Point of No Return Read online

  “Acme. I wonder what acme means exactly,” Charles said.

  “Why, Daddy,” Evelyn said. “Don’t you know what acme means? It means the top of everything.”

  It startled him to have Evelyn tell him something which he should have known himself and which, of course, he would have known if he had put his mind on it. The trouble was that he had not been back long enough for broken links of habit to be wholly mended, and everything at home still seemed to have sprung ready-made out of nowhere. There was something in Berkeley’s theory of philosophy—as he had learned it at Dartmouth—that there was no proof that anything existed except in the radius of one’s consciousness.

  Before the war, Bill had been nine and Evelyn had been six, and now Evelyn was able to look up acme in the dictionary. He was in a ready-made dining room, though he had been responsible for its having been built in 1940. He and Nancy had bought the bleached chairs and table and sideboard and had agreed that the walls should be done in pickled pine because they had wanted it to look light and modern. The glazed chintz draperies still had their original luster and the begonias and ivy and geraniums in the bow window looked as though they had just come from the florist, because Nancy had made an intensive study of the care and feeding of household plants. There were no finger marks or smudges on the table or the chairs and the light carpet was just back from the cleaners without a smudge on it either. It was amazing how beautifully Nancy could keep a house with only one maid to help her.

  “You’d better get the Buick now,” Nancy said. “There’s no use killing ourselves getting to the train.”

  The rain gave the blue gravel near the garage a metallic sheen. The water on the lightly whitened brick of the house—he believed it had been called Southern Brick—made the variegated color look like new plastic, and the leaves of the rhododendrons and the firs near the front door glistened like dark cold water.

  The Buick started easily enough, though it was a 1940 car. It reminded him of a well-preserved old gentleman with an independent income, cared for by a valet, and he did not see how Nancy could have kept it looking so well considering all the bundles and the children it had carried.

  “Move over,” Nancy said. “I’ll drive down.”

  She adjusted a little cushion against the small of her back and took the wheel. She had on one of those transparent, greenish rain capes over her greenish tweed suit. She pulled her gloves deliberately over her engagement and wedding rings, but then she had fixed it so there was plenty of time. She had always said that she was never going to have any man of hers get ulcers running for the train.

  When they were out of the drive and safely through the gates marked Sycamore Park, he glanced at her profile. The rain had made her hair, where it showed at the edges of her green felt hat, moist and curly. They always seemed much more at peace when she took him to the station than at any other time and for some reason it was always the friendliest moment of the day. He and Nancy were alone together, undisturbed by all the rest of the world.

  “You didn’t forget your reports, did you?” Nancy asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got them.”

  “Have you still got that headache? There’s an aspirin in the glove compartment.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s gone.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Darling?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s nice driving you to the train again. It’s sort of like coming back to where we started.”

  He looked at her again. She was looking straight ahead of her, but she was smiling.

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s funny, when I came down there to breakfast this morning the whole place seemed ready-made.”

  “Ready-made?” she repeated.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just as though I’d never done anything about it.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m too efficient.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” she answered, “as long as you don’t mind.”

  He was never nervous when she was driving. She had a peculiar gift of being able to divide her concentration, which permitted her to drive and at the same time balance the household budget or quarrel artistically or give intelligent answers to the children’s questions about God and the life hereafter. The casual way in which she spoke told him that she was thinking very carefully about what she was saying.

  “I wish I could stop coaching from the sidelines, but I can’t help it, can I?”

  There was no use answering because of course she knew what he would say, but still he answered.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “Of course you can’t.”

  “Someday you’re going to say you don’t like it. I’m afraid of that.”

  There were drawbacks, he was thinking, to knowing anyone too well, and yet there was no way to avoid this. There was no actual chance for decent concealment when you knew someone’s voice as well as he did hers. It was all part of the relationship that was known as love, which was quite different from being in love because love had a larger and more embracing connotation. It was a shadowy sort of edifice built by habit, without any very good architecture, but still occasionally you could get enough impression of its form to wonder how it had been built.

  “Darling,” she was saying, and her voice broke briskly into his thoughts, “why don’t you ask Burton what the score is? Aren’t you tired of waiting?”

  The question made him edgy because that phrase about the score was as out of place as her allusion to the ruptured duck. She might just as well have said, Why not go and ask Burton what’s cooking, and he was very glad she hadn’t. The car had stopped at the Post Road for the red light. They were almost at the station.

  “That would be stupid,” he said. “Naturally he knows I want to know.”

  “Well, can’t we get it over with?”

  “It will get over,” Charles said. “Everything does.”

  “Well, if we just had the cards on the table,” Nancy said. “If you just said to him—”

  “Now don’t tell me what to say to him,” Charles said, “because I’m not going to say anything.”

  The light turned green and the car moved forward.

  “Well, I hope Roger Blakesley likes it. Do you know what Molly told me yesterday?” Nancy asked.

  Charles moved uneasily. They were going down the main street. A gift shop had opened there and also a new antique shop on the corner and he wondered why he had not noticed either of them before.

  “She said Roger’s so glad you’re back and settled down.”

  “Well, that’s swell,” Charles said. He had observed that Roger Blakesley had lately been assuming the attitude that Charley had only just returned from the service and was still getting adjusted. He was very glad they were reaching the station. “If the officers and directors want him, they’ll take him.”

  “And you’ll have to resign,” Nancy said.

  “The next thing,” Charles said, “you’ll be asking me to think of the children.” He began to laugh. “‘Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums, that beat to battle where he stands; thy face across his fancy comes, and gives the battle to his hands.’ Alfred Lord Tennyson.” They were stopping at the last light and the station was just ahead of them and there were still three minutes before eight-thirty. “This whole business sounds like Tennyson. It’s exactly as contrived.”

  “All right, why is it so funny?” Nancy asked.

  “I didn’t say it was funny,” Charles said. “I said it was contrived. The little woman kissing her husband good-by. Everything depends on this moment. He must get the big job or Junior can’t go to boarding school. And what about the payments on the new car? Good-by, darling, and don’t come back to me without being vice-president of the trust company. That’s all I mean.”

  Nancy threw the car into gear.

  “Don’t say that,” she said.

  “Why not?”
Charles asked.

  “Don’t say it,” Nancy said, and her voice was louder, “because maybe you’re right.”

  “Now wait a minute—” he began, but she did not let him finish.

  “Because if you say that—” she said, “if you mean that—maybe it isn’t much but it’s all we have. Maybe it isn’t much, but then maybe we aren’t much and if you feel that way there won’t be anything any more.”

  It was a discordant instant of revelation and it broke unpleasantly into the morning. He thought of Clyde again, and Clyde was suddenly more real to him than the car in front of the station. He was thinking of peaceful voices saying that you often had moments of doubt or disappointment, that you often wondered whether what you were doing was worth while. The solution was to continue doing the best you could and everything would turn out all right in the end.

  “Now listen, Nance,” he began, and then for some reason he felt as deeply moved as if he were saying good-by to her for good. “Let’s not get so emotionally involved.”

  “Involved with what?” Nancy asked.

  “With each other,” he said. “Let’s get some sense of proportion.”

  “Don’t talk about proportion,” Nancy said. “There isn’t any time.”

  It was only one of those minor partings, but he was leaving her again.

  “If you’re not taking the five-thirty,” she said, “call me up. Good-by.”

  “Good-by,” he said. “I’ll make the five-thirty all right.”

  2

  A Moment, While the Trumpets Blow

  —ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

  Shortly before the outbreak of the European war, Charles had begun taking the eight-thirty. This was a privilege that had raised him above the ruck of younger men and of shopworn older ones who had to take the eight-two. It indicated to everyone that his business life had finally permitted him a certain margin of leisure. It meant that he was no longer one of the salaried class who had to be at his desk at nine.

  The eight-thirty train was designed for the executive aristocracy, and once Mr. Guthrie Mayhew, not one of the Mayhews who lived on South Street, not George Mayhew, but Guthrie Mayhew, who was president of the Hawthorn Hill Club and also president of Mayhew Brothers at 86 Broadway, had even spoken of getting an eight-thirty crowd together who would agree to occupy one of those club cars with wicker chairs and card tables and a porter, to be attached to the eight-thirty in the morning and again to the five-thirty in the afternoon. Mr. Mayhew was a public-spirited man who always enjoyed organizing small congenial groups. He had suggested the idea first to Tony Burton and they both had decided that they did not want it to be an old man’s car. They wanted some of the younger fellows, too, who were coming along, and they wanted it informal. You could play bridge or gin rummy or pitch if you wanted, or else you could merely sit and read; but the hope was, if you got a congenial group aboard, both young and old, coming not from all walks of life, because there was only about one walk of life on the eight-thirty, but from different business atmospheres—brokers, lawyers, doctors, architects, civil engineers, and maybe even a writer or two from as far away as Westport, if you could get one—it was the hope that if you could get such a crowd together, you could have some good conversation going to and from the city.

  You could have an interchange of ideas on all sorts of subjects, and goodness knows there was a lot to talk about in these days, a whale of a lot, Mr. Mayhew said. There was the New Deal, and Mr. Mayhew was broad-minded about the New Deal. He wanted some New Dealers aboard that car, if you could get them, who would stand right up on their hind legs and tell what the New Deal was about. That car would be a sort of open forum, Mr. Mayhew said. They might even find some newspaperman. They could talk about the Chinese war and about Hitler and Mussolini and the whole European mess. It ought to make the ride to New York a real occasion to which everyone could look forward, because there were a lot of interesting people going to New York if you only got to know them, and in Mr. Mayhew’s experience about everything came down to just one thing—knowing and understanding people, and somehow you kept being shut away from people. That, roughly, was Mr. Mayhew’s idea, but naturally it had evaporated after Pearl Harbor. Charles remembered Mr. Mayhew’s idea vividly, if only because it had come up at the same time that Mr. Burton had suggested that Charles call him Tony.

  Charles could still recall the glow he had felt on this occasion and the sudden moment of elation. Mr. Burton had been shy about it in a very nice way, as an older man is sometimes shy. Charles remembered that Mr. Burton had fidgeted with his onyx pen stand and that first Mr. Burton had called him “feller.” It had all happened one evening when they had stayed late talking over the Catlin estate, which was one of the largest accounts in the trust department.

  Mr. Burton had just made one of his favorite remarks, one which Charles had heard often before. It had happened, Mr. Burton had said, that when he was a sophomore at Yale he had studied Greek. He never knew just why he had hit on Greek, but the result showed that a concentration on any subject trained the mind.

  “Now you’d think, wouldn’t you,” Mr. Burton said, “that the orders of Greek verbs would be a long way from banking. Well, I can only tell you that Greek verbs have taught me more about corporate figures than anything else I ever learned at Yale.”

  Though Charles had heard this before, he had been pleased that Mr. Burton had touched upon the subject of his Greek studies for it showed that everything was going smoothly.

  “Yes, sir,” Charles had said. “I’m just beginning to see that everything fits into banking somewhere.”

  “Everything,” Mr. Burton had said. “Everything. You see banking basically is only knowing how to use extraneous knowledge. I like to think of banking as being not only the oldest but, well, the most basically human business that there is in the world, for it deals with all the most fundamental hopes and aspirations of human beings. In fact, I don’t like, honestly I don’t, to think of banking as a business or even as a profession. Banking—it may startle you a little that I say this, but I’m right, I know I’m right—banking, for a good banker, is an art. The last of the arts, perhaps, but the oldest of the professions.”

  Charles had heard Mr. Burton advance the idea several times before but he did not interrupt.

  “Now you may remember,” Mr. Burton had said, “that Mrs. Burton and I took a little trip in 1933. You hadn’t been with us long then, but I don’t believe that you or anyone else will forget how tense things were in 1933, and now and then I found I was getting a little taut, so when things eased up I decided to go away somewhere to get a sense of perspective. That was when Mrs. Burton and I went to Bagdad. You ought to go there sometime.”

  Charles could not imagine what had ever made Mr. Burton want to go to such a place, unless it had something to do with Burton’s Arabian Nights, and he wondered also what connection it had with all the reports that lay on Mr. Burton’s mahogany roll-top desk. Mr. Burton had placed his elbows on the desk, had linked his fingers together and was resting his narrow chin on them, and there had been nothing for Charles to do but listen.

  Well, it appeared that it had been a very interesting trip to Bagdad. The cruise ship had stopped at Beirut and from there everyone who wanted to take the side trip, including Mr. and Mrs. Burton, had embarked on buses that were as comfortable as the Greyhound buses in America, and after a night in quite a nice French hotel in Damascus, where Mrs. Burton had bought from a real Arab the rare rug that was now in Mr. Burton’s library, they had proceeded in these buses at dawn right across the desert. It had been hot, but there was plenty of ice water and the seats were comfortable. Toward evening the buses had stopped at a place called Rutba Wells right out in the middle of nowhere. It was a mud-walled fort like something in the story Beau Geste, except that, fortunately, it was run by the British and so was sanitary.

  After a very good meal of soup and fried chicken, Mr. and Mrs. Burton had played a game of darts, that British game, right in t
hat mud-walled fort; and then in the cool of the evening they had proceeded right across the desert to Bagdad, and there it was at dawn—a city on a muddy river, spanned by a bridge of boats. They had stopped at the Tigris Hotel, right on the river, large and not uncomfortable, though one strange thing about it was that the water from the bathtub came right out on the bathroom floor and then drained through a hole in the corner.

  The first morning he and Mrs. Burton had gone to the museum to see the treasure from Ur, parts of which looked like something in a case at Cartier’s. You got a lot out of travel if you kept your eyes open. There had been a man in the museum, a queer sort of British archaeologist, who showed him some mud bricks that were actually parts of an account book. When you got used to them, you could see how they balanced their figures; and on one brick, believe it or not, there was even an error in addition, preserved there through the centuries. This had meant a great deal to Mr. Burton.

  That clerical error in mud had given him an idea for one of the best speeches he had ever written, his speech before the American Bankers’ Association in 1936 at the Waldorf-Astoria. Mr. Burton had opened a drawer and had pulled out a deckle-edged pamphlet.

  “Take it home and read it if you have the time,” he said. “I dashed it off rather hurriedly but it has a few ideas. It starts with that mistake in addition.”

  The pamphlet was entitled The Ancient Art of Banking, by Anthony Burton, President, the Stuyvesant Bank, Delivered before the American Bankers’ Association, May 1936.

  “Why, thanks very much, sir,” Charles had said. “I certainly will read it.” It was not the time to say that he had read the speech already or that for years he had made a point of reading all Mr. Burton’s speeches.

  “Look here, feller,” Mr. Burton said, and he had blushed when he said “feller,” “why not cut out this sir business? Why not just call me Tony?”

  That was in 1941 but Charles still remembered his great joy and relief, with the relief uppermost, and that he could hardly wait to hear what Nancy would say.