Point of No Return (25 page)

“I hope Miss Sarah is well, Mrs. Garrity,” his mother said.

“Oh yes, she's well,” Mrs. Garrity said, “and she wants to know if you would be at home this afternoon so that she might be dropping in for a cup of tea, Miss Esther, and to talk about the paper you've been reading.”

“Why, tell her we'll be delighted,” his mother answered in a new, bright voice. “Would she like to come at half past four?”

“Four,” said Mrs. Garrity, “and she'll bring her own tea, and give her thin bread and butter only.”

“We'd love to have her at four,” his mother said, but Mrs. Garrity still stood in the doorway.

“I suppose you'll be getting Minnie Murphy in, Miss Esther.”

“It isn't her day here,” his mother said, “but yes, I'll see if I can get Mrs. Murphy.”

“I'll tell her,” Mrs. Garrity said. “Minnie will come if I tell her. Minnie knows how to do it. It would be best to get Minnie.”

When the door closed, his mother looked worried.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Dorothea, stop playing the piano. Miss Sarah's coming to tea. Now let me see—Charles, I want you to go down to the mill and tell your father to be here at four o'clock, and then go and tell your Aunt Jane. Where's Sam?”

“He went fishing, off the breakwater,” Charles said.

“Oh, dear,” his mother said. “I suppose he'll come back all over fish. I think we'd better use the Canton tea set, don't you, Dorothea? Now run along, Charley. I wish we had more time.”

Charles was the boy carrying the burning cross saying, Excelsior! Miss Sarah is coming to tea. At the end of Spruce Street, he turned right, past Gow's wharf and the coal pocket and then past the gasworks and then past the mill houses where River Street children were playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. The tide was low and he could see the black mud flats with their still pools of water. A humming came from the long brick mill building, a busy but drowsy sound that made him understand why Mr. Felch, the watchman, was dozing in the gatehouse. The windows of the smaller office building were wide open and so was the door, but inside everything was hot. The clerks behind the railings were in their shirt sleeves. He could see Mr. Stafford in his large private office reading papers and only Mr. Stafford wore his coat. Far down the hall, beyond the accounting department, his father sat in his small room, running over a column of figures.

“Mother sent me,” Charles said. “Miss Sarah's coming to tea at four o'clock.”

“Well, well,” his father said, “if it isn't one thing it's another. Run along and tell her I'll be there.”

When he left the mill Charles turned up Gow Street, still carrying the burning cross. Beyond the small and shabby houses, Gow Street made a crooked turn, by French's grocery store, and then widened and changed for the better the nearer one came to Johnson Street. His Aunt Mathilda and his Aunt Jane lived in the square yellow house with the plain picket fence in front and a small stable and garden. It had belonged to his grandfather and it still had his grandfather's name on the silver plate on the dark door. He opened the door without knocking but he closed it carefully because his Aunt Mathilda was sick upstairs, and he walked softly down the hall into the dining room which was dusky and cool because the wooden shutters were drawn.

“Where's Aunt Jane?” he called into the kitchen to Mary Callahan, who was sitting at the table peeling potatoes.

“Where would she be,” Mary Callahan said, “except upstairs reading with Miss Mathilda? But don't go stamping on the stairs.”

Even if he had stamped, the stair carpet with its heavily padded treads would have deadened the sound. In the upstairs hall everything was as dusky and cool as the dining room, with everything in its place and a place for everything. The brasses on the highboy shone in the faint light. Miss Trask, his Aunt Mathilda's practical nurse, was sewing in the hall bedroom, and further down the hall, in the square corner room, he could hear his Aunt Jane reading poetry. She was reading it with pleasure because she loved declamation.

“
Shoal!
” he heard her saying. “
'Ware shoal!
Not I!”

His Aunt Mathilda was sitting in a Boston rocker and Aunt Jane sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair.

“Why, Charley dear, where did you come from?” his Aunt Mathilda asked.

Aunt Jane closed her book.

“Charles, I wish you wouldn't creep around,” she said.

“You told him not to make any noise,” Aunt Mathilda said. “I heard you, Jane. Come here and kiss me, Charley.”

He kissed her timidly because he knew that his Aunt Mathilda was very ill.

“He doesn't have to creep around,” his Aunt Jane said. “What is it, Charles?”—and then he gave the message again. Miss Sarah was coming to tea at four o'clock.

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Mathilda said, and her thin white hands moved restlessly over her dressing gown. “Is she coming here?”

“Of course she isn't, Mathilda,” Aunt Jane told her. “She's going there, to John's house, and I'd better go to help Esther. You know how things are there, Mathilda.”

“Charley, dear,” Aunt Mathilda said, “I think your mother had better get Minnie Murphy in. Tell her that I said so and we'll send Mary Callahan over to help.”

It was not the question of food, he remembered his mother saying, it was the desire to have everything look right that made her nervous. She was not going to have Miss Sarah Hewitt leave the house and tell the Lovells and Thomases and other people that Esther Gray had started as a careless, flighty girl and had not improved. When she had become engaged to John Gray, she knew very well that Miss Sarah had said that it was a mistake and a pity, that Esther was not the right wife for John Gray because she was absent-minded; and Charles's mother did not want to have Miss Sarah saying this again. She had never liked to sit behind a tea tray, pouring hot water into cups and then pouring it into what was called a slop basin—a horrid term, a slop basin. She had to admit that she did not understand tea. She wished that Jane would pour but Jane said that it was Esther's house. The main thing was to have the parlor and the hall picked up and to get rid of John's canes and umbrellas and the boys' fishing rods and John's and the boys' hats—and John's books should be taken upstairs and not left in piles upon the floor.

Charles had never seen the hall and parlor look so neat. Mrs. Murphy and Mary Callahan had washed the woodwork with soap and water. They had beaten the braided hall rug and the two parlor Persian carpets. They had washed the mirror; they had polished the Benares brass tray in the hall and the andirons and the fender in the parlor fireplace and the candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the two Staffordshire dogs had been washed. The picture of the brig
Comet,
which had been sailed around Cape Horn by Charles's great-grandfather, had been taken down and Aunt Jane herself had wiped off the canvas. Cleanliness had transformed the parlor. Shine and polish made everything look almost new, and this was true also with the family.

They were all there except Sam, who was still on the breakwater. Aunt Jane wore her plum-colored silk dress, with a cameo brooch. His mother wore her best afternoon gown, with old lace on it. Dorothea wore her embroidered shirtwaist and her new skirt and her hair was done in her Sunday way. Although it was a hot afternoon, John Gray had put on his blue serge suit and stiff collar, and Charles was again in a clean white shirt and a bow tie. A cloth of Italian lace was placed over the tea table that stood in front of the Victorian horsehair sofa, and the Canton tea set was already on it. A fresh antimacassar had been pinned on the wing chair, partially concealing its soiled upholstery, and a candlestand had been placed beside it.

“Oh, dear,” John Gray said. “Oh, dear me.”

“Don't say, oh dear,” Charles's mother snapped. “You haven't done any of the work. What time is it?”

She did not need to ask because she could see by the banjo clock, but John Gray took out his watch.

“The clock is two minutes slow,” he said. “It's exactly three minutes before four. She'll be here in exactly three minutes. It's amazing how rejuvenating this is. Don't you feel young, Jane?”

“No, I don't,” Aunt Jane said, “and I hope you're going to act your age.”

“That's exactly it,” John Gray answered. “I am. It's an intimation of immortality.”

“I wish you wouldn't chatter, John,” Esther Gray said. “I don't see why you like to talk when you're nervous. I don't.”

John Gray sat down in one of the stiff ladder-backed chairs and folded his hands.

“I'm too young to be nervous,” he said. “I've been washed behind the ears, like Charles. I'm as young as Charles, and Charles and Dorothea aren't born. They're back in the land of the unborn children, and Esther is Dr. Marchby's little girl and Jane is in pinafores.”

It was difficult, sometimes, to understand his father. It gave Charles a very queer feeling when his father said he had not been born. When his father waved his hand slowly, as he did so often when he spoke, Charles could almost believe that he and Dorothea had been rendered invisible.

“I wish you wouldn't be so confusing, John,” his mother said. “No one understands you and there isn't time to try.”

John Gray sighed.

“That's true. No one understands me.” A church bell was beginning to strike four. The church clocks in Clyde had never been synchronized, any more than the religions they represented. Another bell was striking. “That's the Baptist bell,” John Gray said. “You'll notice it's always behind the Congregationalist. Now, Dorothea.” Dorothea looked at him doubtfully. “You and Charles are going to have a remarkable experience. Try to think of yourself as moving backward. I envy you. I wish I hadn't been born.”

“Well, you are born,” Aunt Jane said, “and here she is.”

The bell in the hall was tinkling and his father and mother hurried out while the rest of them waited and Charles could hear their voices in the hall.

“Charley,” Dorothea whispered, “your shirt is coming out.” She seized him quickly, as though he were much younger.

“Let me alone,” he whispered, and he was stuffing his shirt beneath his waistband when Miss Sarah Hewitt entered.

Charles had seen her often, but now she looked strange to him because his father had fixed it so that nothing seemed quite real. She looked as cool as though it were not a hot day. She looked so old that no weather could disturb her. Her brown dress of stiff silk rustled like autumn leaves, and the sound gave the artificial flowers on her small hat an incongruous, waxlike appearance. Her lips were set in an amused, determined line. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her eyes looked old and faded. There was a tremor in her thin, blue-veined hands that made the beaded reticule she was holding shake, but still she had a deliberate, airy way of walking. Her voice, too, had a quaver in it, but it retained a plaintive, musical note like an echo of a younger voice.

“Jane, dear, how do you do?” she said. “And these are the dear children, aren't they, Esther? I thought there were three. Isn't there an older boy?”

“Sam isn't here, Miss Sarah,” John Gray said. “We had no way of reaching Sam. He's gone fishing.”

“You needn't speak quite so loudly, Johnny,” Miss Sarah said. “Fishing—and he should love the sea, shouldn't he? What are the other children's names? I've forgotten. There have been so many names … Dorothea, after her grandmother, of course. And Charles. Now who was Charles? Oh, I remember. Charles who went to the war. Where was it he was killed?”

“Fredericksburg, Miss Sarah,” John Gray said. “Uncle Charles died at Fredericksburg. Won't you sit down? Try the wing chair.”

“If you'll give me your hand, please, Johnny,” Miss Sarah said. “Thank you. It was Burnside's fault, of course. There was a service, wasn't therein the Unitarian Church, but then you wouldn't know. Esther, that paper at the Society was very good. I never knew you could write so well. It made me see her again. Dear Alice Lyte. And Laurence was so pleased with it. You know how particular Laurence is—a perfectionist like dear Nathaniel.” She spoke with a conviction that was conjuring up the unseen, and the quick and the dead were moving about the parlor, mingling democratically together. “Dear, kind Nathaniel—but Laurence is more Lovell than Hewitt. I wish the children would move their chairs so that I can see them. So this is little Charles. He looks like Vernon. Do you know that your grandfather stole pears from the garden once, Charles? I didn't tell, but Father saw Vernon from the window. Did Vernon ever tell you, John?”

“Why, no,” John Gray answered. “Father never told me that.”

“We've all been friends for so many years,” Miss Sarah said, “such friends, in such different ways, but do you know what's just happened? I mustn't forget to tell you.”

“No, what's happened?” Aunt Jane asked.

“The Rose of Sharon bush is blooming again. The pink one. I saw it from my window, but it's not nearly as old as the lilacs. Grandfather brought the cuttings back from England.”

“They're the most beautiful lilacs in Clyde,” Charles's mother said. “I always stop to peek at them through the fence.”

Miss Sarah had forgotten about the lilacs. Her expression had brightened, her glance had turned toward the mantelpiece.

“Why, there she is,” she said. Everyone looked puzzled and John Gray cleared his throat.

“Who?” he asked gently. “Who, Miss Sarah?”

“I forgot you had a picture of the
Comet,
too,” Miss Sarah said, “not that you haven't a perfect right to have one”—and then they realized that she was referring to the oil painting of the brig above the mantelpiece. “Grandfather always said that Captain Tom was his best captain,” Miss Sarah said. “He always spoke so highly of him. Now he would be the children's greatgrandfather, wouldn't he? And he had such bad rheumatism. You would never have thought he'd been before the mast. Grandfather always said so. Susan and I were brought downstairs to meet him. Grandfather wanted us to see what one of his captains looked like. Johnny, do you remember Captain Tom?”