Point of No Return (52 page)

Charles grew familiar enough with those luncheons later. It had been his duty, especially just before the war, to look for promising material and to size up individuals as candidates for minor executive positions in the Stuyvesant Bank, just as Arthur Slade must have been doing then. The technique was always the same. The Stuyvesant at its executive level was very much like an exclusive club, requiring of a candidate certain definite standards for admission. You watched his hands as he held his knife and fork, the expression of his eyes when your glances met. As you listened to the inflections of his voice, you tried to think of his possible behavior under the strain of exasperation or temptation. Discretion, loyalty and trustworthiness were, of course, among those standards, but there were others less susceptible of definition, such as his attitude toward money. He could not have the businessman's greed or anxiety for profit if he was to be in the crowd. He could not covet money, but at the same time he must respect it in an impersonal way, as an astronomer might think of light-years in interstellar space. It was hard to tell, even after long acquaintance, whether someone would fit into the Stuyvesant, but the method of selection was always the same.

“Have you ever thought,” Arthur Slade had asked him, “of working in New York?”

Later Charles knew the technique perfectly, because afterward he had been in the position of both the watcher and the watched. In later years, just before and just after the war, he was used to being asked to lunch by someone from the City or the Chase or some other bank, and there was always that aimless conversation about how busy one was, what one did on Sunday, the Securities and Exchange Commission, anything at all. Then, if everything went well, just at the end of lunch there was always that question. Had he ever thought of moving over to some larger bank like the Chase, or whatever bank it might be, where there was a real future? Frankly, without mentioning names, a lot of the crowd had been talking him over. He was just the material that they wanted. Of course, if he was happy where he was, think no more about it, but at the same time, this was a real chance and it was not offered to everyone. They were not advertising in the papers; they wanted a particular man named Charley Gray and, if he wanted, he could write his ticket. He had better think it over.

He was used to those offers and they always made him happy and he always knew what to say. The Stuyvesant was a small bank, but he was used to it. He knew the office politics. He wouldn't know his way around anywhere else, and of course they wanted him because he was not available. You always wanted someone who was doing well and who was loyal to his crowd.

Had he ever thought of working in New York? He must have told more about himself to Arthur Slade than he could remember and perhaps that glimpse of his father had rounded the impression—but there was no appeal at all in the idea of going to New York.

“No, I haven't thought of it,” he said. “I like it pretty well where I am, but thanks ever so much for the lunch. I've had a very good time.”

“Well,” he remembered that Arthur Slade answered, “if you should be in New York, stop and look me up. Just tell Joe inside the door you want to see me.”

His father was keeping a seat for him in the smoking car of the five-twenty. He had evidently been shopping after the market had closed because there were a few carefully wrapped packages on the rack above his head.

“I happened to see two silver gravy boats in an antique shop,” he said. “Your mother has always wanted a pair, and then I saw a small radio. Who was that Mr. Slade you were having luncheon with, Charley?”

“He came to see Mr. Rush about something,” Charles said. “He comes from New York.”

“Of course he comes from New York. Anyone can see he does. You know, if things would quiet down a little, Charles, and if you could get away for a day or two, we ought to go down to New York. There's nothing like the night boat—a good dinner and a quiet sleep and there you are. He was a banker, wasn't he?”

“How did you know that?” Charles asked.

“Because they're as easy to tell as clergymen. They have a slightly antiseptic, sanctimonious look, and yet they don't look like lawyers.”

“How did things work out today, Father?” Charles asked.

John Gray tilted his hat away from his forehead.

“Oh,” he said, “everything went very well.”

The smoking car of the five-twenty was an old car with uncomfortable seats and painfully creaking woodwork, and its worn wheels made it sway on the rails with a rhythm of its own. Three million share days and the Parker House and especially Arthur Slade had nothing to do with the stale tobacco smoke and the pitch players and the elderly brakeman who was always watching the card games.

“If we only had a good car and a chauffeur,” his father said, “I don't see why he couldn't drive us back to Clyde in good weather.”

“We haven't got a car or chauffeur,” Charles said.

“I didn't say we had,” his father said. “I was just saying we might get one. Charley, you're looking rather tired.” His father was looking at him not impersonally, as he did so often, but in a kindly, interested way. “If I were you I wouldn't push too hard.”

“How do you mean?” Charles asked.

“It doesn't pay. It isn't worth it,” his father said. “You can't beat the system that way, Charley.” Sooner or later John Gray's mind was always back there.

“You can't beat it your way either,” Charles said. “I hope you're being careful.”

His father laughed and slapped him on the knee.

“As careful as a banker,” he said. “I'm as sound as Electric Bond and Share.”

It was strange to think how little seemed unusual in those days, perhaps because nothing seems peculiar in any present. Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic. Human flies were scaling the exteriors of office buildings. Flagpole sitters were perched on their poles like Simeon Stylites, and marathon dancers were fainting in the clinches. They were all phenomena which one could accept. Nothing was ever very peculiar at the moment when it happened.

Charles was not particularly surprised, for instance, at an extraordinary episode that occurred one Sunday at church, shortly after he had met Arthur Slade; or if he was surprised at least it was appropriate to the contemporary scene. For years he had gone to the Unitarian Church with his mother and Dorothea. It was a habit of childhood, something which was expected of him and a part of Sunday, but his father seldom went with them. His father always said that church was a very good thing and that he approved of it entirely. He would have been glad to go to church if it had not been for Mr. Crewe. It might be all right for Esther and Dorothea and for Charles to listen to Mr. Crewe, but it always gave him an unholy reaction. He did not want to have Mr. Crewe telling him how to be good in a Unitarian way. He was not at all sure that Mr. Crewe knew much about goodness, because Mr. Crewe did not know anything about badness. He was not able to visualize the powers of evil.

Besides, he used to say, what was Unitarianism? He was in no position, not for a minute, to embark on a theological discussion or to criticize the tenets of a religion embraced by Emerson, Channing, and Samuel McChord Crothers. As a religion it was an obvious and enlightened outgrowth of the New England Congregationalist faith which had attracted his ancestors to these shores. He was willing to admit, too, that his own father had been a Unitarian and so had the Marchbys. He had been to Sunday School himself in the room behind the organ loft, and he had been married in the church. He realized also that a belief in the brotherhood of man and in the general progress of mankind, onward and upward forever, was a stabilizing influence, good for him and for everybody else, particularly for the children. He would have been glad to consider this mild dogma every Sunday and even listen to the asthmatic sound of the organ and to swelter with cold feet beside the hot-air stove in winter if it had not been necessary to have Mr. Crewe tell him about it. He simply could not follow Mr. Crewe's train of thought and instead of trying to follow it he found himself thinking instead of all sorts of things that had nothing to do with church or the possibilities of immortality. The best thing about Unitarianism was that there was no compulsion about attending its services—none at least for him. When it came to Charles and Dorothea it was different. If their mother wanted them to go to church, they had better go.

When John Gray came down to breakfast that Sunday morning, he was wearing a new double-breasted suit.

“I think it looks rather well, don't you, Esther?” he said. “Why are you looking at me in that critical way, Charles? Is there anything wrong with it?”

There was nothing wrong with it except that its impeccable newness and the careful tailoring of the coat gave his father the disconcertingly streamlined appearance of a figure in a fashion plate.

“Why, John,” Esther Gray said, “you didn't tell me you'd bought a new suit. You look as though you'd stepped out of something.”

“It's a surprise,” John Gray said. “A new leaf, Esther.”

“You're not going to church with us, are you?” Dorothea asked.

“I don't see why I shouldn't,” John Gray answered. “It's been in the back of my mind.” He sat down and stirred his coffee slowly. “It just occurred to me that a morning in church might do me good. You never can tell till you try.”

“But, John,” Esther Gray began, and her forehead wrinkled. “Why did it come over you this morning?”

“I'm sure I don't know why, Esther,” John Gray said. “It must be some sort of compulsion.”

“John,” she asked, “why are you going?”

Charles could understand his mother's uneasiness. There was something unstable and bizarre about the morning.

“I'm sure I don't know,” his father said again. “Let's say I have a new sense of spiritual responsibility this morning that demands direct action. After all, why shouldn't I go to church? I do believe in the institution, Esther.”

It would have been like any other Sunday if John Gray had not been with them. The church was a hundred years old, a beautiful church, and its white woodwork with the delicate moldings, consciously devoid of all clerical richness, gave a sense of repressed peace and of serene plainness that must have been a part of an older, Puritanical tradition. The bell was ringing but Charles was more conscious of its vibrations than of its sound, which only accentuated the stillness and the cool, white light that came through the tall, plain windows. There were not more than fifty persons in the box pews, distributed unevenly, with large areas of unoccupied space between them. The church had been built for a larger congregation but its very vacancy added to his general sense of peace. He found himself thinking, as he had as a boy, of invisible presences in the vacant gallery and in the empty pews. The past and the present always seemed to meet when the bell was ringing.

A spareness and a graceful restraint in all its detail, which reflected the old, deliberate attempt of its builders to eradicate any hint of papacy, gave the building its own peculiar sense of freedom and gave to Charles a feeling of personal loneliness that somehow was not disturbing. He always seemed to be drawn inside himself in those first silent moments, and his mother and Dorothea and his father were like strangers to him, cloaked in a sudden aloofness. The Meaders, three pews in front, and the Masons, to the right, and Mr. and Mrs. Howell, just below the tall white pulpit with its double winding stairs, did not look like weekday people. Though they were together, they were all alone with their thoughts. Mr. Crewe had climbed the stairs to the pulpit and now he stood, a small figure, high above them.

“Let us unite in singing,” he was saying in his reedy voice, and the service began, an unadorned, rational service which had little beauty except in its plainness and which relied on little else to bring conviction.

“When two or three are gathered together,” Mr. Crewe was saying, and Charles glanced at his father, still incredulous that he was there. Later he heard his father repeating the Lord's Prayer, in a voice which seemed to him unduly loud, and when they came to the responsive reading he was conscious again of his father's voice, more deliberate than the other voices, not to be hastened by others' haste. He saw Dorothea glance up nervously from her book. His father was enjoying the words of the Psalms for their own sake and he clearly did not care how rapidly others might slur over them. In church, as everywhere else, he was unwilling to conform and this did not disturb him in the least. He was reading the Psalm the way he wished it read and not the way the Masons or the Meaders or anyone else cared to read it.

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

His father spoke the last words, serenely and unabashed, long after everyone else had finished, and Charles knew that everyone there would speak of it later.

“Dear me,” Charles heard him whisper as they sat down, “how they mumble.”

When it was time for the offering, the organ in the loft played wheezily while Mr. Howell, Mr. Meader and Mr. Blashfield walked to the table in front of the pulpit. Each of them picked up a wooden contribution box, holding it gingerly by its long handle, and each walked down the aisle with self-conscious precision, their shoes and the boards beneath them both creaking. There was the usual furtive rustling sound above the music. His mother and Dorothea were opening their purses and he saw his father draw a wallet from inside his new double-breasted coat. It was a pigskin billfold, aggressively new, and his father flipped it open carelessly. Mr. Blashfield, conscientious and perspiring slightly, halted at the pew and pushed the box impersonally in their direction. Then Charles saw Mr. Blashfield's back stiffen. His father had taken a bill from his wallet and had dropped it in the contribution box. It was a hundred-dollar gold treasury note. Then he leaned back, gazing upward at the American flag and the service flag which hung suspended from the balcony. Mr. Blashfield paused uncertainly before he took the box away and at the same time Charles heard his mother draw a sharp, indignant breath. In a little while, perhaps even before the sermon was over, everyone would know about the hundred-dollar bill.