansas, to earn his living like other people. Instead, someone was always paying his expenses to places barely mentioned in school geography. He was always getting a Guggenheim grant or doing a piece of work for a museum or an institute. Ever since his father, a Kansas farmer, had sent him to the state university, Malcolm had consistently been receiving scholarships. His father, plus a scholarship, had helped him get an A.M. at Wisconsin, and other scholarships, plus instructing jobs, had helped him to his Ph.D. at Harvard. Then he had gone with a museum expedition to Polynesia and had written his paper on the knotting of fish nets, which tended to support certain theories on Polynesian migrations—a paper which gave Malcolm the beginning of his reputation. It seemed that social anthropology was not as crowded a field as it might have been. At least there were not so many brilliant social anthropologists who could get along with academic groups. As far as Charles could gather, besides having the requisite academic background it was also necessary to be assiduous and polite to the right people to achieve true anthropological success. Malcolm said that he had always been able to get on with heads of museums—it was a gift.

“Besides,” Malcolm said, “I get on with primitive people. Put me anywhere and I can make friends with them.”

Besides, Malcolm said, he was a good lecturer and he was good at raising money. They always liked him around when a money raiser was needed, even though he might be forgotten when they were passing around honorary degrees.

“Put me anywhere where there's money,” Malcolm said, “and I can dramatize myself,” and this was important, Malcolm said, if you wanted to get anywhere. He could tell good after-dinner stories about curare and shrunken heads in the Oriente, and besides, Malcolm said, he knew how to organize an expedition.

Charles was never tired of hearing about Malcolm's expeditions, though he sometimes thought if he were a rich man he would not finance one, and when he once told Malcolm so, Malcolm told him he was not the type. Malcolm said that most people who financed expeditions were frustrated and only wished to project their egos.

Charles preferred having Malcolm talk of his academic ambitions to listening to his ideas on love, but Malcolm frequently brought up the subject. As a rule, he said, he was too busy to think about love and he never approved of women on expeditions. Wives inevitably interfered with progress, and the women who did go along were a type it was hard to fall in love with. There was a time in central Africa when he had met the daughter of a British medical missionary, but it might be just as well to skip that; and once, when he was with the Persian nomads in Luristan, there was an archaeologist named Alvira Small, who wore shorts. He had always intended to look up Alvira in California sometime. There was also a girl in Kansas, but that was a long while ago. On the whole, women interfered with work, and there was seldom time to fall in love when you were always writing a report or getting organized for a trip. He could not understand why this had hit him all of a sudden, up there at the Lovells'.

“It happened late one afternoon in the wallpaper room,” Malcolm said. “She was standing by the fireplace. Abruptly it came over me.”

It was the room's fault, Malcolm said, that beautiful, frigid, restrained room, and then her lips and the way she narrowed her eyes when she smiled.

“And her figure,” Malcolm said.

Until that moment Malcolm had never been conscious of her figure, and Charles hoped he would leave it at that, but Malcolm did not. She was wearing a silk dress that was too long and badly cut and suddenly something reminded him of “The Road to Mandalay.”

“I don't know why the devil that dress made me think of an erotic dance in Burma,” Malcolm said. “It was the damnedest thing to think of in that restrained and sterile room.”

Charles wished that Malcolm would not go on with it, but Malcolm went right on.

“You know,” Malcolm said, “her figure's Balinesque. I don't know where she got it. I don't usually mentally undress women.”

That wasn't all, either, Malcolm said. She was so lonely, so unfulfilled, in front of that fireplace, so hopeless in that ugly dress. It all made him feel his own loneliness and that nothing he had done had amounted to anything and that until then he had never lived.

He had tried for several weeks, he said, to get Jessica out of his mind. He told himself that he did not like the Lovells. Mr. Lovell was frankly a desiccated stuffed shirt with an absurd approach to everything and Miss Lovell was a perfect tribal type, except that there were few virgins in primitive societies. He had tried, but he could not get Jessica out of his mind. He supposed it was love. He had once read half of Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
in the South Atlantic, but he had lost the book when he came down with malaria in Kenya. He had learned enough, however, to realize that Jessica's father was in love with her. He wanted to do something about Jessica. He wanted to save her. He supposed that this was love. The only thing to do, he supposed, was to tell her frankly how he felt, but he never could find an opportunity. She did not seem interested in what he was doing, and she never wanted to talk about herself. It never should have happened and it was destroying his perspective, but he supposed that it was love.

It was embarrassing for Charles to listen but at the same time it gave him a perverse satisfaction. He was relieved to discover that when he saw Jessica at the Players she talked about herself very often and frequently asked him what he had been doing lately. It was wonderful when she told him once that his necktie did not match his suit and nothing was more wonderful than when she told him once that she wished Malcolm Bryant would not always keep popping in and out of the house. She wished he would stop telling her about Africa and Borneo and would stop comparing everyone in Clyde to the head-hunters. Charles was very much relieved when she said she liked to be with someone of her own age for a change. There began to be something new about Jessica every time he saw her. He did not know enough that winter to suppose that it was love.

Charles met Jessica Lovell in the Dock Street Savings Bank unexpectedly one Saturday morning near the middle of April. He had asked Mr. Howell at Wright-Sherwin for permission to go there before the bank closed in order to cash his pay check and deposit a part of it, and Mr. Howell had told him that it would be all right if he would hurry.

Malcolm would probably have called the regular visits of citizens to the Dock Street Bank a ritual, similar to a primitive temple offering, and Charles would not have disagreed with him. At birth his Aunt Jane had presented him with a five-dollar deposit in a savings book, entered in beautiful Spencerian writing, and this was the beginning of his financial biography. Charles had been taught, not by his father but by the women in the family, that regular, persistent saving was essential for successful living.

Among his earliest memories was one of those little scenes so dear to bankers. His mother had led him up the steps of the Dock Street Bank, holding a small coin receptacle, supplied by the bank, in the shape of a barrel, upon which was written the slogan, “Put in a coin and you'll soon have a barrel of money.” Though he was scarcely tall enough to see over the dark walnut counter, he could remember being propelled gently forward by his mother and placing his barrel of money and his savings book in the hands of Mr. Gregg, the cashier, and watching Mr. Gregg open the barrel with a little key. Mr. Gregg always made some wise remark about thrift as he counted the nickels, dimes and pennies and he used to say that this was the way to make It grow but the slow growth of It was sometimes discouraging to Charles, even when he was conversant with the wonders of compound interest. He had learned what would happen if you left a small sum in the Dock Street Bank a hundred years undisturbed, in the care of its kindly officers. Every year you got four cents on a dollar and the four cents, too, would begin making money too if you left it long enough, but a hundred years was a long time. Mr. Gregg explained that the start was the slowest part of it but wait until Charles had a thousand dollars, then he would have forty dollars a year and think what a boy could do with forty dollars.

Now when Charles was twenty-four, his account had risen to a hundred and fifty dollars and the pages of his savings book told their own story of general self-denial and occasional indulgence. More through habit than through any faith in accumulating a large sum he was back again at the Dock Street Bank on that Saturday in April.

Mr. Gregg, now a frail, elderly man, was still behind the broad counter. There was still the old reassuring smell of oil and ink and ledgers, and still the same small pyramid of coin barrels that would give you a barrel of money. There were still the same rustle of paper and clink of coinage, and Mr. Thomas, also older, was still visible in the distance at his black walnut roll-top desk beyond the rows of bookkeepers; and beyond Mr. Thomas yawned the open doors of the Dock Street Savings Bank safe, an up-to-date addition, with its time lock and tumblers glittering in the light that came from the tall windows. Everyone in the space behind the counter seemed to move in his own stream of time, impervious to anything except geologic change.

Outside on Dock Street the pallid April sun had been dodging in and out behind low, wind-blown clouds. The trees were still bare and front yards and lawns were as brown and sodden as they had been when the winter's snow first melted. It was a gusty morning and the air had a reluctant touch of winter, but inside the bank there was a uniform climate. Charles had cashed his check and had just given Mr. Gregg five dollars and his deposit book when Jessica Lovell came in, and when Mr. Gregg saw her, he pushed his spectacles more securely on his nose.

“Good morning, Miss Lovell,” Mr. Gregg said. “I'll be with you in just a moment, and it
is
a good morning, isn't it?”

Jessica, too, was holding her savings book. Her cheeks were red and fresh from the April wind and she was wearing a short coat of gray wombat, a sensible, inexpensive fur, and one of her tight felt hats was pulled down close over her unruly hair.

“Hello, Charley,” she said, and she spoke in the low, serious tone which one always used in the Dock Street Bank. “Don't go. I'll be through with this in a minute. It's my Wright-Sherwin dividend. Father likes to have me bring it in myself.”

She was entirely at home, friendly and confiding, as she should have been, in the Dock Street Bank. Her voice, though it was low, carried pleasantly through the banking room and Mr. Thomas when he heard it rose from his roll-top desk and walked to the counter.