The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  She shook her head. “I have no one to notify.”

  “No one?” Prexy’s voice was, for all his control, clearly incredulous.

  “No one at all,” she said with a faint smile.

  “I see.” But it was plain that Prexy did not see, that she had baffled him, thwarted him in some way not clear to me at the moment.

  “When I have had a few days to think this all over,” she went on, “I shall consult you, if I may, as to what is best for me to do.”

  “Certainly. I shall be only too glad.” Prexy’s voice sounded stiff. “Please,” she said, looking at each of us in turn, “do not be too distressed. Do not worry about me. I shall be all right. And do not think of this dreadful thing which has happened. It will be best for all of us not to think too much about it. We must leave it to the police. Thank you all again for coming.” It was an incredible sort of speech for a woman in her situation; without waiting for any reply from us, she turned, left the room, and went up the stairs. I noticed now with what flawless, integrated grace she moved, and how, under her clumsy clothes, her body was a moving statue, incredibly changed into flesh and blood.

  For a moment the three of us stood there, staring foolishly after her. The sound of her footsteps died out along the upstairs hall.

  “Well!” Prexy’s tone was incredulous and for the instant distinctly irritated, but he covered it up smoothly by going on at once. “Since there is nothing more we can do for Mrs. LeNormand—”

  We went out at once; I was last through the door, and as I went I felt for an instant as though there was something at my back. The click of the latch behind me was pleasant.

  Prexy said good-by to us on the sidewalk in front of the house; he thanked us for coming and promised to keep in touch with us about the progress of the investigation. Again, in a fatherly way, he warned us against talking about what had happened. Then he was off, his broad shoulders square, his step, as Charles Lamb once said, “peremptory and path-keeping.” We watched him go in silence.

  “And now, what?” I asked.

  “Let’s see if the car is still there,” suggested Jerry, “and if it is, let’s get the hell out of this place.” He glanced swiftly up and back at the house behind us as we swung off toward the bowl.

  It was a cold, clear Sunday. The November sun lighted every twig of tree and detail of building as we crossed the campus. The chapel bell was tolling with bronze insistence as we walked, and our feet scrunched loudly in the gravel.

  Without my overcoat, the air had a shrewd bite to it, and I should have been uncomfortable had I not been too busy thinking to notice how I felt. The interview with Mrs. LeNormand, as I went over it in my mind, bothered me more and more. There is no predicting how people will react to tragedy and disaster, and I realized that because Mrs. LeNormand had not behaved or spoken as I expected a grief-stricken widow to do, I yet had no right to see anything queer, or unnatural about it. But there was a flavor to the interview that eluded me, that I could not put a name to, but which I definitely disliked. I thought of her as she came down the stairs, of the way she looked at us and specially at Jerry, when she talked, of the extraordinary quality of her beauty. I tried to imagine her married to LeNormand, their courtship, their sharing a common bed. It was all incredible. She was no more to be imagined in any of those ways than her magnificence was to be confused with the shabby clothes she had been wearing. I thought about those clothes for a while. I felt that if I could understand them I should have learned something about her.

  “Jerry,” I began tentatively, and stopped.

  “What?”

  “Those clothes she wore. Did you notice them?”

  “No.” There was a suggestion of reproof in his voice, but I disregarded it.

  “Well,” I said, “they were terrible. Dowdy and unbecoming and inappropriate and messy, and everything you can imagine a Bryn Mawr Phi Bete’s wearing and no one else.”

  He glanced at me with a little frown. “I don’t see what you’re trying to say.”

  “I was wondering,” I said carefully, “why she dressed like that.”

  “Good God,” Jerry replied in amazement, “what do you expect? Paris fashions when her husband’s not yet cold—?” He bit off the end of the sentence.

  “Easy, easy,” I said. “Whatever she wore this morning, it had to be something she already had. I can’t believe a woman like that would ever dress herself in that skirt, that sweater, those shoes.”

  He saw that I was in earnest. “Well, I didn’t notice especially what she had on, but I’ll take your word that it offended your aesthetic eye.” He paused and said, half to himself, “Though if you have an aesthetic eye—well, shoot, what’s on your mind?”

  “Well,” I went on doggedly, feeling foolish, “I just wondered if LeNormand had bought those clothes for her.”

  “It’s possible. What of it?”

  “Several things of it. One is that I never got the idea from you or from LeNormand the few times I saw him that he was the sort who would buy any woman clothes, not even his wife.”

  Jerry grinned. “No, you’re right there. But the only thing that proves is he probably didn’t buy them after all.”

  I tried again, another way, “She is a very beautiful woman,” I said, “and beautiful women almost always know they are. And they don’t dress to conceal the fact.”

  “She didn’t conceal it.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “you don’t get the point. Those clothes were too wrong for her even to own them. For one thing, she’s too intelligent—”

  That was it, of course! Why hadn’t I realized it before? She was too intelligent. Too intelligent. For all her beauty and her strangeness, it was the quality of mind that had most impressed me about her. The way she had questioned us, the precision and calculation of everything she had said after the first minute or so came back to me in a rush. She had not been speaking from grief or even loneliness. There had been something she wanted to find out from us, something she had found out from us. Perhaps more than one thing. At any rate, she had cross-examined us mercilessly and directly, and I’d been such a dunce I had not even realized she was doing it. I felt my mental pulse begin to quicken. If that was so, what did it mean?

  The first conclusion I came to was a disappointing one. Neither her beauty nor any mystery about her was necessary to explain her marriage to LeNormand. He had met someone intellectually equal to himself. She was a woman, and so he had married her. Perhaps she had been as surprised, as glad as he must have been to find, in a world of little people thinking small, imprecise thoughts, a person of the same intellectual size and efficiency. The very fact, I thought, that LeNormand was such a lonely man, so little in need of people, must have made the attraction between them deep and strong. It was natural they should have married, natural even, I had to admit, that she should care nothing at all for clothes. Perhaps it was inevitable that she had reacted to the news of his death in a purely mental, impersonal sort of way. The quality they had in common would make anything more customary for the rank and file of humanity out of place—a psychological absurdity. People with minds as strong and clear as I realized upon reflection hers must be were more likely to be stoical and self-contained. I began to feel I’d been scenting mystery where there was none.

  “I don’t see,” Jerry was saying, “what intelligence has to do with the clothes a woman wears, necessarily.”

  “All right,” I conceded somewhat crossly, “forget it. I had an idea, but on second thought it isn’t so hot.”

  “One thing,” said Jerry. “It’s no mystery now why LeNormand married her. Prexy was right. She damn well is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “She’s certainly one of the most intelligent.”

  “Maybe.” He did not sound particularly interested.

  “You needn’t try to be that way,” I said to him, with a little prickle of annoyance beginning to come into my tongue, “I saw you look at her when she started to cross-exami
ne us.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Listen,” I said to him patiently, “when she began asking us all those questions, I saw you go on guard. Mentally, I mean. You got something right then that I’ve only just doped out.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Bark!” His voice was sharp for an instant and he checked himself immediately afterward. Then he looked at me and grinned. “No man can remain a mystery to his roommate, I suppose. Well—” he paused and thought a moment—“you’re about half right. Something did go through my mind. I’ll admit that. You go on looking into the crystal globe of my character a bit more, and you ought to be able to tell what it was.”

  He was nice about it, but the snub was there just the same. We walked on in silence, I a good deal annoyed at him and he apparently sunk in some thought that did not include me or my annoyance.

  The car was still there, solitary in the parking field and looking like a monument. We got in it and started back to New York without saying anything more. It was bitter cold and we stopped once along the way to have a drink from Jerry’s flask.

  All the way back there was an emptiness inside me. A Sunday Weltschmerz, due, I suppose, to nervous fatigue. Perhaps a few more drinks or a couple of soda mints would have cured the feeling of foreboding which haunted me, but I don’t believe so. Some subliminal part of my mind must have understood that the die of the future was cast, and that Jerry and I were headed toward different lives from any we had known thus far.

  6. WHAT SEEMS SO IS TRANSITION

  THERE is one thing to be said for Mondays. They take the mind off everything else. When I reached my desk the morning after our return to New York, it was three feet deep in unpleasantly persistent folders from the tickler file. By the time I had worked my way to the bottom of the heap it was six in the evening, and I headed down toward our Greenwich Village apartment with almost nothing in my head but plans for the next day’s work and an increasing enthusiasm for a shower and a leisurely pre-supper cocktail.

  Although the stories in the papers had been sensational, none of them mentioned Jerry’s name or mine, and only one or two referred to the fact that the body had been found by “two graduates of the institution.” Most of the reporters seemed to feel that it made a better story to have Prexy discover what had happened to LeNormand, and he had been drawing an infamous quantity of publicity. I was well content to let him have it all, and more than a little grateful to him and Parsons for not giving our names to the press.

  Jerry had a fire going in the grate, and the cocktail shaker was already standing on the coffee table in front of the sofa. I took a quick shower, with a drink before and after, and felt fine. Then I went out to the kitchen and fixed supper. It was my week to cook and Jerry’s to wash dishes. We ate heartily, but without conversation, and I left him washing the dishes. His only comment was that when I cooked a meal I used every utensil in the kitchen.

  Before he came back into the living room I made a discovery that left me distinctly unhappy. The drop leaf of the desk was down, and a partly written letter in Jerry’s hand was lying on the blotter. Without meaning—or wanting—to, I read the salutation. It was:

  My dear Mrs. LeNormand—

  It gave me an odd start to see her name, and although my first thought was that perhaps I, too, ought to write her some sort of note of condolence, the more I considered it the more out of place a letter from us—either of us—seemed to me to be. Perhaps Jerry had thought of something else that he wanted to tell her, but I doubted it. The only other idea that occurred to me was that he wanted to write to her, and the implications of that were not entirely plain to me.

  After a while he came in from the kitchen and sat down at the desk; he never even glanced in my direction, but began to go on with the letter. I tried to read. The scratch of his pen across the paper distracted me.

  “If you’re writing to Dad,” I said, “tell him from me that his Irish whisky saved my life.”

  He didn’t look up. “Oke,” he said, and his pen went on steadily.

  I turned on the radio, feeling pretty cheap as I did it.

  “For God’s sake,” said Jerry, “shut the damn thing off. I can’t think with all that noise.”

  I flipped the switch and sat down in another chair, feeling restless. There is something irritating about having a person write a letter in the room where you are; I always want to interrupt them, and in this case I wanted to more than usual. After a few moments Jerry got up and took a book out of the bookcase, glanced at it, and carried it over to the desk. Some insane impulse prompted me to say

  “I did but see her passing by.

  Yet will I love her—”

  “Damn you!” Jerry whirled round in his chair. “Did you see this letter?”

  “I don’t have to,” I told him. “Remember sophomore year? You used up half Palgrave’s Golden Treasury on that babe from Poughkeepsie. I know the symptoms.”

  His face was white. He stared at me for a minute, and I wondered if he was counting ten before he spoke. “And you don’t approve?” he asked politely.

  Then I had a choice to make. Either I could provoke him to a point where we’d have a row—and it was really less painful and injurious to go through a mangle head first than row with Jerry when he was angry—or I could turn the whole thing off with a decent remark, in which case the tension would subside. The trouble with the second method was that sometimes it left a rankling sore, and besides, I wasn’t sure but what it would be better to have Jerry mussing up my back hair with his customary athletic thoroughness, unpleasant though the process would be for me. It might snap him out of the whole thing.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said as cuttingly as I could, “I did accidentally see the salutation of your letter. You shouldn’t have left it out. And I don’t approve.” The look on his face, the slight narrowing of his eyes, told me that he was getting ready to take positive action, and suddenly the impression came over me that this would not be like the other swift-brewed, swift-forgotten rows we had had in the past. “But I’ve acted pretty stinking about it,” I told him, “and I’m sorry for that.”

  He put his pen down slowly and went over to the sofa. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking about.

  “It doesn’t really matter whether you approve or not,” he said, but his tone was almost questioning.

  I admitted the truth of that.

  For a while he lay on the sofa and looked up at the ceiling. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “We could have a row about it if you—if we—liked. Brothers always have the nastiest sort of fights, because they’re really civil wars.”

  I couldn’t refuse that olive branch. “Hell,” I told him, “I don’t want to fight.” I searched my mind to make what I felt clear enough for words. “I’m more worried, I guess, than anything. Mondays are always foul.”

  He nodded and then looked across at me. “Why does my writing to her worry you?”

  I couldn’t put it specifically. “It’s just that she’s . . . I don’t know how to phrase it. She’s not your type.”

  He lay back on the sofa and laughed until I began to get mad at him. “My God, Bark! I suppose if the Old Man sends me down to City Hall tomorrow, and you hear about it, you’ll think I’ve gone down for a marriage license!”

  “Nuts!”

  “Only one nut, and you’re it.” He stopped grinning, and went on sadly. “I want to ask her when the funeral is going to be. I think it would be decent for me to go, don’t you?”

  My face began to feel hot. “Will you excuse it, please?” I said to him, and then, less flippantly, “I forgot about that. I’m an ass.”

  “Okay, forget it.” He went back to the desk, finished the letter in a minute or two, and took it out to the mailbox right away. When he came back he had an evening paper with him and we read over the account of the case in it. Nobody seemed to have found out anything, nobody was giving any interviews, and the only new item in the whole story was a
picture of Mrs. LeNormand. Even in that inferior reproduction the extraordinary, sculptural quality of her face came out strongly.

  We went to bed early because we were tired and neither of us wanted to run the risk of further talk. But as I was dropping off to sleep, something slipped back into my mind, and I spoke into the darkness of the room.

  “Hey, Jerry.”

  “What?”

  “Just why in hell did you need a book of poems to ask her when the funeral was going to be?”

  “You go to hell.”

  Instead, I went to sleep.

  He lit another cigarette and said, “You never told me about that episode.”

  “It isn’t one I’m very proud of.”

  “Then you are telling it to me for a purpose.”

  “Yes,” I said, and paused. The night was luminous around us. Starshine is the lovely word for the light that is faintly implicit in the dark of a clear and moonless night. But it is not the greater part of it. A radiance from the stars. Jerry once told me that most of it was caused by the fact that the gravitational field of the earth bends the rays of energy from the sun around the curve of the earth and causes the whole upper air of the night to glow dimly from the molecules which those rays strike and excite.

  The tip of his cigarette turned red-white for a moment. “And your purpose is . . .”

  “To explain how he felt, even then. Except when it was a question of her, Jerry was never . . . devious . . . like that. From the very first, you see, he was different about her. He must have felt that there was something not quite right . . . I’m not being very clear.”

  “I understand you,” he said, and turned to look out across the Sound.

  The funeral was that Thursday. Jerry took the whole day off to go to it, but I sent some flowers and stayed in the city. I knew he did not want me to go with him, and there was no real reason why I should. Several times during the day I had a momentary feeling of uneasiness, though when I stopped to think about it I was not just sure why I should feel that way. Once I detected myself wishing flatly that I had gone along.