by JOHN P. MARQUAND

HE did not feel the way he should have felt that morning. He had not felt well but he had been sound asleep when Nancy woke him up. He realized that he had a slight headache —nothing that would not pass, of course, when he had some coffee.

“Are you awake now?” Nancy asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “Naturally I’m awake. It’s a hell of a morning, isn’t it?”

“If you’d only remember,” Nancy said, “not to take anything to drink after dinner. I’ve learned it long ago and I don’t see why you can’t.”

It always annoyed him when Nancy got on the subject of alcohol, because she always made it seem as though alcohol were a problem, and it wasn’t. Nancy knew as well as he did that they never drank anything as a rule, except when they went out to dinner or had people in. He would always think of Nancy saying, as she did so often, that she and Charles, when they were just quietly at home, enjoyed each other’s company so much that they did not need a cocktail. It sounded well enough but it was not always true, particularly when Nancy got started on the household bills.

“I only had one drink,” he said, “and if I hadn’t, I’d have gone to sleep.”

“Yes,” Nancy said, “I saw you, darling.”

“Saw me what?” he asked.

“Saw you almost go to sleep,” Nancy said. “You had a glazed look. You couldn’t keep your eyes open.”

“It would have been all right if we’d played bridge,” he said. “I hate sitting around with a lot of people, just talking after dinner. My God, four hours of steady conversation after talking all day.”

“Now, darling,” Nancy said, “who was it who wanted to go to the Cliffords’?”

“All right,” Charles said, “who was it?”

“I told you,” Nancy said, “that we didn’t have to go to the Cliffords’. They had us in January and we had them, and everything was square, and now we’ll have to have them again.”

“Well, we don’t have to have them right away,” Charles said. “Let’s try not to think about it now at half past seven in the morning. She’s the one who gets me down. You know, when I see the whole picture I can’t help feeling sorry for Bradley Clifford.”

“I wish you’d stop feeling sorry for Bradley Clifford,” Nancy said. “Everybody’s sorry for him. I wish you’d start feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I do,” Charles said, “right at this moment.”

“And I wish you’d feel sorry for me,” Nancy said.

“I do,” Charles said. “I do feel sorry for you, and for everybody else who lives in this bedroom town, and in fact for everyone else in the world. That’s the way I feel, at the moment.”

“Darling,” Nancy said, “don’t be so broadminded, You’ll make me cry.”

“Well, don’t say I’m narrow-minded then,” Charles said. “Is Bill awake?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “He doesn’t have your troubles.”

“He doesn’t have to stay up all night,” Charles said. “Is he out of the bathroom?”

“Yes, dear,” Nancy said. “There’s no excuse for you to stay lying there. You’d better get up or there’ll be the usual morning marathon.”

“Is Evelyn up?” Charles asked,

“She’s up and she’s studying her geography. And besides, she doesn’t use your bathroom.”

“All right,” Charles said. “All right.”

“And don’t go to sleep again,” Nancy said. “I have to go down to cope with the coffee.”

“What?” Charles asked.

“You heard me,” Nancy said. “You’re always better when you have your coffee. Now don’t go to sleep again.”

“Where’s Mary?” Charles asked. “Isn’t she down there getting breakfast?”

“Mary went to spend the night with her sister in Harlem,” Nancy said. “She won’t be back until this afternoon.”

“All right,” Charles said. “All right. Is it raining?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “It’s raining hard, and we’ve never had the windshield wipers on the Buick fixed.”

“Well, that makes it swell,” Charles said. “It’s nice it’s come to our attention.”

“I thought that might wake you up,” Nancy said. “You’d better wear your herringbone suit. It came back from the cleaners yesterday. I’ve put your ruptured duck on it.”

Although he made a conscious effort not to be annoyed, he felt a distinct sense of irritation for two reasons. She was, of course, referring to that gold emblem which had been issued to exsoldiers and sailors, but there was no reason why she had to refer to it by what might be called its GI name as though she had been in the service, too. Also there was no reason why she should keep getting it in his buttonhole before he took the train. He was already beginning to think that there was something juvenile about the emblem that placed him in a youth category to which he did not belong. He was not sure how well it looked at the bank, either, at his desk near the older officers.

“Never mind it,” Charles said. “ I’m not running for any office.”

Then he checked himself because he knew exactly what she would say before she said it.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “you are, and don’t you keep forgetting it. You’re right in there polishing apples.”

“All right,” he said, “I’m not forgetting.” It occurred to him that there was no way to forget, that most of his life had been spent polishing some apple or other. If you had to earn your living, life was a series of apples.

“And don’t forget,” and Nancy gave his shoulder a pat, “to put two hundred into the housekeeping account. There isn’t anything there and I’m going to draw on it today.”

“What,” Charles asked, “again?”

“Yes,” Nancy said, “again and again and again. I thought you’d like some cheerful news, darling.”

“All right,” Charles said. “It’s a hell of a morning, isn’t it?”

“And don’t forget that herringbone,” Nancy said, “or your golden order either. You know how well Roger Blakesley always looks, but he hasn’t got a duck.”

“No,” Charles said, “that’s right. He was too damned bright to get one.”

“And remember we’re going to the Bartons’ Friday night,” Nancy said. “Don’t forget to tell Mr. Burton you’re looking forward to it when you see him at the bank.”

Nancy was good at things like that. In fact she hardly ever forgot things like that.

2

His herringbone suit had a slight benzine odor which showed it as just fresh from the cleaners. He had worn it very little though it was four years old and now it was tight in the waist and shoulders, but not too tight. It was not a bad-looking suit at all and in fact it made him look like one of those suburban husbands that you saw in advertising illustrations, one of those whimsically comical men who peeked naïvely out of the corners of his eyes at his jolly and amazed little wife who was making that new kind of beaten biscuits.

Actually he had first seen Nancy outside the vice-president’s office in a downtown bank. He could remember the exact, uncompromising way that she sat behind her typewriter and the exact amount of attention she had given him, not a bit more than was necessary and that was not much.

“He’ll be free in about five minutes,” Nancy had said. Nancy could always keep track of time as readily as a railroad conductor. That was the way he and Nancy had met, and that had been all there was to it, no furtive smiles, no light chatter, no argument or anything.

“ You needed a haircut,” Nancy told him later, “but not very badly, and the way you held your brief case showed you weren’t one of those bond boys. You weren’t bothered about your brief case, and you didn’t have a handkerchief in your breast pocket.”

“Well,” he had told her later, “you didn’t look so lovable either,”

“Darling,” Nancy said, “that’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever told me. I spent a long time cultivating just that look.”

When he came down to the dining room, Nancy was sitting in much the same posture, very straight in her bleached oak chair. Instead of a typewriter she was manipulating a toaster and an electric percolater, and there was a child on either side of her — their children.

“Don’t trip over the extension cords,” Nancy said. “Billy.”

His son Bill rose from the table and pulled out his chair for him, a gesture which Nancy had taught him and which always made Charles nervous.

“Well, well,” Charles said. “Good morning, everybody. Hasn’t the school bus come by yet?”

“It’s not the school bus,” his daughter Evelyn said. “It’s the school car. Why do you always call it a bus?”

“It ought to be a bus,” Charles said. “You kids ought to be going to a public school.”

Nancy was looking at him critically as she always did before he went to town.

“You’ve forgotten your handkerchief,” she said.

That idea of hers that every well-dressed man should have a corner of a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, he often thought must have been a hangover from Nancy’s earlier days, when she still read books of etiquette. But then perhaps every woman had her own peculiar ideas about male dress.

“Now listen, Nancy,” he said, “never mind about the handkerchief.”

It surprised him that she gave up easily.

“Evelyn, pass your father his coffee,” she said.

“And don’t look cute when you’re doing it,” Bill said.

“Mother,” Evelyn said, “won’t you tell Bill to stop that, please?”

“Yes,” said Nancy. “Stop, Bill. And go out in the kitchen. Put the eggs in and watch the clock.”

There was no necessity for listening carefully to the voices of Nancy and the children.

“You’ve got to leave in five minutes,” Nancy said. “The roads will be slippery.”

Charles pulled his watch from his vest pocket, the Swiss watch he had bought at a ship’s store in 1943. “ You must be fast,” he said. But there was never any use arguing about time with Nancy.

“And remember,” Nancy said, “you’ll have to go and get the Buick out. It always chokes when it’s raining.”

“Didn’t you send it down to be fixed?” Charles asked.

“Yes,” Nancy answered, “but you know what they’re like at that service station. They just look at the carburetor and don’t do anything. I wish you’d go to that new Acme place.”

“Acme. What does acme mean?” Charles asked.

“ You hear new words all the time now and you don’t know what they mean.”

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

He did not know why it startled him to have Evelyn tell him something which he should have known himself, and of course he would have known if he’d put his mind on it. The trouble was that he had not been there enough because there had been that interval when he had been away, and then the chain of habit had been broken. That must have been why everything seemed ready-made. There was something in Berkeley’s theory of philosophy — he still could remember that course at Dartmouth — that there was no proof that anything existed except in the radius of one’s consciousness.

Before the war, Bill had been ten and Evelyn had been seven, and now he was in a ready-made dining room, though he had had it made himself in 1940. The house had been a thirty-thousanddollar house not including extras and there had been a number of extras, and he and Nancy had bought the bleached chairs and table and sideboard and had ordered the walls done in pickled pine because they had wanted it to look light and modern. It still looked new and the glazed chintz draperies still had their original glitter, 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.”

3

THE rain gave the blue gravel near the garage a metallic sheen. The water on the lightly whitened brick on 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 glittered like dark cold water.

“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 raincapes over her gray tweed suit. She pulled on her gloves carefully 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 gray felt hat, moist and curly. They always seemed much more alone when she took him to the station than any other time and for some reason it was always the friendliest moment of the day. He could feel that he and Nancy were alone together with all the rest of the world outside.

“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 glancing straight ahead of her, but she was smiling.

“Yes,” he said, “I know what you mean. When I came down there to breakfast this morning it all seemed ready-made.”

“Ready-made?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said. “Just as though I hadn’t 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. Her mind was always on what she was doing, but she had a most peculiar gift of being aide 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. She was giving her full attention to what she was doing, but at the same time the casual way in which she spoke told him that she was thinking very carefully about what she was saying.

“I wish I could help 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.”

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

It was, of course, the absolute truth, and it was just the time when they told each other the truth.

There were drawbacks, he was thinking, about knowing anyone too well, and yet there was no way to help it. There was no actual chance of decent concealment when you knew someone’s voice as well as he did hers. It was probably the relationship that was known as love, which was quite different from being in love, because love had a larger and more embracing connotation. Love was a vast abstraction that was made by time, a shadowy, subconscious sort of edifice without any very good architecture, but still occasionally you could stand away from it and 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, and that indescribably lonely moment when two people were close together was over. “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 waiting for the green light. They were nearly 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 tell him 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 them before.

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

“Well, that’s swell,” Charles said. He was very glad they were getting to the station. “If the 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.” Charles began to laugh.

“All right, what’s so funny?” Nancy asked.

“Well, isn’t it kind of funny?” Charles said. “The little woman kissing her husband good-bye. 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-bye, 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,” Nancy said.

“Why not?” Charles asked.

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

The last thing he expected was to have her hurt when he had only meant to be amusing.

“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.”

He had never thought until that moment that anything about the day might be particularly serious and he still put the seriousness away from him. He was only aware at the time of a discordant instant of revelation that broke unpleasantly into the morning. Nevertheless, he wished she had not said it.

“Now listen, Nance,” he said, and then for some reason he felt deeply moved. He could almost think that he was saying good-bye 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. “The train’s due in two minutes.”

It was true, there was no time. There was only time to move from one thing into something else. 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-bye.”

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

4

THERE had been a time, it must have been before the outbreak of the European war, when Charles had realized that taking the eight-thirty was a distinct step ahead and one indicating that he had a certain amount of promise. It 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 the salaried type who had to be at his desk at nine.

The eight-thirty train was designed for the 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 Green River Club and also president of Mayhew Brothers at 86 Broadway, had even spoken of getting an eight-thirty crowd together who would arrange to occupy one of those club cars with wicker chairs inside 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 always a publicspirited man who enjoyed getting little congenial groups together. He had suggested the idea first to Tony Burton and they both had decided that they did not want just 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 backgammon if you wanted to in that car, or else you could merely sit and read, but the hope was, if you got a congenial group aboard, representing men young and old, coming not from all walks of life, because there was only about one walk of life on the eight-thirty, but coming 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 those 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 fight 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 it never worked out, because of Mussolini and Hitler. Charles remembered Mr. Mayhew’s idea, because it had all started about the time that Mr. Burton had suggested to Charles that he call him Tony.

Charles could still recall the glow he felt in that sudden moment of defenseless warmth, and Mr. Burton had been shy about it in a very nice way, as an older man is sometimes shy. He remembered that Mr. Burton had fidgeted with his onyx pen stand, and that first Mr. Burton had called him “feller.” It had happened one evening when they had all stayed late to talk over details in connection with the Catlin estate.

Mr. Burton had just made one of his favorite remarks 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, but he had selected it and it showed that a concentration on any subject trained the mind.

“Now you’d think, wouldn’t you,” Mr. Burton said, that the order 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 any other course I ever took at Yale.”

Though Charles had heard this before, he had been pleased that Mr. Burton had got on the subject of his Greek studies, for it showed that everything was going smoothly with the Catlin estate which was one of the largest accounts in the trust department.

“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 it’s 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 basic 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 and it showed that he was satisfied on the whole with the way things were going.

“Now you may remember,” Mr. Burton had said, “that Mrs. Burton and I took a little trip in 1933. I don’t believe that you or anyone else around here 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 wanted 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.”

This was the first time that Charles had been surprised by the conversation. He 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. Though he knew nothing about Bagdad himself and had not the slightest desire to go there, he wondered what connection it had with all the reports that lay on Mr. Burton’s mahogany 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 the rare rug that was now in Mr. Burton’s study, 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 that story of Beau Geste, except 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 that 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 a mistake 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 Association of American Bank Presidents 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.”

“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 the time still seemed very close and Charles still found it hard to unsnarl the tangle of his reactions. His main reaction must have been one of great joy and relief, with the relief uppermost, and he remembered thinking that he could hardly wait to hear what Nancy would say. His mind was so mixed up that he never could remember exactly what he said to Mr. Burton but it must have been all right.

“You know, Charles,” Mr. Burton had said, “Guthrie Mayhew and I have quite an idea. We’re going to get hold of Tommy Mapes on the New Haven and see if he can’t get us a special car on the eight-thirty. How about getting aboard? My idea is to call it the Crackerbarrel Special.”

“Why thanks,” Charles had said. “I’d like to very much, Tony.”

He could not remember what train he had taken home, but he remembered that Nancy had been asleep when he got there.

“Nance,” he was saying, “wake up. I’ve got something to tell you. Burton’s asked me to call him Tony,” and Nancy had sat bolt upright in her twin bed.

“Start at the beginning,” Nancy had said. “Exactly how did it happen, darling?”

They must have talked for a long while, there in the middle of the night, but Nancy had known what it meant because she had worked downtown herself.

“Now wait,” Nancy had said, “let’s not get too excited. Who else calls him Tony?”

“I don’t think anyone else does,” Charles had told her, “except the officers and old Jake.”

“Who’s old Jake?” Nancy asked.

It surprised him that Nancy did not know, for she usually kept everything straight, but when he told her that old Jake was the day watchman in the vault who had been there when Mr. Burton started, Nancy had remembered.

“Darling, we ought to have a drink of something, shouldn’t we?” she said. But it was pretty late for a drink. “Darling, I knew it would happen sometime. It just had to happen. Oh, Charlie, I’m so proud.”

It was only a week later that they found out that Mr. Burton had also asked Roger Blakesley to call him Tony and they never could find out whom Mr. Burton had asked first.

5

TONY BURTON always boarded the eight-thirty at Stamford and it occurred to Charles that it might be a good idea to walk through the cars and to sit by him if the seat beside him should be vacant, He had nothing particular to say to him, but it might be a good idea. He even went so far as to think of a suitable conversational subject and he decided on the action of the market. He knew it would be a risky subject to be approached cautiously because Tony Burton was always careful to say that he was only interested in the long-swing implications. The Board was convinced, and Charles was too, that the general situation predicated a long-term rise and that the present drastic slump was a temporary adjustment and not the beginning of a bear market, no matter what the statisticians might conclude.

The station was crowded and damp, but in spite of the crowd the atmosphere was restful. You had a feeling that the rush of commuters was nearly over for the day and that only the rear guard was left of the whole army that had marched to the city. The men in the station gave an atmosphere of executive leisure, implying that they did not have to arrive anywhere at any particular time, but that nothing actually could happen until they did arrive. Their mail would be open and waiting and everything else would be waiting. In the meanwhile, they gathered about the radiator near the ticket windows, talking about the weather, and the room was almost like a club, where everyone was on a first-name basis.

He saw that Mr. Mayhew had a new gabardine raincoat and as he moved to the newsstand to buy the New York Times he nodded to Courtney Jeffers of the New York Life and to Rodney Bishop in the General Foods Sales Department and to Bill Ward well in Eckert and Stokes. Curiously enough, it was all more familiar than home because it was all a part of the city to which they all were going, a part of something more important than any suburb, a part of life that was somehow genuine. There was a sort of preoccupation today, almost a feeling of suspense. He had just bought the New York Times and had turned away from the newsstand when he saw that he was face to face with Roger Blakesley.

Roger was wearing a blue, pin-striped suit, double-breasted and carefully pressed, in the Brooks Brothers most conservative tradition. His dark-brown hat went very nicely with his tweed overcoat. He was polishing his rim lass glasses with a fresh handkerchief, and his face, which had grown plumper and more rotund lately, was fresh and shining.

“Why, hello, Chas,” Roger said.

“Hello, Roge,” Charles answered, and then he went on because you had to say something. “Are you still using that electric razor?” It must have been the smoothness of Roger’s cheeks that made him say it.

“Frankly no, Chas,” Roger said. “I think I’ve got too much of a beard for it, and besides,” Roger put on his glasses and laughed, “it makes me feel like a putting green.”

It was just the sort of thing that Roger would say and his smile grew broader as he waited.

“Or a bowling green,” Charles said.

“All right,” Roger said, “a bowling green, as long as you don’t cut it too fine. That was a swell party last night, wasn’t it? I couldn’t tear myself away.”

“Neither could I,” said Charles, and they both smiled.

“Listen, feller,” Roger asked, “what sort of a schedule have you got today?”

“Nothing much,” Charles said. “How about lunch?”

“I can’t make it,” Roger said. “I have a date with Tony at the University Club. After that, Mapes is coming in, and after that I’ll be down in the vault. But we’ve got to check up on the Catlin thing before we meet the attorneys.”

There was a roaring sound outside and everyone was moving. The eight-thirty was coming in.

“We can go over it on the train if you want to,” Charles said. “I’ve got the papers here.”

Roger Blakesley patted his shoulder.

“I can’t, feller,” he said, close to Charles’s ear because of the roaring of the train. “Tony wants me. He’s saving me a seat.”

Charles also raised his voice.

“There’s a lot more to banking than you think, isn’t there, feller?” he said. “It’s an art, isn’t it?”

Roger smiled again and linked his arm through Charles’s.

“Now don’t get sore, feller,” he said.

“I’m not sore,” Charles said. “I’m just saying banking’s an art.”

“That’s so,” Roger said. “It is. Well, I’ll see you in church, feller.”

“All right,” Charles said. “Don’t pray too hard.” But Roger had not heard him. He was bounding up the steps of the third coach already and Charles could not blame him. Roger was always quick on his feet and they did not actively dislike each other. That sort of thing had been going on long enough so that Charles could understand it and they both had been very busy lately. He was even reasonably sure that Tony Burton had not asked Roger to sit with him, but then Roger had thought of it first. He was not even entirely sure that Tony Burton had asked Roger to lunch at the University Club, even though that was where Tony Burton went to luncheon every Wednesday.

Charles found a seat by a window and opened the New York Times to the financial page. There was nothing like competition. His mind was working more quickly since he had met Roger Blakesley and everything seemed worth while. Roger was working on loans now and he was in the trust department, but they had been all through the mill together. Either of them could handle customers. They both were very bright boys, though he had never worried about Roger much. There would be no reason to worry about Roger if Roger had gone to the war. The financial page was dull but Charles put his mind on it. Roger had a quick way at jumping at facts without examining them first. Charles’s memory was more retentive than Roger’s. He could have gone through the Gatlin account, for instance, without looking at a single paper, and Tony Burton knew it. But memory was not personality. Smith Chemical, he saw, had dropped a point, and he made a mental note to do some reading on Smith. His mind was working very well and everything was worth while.

6

WHEN the train pulled into the lower level of the Grand Central, habit made Charles move instinctively, oblivious to his surroundings; yet without consciously noticing the shining marble of the lower level or the starry vault of the concourse of the upper level, he was aware of the spaciousness and aware that he was back in a part of his life that he could completely understand, for habit had made him a proprietor of that station and all the streets around it. Habit made him move instinctively to the broad stairs on the right up which he ran gently and easily, for no good reason except that he had always taken them at a run. On the upper level he turned sharp right again, walking past the parcel checkroom to the ramp on the left and past the heaps of newspapers by the doors out to the corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue,

Whenever he emerged from the station and set foot on 42nd Street he always experienced in varying degrees a sense of coming home. He always knew, whether he thought of it or not, that he belonged to New York City more than he did to any other part of the world, whenever he reached 42nd Street. His mind was in tune with the traffic, with the drugstores and the haberdasheries, with the Lincoln Building and the Park Avenue ramp, and with the marble corner of the Public Library up the street. He belonged to New York, and conversely New York belonged to him, if only because so much of his life and energy and thought had been spent in it. It did not matter that he had not been born and raised there. New York belonged to people who had come from other places. New York was only the result of living in it, a strange indefinable combination of triumph and discouragement and of memories. He only thought of this vaguely, when he thought of it at all, and nothing that other people had said about it had ever impressed him. It did not matter what the weather was there, or the season of the year, or whether there was war or peace. He always had that same impression of coming back, and something always made him step more briskly through the crowd.

He was aware that the place was changing without his being able one jot to influence that change, but still the place belonged to him. There were new stores, new façades, new plastics, but there was always the same result. The only institution in the neighborhood that had not changed much was the Stuyvesant Bank, a name which had been given to it when Murchison Brothers had first started the business on lower Broadway in the early 1800’s. It had moved uptown since then, but even that move had been a long while ago, and almost from the beginning the Stuyvesant had been what it still was, a family bank.

It was essentially the same, Charles often thought, as it had been when he had first entered it with his father on a trip to New York when he was twelve years old. He could not recollect the circumstances which had surrounded that trip and now it was too late to find them out. It must have been one of those rare times when some transaction in Boston, probably in textiles, had put his father in a genial and opulent mood or they never would have come to New York or stopped at the Hotel Belmont. Things must have gone well with his father because he had filled his cigar case, and what Charles could remember most clearly about the trip was the opulent smell of good Havana tobacco.

When things were going well it was his father’s habit always to get out his cigar case from the back of his upper bureau drawer. Charles remembered very clearly the oak woodwork in the downstairs room of the Belmont where they had breakfasted after driving in a taxicab from the Pall River Line Pier downtown. There was no need, his father had said, to bother about taking the elevated or the subway. They had breakfasted on grapefruit, with a red cherry in the center, oatmeal and cream, kippered herrings and scrambled eggs, and after consuming a pot of coffee, his father had lighted a cigar.

“It’s a great town, New York, when you get to know it,” he had said, “and everyone ought to get to know New York.”

It was pathetic, Charles sometimes thought, that desire of his father’s to be a man of the world. It was not unlike Tony Burton’s desire to be a great cosmopolitan and their efforts achieved about the same success. His father’s remark, that it was a great town, New York, had about the same ring as the Burton statement on Bagdad and approximately the same conviction.

“They tell me there’s a very good show in town, a musical comedy called Very Good, Eddie,” his father had said. “ You and I will go to see it tonight, Charlie, and we’ll ride in a bus up Fifth Avenue this afternoon, and we’ll look in at the Museum of Natural History. Now straighten your tie. No, the other way. I don’t know why you can’t learn to tie a four-in-hand. We’re going to the bank to cash a check, and pull your stockings up.”

It was God’s truth, and not a very palatable one, that Charles wore black ribbed stockings and knickerbockers, purchased for that first visit to New York. He was old enough to be painfully embarrassed at the way his stockings kept coming down and he tried to change the subject.

“What bank?” he asked.

“Let’s see,” his father said, and he pulled a letter from his pocket., “The Stuyvesant Bank. It’s just a few blocks from here.”

Even in 1916, banks were beginning to be imposing, and Charles was disappointed when he first saw the Stuyvesant, for anyone could see that it was in a remodeled house, a big New York corner house, with brick and brownstone, with a somewhat grimy façade. A doorman in gray opened what had been the front door, and once they were inside, that impression of being in a house still remained, though all the ground floor had been remodeled to make room for the paying tellers. One side was for ladies and a little fire was burning in a grate. There was the same desk near it with a white-haired gentleman there to help the ladies, just as Mr. Cheseborough did now, but it was not Mr. Cheseborough. There were the same mahogany roll-top desks by the windows, and other desks in the distance under electric lights. Charles could remember the flight of stairs leading to the vaults in the old house cellar. He stood there by the teller’s window while the teller read his father’s letter and asked his father whether he wanted it in fives or tens.

“That’s a good bank,” his father had said when they were out on the street again. “A family bank, without any funny business. It stood up through the panic of ‘93.”

7

THAT old house of the Stuyvesant was still an asset. It was still a family bank whose doorman could greet depositors like the doorman of a club and where there was always a sense of leisure. You had a feeling, as you entered, that the Stuyvesant had handled the same family accounts for generations, and this was absolutely true. An effort had always been made to think of personalities as much as money, and employees had always been hired because of their ability to get on with people. Year after year there had been talk about a new building, not necessarily a modern one but something colonial and new like that brick effort of the Bank of Manhattan on Madison Avenue, but the directors had always turned down such proposals.

It paid to keep the Stuyvesant in that ugly old brownstone mansion with its floor plan about the way it had been when the Stuyvesant had first moved there. It paid to keep the open fire burning and to keep tellers and investment counselors who were kind to confused old ladies and genial with arthritic old gentlemen. It paid to have a travel service which could take great pains about letters of credit. It paid to have kindly tax experts who would seemingly waste hours over minor problems of bewildered depositors.

Other banks, larger ones, were constantly advertising their friendly services, pointing out the horrible complications faced by anyone who owned property in this period of economic change and regulation, but the Stuyvesant seldom advertised. It was a matter of words rather than deeds, a matter of personal service at the Stuyvesant, and it paid. The wills of deceased depositors were proof enough that the Stuyvesant had been a reliable, friendly bank. The Stuyvesant had been named as executor and trustee in hundreds of wills. The employees of the Stuyvesant had to be sympathetic men who understood rich clients and who knew all the complications of being rich, although they were not rich men themselves. They had to deal familiarly and almost jovially, but always scrupulously, with huge sums of money, although most of them lived on comparatively modest salaries.

If you were good at things like that you developed a priestly, untouchable, ascetic attitude. You had to think of your own financial life and your own problems as something apart from those greater financial complications. If you did well enough to become an executive in the Stuyvesant, and this took a lot of time and an arduous apprenticeship, you found yourself solving the problems of individuals who had difficulty in living on incomes of several hundred thousand dollars a year while you yourself contrived to worry along with a salary minute by comparison. You found yourself spending the working day discussing the investment of huge sums of money, only to get home yourself and to worry because the butcher’s bill had risen some forty dollars above the month before. You had to debate the purchase or the sale of controls in business enterprises and then return home yourself to decide whether or not you could afford to buy a new car or a ready-made or a tailor-made suit.

In time this gave you a strangely split sort of personality. You had to toss your own problems completely aside and never to allow them to mingle in any way with problems of clients and depositors when you reached your desk at the Stuyvesant Bank. When you reached your desk you had to be a friend and confidant, as professional as a doctor or a lawyer, ready for almost anything with an intelligent perspective. Anthony Burton had once said that this was your responsibility toward society. Though personally Charles had never felt like a social worker, he realized it was a responsibility. He was already forgetting Nancy and the children, already becoming a different person, when he said good morning to Gus, the doorman on the sidewalk outside the Stuyvesant.

“Is it wet enough for you, Mr. Gray?” Gus asked.

“It has to rain sometimes,” Charles said. “Are you a grandfather yet?”

“No, not yet,” Gus said, “but any minute now. ”

Then Charles said good morning to Joe inside the door. The bank was very neat and cleared for action. He could hear the click of the adding machines in back and he could see the new pens and blotters on the tables as he walked past the tellers behind their gold wickets and turned to the right past the foreign department to the coatroom. When he had hung up his coat and hat, he looked at himself in the mirror. Though his herringbone suit was a little tight, it still fitted well but he straightened his coat carefully and straightened his gray tie. His slightly freckled face was moist from the rain and his sandy hair, though it was carefully trimmed, was disheveled and so he went to the washroom to dry his face and brush his hair because he had learned long ago that it did not pay to look sloppy when you sat out there by the officers’ desks by the front window.

Though you seldom talked of salaries at the Stuyvesant, your social status was obvious, depending on where you sat. Charles occupied one of the two flat mahogany desks that stood in a sort of no man’s land between the three roll-top desks of the officers and all the smaller desks of smaller executives and secretaries that stretched the whole length of the bank outside the cages. A green carpet extended from the officers’ desks in a neat exclusive area that just included Charles’s desk and the one beside it, which was Roger Blakesley’s. Charles could see their names, Mr. Blakesley and Mr. Gray, in silver letters, and he was pleased to see that he had got there first from the eight-thirty, a minute or two ahead of Roger and Mr. Burton, ahead of everyone near the windows.

Mr. Burton’s desk, which had the best light, was opened already and so was Mr. Steven Merry’s, the first vice-president. Though he made a conscious effort not to look at it, he noticed the rolltop desk which was still closed, Arthur Slade’s desk, the fifth vice-president of the Stuyvesant. who had died in a plane accident when returning from the West Coast two weeks before. The closer! desk still gave him a curious feeling of incompleteness and a strange mixed sense of personal gain and loss because he had been more friendly with Arthur Slade than anyone else in the Stuyvesant, but then you had to die sometime. Once Arthur Slade had occupied Charles’s own desk and then Mr. Walter Harry, who had been president when Charles had first come to the bank, had died of an embolism and everyone had moved like players on bases — Burton to Harry, Merry to Burton, Slade to vice-president — and so on down to Charles himself in Arthur’s place. The Stuyvesant was decorously accustomed to accident and death and it was so plain which one of two persons might be moving next that it was embarrassing.

8

ANY depositor must know and certainly everyone else in the bank did right up to the third floor that either Mr. Blakesley or Mr. Gray would move to Arthur Slade’s desk by the window. Undoubtedly they were making side bets out in back as Charles used to himself in the late twenties when he had first come there from Boston. Undoubtedly the clerks and the secretaries and the watchmen had started some sort of pool. Charles pulled back his mahogany chair and sat down, glancing coolly aall the desks in front of him.

Miss Marble, his secretary, had seen him already. She had already arranged his engagement pad and now she was standing beside him with his pile of morning mail. When she said good morning, she reminded him of Nancy as she had looked when he had first known her — a front-office girl, an executive’s private secretary, as neat as a trained nurse, whose private life, like his own, was pushed behind her. In spite of that rather crowded room, for a few hours he and Miss Marble would be alone in it, dependent on each other in a strange, impersonal, but almost intimate relationship that had very little to do with living. As soon as he said good morning to Miss Marble, his whole mind set itself into a brisk, efficient pattern.

“Mr. Joyce wants to see you,” Miss Marble said, “before the eleven o’clock meeting. There’s nothing on your calendar except the meeting, but Mrs. Whitaker has been calling you.”

“You mean she called this morning?”

“Well, not Mrs. Whitaker,” Miss Marble said, and she smiled. “The butler called. She’s very anxious to speak with you. ”

“All right,” Charles said. “Get her for me in five minutes,” and he picked up the letters.

Then Roger Blakesley and Anthony Burton came in and Charles nodded at them and smiled. Roger walked to his own desk at once, and Miss Fallon, his secretary, was there, but Anthony Burton stopped for a moment. As he did so, it seemed to Charles that the whole bank was watching them, and Mr. Burton must have been aware of it but he was more used than Charles to being watched. He stood straight, white-headed and smiling, dressed in a pearl-gray double-breasted suit with an expensive heavy gray checked necktie, He had that, air of measured deliberation which eventually always covered the features and the postures of bank officers and corporation lawyers. He was straight, gray, and mature, almost, younglooking, considering his sixty-five years, though Charles could never think of him as having been a young man. He always thought of him as an unchanging, a measured, deliberate, constant quantity, like a Greek letter in a mathematical formula.

“I didn’t see you on the train,” Mr. Burton said.

Charles glanced at Roger Blakesley’s desk. It was an opportunity but it was also a time to be careful.

“I didn’t see you either,” Charles said. “Mrs. Whitaker’s butler is after me. ”

It was better to do it that way. It did no harm at all to have him know about Mrs. Whitaker.

“Well, as long as she’s after you and not me,” Mr. Burton said, but they could hardly talk about Mrs. Whitaker with everyone watching. “We’ll see you at dinner Friday, won’t we?”

“You can count on it,” Charles said. “Absolutely.” And he laughed and Anthony Burton laughed.

“Yes,” Mr. Burton said, “I suppose we can, Charlie. How are Nancy and the children?”

“They’re wonderful,” Charles said. “They’re a steadying influence. ”

“Nancy’s a great girl,” Mr. Burton said. “You boys are getting together at eleven, aren’t you? I’m going to drop in myself.”

“I don’t believe there’s any need to make any changes,” Charles said.

“That’s good,” Mr. Burton said. “There’s that Catlin business. We’ll have to get together on that Catlin thing.”

“You mean the new money?” Charles asked.

“That’s it,” Mr. Burton said. “I want to check on the recommendations. Well, see you at eleven.”

He smiled and nodded and walked over to his desk in the corner.

9

CHARLES could not help but wonder whether Mr. Burton had weighed every word of that conversation as carefully as he had. For a second he thought whether there was some implication between the lines, but he could not think of any. It had simply been a bland routine conversation, friendly and nothing more. Still, there could not have been any more with Roger’s desk right beside him. Tony Burton was gone and Miss Marble was back.

“Mrs. Whitaker’s on the telephone now,” Miss Marble said, and Charles picked up the desk telephone, speaking softly as one always did in the bank.

“Good morning, Mrs. Whitaker. This is Mr. Gray.”

He could recognize the tone of her voice exactly. It was her gracious informal tone that she was in the habit of using when she wanted to make a pleasant impression on people who handled her affairs. It kept one at arm’s length, though at the same time giving a pretty little picture of her capacities for universal understanding, democracy, and kindliness.

“Oh, Mr. Gray,” he heard her say, “it’s so nice to hear your voice.”

It was difficult for Charles to respond properly to this remark because he was not at all glad to hear Mrs. Whitaker’s, and he had heard it a great deal lately, yet he had learned long ago never to be brief with a large depositor, particularly when everybody knew that the Chase, the Guaranty, and the National City had all been making overtures for the Whitaker account.

“You sound well and happy, Mrs. Whitaker,” Charles said.

Sometimes he was astonished at his own adroitness. He never sounded like himself when he spoke in those hushed tones at his desk. He sounded like a doctor or a diplomat, and now he was a loyal friend of the Whitaker family who could allow himself the least bit of jovial familiarity.

“Hubert and I are so dreadfully worried, Mr. Gray,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “That’s why it’s so nice to hear your voice. ”

He could not tell whether it was a further act of graciousness or a lapse of memory that made her refer to Mr. Whitaker as Hubert and he could not recall that she had ever done such a thing before.

“Why, I’m sorry,” Charles said. “What have you to be worried about?”

That was it. What did she have to be worried about?

“We have to sell something,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “We have to sell something right away. We literally haven’t got a cent of money.”

At least he was able to smile since Mrs. Whitaker was not there, and the strange thing about it was that her tone of desperation was completely genuine, as genuine as though she had to sell some piece of furniture to pay the grocer. One part of him could smile but another part was completely sympathetic. That was one of the things that the business had taught him.

“Oh,” Charles said, and he was about to add that he was sorry but he checked himself because he had learned that it made depositors angry if you became too actively sorry.

“And we simply don’t know what to sell,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “We’ve been going over it and over it.”

“I know,” Charles said. “It’s always difficult to make up one’s mind.”

“We would like to sell something that has a loss to it,” Mrs. Whitaker said, “but there literally isn’t anything. Everything shows a profit. Why don’t you ever leave us anything with losses?”

Charles drummed his fingers softly on the desk and raised his eyes to the baroque ceiling with its new indirect lighting. It was a wonderful conversation and he wished he could tell Nancy about it but he knew enough not to gossip about clients, particularly large clients.

“Well,” he said, “I see what you mean, but the object usually is to show a profit. Most of our friends like it better that way. There are still advantages to having a profit rather than a loss.”

“Are there?” asked Mrs. Whitaker. “I know it’s so if you say so, but you’ve simply got to help us, Mr. Gray. Anything you decide on, you will help us, won’t you?”

“Of course I will,” Charles said, and his voice was gently reassuring. “That’s what I’m here for. Let me see, there are a number of short-term governments. ”

“I know Mr. Whitaker doesn’t want to sell those. He refuses, absolutely.”

“Oh,” Charles said. “Why does he?”

“Because his father always said that you mustn’t be a bear on the United States,” Mrs, Whitaker said. “He says that we must back up the government no matter what it does. If we don’t back up the government where will we be? I believe that, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say it would be disloyal,” Charles said. “Short-term governments are about the same as cash. That’s the way they’re generally used.”

“Suppose we try to think of something else,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “There must be something else.”

“Yes,” Charles said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’d better get a picture of the whole situation. I’ll send Mr. Joyce over right away.”

“I don’t think Mr. Joyce has the experience for that, do you?” Mrs. Whitaker said. “I know he’s a charming young man, but he’s really not much older than Albert, and he’s always so, well, so indefinite, and Mr. Thingamajig, what’s his name? The one Mr. Burton sent over the last time. He was so indefinite, too, and besides I thought he was a little like a pussycat.”

“Whom do you mean?” Charles asked. “I can’t exactly place him from your description.”

“That round-faced, pussycat man with glasses,” Mrs. Whitaker said.

“You don’t mean Mr. Blakesley, do you?” Charles asked.

“That’s it,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “Mr. Blakesley.”

Charles glanced across at Roger Blakesley. Roger was busy with his letters.

“I know him pretty well,” Charles said. “I wouldn’t say he was a pussycat.”

“It’s a compliment,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “Hubert and I want you, and we simply have to find a hundred thousand dollars somewhere. It isn’t asking too much for you to come over, is it?”

“Oh no,” Charles said. “Not at all.”

“You see, we’ve decided after all to buy that ranch,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “Albert’s fallen in love with it, and I think Mr. Whitaker has too, a little. You’ll come at five-thirty, won’t you, when we can all be quiet at teatime, and tell us howunwise it is.”

“I suppose it depends on the ranch,” Charles said. “Why yes, I can come at five-thirty.”

“But don’t say it’s too unwise,” Mrs. Whitaker said. “You’re so New England, sometimes, Mr. Gray. Don’t be too uncompromising, will you? Just say it’s a little bit unwise.”

“All right,” Charles said. “At five-thirty. I’ll remember. A little bit unwise.”

“And Mr. Gray.”

“A’es,” Charles said.

“I adore New Englanders. Father came from Maine.”

“Maine’s chief export is character,” Charles said.

“Do you know,” Mrs. Whitaker said, “your voice sounds just like Father’s when he was in a disapproving mood. You won’t be too Olympian, too disapproving, will you?”

“Oh no,” Charles said. “Only a little disapproving. I’ll see you at five-thirty, Mrs. Whitaker.”

(To be continued)