The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  He was staring out over the water, the clean outline of his profile with its high, thin nose and jutting chin stamped out in dull bronze against the night. I recognized the expression on his face, the sureness of his look, the calm determination in the set of his mouth. It was the way he looked when he performed a difficult operation.

  “Bark,” he said finally, “are you in love with Selena yourself?”

  The question shocked me, it was so wide of the mark. “God, no!”

  “But you are afraid of something. I wondered if you were afraid of falling in love with Jerry’s wife.”

  “I’ve never felt that way about her for a moment.”

  “Then,” he said, “I used to think you might be afraid for Jerry. That you had some intuition it would end like this. Was that it?”

  I was grateful for the opening, the chance to give a logical excuse for the feeling he had managed to detect in me. “Yes,” I said, “I was afraid of that.”

  He withdrew his eyes from the dark stretches of the Sound and looked full at me. “Then, why are you still afraid? It has happened, as you feared it might. What else is there still to dread?”

  “Nothing,” I replied without meeting his eyes.

  “You ran away from her. I don’t understand that.”

  “Jerry told me she often went up to the mesa at night, alone. I left her because I thought that was the best way. I think she wanted me to leave her.”

  He said, “I see,” in a tone entirely empty of conviction. Then, after a while, in a low voice and half to himself: “I cannot believe that a son of mine would commit suicide. Even if he was not happy with his wife.” For the first time his voice trembled slightly.

  “Don’t think about it.” And then, knowing how his pride and his conviction of Jerry’s fineness were being humbled, I said without thinking, “And you’ve got to understand that what he did was not cowardly.”

  “Killing yourself is not a brave business.” There was nothing I could say to that; it was a part of his own creed, and it was, I could have sworn, no less a part of Jerry’s. He went on, slowly, to himself, “I should have expected some word from him—” For one instant the discipline of his face relaxed, and the grief and despair in his heart looked out at me.

  “Don’t,” I cried, “don’t! He did think of you. There wasn’t time—” and stopped, appalled.

  He took me up instantly. “You haven’t told me everything!”

  “No, not everything.”

  “Was he killed?” I didn’t say anything, and he pressed me relentlessly. “Was he murdered? Did she kill him?” All the violence of his emotions, so sternly repressed up to now, was in the questions.

  “No,” I told him, “he shot himself. I saw him do it.”

  “Ah,” he said, quietly again. “You were in the room?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “And she was there too.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes.” I added nothing more.

  He paused and watched me. When he spoke, his voice was gentle. “Will you tell me the whole story, now?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good, Dad, and it might do a lot of harm. The facts are the only things that matter, and I’ve told you those. I’m not holding anything really important back. Don’t ask me any more questions, for God’s sake.”

  He looked at me quietly, and as happened between us sometimes, I knew what he was thinking. He expected me to remember the fifteen years that the three of us had been together and come to realize that I must share with him whatever knowledge about this thing I had. Relying with such conviction on those years, on the tradition of absolute trust among the three of us, on a thousand inescapable ties, he was sure that I would tell him the rest of it. But he did not know what he had to fight against. No anxiety to spare him or myself was holding me silent. It was, I admitted to myself, fear, and fear of an intangible something too slight to formulate in words. What exactly I was afraid to say I could not tell, but I understood that once I began to talk about it to him it would become more definite and more horrible. Instinct told me that the less shape I gave that shadow the better for both of us. And if, by keeping silent, I had to forfeit his confidence and spoil a relationship that mattered deeply to me, that was nevertheless the smaller evil. I filled my pipe and lighted it, and I did not speak.

  The thing that broke my resolve was so trivial and fortuitous that I was not on guard against it. The absolute quiet that surrounded us was broken by the click! click! click! of a dog’s nails tapping on the slates of the terrace. Beyond Dr. Lister, in the penumbra of the candle glow was a patch of familiar blackness. It came toward me gravely and joyfully, tail wagging and one crimson triangle of tongue lolling out. Boojum, Jerry’s Scotty. With dignified eagerness he crossed the terrace and came to my chair. Sedately he sat up and put one black paw against my thigh; his head was cocked to one side and his eyes were bright. It seemed to me that there was the inevitable question in them, and something hot rose in my throat. I put my hand on the rough hair of his skull and scratched him in the hollows behind his ears. He whined.

  I tried to say “Boojum!” and couldn’t.

  Dr. Lister stirred in his chair. “You can’t do it, Bark. I don’t know what it is you haven’t told me yet, but nothing will be right until you do.”

  My resolution crumbled. Jerry had been my best friend. To let his father go on believing that he had causelessly, in a moment of insanity, shot himself was utterly unjust to him. And yet, even as I began to speak the sort of quick stab went through me that comes when you realize that you have made an irreparable mistake.

  “There’s something behind it,” I said, “and I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there.”

  “What sort of thing?” he asked me.

  “That’s what I don’t know. But Jerry found out, and once he knew it he killed himself. I’ve been afraid to think about it, and I still am. It’s not an ordinary thing. It’s connected with her, and with LeNormand, and with all sorts of things that have happened the last two years.”

  He said, “If it will explain why my son committed suicide, I want to hear it. And if it’s any question of justice—”

  “No, it’s not a question of justice.”

  “Or even”—and there was steel in his tone—“of revenge—”

  I looked up at the night above us, studded innumerably with stars. “You can’t revenge yourself,” I told him. “Here’s the way it was.”

  Boojum lay down across my feet as I talked; his body trembled slightly, like a car with an idling motor, as he panted. Dr. Lister listened, leaning forward and twirling the glass with its topaz wine between his long fingers. The night was a vault that shut us in and swallowed my words as I spoke them.

  I told him just what had happened when Jerry died. He heard me out with no sign of the agony it must have been for him. Only his face grew stiller, more sharply etched, and the glass in his hands revolved more and more slowly. I left out nothing, from the time I caught the Century out of New York to my return, except one thing that would mean nothing to anyone except me. I even told him my thoughts on the staircase coming down from my room, and of my fear.

  “And you haven’t defined this thing you are afraid of, even to yourself?” he asked me when I had finished.

  “No,” I answered.

  He took a sip of wine. “Between us we ought to be able to understand it, if we think about it a little.”

  “I don’t want to think about it any more.”

  “Then it will go on festering in your mind, and in mine as well. I’ll always wonder if you could not have told me something more that would . . . that would make this thing less intolerable.”

  I said, “I don’t want to die. Jerry thought this thing through, and that’s why he’s not alive now.”

  He leaned forward, put his hand on mine for a brief second, and asked me, “Just what do you think living is for?”

  For him, perhaps for me, it was a fundamental question
. Dr. Lister based his whole life on integrity and he had taught me to do the same thing. Integrity of mind, of will, of loyalty to the people one loved. He believed that the purpose of life was to live it well; unless he could explain to himself why Jerry had committed suicide, there would be, for him, a stain on his honor. I thought of a time when he had turned to me during one of the talks the three of us used to have about life and death and time and humanity and all the incomprehensible generalities and said, gravely, “The one unforgivable fault is weakness.”

  And now it appeared to him that his only son had done a weak and dishonorable thing. The foundations of his life were attacked by that act—everything he lived by and had taught his son to cherish was smirched by it, put into question. There was nothing in life so important, now, as to probe into the motives behind Jerry’s action and find there the honor and courage that his instinct told him must lie behind the immediate fact.

  It was not so easy for me. Although I loved Jerry and his father more than any two people on earth, I was not of quite the same breed. It is not necessary for me to know that every action of the people I belong with is founded on honor and courage. I think you have to be born into the aristocratic, Spartan mind, and I was not. There is an easygoing, friendly, perhaps insubstantial strain in my family that is a part of me. But more immediate than my heritage was the memory of two days and two nights under Cloud Mesa. I had told Dr. Lister the story of what happened during them, very much as it is set down in this narrative in a later chapter, but I could not translate to him the odd, tight tone of Jerry’s voice—a tone I had never heard before from him in spite of the dangerous moments we had shared—nor the calm, impersonal regret in Selena’s eyes. I wondered if she was at that very minute on the flat tabletop of the enormous mesa, looking up at the western stars. And if she was, what was in her heart? As I imagined her there, a curious feeling of alarm went through me. Perhaps she was imagining me here in her mind, putting out the fingers of that damnable intelligence of hers to touch the stuff of my own brain. A prickle went along my spine at the thought. I did not want her to be thinking about me in any way.

  Dr. Lister’s question was still heavy in the air between us. I had not answered it. If there was any point for me in the process of living, it lay in my relationships with people who were close to me, and if I was to preserve the one most important to me of all I should have to tell him everything I knew, put each separate piece of the puzzle before him. And then the nameless fear in my mind would have a name, and what would happen after that I couldn’t even guess.

  “All right,” I said with despair and fear in my heart. “I’ll tell you the rest of it.”

  He smiled. “Good. I knew you would.”

  He took out a cigarette, lit it, and poured each of us another glass of the sherry. “Whatever it is you’re afraid of, we’ll find the answer to it. There’s nothing the human intelligence, properly applied, can’t cope with.”

  I tried to put behind my words all the conviction I felt. “Oh, yes, there is. Your intelligence won’t be able to do much with this business, if it is what I think. This isn’t a detective story or a problem of deduction.”

  He looked puzzled. “Well, I don’t know what you mean. But I think I have an idea—”

  “Don’t think,” I told him. “Thinking won’t get you anywhere. Don’t refer what I say to any system of logic or to your scientific training. I’m certain of one thing. The answer we are looking for doesn’t lie in anything you—or I—know. Maybe it’s in what we don’t know. And perhaps there isn’t any answer.”

  He said quietly, “We’ll see.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “We’ll see. But not with logic. We tried before to solve LeNormand’s death with our minds, and we failed. You know that. Now you want to know why your son killed himself. It’s the one thing on earth that I never want to know. But I’ll help you if I can. Whatever it is, Jerry found it out, and not by thinking.”

  His look was a question.

  “He found out,” I said brutally, “by living with it.”

  “Ah.” His fingers tightened on the stem of the glass. “Then it did all start with their marriage?”

  “No. Before that.”

  He nodded. “When they met, then.”

  “The day before that.” I settled myself in my chair and put a fresh match to my pipe. “The day almost two years ago when Jerry and I drove down to the State game.”

  And as I began to tell him about that a cold finality settled upon my mind. Whatever the end, it was inevitable now.

  2. AUTUMN WEEKEND

  “THIS looks good enough.”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  Jerry cut the car off the edge of the concrete and into the mouth of a lane that ran back between scrubby thickets of second-growth trees. A few yards in was a battered sign that said:

  TO ADATH JESHURUN CEMETERY

  “You have a cheerful taste in picnic grounds,” I observed.

  He grinned. “It’ll be quiet.” There was a sort of turn-around in a clearing; we swung into it, and he cut the motor and ratched up the emergency. “Is this okay, or do you want to go clear in and look at the monuments?”

  Getting out of the car, my legs were stiff. It had been a long drive, and cold. “Do they have monuments?”

  “Damned if I know.” He handed out the cardboard box of sandwiches.

  There were four sandwiches and a couple of hard-boiled eggs in it; I laid them out on the running board. Jerry was rummaging in the compartment back of the seat. In a moment he produced a bottle of Scotch, two or three bottles of White Rock, and a couple of Lily cups. I set them out beside the sandwiches. The whole display looked attractive.

  “We ought to photograph that and send it in to Esquire,” I suggested. “The smart picnic for young graduates returning to their Alma Maters for football games.”

  “I don’t want to photograph it, I want to eat it and drink it, right now.” He poured out two stiff ones in the Lily cups, and splashed in a little White Rock. “God, it’s cold. This ought to be good for what ails us.”

  We touched the rims of the cups together. “Well,” I said, “here’s to ’em.”

  “And to hell with State.”

  The Scotch was good, warm all the way down.

  We sat on the running board and began on the sandwiches, talking about the team between swallows. A raw November wind was rustling around in the bushes like a rat in a packing case. Even at noon, and with the sun shining, it was cold. After a while we didn’t notice it so much, and by the time the Scotch was all gone we felt a whole lot better. We agreed that State was going to be tough, but Mortenson, our right half, would be the best back on the field, and our line was sure to be stronger. Jerry thought we’d win by four touchdowns; I wasn’t so sure. Anyway, it was going to be a great game. After a while we stuck the empty bottle and the box and papers into a pile of brush and got back into the car.

  “Good-bye, folks,” said Jerry, nodding up the road. “Sorry you can’t come with us.” He swung the big car around with a rush and we headed on toward the game. The Scotch inside us was fine; it was a fine day. Everything was fine. We sang “The Best Old Place of All” at the top of our lungs. The road went away under the tires in a slipstream of blurred gray.

  By and by we saw the towers come up against the sky. Drunk or sober, I love that place, and it always makes a lump in my throat to see those sharp Gothic pinnacles notch up above the trees. Neither of us had been back in the two years since graduation, and I suppose we got sentimental about the fact. Then we were in the midst of traffic, and everything began to feel like a football game. We had to park half a mile from the stadium, and by the time we got to the portal the exercise of walking, and the cold air, had reduced the effects of the Scotch to a pleasant glow.

  There was the usual push and jostle around the turnstile. And a classmate whose name neither of us could recall who seemed unwholesomely glad to see us. Once inside the gate, we brushed through a phalanx
of freshmen who wanted to sell us programs, cushions, and God knows what. The muffled blare of bands was pouring down the tunnels from the bowl, and outside the door of the Ladies’ Room was the inevitable sore-looking gent with a folded blanket over his arm, worrying for fear he was going to miss the kickoff. We shuffled down our tunnel with the roar of seventy thousand people coming at us from the other end, louder and louder. Then the field, amazingly green and mathematically striped with white, and on it the two teams, warming up.

  Dr. Lister moved a little in his chair and said, “Don’t bother with all these details, Bark, unless you want to.”

  “I’ve got to tell the thing this way,” I replied. “These things are all part of the picture. You won’t find the answer anywhere but in the whole story. Besides, something happened at the game that may have a meaning.”

  He nodded and drew on his cigarette. I took a sip of sherry and went on.

  We were going to kick off. Our boys were strung across the field just behind their own forty-yard line. They looked fine with the sun catching their gold helmets and their light-gray jerseys new and clean. The State eleven, in red and black, weren’t so pretty, but they looked like ball players . . . Big Dan Hevutt, our left tackle, was going to kick it; he raised himself on his toes and began to run forward. As his boot met the ball the line of gold and gray was surging forward; the ball arced up into the air.

  There’s something about a kickoff, something indescribable and thrilling. It’s the curtain going up on a new play, it’s the little white roulette ball clicking into the compartment, it’s waking up Christmas morning when you’re ten years old. Underneath the ball as it tumbled end over end through the air the two teams flowed into each other. Men were sprawling out on the grass. The kick was coming down in coffin corner; the State man who caught it never had a chance. Thompson and Ives, for us, hit him like a ton of bricks. And as he went down, the ball squirted out of his arms; one of our gray jerseys fell on it instantly. The noise in the bowl was terrific.