Point of No Return (30 page)

John Gray's appearance had changed very little since his reversals of 1916. His hair was shot with gray and so was his mustache, but he had retained his posture and he had not put on weight. He could still read without glasses and he still had the appealing smile of a younger man. As Aunt Jane used to say, John had matured beautifully, and Charles had even heard his Uncle Gerald Marchby admit it once, on one of those rare occasions when he and Aunt Ruth Marchby came to call. It meant a good deal when the Doctor, for Uncle Gerald was a doctor too, like Charles's maternal grandfather, had a kind word of any sort to say about his brother-in-law. He said he did not know what John had done to keep so young.

John Gray answered that if he looked young it was because he had not worried for years. He had no financial problems. Gerald and Hugh Blashfield, not to mention Esther and Jane, would not allow him to have them. He was referring, of course, to an agreement he had made at the end of 1917 to let Gerald and Hugh Blashfield pay the bills out of the proceeds of the Judge's trust. He had no financial worries, and Jane had paid for Charles's education, such as it was—he could never understand why Jane had wanted first Sam and then Charles to go to Dartmouth. He did not have to worry about the children. Charles was in Wright-Sherwin making twenty-five dollars a week, a miserable sum, even for a graduate of Dartmouth (a small place but he loved it), and Dorothea, who never could seem to find anyone suitable for a husband, although she had tried, was comfortably established in the public library, and she still had someone keeping company with her. It was Elbridge Sterne now, who had come from Kansas City and was doing something about metallurgy in Wright-Sherwin. No, he had no financial worries, and besides, he had no vices. He smoked very little and he hardly ever drank, except for an occasional glass of port in his bookroom upstairs, and he always walked to the mill, where he did not have to worry either. He could do the accounting with his eyes shut. If anybody worried about the mill, it ought to be Gerald and Hugh Blashfield. He had suggested that they sell the family's holdings, as cotton mills in New England were on the downgrade, but that was their responsibility since they were trustees for the Judge's estate. It was their blood pressure that ought to rise, not his.

Besides, he did not gamble. He was pained to see that Gerald and Ruth looked surprised but it was true,
he did not gamble.
He had attempted some investments occasionally in Boston, of a speculative nature, on the rare occasions when he had been allowed a little capital, but that was all over, now that Gerald and Hugh saw to it that he had no cash but pocket money. He did not mean to say that they were not generous. What they gave him, together with that wretched pittance that Stafford paid him for keeping the mill's accounts, would have been enough to have allowed him to do something at the race track, but there was one thing that they would all admit, Esther, Jane, and Ruth and Gerald, and Gerald could remove his gall bladder tomorrow morning if it wasn't true. He had never done anything with races. He had never approved of them and he hated the uncertainty of horse racing, and he did not like games of chance, dice, numbers or cards. He had never played them except for a little friendly poker down at the Pine Tree firehouse. He did not gamble. What was it Thomas Fuller said? “A man gets no thanks for what he loseth at play.” Of course Edmund Burke took a wider view. What was it he said in his speech in the House of Commons? “Gaming is a principle inherent in human nature. It belongs to us all.” Yet David Garrick put it another way. What was it David Garrick said? Oh, yes. “Shake off the shackles of this tyrant vice; Hear other calls than those of cards and dice.” That would be a very good thing for Gerald to remember when he played auction at the Whist Club, but personally it did not apply to him.

He could not understand why certain people, particularly on Johnson Street, looked on him as a black sheep just because he had attempted to make a few speculative investments. He was faithful to his wife, and that was more than could be said of certain individuals on Johnson Street and on other streets in Clyde—but the trouble with Clyde was that Clyde never forgot. It remembered the indiscretions of youth as though they were yesterday and if you made one mistake in Clyde it did for you.

He still had a spring to his step when he walked down the street and he had what was commonly known as a cheery word for everyone. He and all the other John Grays Charles knew later were impulsively generous, always ready with a dollar when the hat was passed round, always ready to buy a tag, any sort of tag, on tag days. John Gray was the sort of man who would always stop when a child was crying in the street. When anyone was ill, he would always be the first to call. The people at the mill all loved him. He was the one they called on, when they were in trouble, to intercede with Judge Fanning at the police court or with Alf Jason, the truant officer, or with Miss Nickson, the visiting nurse. John Gray was exactly the sort of person who would give you the shirt off his back, impulsively and generously, if you needed his shirt.

It was true, as it sometimes occurred to Charles, that most people who said this about John Gray were not shirtless, and it was unfair to think that John Gray and people like him were tolerant and kindly because they were never sure when they would need such coin themselves.

Yet it was also true, as John Gray said so often, that no one forgot in Clyde, particularly about money. Everyone knew that John Gray had run through money, thousands and thousands of dollars of it. Everyone knew that Mrs. Gray and Dorothea would not have been able to afford even a part-time maid or a cleaning woman and that Charles could not have gone to college if Miss Jane had not helped out. If you were in the family you were always conscious of this, and though his father always treated those matters lightly when he mentioned them, John Gray was bitterly ashamed of his failures; but Esther Gray always understood his sensitivity, and Dorothea and Aunt Jane, and if the subject of poverty came up in the family it was always slurred over with great speed.

Charles first fully understood this family feeling from observing that his father was not put on the committee of the Clyde Fund after Mr. Finch had died. At this time Charles had been working for more than a year at Wright-Sherwin. He had recently been moved into the accounting department under Mr. Richard Howell, one of those assiduous slaves of detail so useful in any office. The man whose place Charles had filled, and an older man, too, had been fired by Mr. Howell, who used to say that things were either right or wrong and that there was no excuse for not doing them right. When things were done right he accepted them without a word but he always blew up when there was a mistake. Charles had been checking over an inventory that afternoon and he felt tired and uncertain.

It was a dull September day and the wind was so high that he thought it was blowing up for a storm. He was wondering what he would do if he were fired from Wright-Sherwin. It was the first time that his future had depended on the whim of a single critical stranger. As he walked into the wind down River Street and into the square at Dock Street, he hoped that for once the family would not ask him how he was getting on with Mr. Howell. This was a question which his father invariably asked each evening. John Gray, it seemed, had been to Sunday School with Dickie Howell, who had been in charge of passing out the hymnbooks, and now Dickie Howell passed the contribution box. It all went to show, John Gray had said, what happened if you were consistent. Dickie had married a girl in the Sunday School class named Myrtle Snyder, who had a thin jaw and a button nose like Dickie's. They lived in the North End and you could see Dickie clipping his privet hedge every Saturday afternoon. He had the straightest hedge in Clyde. Details like these were always interesting to John Gray, but they had nothing to do with Charles's difficulties.

“It must be a beautiful relationship,” John Gray said, “yours and Dickie Howell's.”

“Can't you tell me what he's like?” Charles asked.

John Gray only said that it did not matter what he was like. He said it was the old master and man relationship. He only said it was fascinating that Charles was working for Dickie Howell, and that it was a small world and a just world.

“I used to kick Dickie Howell's shins at Sunday School,” John Gray said. “I never dreamed that he would be kicking yours, Charley.”

Dorothea and his mother were in the parlor when he got home, reading the
Clyde Herald
, which Tommy Stevens always threw on the front porch from his bicycle at five o'clock.

“I think it would be just as well not to speak of it at all,” his mother was saying to Dorothea, who was darning one of her best silk stockings.

“Well, here's Charley,” Dorothea said. “Ask him. He knows everything.”

“I know how you got a hole in it,” Charles said.

“How?” Dorothea asked.

“Running after Elbridge Sterne.”

“Well, I'd rather run after Elbridge,” Dorothea said, “than trot around after Mr. Howell.”

“I wish you children wouldn't always bicker,” Esther Gray said. “Charley, the Clyde Fund didn't take your father.”

The Clyde Fund was one of those generous bequests which so many New England citizens have left for the benefit of towns in which they lived. It had started with a bequest of five thousand dollars in 1820 by a Mr. Clarence Fanning, the principal to be held for a term of years at compound interest and then the income to be expended on shade trees and on other street improvements, under the direction of five representative citizens, to be named by the Dock Street Savings Bank. The trustees met three times a year, in the Dock Street Savings Bank directors' room, and Charles's grandfather, the Judge, had been one of the first trustees.

“Why should they have taken him?” Charles asked.

“Oh, Charley,” his mother said, “don't say that.”

“That's just the sort of thing Charley would say about Father,” Dorothea said.

“Well,” Charles said, “you might as well mention it, because he'll find out.”

Just at that moment John Gray came in from his work at the mill.

“Well, well,” he said, “the wind's getting into the northeast. How's Dickie Howell, Charley?”

“Don't tease him, John,” Esther Gray said.

“Now, Esther,” John Gray said, “Charley and I have our own brand of humor, acrid, but it's humor. Well, so you're all reading the
Clyde Herald.
”

“John.” Charles's mother smiled brightly. “You didn't tell us that the Pine Trees were going to another muster.”

“Are they?” John Gray answered. “I didn't see that, but I saw about the Clyde Fund. Don't look disappointed, Esther. I'm hardly the type. What would I do in a savings bank talking about shade trees?”

Supper was the time in the day when the family was always drawn closest together and Charles's pleasantest memories, as well as memories of quarrels and crises, all began with the supper table at Spruce Street. The old sliding shutters were always drawn across the dining room windows and for light there were four candles in brass candlesticks and a hanging oil lamp above the table, a strange and ugly Victorian contraption which let itself up and down on pulleys. There was a halo of light above the round dark walnut table but the fireplace with its mantel and paneling over it and the white dado of the dining room were always in shadow. The same willowware pot of boiled cracked cocoa always stood by his mother's place. He had once told Nancy about that cocoa, which used to steep on the back of the stove for days, and out of curiosity Nancy had looked for some in New York but she could never find it. It only seemed to exist at Mr. Beardsley's grocery shop at Clyde. There was always a loaf of bread and a knife and a breadboard by Dorothea's place and a covered Sandwich glass butter dish at John Gray's end of the table. The napkins were neatly rolled in silver rings, each with its owner's initial. (Sam's ring was still in the Empire sideboard.) The chairs around the table were of the painted, Hitchcock type, and all these furnishings were so closely associated with the family that each thing in the room had an almost living relationship to each other thing.

Even if they were gossiping over the most humdrum events of the day at supper, John Gray was always entertaining. He began that evening by touching lightly on the Clyde Fund. The Fund, he said, had a definite effect on the mental processes of all its trustees and being a trustee was a great responsibility. Should the income be spent to sprinkle Johnson Street in the summer or should it be spent for public hitching posts on Dock Street? It was still to dawn, he said, on a Clyde Fund trustee that it was more important to regulate motor traffic. Or should the money be spent in erecting a suitable drinking fountain for horses at the southwest corner of Dock and Johnson Streets to balance the Hewitt Memorial Fountain on the northwest corner, and, if so, how high should the fountain be? These were problems, John Gray said, that needed Clyde's best minds, and how could the birds be kept from the head of George Washington near the courthouse without discouraging the birds? He was sorry, very sorry, that he could not be there to help.

Then his mind moved on. The Dock Street Bank had closed its mortgage on the old Bingham house. Surely Charles must have noticed it, the square brick house that he passed every day on his way to Wright-Sherwin. Its fence was gone and its window sashes were rotted but it had a perfect doorway. Tony Leveroni, who worked at the mill, lived there, and John Gray had been in to see him when his boy was sick. The Leveronis lived in the old ballroom but their stove and sink and washtubs could not spoil it. It was one of the stateliest rooms he had ever seen. The molding was as light as lace. It was a privilege to sit with Tony Leveroni and look at the carved medallion below the mantel. If the Clyde trustees wanted to do anything they should buy that house and restore it, and then he shrugged his shoulders.