Point of No Return (51 page)

Then, just before Charles reached the door, his father called him back. He had settled himself comfortably in his Morris chair, with one knee crossed over the other, and everything he had said seemed to have been erased already. The magnificence of his thoughts made him look like a New York customer of E. P. Rush & Company. He looked richer than Mr. Thomas at the bank and more distinguished than Mr. Laurence Lovell.

“Charles,” he said, “I've just thought of another quotation, which won't ever appear in a gnomologia. You'll like this one. ‘Everybody's doing it now.'”

Charles must have known that morning that his aunt's legacy was as good as gone. There was no use going to anyone for advice and it was pointless to tell his mother and Dorothea what he knew. He walked out of the front door and stared for a long while at Spruce Street, at the elms with their leaves drooping in the summer heat, and at the heat waves shimmering on the shingles of the Masons' roof. While he stood there at the front yard gate, he conceived a fear and contempt for certain aspects of finance, but it was a respectful contempt. He was afraid of money and he never lost that fear, and it was not a bad attitude, either, if you had to deal with investments—caution and contempt held together by respect. He was thinking of his mother and Dorothea in the house. He was trying, for the first time in his life, to cut a loss. He was thinking of the five thousand dollars his aunt had left him, an immense sum in one way and so insignificant in another, and someone had to do something. At least he was sure that he knew when to stop.

That was his only reason for playing the stock market that next year, a desperate and feeble reason. Circumstances forced him and he did it without satisfaction, as though he were engaged in a secret vice. It was interesting, sometimes, to imagine what would have happened to his mother and indirectly to Dorothea if he had not, or if he had not known when to stop, but it was hardly worth the time. Nothing could have altered what happened in Clyde, though he did not know it then.

17

If You Can Dream—and Not Make Dreams Your Master …

—
RUDYARD KIPLING

Nearly everyone in Rush & Company was in the market and it may have been just as well that he was in it too, for it afforded a common ground on which to meet all those others who had come there to learn what was called finance. It was an era of apprenticeship, when most people preferred to pick up their knowledge by firsthand experience, backed only, perhaps, by a course in Economics I at Harvard. Finance still had the aura of a gentleman's profession, particularly in Boston. All those young men in Rush & Company, whom Charles knew and whose manners he studied so carefully once, were there because gentlemen handled the broader aspects of money. They did not count it or set it down in figures as the tellers did and the book-keepers, who, whatever their abilities, could only by the most outside accident rise out of these departments to compete with the young men in the open spaces. In military terms, these latter were the officer class, who might be partners and bank officers some day.

They were a class not trained to realities and they were not, he often thought, well fitted to cope with the depression. The early thirties made gaps in their ranks, as though they had been hit by round shot and canister, and he still knew the crippled casualties of those days, the limpers, the spiritually legless and the armless. The truth was that finance, using that inclusive term for partners, bond salesmen, and bank presidents, was not entirely a gentleman's game, though it demanded as a rule the code of ethics and morality associated with a gentleman. However, all the temptations and spiritual stresses and strains which came later with the depression were negligible when Charles worked in E. P. Rush & Company with what Lawrence Stoker, the head of the bond department, called the Team.

Football men and crew men were somehow the most desirable material at E. P. Rush & Company and it seemed to Charles that all of the team came from what were known as final clubs at Harvard. He only learned these facts gradually but later he realized that they were important in a business way and he faced them without rancor. He had nothing in common with the team, except the market and the routine of the office, but he was sufficiently one of them so that he might listen when they talked to each other and about each other. His position on the team reminded him of the story of the man who maintained that the Harvard crew was democratic because after three years everyone in the boat spoke to him except number seven.

They were nice—the boys on the team at E. P. Rush—and they seemed to accept cheerfully the fact that he had to be more ambitious and brighter than the rest of them, much as Charles himself had accepted the same thing with a Chinese or a Japanese student in a college class. They even seemed pleased that he was getting on. There was none of that sense of competition and knifing in the back that he was to know later. They were nice boys and they began calling him by his first name—after a decent period.

Although he looked like most of the team, he knew that he would always stand out from them, and it had been just as well, even in E. P. Rush. He was not too different from the rest to have that difference disturbing, but he was different enough sometimes to be noticed. If he had not been a little apart, Arthur Slade would never have noticed him that time when Mr. Slade came on some errand from New York, and he told Charles so long afterwards.

“I saw you right away,” he said, “and I said to myself, how did he ever get in here? But I said it in a very nice way. I wondered if you could be a Yale man, but that could not have been possible in E. P. Rush. It explained everything when you said you came from Dartmouth.”

There was every reason to remember his first meeting with Arthur Slade, for had it not occurred he might never have gone to New York. Certainly he would never have been given his chance in the Stuyvesant Bank at the time when banks were firing instead of hiring. There would have been no Nancy, no children, no house in Sycamore Park. Instead, he might have stayed on in Rush & Company and married some girl in the Newtons, perhaps, and have been living now in one of those tapestry-brick Colonials, forgotten by people like E. P. Rush partners after business hours. Finally he would have been like all those other useful Boston wheel horses who knew the business like the palms of their hands and came through in a pinch and who disappeared daily behind a curtain of suburban life. He would have been Charley Gray, an agreeable and reliable person, whom you could trust to do anything. Mr. Rush would have invited him to his lunch club now and then, but never in the world would he have become a member. It would have been a pity that he did not have quite the background or connections to have made him partnership material. There was every reason why he should have remembered every detail of his meeting with Arthur Slade.

Charles's desk was about midway in the center of the open office and one September morning when he was reading market letters he heard Mr. Rush speaking, but he did not look up.

“It will only be what you've seen already,” Mr. Rush was saying. He had brought a stranger with him to the investment advisory department.

“Oh, Gray,” Mr. Rush called. “Mr. Slade wants to see everything we have on—” and he gave the name of that foreign stock which later was to make so many people poorer. “Gray will get you everything, and you can read it here if you want to.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said, and he hurried to the files for the folders.

“I think there are a few rather frank office notes on it,” Mr. Rush said. “Go ahead and read them, but don't quote us.”

Mr. Rush walked away, leaving the stranger from New York. Mr. Slade must have come in from New York on the “Owl” but he did not show it. He was, of course, an imitation of Tony Burton, like everyone else in the Stuyvesant Bank. His dark hair, appropriately gray at the temples, was closely clipped, like Tony Burton's. His dark gray flannel suit had the style of Tony Burton's tailor. His face had Tony Burton's authoritative alertness. His whole appearance was like that song parody which Charles wrote later about walking and talking and dressing like Tony Burton. The Stuyvesant Bank was printed on Arthur Slade, indelibly, magnificently, an imprint distinguishable from anything in Boston.

“Wouldn't you like to use my desk, sir?” Charles asked.

“Oh no,” the stranger said. “Go on with what you're doing,” and he sat beside the desk reading, while Charles went back to the market letters. Mr. Slade did not speak again for three quarters of an hour.

“Dear me,” he said, when he had finished, and Charles saw he was holding a memorandum in Mr. Rush's handwriting, “you certainly have a personalized investment service.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles answered.

“Well,” Mr. Slade said, “I'm much obliged to you. You'd better put that away and lock it up.” He was smiling and Charles did not like the suggestion because it somehow seemed to reflect on Rush & Company.

“You know I was told to show it to you,” Charles said.

“I know you were,” Mr. Slade answered, “but I hope you won't leave it around.”

“We don't leave things around here much,” Charles said, and he sat up straighter because he was a member of the team.

“It's about time for lunch, isn't it?” Mr. Slade said. “How about your coming over with me to the Parker House?”

Arthur Slade must have been curious about Rush & Company, because he asked a good many questions, Charles remembered, and Charles answered them as he should have, politely and loyally. When Arthur Slade asked him about himself, he told him that he lived at Clyde, and Mr. Slade had never heard of Clyde.

“I suppose you're in this market like everyone else,” Arthur Slade said.

“Yes,” Charles answered. “It's all a question of when to stop, isn't it?”

He said that the market did not interest him as it did his father, and he began talking to Arthur Slade about his father, a safe subject because Arthur Slade would never meet him. Perhaps he spoke with the clumsy confidence of anyone his age, but whenever he thought of that lunch at the Parker House, he was never entirely sure that he had been clumsy. There was no reason to show himself in any sort of light or to strive to make a good impression, and besides he did not feel like a callow young man from Rush & Company.

“There's no such thing as unbiased advice from an investment house that markets securities,” Arthur Slade had said. “It's a little like selling patent medicine that can be used externally and internally, for baldness, dandruff, muscular pains, and stomach-ache. Now in this investment advisory thing of yours, doesn't Rush recommend its own securities? Of course it does. It can't help it. All bond houses recommend Telephone and Tobacco B and General Electric and some railroad bonds and then they slip something of their own into the package.”

It was true, of course, but Charles was loyal to Rush & Company.

“If you believe in what you're selling,” he said, “why shouldn't you recommend it?”

“Now, it's different in a bank trust department. We haven't got anything to sell.” Arthur Slade took a thin gold cigarette case from his pocket and opened it and laid it on the table.

“Don't you ever get stuck with anything in a bank?” Charles asked.

“Not usually,” Arthur Slade said, and he smiled. “Not in our bank. Did you ever think of working in a bank?”

Charles shook his head. “No, I've got too much else to think about where I am.”

It never crossed his mind that Arthur Slade might be offering him a job. As he looked about that solid, conventional room, the face of Arthur Slade stood out from all the other faces and Charles wished that he could ever manage to be like him. There was irony in the recollection, but a pleasant sort of irony for there at the Parker House it was like seeing himself mirrored in the future. He was not so far now from being like Arthur Slade, though without his money and without his game of tennis and without his place on Long Island, but he, too, could dress and talk like Tony Burton. Perhaps you always picked a hero when you were in your twenties, and Arthur Slade was the best trust officer he had ever known. Yet back there at the Parker House, Arthur Slade was still an impeccable stranger from New York, whom he would never see again, and lunch was nearly over, like all those other workday luncheons which he was to know so well later. It was time to get back to Rush & Company. No one liked it if you stayed too long for lunch.

“Some people think that banking's dull,” Arthur Slade was saying, “but I've never found it dull. It's a matter of perspective. There's only one trouble about it.” He stopped and lit a cigarette. “You get pressed from the bottom and the top. Something always hems you in.”

As Arthur Slade was speaking, Charles saw his father walking toward them between the tables, with his hair and his mustache freshly clipped, and Charles's attention wandered.

“Oh,” he said, “there's my father.”

“Where?” Mr. Slade asked, but his father was already at the table and they both stood up. John Gray smelled pleasantly of bay rum and he was smoking a cigar. He remembered Arthur Slade's smile as they shook hands and he had that fear one always had about one's parents—that his father might say something startling or out of place.

“Won't you sit down and have coffee with us?” Mr. Slade asked.

“That's very kind of you,” John Gray answered, “but I'd better be getting back to work. Perhaps I'll see you on the five-twenty, Charley.”

John Gray smiled and nodded and walked away. He had said nothing significant, but Charles was always glad that Arthur Slade had met his father.

“He looks happy,” Arthur Slade said.

“Yes,” Charles answered. “Father is usually happy.”

“It's curious how few people are,” Arthur Slade said. “Have you ever thought of working in New York?”