Point of No Return (56 page)

This was what everyone must have been saying and Charles did not mind whatever repercussions he sensed of it because he was almost sure it was all said in a kindly, friendly way. Those rumors about himself and Jessica Lovell gave everyone a vicarious sort of satisfaction for it looked as though Jessica might marry a Clyde boy who did not live on Johnson Street and Mr. Lovell, in spite of all his talk about the Lovells and Clyde, thought the Lovells were too good for Clyde.

No one could say anything definite. The Grays had not been asked to the Lovells' for a meal and Laurence Lovell and Miss Georgianna had not been to call on the Grays, but then Clyde was never a hospitable place. However, when his mother finally asked her, Jessica Lovell did go to supper at Spruce Street, in spite of implications, and there was nothing Mr. Lovell could have done to prevent it.

Charles had somehow been reluctant to talk things over with his mother because he had felt that she knew enough of what was happening without his having to explain it. She knew that he and Jessica were always calling each other up and she knew how often he went to see her, and she had seen the marble Pliny doves on his bureau and the photograph of Adam from the Sistine Chapel and later a pair of silver-backed military brushes. He had told his mother immediately when she asked about the brushes that Jessica had given them to him and his mother had said they were perfectly lovely brushes and that Jessica had very good taste. A curious sort of pride had prevented his saying anything more to anyone until it could be more definite, but one December evening when he came home from Rush & Company, his mother and Dorothea were waiting in the parlor and something in their expressions told him that they were waiting for him particularly.

“Where's Father?” he asked, because his father had not gone into Boston.

“Just where he always is—upstairs reading the papers,” Dorothea said.

“You can see him later, dear,” his mother said. “Why don't you just sit down and talk to us?”

“Is anything the matter?” Charles asked. His mother and Dorothea exchanged a meaning glance.

“I don't know why you're so nervous lately, dear. Why should anything be the matter? Dorothea and I just like to visit, now that we don't have to get supper. It's awfully queer to sit here in the afternoon and have Axel and Hulda doing everything. Did Axel press your other suit nicely, Charley?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “Axel's all right.”

“I can't get used to having a man in the house in the daytime,” his mother said, “and Dorothea was just saying Axel's lazy. He makes Hulda do his work and he sits in his room all afternoon reading True Love Stories.”

“
True Love Stories?
” Charles repeated.

“Yes,” Dorothea said. “There are such things as true love stories, in case you haven't realized it.”

“Well,” Charles said, “you ought to know. Where's Elbridge?”

“You ought to know, too, and never mind about Elbridge.”

“Charley”—his mother smiled at him very sweetly—“Dorothea and I have just thought of something that we think might be nice. Don't you think now that we have the couple, Charley, it might be nice to ask Jessica Lovell for supper on Saturday?” The expectant way they watched him explained the uneasiness he had felt the moment he entered the parlor.

“I don't see any particular reason for it,” he said. “Why should you suddenly ask her to supper?”

“But she's never been inside the house, dear, after all this time.”

“After all what time?” Charles asked.

“Oh, Charley,” his mother said, and she looked hurt.

“We know about these things better than you,” Dorothea said. “It looks queer not having her. Don't you know that everybody's talking?”

“If anybody so much as looks at a girl around here,” Charles said, “everybody starts talking.”

“Now, really, Charley,” Dorothea said, “have you only just been looking at Jessica Lovell?”

Charles felt his face grow beet-red.

“Oh, Charley”—his mother still looked hurt—“don't you see it looks as though you were ashamed of us? You're not ashamed, are you, Charley?”

“I didn't say I was ashamed of anyone,” Charles said. “I just don't see any reason to underline things.”

“Charley, dear,” his mother said, “there's nothing to be so upset about. We all think she's a very nice girl and we're all very happy about it.”

“I'm not upset about anything at all, Mother,” Charles began. “I only think—”

“Then don't you think, dear”—she was speaking in a soothing tone she had used when he was much younger—“that it would be nice to have her for supper on Saturday night, just so we could all see each other? I'd love to ask her myself.”

Charles shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, all right,” he said, “if you have to have her, if you all want to look at her, why go ahead and ask her.” He did not mean to sound ungracious but he hated to think how it would be, with the family knowing everything and yet not saying anything.

As a matter of fact, it was not nearly as bad as it might have been. Everyone tried to behave as though it were the most natural thing in the world for Jessica Lovell to come to supper. The new silver candlesticks and a new Canton china dinner set were on the table—his father loved Canton china—but there was no reason for Jessica to have thought that a special effort was being made. In fact, it was almost like a family meal—just the family, Esther Gray had told Jessica over the telephone, just a family supper.

The worst of it was waiting for Jessica. Elbridge Sterne was there, just to even out things, as Dorothea said, and everyone gathered in the front parlor, which looked very well with its fresh curtains and with the new furniture from Gow Street. Everyone tried to talk about ordinary things, but his mother and Dorothea, in their dresses from Hollander's in Boston, kept moving about straightening ornaments or going out to the dining room to take a last look at the table. Elbridge Sterne was kind to him, almost like an elder brother. His father had a bland, noncommittal look.

“I'm sure Jessica won't mind if Axel brings in the cocktails,” John Gray said, and then he went into the hall and called loudly. “Oh, Axel.” He always loved to call to Axel, and Axel and Hulda were always saying what a fine gentleman Mr. Gray was. John Gray seated himself on one of the Martha Washington chairs from Gow Street and examined complacently his new shoes which had been made to order in London.

“I've just been rereading Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis” he said. “Have you ever read it, Elbridge?”

“No,” Elbridge answered. “What's Atlantis?”

“Oh, dear me,” John Gray said. “That's another hiatus in a Kansas education, Elbridge. I know they only teach useful things in Kansas and Atlantis is perfectly useless—a mythological concept based on a geological fact. A body of land somewhere near the mouth of the Mediterranean actually did sink beneath the sea in the tertiary epoch and the rumor is that it was the cradle of civilization with beautiful cities and palaces, a dream world, perhaps the basis for the universal flood legend. Oh, here come the cocktails. Thank you, Axel.”

“Now, Father,” Dorothea said, “there's no reason to give us a free lecture. Why should Elbridge know anything about Atlantis?”

“I don't see why I shouldn't give one while we're waiting, Dorothea,” John Gray said, “and it's very good for Elbridge, and Charles too. Ignatius Donnelly, though brilliant, is doubtless inaccurate, but think of Atlantis, the cradle of beauty and wisdom, and then a slight quiver of the earth's crust and then in comes the sea. Only the Azores are left, according to Mr. Donnelly. You know, I don't see why we shouldn't go to the Azores sometime. They have wild canaries in the Azores.”

The doorbell rang.

“It must be Jessica,” John Gray said. “You'd better let her in, Charley.”

Her cheeks were glowing from the cold and she spoke a little breathlessly, saying she hoped she was not late. She must have been hoping, too, that she did not look nervous and that everyone would like her. She wore a new green dress, and he wished she had not walked into the parlor as though she were going to a formal dinner, but actually everything went very well. At first, Charles had a sinking feeling, but when she stood beside him in the parlor he suddenly felt proud and happy and glad that she had come.

“Would you like a Martini, Jessica?” John Gray said. “We were just talking about Atlantis.”

“Oh,” Jessica said, “the book about the lost continent?”

“Yes, Jessica,” John Gray said. “I always keep it beside the
Origin of Species
and
The Voyage of the Beagle
. Atlantis is really a state of mind. Everybody is always on his own Atlantis sometime. We must learn to jump when the earth shakes. I suppose Charley talks to you about states of mind.”

Jessica shook her head, the way she did when her hair blew across her forehead.

“I wish he would talk about Atlantis instead,” she answered.

“Well,” John Gray said, “here's to Atlantis, Jessica.”

It was just as though he had said, Here's to Jessica and Charles. Everyone knew that they belonged to each other, as they stood side by side in the parlor.

“What is it, Axel?” his mother said. Axel was standing silent in the doorway to the dining room. She never could get entirely used to Axel's announcing supper.

It was something he would always remember, the dining room and everyone around the table. There was an irony to his father's having mentioned Atlantis, for the waves were to flow over all of that era and it was buried long ago, fathoms deep—but echoes of it were still with him, like the church bell that rang beneath the sea.

“Your father and I don't see as much of each other as we ought to, Jessica,” his father said, as he carved the leg of lamb, “but we know each other very well. Did he ever tell you that we studied together for our entrance examinations before we went to Harvard? I was a very bad boy. I didn't last there long.”

Then he was telling what things had been like in those days and about his sisters and the Judge.

“Esther, do you remember the first time I ever called on you? I'd just been excused from Harvard.”

“I don't know why you should think of that now,” Esther Gray said.

“It just passed through my mind,” John Gray said. “If I hadn't come to call, if I hadn't quoted Shakespeare—” He stopped and looked at the carving knife. “Do you know what I wish?” He stopped, but no one answered. “I wish Sam were here.”

It must have been years since his father had mentioned Sam and it was strange that he should have spoken of him with Jessica there.

“Charley has told me about him,” she said. “Do you remember that time you told me about making whistles, Charley?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “I never could make one, could I?”

“When did you two try to make whistles?” Dorothea asked, and Jessica laughed.

“Oh, that was a long time ago,” she said. “Well, it was only last April, but it seems like a long time ago.”

When he walked home with her, she said she loved the family. She loved his mother; she was so pretty and she seemed to be so happy. The whole place was so alive, she said, and she liked the way he and Dorothea kept arguing, without ever really getting angry. He would never know, she said, how lonely it was to be an only child. She liked Elbridge Steme, too, though he had not said much.

“No one says much,” Charles told her, “when Father starts talking.”

“I hope he likes me,” Jessica said. “Charley, do you think he does?”

“Didn't you see him showing off?” he said. “Of course he likes you.”

“Darling,” she said, “it seemed so, well, so ominous when I was standing ringing the bell, and now I'm awfully glad. I feel just the way I ought to feel,” and then she sighed.

The wind was waving the bare branches of the elms in front of the Lovell house. Though it was late in December there was no snow on the ground yet, but the air felt like snow.

“Father's got to get used to it,” she said, but it seemed to make no difference then whether Mr. Lovell was used to it or not. Jessica had gone to Spruce Street and though the Lovells did not ask Charles to dinner, Miss Lovell, a week later, asked his mother and Dorothea to tea.

Memories of that winter in Clyde had little or none of the continuity of his recollections of former winters. There was not the usual sensation of endlessness or the interminable waiting between the melting of the snow and spring. December and January were considered possible in Clyde but as long as Charles could remember he had heard people say each winter, as though it were a new thought, that February and March were the worst months in the year. He had always felt this monotony in his school days and in his days at Wright-Sherwin, but those early weeks of 1929 possessed a staccato quality which he had never experienced before or since. They had the rhythm and the irregularity of dots and dashes in a telegraphic code—a dot for the fenced-off desks at Rush & Company, another dot for the board room and for Mr. Rush taking off his arctics, a dash for hurried, furtive luncheons with Jessica when she came to Boston, a break in the cadence and two quick dots for Spruce Street.

Early in January, John Gray had said that he could see no earthly reason why they should congeal slowly in Clyde if it was not necessary. February and March were the hardest months and at least they could get away for a week or two. He could put things in shape and leave them for that long. Winter in Clyde did something to people's faces, particularly to women's. Charles could stay, he had to since he was following his bundle of hay at Rush & Company. Axel and Hulda could look after him, but his mother needed a rest and so did Dorothea.

By the middle of the month he was reading the travel folders, usually aloud, and the rich, glowing texture of their language kept setting his mind off on cruises of its own. They would sail to the Caribbean on one of those ships which was your hotel while you were in port, and it had better be an English ship because the English knew how to do things properly and English crews did not rush to the boats first when there was an accident. They stood at attention and sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee”—not that any ship would sink, not on a voyage of enchantment to the dreamlike Windward and Leeward Islands, to dark Haiti with its brooding citadel, to Yucatan with its Mayan ruins, to Cartagena, a topaz in a setting of old Spain, or to quaint, neat, varicolored Curaçao, a bit of old Holland, adrift, but charmingly, on a turquoise sea. What ho, for the Spanish Main, with its memories of pirates and buccaneers, its century-old frowning ramparts and cathedrals, its islets like emeralds surrounded by reefs of purple coral. Esther needed a change and so did Dorothea. They all needed to get out of themselves, and there was no reason why they shouldn't, for a week or two.