Point of No Return (7 page)

“What?” said Malcolm. “Didn't you marry Jessica?”

“No,” Charles said. It seemed to him that the tellers were unreasonably slow.

“How's Clyde?” Malcolm asked.

“I don't know, Malcolm,” Charles said, and, though it was the truth, the bareness of his answer made him feel uneasy.

“Aren't your family still living there?”

“My father's dead,” Charles said. “My mother's living with Dorothea in Kansas City.”

“Oh,” said Malcolm, “so Dorothea's married.”

“Yes,” Charles said. “She married a man named Elbridge Sterne who was a metallurgist at Wright-Sherwin. He's in Kansas City now.”

“Oh,” said Malcolm. “Elbridge,” and he must have remembered Elbridge Sterne. “What about the old house?”

“I guess it's still there,” Charles said. “We sold it. I haven't been there for a very long time.”

“A ghost town,” Malcolm said. “A vital sort of ghost town. That's the way I described it in the introduction. Haven't you seen my book on Clyde?”

“No,” Charles said.

“You've never seen it?” Malcolm said. “It's the best thing the foundation ever got out. I'll give you one.”

“Why, thanks, Malcolm,” Charles said.

“
Yankee Persepolis,
” Malcolm said. “That's what I called Clyde—Persepolis.”

Charles wished Joe would come back with the cash.

“Why Persepolis?” he asked.

“Where the Persians worshiped memories,” Malcolm said. “I stopped off there in 'thirty-five on my way to India and looked in on the University of Chicago dig. I was studying some dog worshipers in India.”

The dog worshipers made Charles more comfortable.

“So you're still on primitive man, are you?” Charles asked.

“Yes,” Malcolm said, “but don't forget all man is primitive. You ought to know that. You're primitive.”

“Yes,” Charles said, “I suppose I am.”

“And so is Clyde,” said Malcolm. “Primitive, like any other social structure.”

Charles glanced uneasily at Roger Blakesley's desk. Roger could not help but overhear the conversation.

“I don't know much about anthropology,” Charles said, “except what I learned from you, but it always seems to me you people oversimplify.”

“Man only has a few basic behavioristic patterns,” Malcolm said, “that are constantly repeated with silly variations. You can't oversimplify. That's the beauty of it.”

Charles laughed. Joe was moving toward them with Malcolm's money and Miss Marble had also appeared.

“It's eleven o'clock, Mr. Gray,” Miss Marble said.

“Here is your wampum, Malcolm,” Charles said. “You'd better count it.”

“It's paper,” Malcolm said. “It has less intrinsic value than shell money. It's symbolism. Where are you going?”

“I have to go to a meeting,” Charles said.

“How about lunch?” Malcolm said. “Come on over to the Harvard Club.”

Charles glanced meaningly at Miss Marble.

“Have I a luncheon engagement, Miss Marble?” he asked.

“Why, no,” Miss Marble said. “Not today, Mr. Gray.”

It was very obtuse of Miss Marble and now there was no reason for him not to have lunch with Malcolm Bryant.

“Well, thanks,” Charles said, “if you don't mind lunching early. Can you make it twelve-thirty?”

“Meet me there at twelve-thirty,” Malcolm said. “Good-by, Charles.”

The depositors' room off the vaults had just been refinished and redecorated and Tony Burton had called the conference there because he wanted to see how everything looked. The vaults themselves, starting with the barred anteroom with its uniformed attendant at the gate, always reminded Charles of the prison scenes in films showing the brave wife on a visit to her erring husband at Sing Sing. There was an efficient smell of oil on all the glittering steelwork, and down the narrow, brightly lighted passages he had a glimpse of the safe-deposit boxes and the private cubicles where individuals could examine the contents of these boxes in an antiseptic seclusion almost as complete as the privacy of the Great Pyramid. Even the gentle sound of a ventilating system added to the impression of inexorable security.

The Stuyvesant was a small bank, but its vaults were completely modern, shock-proof, dust-proof, and time-proof, the acme of safety, the ultimate citadel of property and possession. Put your family jewels in the vault, leave your heirlooms for a modest sum, your priceless papers and mementos, your bond and stock certificates. The Stuyvesant would guard them, and if, for any reason, you did not wish to descend to the vaults yourself, walking the slightly slippery steel floors to your safe-deposit box, if you found it tiring clipping coupons and filling out all those troublesome federal forms, why not let the custodian service of the Stuyvesant do it for you? Why not leave such fatiguing details of ownership to the oversight of careful, conscientious experts? For a purely nominal sum the Stuyvesant would do it for you. Call today yourself and consult one of our officers.

Hugh Garrity, an old Second Division veteran of World War I, dressed now in a Confederate-gray uniform, was on duty at the gate, and Mr. William Poultney, who led clients to their boxes and put both clients and boxes into the private alcoves, was seated watchfully, like a Sing Sing warden but also like a kindly hotel clerk, at his desk behind the bars. Hugh Garrity, and Mr. Poultney too, both wore an air of lynxlike alertness, which was to be expected since the bank officers were making this unaccustomed use of the new room.

“Good morning, sir,” Hugh said, and he saluted in that heavy, half-formal way common to all civilian guards. If he had been a dog, Charles thought, he would have slowly wagged his tail. Charles waved his hand to William Poultney and it occurred to him that William Poultney still owed him fifteen dollars, but it was not the time to mention it. Somehow there never did seem to be a suitable occasion for taking up this detail.

“William,” Charles asked, “do you use an electric razor or a safety razor?”

William Poultney looked startled and passed his hand carefully over his smooth and rather heavy jowls.

“What's the matter?” he asked. “Don't I look shaved?”

“You look beautiful,” Charles said. “I was just thinking of something else.”

He was thinking of Roger Blakesley's electric razor, but Mr. Poultney still looked startled. It was seldom in order to joke in an eccentric way down there in the vaults. Besides, William Poultney had a thorough and conscientious mind and he approached every subject carefully.

“As a matter of fact, now you bring it up, I have this shaving problem licked,” William said. “The truth of it is, the razor doesn't matter. It's the soap. I use a brushless cream. You just rub it on and there it is.”

“Well, well,” Charles said. “But you have to get it off later, don't you?”

Hugh Garrity smiled sourly.

“The whole secret is the lather,” Hugh Garrity said. “Get a good heavy lather and swab it on your face with a big brush—” His face froze suddenly and he stiffened to attention and Charles saw William Poultney square his shoulders and he heard a light, quick step behind him. It was Mr. Anthony Burton, coming down for the conference.

“Hello,” Tony Burton said. “What's the discussion?”

Tony Burton was smiling, but even so there was a faint atmosphere of constraint. After all, they were on their way to a conference.

“I don't know how the subject came up,” Charles said. “We were talking about shaving and electric razors.”

He was relieved to see Tony Burton smile and he remembered what Tony often said about the bank—that everyone in it was part of one big family.

“I wouldn't have one of those damned electric razors in the house,” Mr. Burton said. “My wife gave me one for Christmas and it blew out half the fuses. Come on, Charles.”

Charles had a vicious fleeting thought, which he immediately dismissed, that it might be appropriate to say that Roger Blakesley used an electric razor. It was one of those small matters that could possibly count for something, but as he weighed the question he was appalled at his own small-mindedness, and he followed Mr. Burton to the depositors' room without speaking.

That subterranean room, like most bank interiors, had formerly been decorated with dark paneled walls and indirect lighting, with an oval table, and chairs, until someone had hit upon the idea that the Stuyvesant was old enough to have a tradition and the room, in which large customers met with officers and attorneys, ought to have some of that tradition. Thus some interesting prints and pictures now adorned the walls, old prints of Broadway, the Seventh Regiment marching down Fifth Avenue in the Civil War, framed pieces of Continental currency, ancient lottery tickets, century-old advertising broadsides, and a shelf with the first account books of the Stuyvesant. The State Street Trust in Boston, Tony Burton used to say, went in for ship models and now they had so many it made him seasick. He did not want to go as far as this but at the same time it did not hurt to show that the Stuyvesant had a past.

The group had already gathered in the room with a past, although the material under discussion at this routine meeting was to deal essentially with the future. Stephen Merry was there, wearing his new oversize tortoise-shell glasses, and Roger Blakesley with his rimless glasses, and Alfred Brock from trust administration and Tom Joyce and two other men from the trust department. When the door was closed everything was friendly, because they were one big family.

“That was an awful rain last night,” Steve Merry said. “Our cellar leaked again.”

Then they all sat down and talked for a few moments about cellars and the difficulties of subsurface drainage and Tony Burton began to tell about his own cellar and heating plant until he checked himself and said they had better get to work.

Charles sat listening attentively with his eye on Roger Blakesley as Tony Burton took the meeting over. Since it was a routine conference, he knew most of the subject matter already—the general money situation, the holdings in new accounts, the stability of certain industries. Roger Blakesley, it seemed to Charles, was talking more than usual and trying almost too hard to contribute useful ideas. Charles could follow the discussion with no difficulty and at the same time think of Malcolm Bryant upstairs. He remembered, too, that he must have two hundred dollars transferred to the housekeeping account for Nancy, but his watchfulness never flagged. No matter how dull and how meaningless it was, you had to be very careful at a meeting. You had to remember the arguments and the way the minds had worked around the table. At any moment Tony Burton was apt to ask your opinion.

It was only after half an hour that anything came up of an unusual nature. It came so entirely out of the blue that he had to think carefully back to what had led up to it. Somehow the thread of the meeting and its purpose had been dropped and Tony Burton had embarked on an extraneous subject, and it was most unusual for Tony to stray from the agenda. Suddenly he had announced, out of a clear sky, that a new depositor, with whom Charles was not acquainted, was applying for a six months' loan of three hundred thousand dollars. He was a man named Godfrey W. Eaton who was the head of a substantial company manufacturing tiling. Roger Blakesley had seen him first and he had taken him to Stephen Merry and afterwards to Tony Burton. The bank had investigated Mr. Eaton through all the ordinary channels and now all his business life was down on a memorandum that sounded like the dossiers of a hundred other people whose names had come up at loan conferences.

Mr. Eaton was from the Middle West, where he had owned a number of small factories, and Mr. Eaton had obviously done well for himself because now he owned two apartment buildings free and clear, was a director of a chain of stores, and a part owner of a sugar refinery. He was obviously one of those adroit people who could move from one enterprise to another. The purpose of the loan was for additions to a tile plant. Part of the collateral was in government bonds and part in stocks. It surprised Charles that the officers had not given him the loan at once, particularly since it appeared that Mr. Eaton was a director of the Pacific Investors Trust and thus indirectly controlled several large accounts at the Stuyvesant which were not his own. If Mr. Eaton were disappointed personally, the disappointment might go much further, but recently Tony Burton and Stephen Merry had been exhibiting an unusual slowness in making decisions.

“I wonder why he didn't go to his own bank,” Charles said, “not that it's any of my business.”

Clearly Roger Blakesley was delighted by the question.

“Because I met him first, Charles,” Roger said, “and I'm selling him on the personal service of small banks. I met him playing golf. I've seen quite a good deal of Godfrey Eaton. He's a friend of Sam Summerby—you know, Tony—Sam Summerby from Baltimore.”

Perhaps it was Charles's imagination, perhaps he was becoming unduly sensitive, but it seemed to him that there was a slight rustle around the table. It seemed to him that everyone was watching them, and he realized that Roger had made a very good point. He knew that Roger was implying, without being obliged to say it, that he had brought in a very nice piece of business to the Stuyvesant, which was more than Charles had done lately. He was implying, without having to say it, that he brought in new business because he got around and sweetened contacts and played golf with people like Samuel Summerby, and everyone knew the Summerby Corporation. He was implying, without saying it, that it was too bad Charles played a very poor game of golf, and it seemed to Charles that he was called upon to give some sort of answer.

“Are you on a first-name basis with him, Roger?” he asked.

It was a small and sordid little contest. He was implying, without having to say it, that several times in the past Roger had been too prematurely friendly.