Point of No Return (44 page)

“Do you go around much in Clyde?” she asked.

“No, I'm pretty busy. I don't go around much,” Charles told her.

“Aren't you in a crowd?”

“What sort of a crowd?” Charles asked.

“Weenie roasts, or dances. That sort of thing,” Evangeline said. “You know. I wish you'd introduce me to your crowd.”

The last thing he wanted to do was to introduce Evangeline Scroll to anyone and he was glad when Malcolm Bryant interrupted them.

“Come on, Charley,” Malcolm said. “Bill Horsley wants to ask you a question. This isn't a time for sexual selection.”

“Now, Malc,” Evangeline said, “you told me he was mobile.”

That was the word, mobility, an awkward word. He could move either up or down, and when he thought of Jessica he could see that she could move nowhere at all. She must remain exactly where she was. If things had been slightly different, if he had not gone to college, it might have been Doris Wormser, and now the thought made him shudder. It was dangerous to have mobility, but at the same time if he had not possessed mobility nothing that had happened that afternoon would have happened.

It was after eleven when he left but it was a beautiful night and he did not want to go home at once. Nearly all of Clyde was sound asleep. There was a faint smell of lilacs in the air, although the lilacs were not in bloom. They always bloomed on Decoration Day. There was also a scent of new leaves and grass and a touch of salt from the sea. Spring in Clyde, the soft darkness of that starlit night, and the halo of the street lights with the May flies fluttering about them, were things that Malcolm Bryant and his team would never put in their cross-reference catalogues. There were still a few couples on the benches on the green by the courthouse and now and then a car would whirl by it, going you could not guess where. The last show at the movies was over. The last soda fountain had closed, but there were still lights in the pool parlor at Dock Square and there were lights in the firehouse. Its doors were open and a few men were sitting by the engine. Peter Murphy, who was on the police night shift, was standing in front of the darkened news store, staring up Dock Street.

“Hello, Mr. Murphy,” Charles said. “It's a nice night, isn't it?”

“Why, hello, Charley,” Mr. Murphy said. “What are you doing up this time of night? Are you in love?”

It was a beautiful night and he did not want to go to bed. Down on River Street, he could see the harbor lights and the light from the stars on the calm black water. The Wright-Sherwin plant was a grim black shadow on River Street, with the street light shining on its blind brick façade. A radio was blaring and a dog was barking, but when he walked up Dock Street and turned left to Johnson Street there was no sound except his own footsteps on the brick sidewalk. Johnson Street was sleeping in the starlight. The trees made black patches on the Lovells' lawn which hardly could be called shadows, but the fence and the house itself looked very white indeed, as he stood there for a minute looking at them. The night light was burning in his Aunt Jane's room on Gow Street. He had never felt the unity of Clyde as he felt it then. It all belonged to him that night, because he was in love with Jessica Lovell.

13

How About It, Charley?

The Wright-Sherwin Company was the oldest of the three or four small industries that furnished work for the inhabitants of Clyde and nearly everyone knew its history and origins, simply because they had always heard about them. Ezra Wright, who in 1795 had started a small brass-and-iron foundry on the river, must have been one of those ingenious artisans who could turn their hand to anything. He invented a new type of blacksmith bellows. He made certain improvements, too, on the Franklin stove, and for a time he made clocks and andirons, which were still in existence, but his main interest was in metals, especially brass. Then a newcomer to Clyde named Samuel Sherwin had purchased the company and had obtained valuable contracts during the Civil War, and it kept going in a modest way down through the turn of the century. In 1912 Mr. Francis Stanley, a modern entrepreneur more concerned with business methods and salesmanship than invention, came to Clyde and acquired the property, and he obtained several large subcontracts in World War I for the manufacture of precision instruments.

Thus Wright-Sherwin was a tidy, aggressive little company when Charles Gray worked there, with complicated inventories and a plant that was thoroughly new. Mr. Francis Stanley, though he made a good thing of it, had not drained the profits but had plowed most of them back into brick and mortar and modern machine tools. He hated to raise wages, but he was willing to pay generously when necessary for metallurgical designers and a sales-manager—and whatever one thought of Mr. Stanley, more than five hundred people were employed at Wright-Sherwin that Monday morning in May 1928 when Charles left Wright-Sherwin forever.

The plant always opened at eight and Charles could hear a pleasant humming sound when he walked up the granite steps of the administrative building. The clock on the wall opposite a cadaverous looking portrait of Ezra Wright showed that it was twenty minutes before nine and Daisy Glover, who ran the telephone switchboard, smiled at him and checked off his name when he pushed open the little gate that led to the offices. Typewriters were clattering in the sales and promotion departments and the safe in the accounting department was already open, and he noticed a smell of freshly scrubbed linoleum in the passageway between the ground-glass partitions.

The desks of the accounting department occupied a large room, the rear windows of which looked over the foundry roofs to the blue water of the river. By the time Charles opened the door of the little closet where he hung his coat, Jackie Mason had arrived and nearly all the girls as well. Though they were always called girls, they were all middle-aged except Lottie Barnes, the secretary, who had been a classmate of Charles's and had taken the business course at high school. On the other hand, Miss Rosa Follen, who handled the petty cash and all the data that came to the office, and Miss Winona Pearson had been school friends of Charles's mother before Esther Gray had gone to the Academy. Charles said good morning to them all in a gentle tone because Mr. Howell always kept the door of his small office open.

“Good morning, Jack,” Charles said, and he pulled back the chair of his own desk across the aisle from Jackie Mason.

“Hello, Charley,” Jackie said. “Where were you yesterday? I thought you were going over to the Meaders'.” Jackie Mason had been checking up on him lately and he wondered whether Jackie knew how much he had been seeing of Jessica. He even wondered why he had never spoken to Jack about Jessica, because technically Jack was still his best friend though for a long while he had not seen much of him. When Charles saw his yellow hair still moist from its careful morning brushing and his sedulously knotted tie with its unduly brilliant colors, he was so conscious of Jackie's limitations that he had a guilty feeling. They were growing away from each other and it was not Jackie's fault. Charles knew it was he who had changed in the last six months and not Jackie Mason. Jackie was a small-town boy. It was the first time Charles had used such a term about anyone, even in his thoughts, and it was ridiculous since he was a small-town boy himself, but there was something too aggressively brown about Jackie's suit, something about his manner that made Charles know all at once that they could never talk unreservedly again. Still he should have told Jackie on Sunday that he was going to leave Wright-Sherwin.

Charles opened the drawer of his desk and took out the inventory figures which he had been transferring to the Boston account book on Saturday morning. It seemed like a year ago that he had started checking the final list in Shed Three against receipts.

“I had to mow the lawn,” Charles said. “I couldn't get over to the Meaders'.”

“What are you doing Decoration Day?” Jackie asked. “The crowd is going down to the beach.”

Jackie meant, of course, that Jeffrey and Melville and Priscilla Meader and Sally Bolton and Olive Rowell and all the rest of them were going for a picnic on the beach.

“I don't know,” Charles said. “I will if I can make it.”

“You'd better come along,” Jackie said. “Don't be a stranger.” It was what the old crowd always said if you did not see enough of them. They had started saying it when he went to Dartmouth.

He should have told Jackie on Sunday that he was going to leave Wright-Sherwin, but actually, there was still time to change his mind about leaving. He had never before faced the fact that by saying a few words security could be irretrievably ended. He would be leaving Jackie Mason and the old crowd forever when he left Wright-Sherwin. He would see them but he would not be a part of them.

“Let's have lunch at the dog wagon,” Jackie said. He was referring to the new luncheon place across the street where the Wright-Sherwin office ate if they did not go home. He could tell Jackie then that he was going to leave Wright-Sherwin—but nothing would amount to anything until he had done what he had to do.

It was impossible to keep his mind on the inventory figures. Charles twisted in his swivel chair so that he could see Mr. Howell's room behind him. Mr. Howell was at his desk, unlocking the red leather general ledger, that contained all Wright-Sherwin's financial secrets. He had already put on his black alpaca coat and his green eyeshade, relics from bookkeeping days at Wright-Sherwin before Mr. Stanley had bought the company. Charles drew a deep breath, rose from his chair and walked down the aisle, even though he knew Mr. Howell did not like to be disturbed early in the morning.

Mr. Howell pushed up his eyeshade when he saw Charles and the green shade made Mr. Howell's gray hair rise in an untidy wave.

“Do you mind if I close the door, sir, for a minute?” Charles asked.

Mr. Howell straightened his bent shoulders and his pale lips tightened. If anyone closed the door it indicated, of course, that there would be some sort of trouble.

“What's happened now?” Mr. Howell said. “Don't just stand there looking at me.”

Charles just stood there because there was not an extra chair in Mr. Howell's office. If other people wanted to see Mr. Howell, they sent for him, and so there was no need for a chair.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Charles said, “that I want to leave, sir.”

Mr. Howell took off his steel-rimmed reading glasses.

“What's the matter?” he asked. “After I've been losing my patience teaching you and you're just getting to be useful you want to leave? Don't you like your job?”

“Yes, sir, I like it all right,” Charles said.

“Then, by godfrey,” Mr. Howell said, “why don't you use your head? You're in the best place in Clyde and you're doing all right. Why do you want to leave?”

“Because I don't think there's much future here, sir,” Charles said.

“Don't you?” Mr. Howell said. “What do you know about a future if you haven't got a past? How do you mean there isn't any future in Wright-Sherwin? Look at me. I've been here for forty years. I've got a house of my own and money in the bank.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said.

“And how did I get it? By sticking to one job and not changing. That's the way to get ahead. You want to get ahead, don't you?”

Charles had never thought that Mr. Howell would be sorry to have him go. Mr. Howell had never said a word to him about his work unless it was incorrect and each day he had made some acid remark about penmanship.

“I'm leaving because I want to get on.”

Mr. Howell closed his general ledger carefully.

“What in hades,” he said, “do you think I've been training you for? Do you think I'll live forever?”

Mr. Howell took his long-view spectacles from his waistcoat pocket and snapped open the case. It was a tremendous statement, because it was the same as saying that he was offering everything he cared for most. It was the same as saying that Charles could be the head of the accounting department someday. The unvarnished simplicity of it was what made it pathetic. Charles could see himself, his hair thinner, growing older, sitting at Mr. Howell's desk unlocking the red control ledger.

“I'm glad if you think I've done all right.”

“I didn't say you've done all right,” Mr. Howell said. “I said you might do all right. Now get out of here. It's nine-fifteen.”

“It isn't as though I were leaving you without anyone,” Charles said. “There's Jack Mason and he's just as good as I am. I'd like to leave in two weeks, and if it's all right I'd like tomorrow off.”

“Oh,” Mr. Howell said, “so you don't believe what I've been telling you, do you?”

“I didn't say I didn't believe you,” Charles began again, but he had to make it clear that he was going to leave.

When he was back at his desk he thought of himself for the first time as a possible asset or a piece of human material that could be sold at a price and it gave him a feeling of confidence. Mr. Howell emerged from his office a minute or two later and walked down the aisle between the desks and there was a quiver of excitement because it was obvious that Charles had done something to disturb him. When Charles heard that Mr. Stanley wanted to see him, he knew that he really must have been spoken of as a possible new head for the accounting department someday, but he also knew that nothing short of unforeseen accident would ever take him out of the accounting department if he was useful there.

Charles had only faced Mr. Stanley once in a brief interview when he had applied for work at Wright-Sherwin although they always had exchanged greetings when they met outside the office; but even this superficial acquaintance was enough to show Charles that Mr. Stanley carried on his shoulders the cloak of a larger world. Unlike most other Clyde businessmen, he attended out-of-town conventions and once or twice a year took trips about the country calling personally on his customers. Mr. Stanley was stout, bald, and wore rimless glasses. He had a plump face, hard and yet jovial, which was always to remind Charles of the photographs of successful executives which appeared on the
New York Times
financial page above the announcement of a large company's change in management. As he sat in his comfortable corner office, behind his leather-topped desk, surrounded by prints of sailing ships, Mr. Stanley looked deceptively approachable. He smiled and waved his hand at Charles as though they were old friends and, in the same gesture, waved to a green leather armchair beside his desk.