The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  When I got back to the apartment, Jerry was already home. He looked tired, and quiet, and somber in his dark suit and black tie. After a few tentative remarks I discovered that he did not want to talk, and silence suited me just as well. When you have roomed together as long as Jerry and I had, it is almost like a marriage. There are plenty of times when it is more comfortable simply not to talk, and our silence was a friendly one.

  After supper Jerry poured himself a drink and looked across at me. “They buried him out at the Clear Brook cemetery.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He twirled his glass in his fingers. “I arranged for the stone. She asked me to.” He paused and stared into the amber of the whisky. “She asked me what to put on the stone.”

  I couldn’t think what to say to him about that. It was all of a piece, I thought, with her behavior when we called at her house that Sunday morning.

  He said slowly, “I told her just his name, and his dates and S.T.T.L.”

  I was startled. “Why that?” I asked him.

  “LeNormand wasn’t a Christian exactly . . . He was a scientist. And I remembered your telling me that the Romans always put that on their tombstones.”

  The whole idea was astonishing to me. Why should Mrs. LeNormand have asked Jerry about the details of her memorial to her husband? A moment ago it had seemed natural to me, because it was consistent with her behavior at that strange interview with her last Sunday. Now, it seemed to me that the only rational element in the two episodes was their common denominator of strangeness. Neither of them was to be understood in common, human terms. “S.T.T.L.!” I thought of the inscription on a grave far out along the Via Appia outside Rome. A stone that an ancient Roman matron had erected for her husband, T. Sulpicius Arva. That, like so many of the others, had borne those initials, and I remembered my telling Jerry about it and what it meant—Sit tibi terra levis.

  “May the earth lie light upon thee,” I murmured half to myself.

  “Yes,” Jerry said, and then, after a moment, “He wasn’t really a Christian, and I don’t think she is.”

  “I know,” I said curiously, “but he wasn’t a pagan, either; and even if she does look like a living Praxiteles, I doubt if she is.”

  He looked a little embarrassed. “Well, maybe it wasn’t the right thing, but she was so proud, so steady, so in command of herself that I thought of her as one of those Roman matrons, and the whole thing just came into my mind. It seemed appropriate, somehow.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then what I had taken for an intellectual coldness that came from the mind because heart was not involved in Mrs. LeNormand’s reaction to her husband’s horrible death had seemed to Jerry a stoic, Roman suppression of emotion. Well, maybe he was right. I began to see her in a new light, even to discard some of the hostility that my one encounter with her had aroused. Perhaps I had not been entirely fair.

  “Hell,” I said to Jerry, “it was a swell idea. It just surprised me at the moment. I see the reason for it now.” Another thought came into in mind. “Who else was there?”

  He stared into his glass and finally said, “Just she and I and Prexy and old Doc Lassiter from the Math Department.” There was pain in his voice. “Hardly any flowers, even. It was rotten. I felt sorry for her.”

  “What’s she going to do now, I wonder?” And I found suddenly that I was intensely curious; what new niche could such a woman as Mrs. LeNormand find in life? She had told Prexy and Parsons that she had no family. Apparently, then, she had no home to which she could go back. Life in Collegeville, surely, would prove almost intolerable to her under the circumstances, even if her strange beauty—I cut that thought off right there.

  Jerry did not look at me as he replied. “I told her that she ought to get away. She can’t stay on there, Bark, it would be plain hell. She needs to get away someplace where the life would be different, and take her mind off what’s happened. Someplace where she could disappear from sight, find new friends and a new interest in life. Don’t you think that’s the dope?” The entreaty in his voice was plain. He looked at me half defiantly, half pleadingly.

  Naturally, I knew then what else he had said to her. He had told her to come to New York. I faced the issue squarely; subconsciously I must have known all along what sort of effect she could have on Jerry, and no matter what I thought of her there was no possibility of evading the ultimate issue. And just as you know at the very outset of a Greek tragedy that the gods have willed a full carload of grief for the protagonists, so now I felt certain that if Jerry and Mrs. LeNormand were to fall in love with each other there could be no happy ending to it. It was not my affair beyond a certain point, and I felt instinctively certain that that point had already been passed. Tragic though the outcome might be, there was nothing for me to do now.

  “Well,” I observed as casually as I could, “the obvious place is New York.”

  He nodded and gave me a grateful look. “That’s what I told her.”

  “And what, Mr. Bones, did she say to that?”

  “I think she agreed. She told me she hadn’t made any plans as yet, but she’s going to let me know if she comes to the city.” He was silent for a moment, and his eyes were withdrawn. I guessed that he, too, was looking ahead and weighing things in his mind. Then he smiled, as though he had thought of something pleasant. “When she does come, we’ll have to rally round and give her a good time.”

  “Sure,” I said, making the mental reservation that it probably wasn’t in me to give that woman a good time but that she’d never miss me so long as Jerry was on hand.

  For a while, then, the conversation came to a full stop. Neither of us could think of a way of getting it going again, though I could see that Jerry had something else he wanted to say if he could find the right formula. He took one or two thoughtful pulls on his highball.

  “Listen,” he said finally, “I know you think this whole thing is crazy. Probably it is. But to tell you the honest truth, I was wondering if Grace . . .” He stopped and looked at me.

  I couldn’t imagine why he should mention her at this juncture. My mother is one of the most delightful women in the world from one point of view. From more than one point of view. In fact, Grace is a wonderful woman who was simply not designed by God to be a mother. She is gay and charming, still looks only about thirty, dances superbly, dresses in the most flawless taste, has a notable flair for interior decoration, reads a lot more books than you’d suspect, and lives the ideal life for her with Fred Mallard. He inherited about a million dollars at the age of twenty-one and they retired from life’s more strenuous battles. The two of them travel over Europe and America together, dance, drink, make love to each other—they’re a disgustingly devoted couple—move into a different apartment every year just to have the fun of fixing up a new place, collect various minor sorts of objets d’art, and are generally as delightfully ornamental additions to the theory of the leisure class as you could hope to find. They have a vitality about everything they do that is practically indistinguishable from youth, but it is never obtrusive.

  But Jerry’s half-finished question about Grace startled me. He and she had always got on superbly together—partly because she was so grateful to Jerry’s father for virtually adopting me and hence removing the problem of little Berkeley Jones from the bright lexicon of her life with Fred. Jerry, I knew, had always liked her, and recently, as he had got old enough to appreciate her, I think she had begun to delight him. After all, of her sort she is perfect, and irresistible, and Jerry, to whom she was indirectly indebted and for whom she was not in any way responsible, was really a protégé of hers. She used to labor over his taste, give him subtle little presents of a bit of chinoiserie, or a rather over-ornamental dressing gown for Christmas, in what I feel sure was a campaign to feminize his solidly masculine taste.

  But where, I asked myself, did Grace fit into the idea that Jerry was trying to convey to me? I could not believe that he had any notion of chaperonage. I decided to be blunt.
“Where does Grace come in? I can’t see what—”

  “I know,” he said quickly. “But she—Mrs. LeNormand—doesn’t know a soul in town and I thought maybe Grace could—”

  The idea struck me as supremely funny. I laughed long and loud, perhaps a little too long and loud. “Jerry, for God’s sake!” I finally managed to get out. “Grace is not the person. Not now, for Lord’s sake!” I could see Grace trying to organize sober little dinner parties of intellectuals and the kind of social start that would be possible for the recent widow of a college professor.

  He looked pained at my laughter, and a little embarrassed. “Sometimes, Bark, I think you don’t appreciate your mother.”

  “Of course, I appreciate Grace, but what could she do?”

  Jerry hesitated. “She could talk to her and, well,” his voice a bit defiant, “she could sort of tell her things.”

  “Tell her things?” I couldn’t see at what he was driving. “What sort of things?”

  He got red and looked away. “Things like how to fix your hair right and where you get clothes, and all that woman’s stuff.”

  My first temptation was to laugh again, but I stifled it. This was the kind of conversation that seems silly and pointless on top, but underneath I knew that we were working out something, and that it would be easy to say one really wrong thing and thereby close a door that we might need to keep open. I began to see, too, that Jerry was a man with a fixed idea, and that he had gone far enough with it to map out a plan of campaign. I was still wondering just what he was trying to prove when he stood up and started toward the kitchen with his empty glass in his hand.

  “You see,” he said, with his receding back toward me so that I could neither see his face nor have time for a reply, “I got to thinking about all that stuff you said last Sunday, and she does wear pretty terrible clothes.” The kitchen doorway swallowed him.

  I filled my pipe slowly and tried to figure just where we were at this point. One thing stood out plainly: there was nothing hypothetical about Mrs. LeNormand’s coming to town. It must be pretty well understood or Jerry would not have begun counting on Grace to make Mrs. LeNormand over into the well-dressed woman. But that presented me with another thought, one that on closer inspection I did not care so much for. It meant that Mrs. LeNormand had been easy to persuade about coming to New York. Either she had been planning it ahead of time, or Jerry had had little difficulty in selling the idea to her. There was no reason why she should not come to the city, that I could see, and certainly no special reason why she should. Unless . . . unless the only reason she had to go anyplace was the slight one of Jerry and her slender contact with him. Perhaps that reason was more compelling than I liked to think about.

  The whole situation appeared to me strange and made me uneasy, with a feeling of anxious uncertainty that was not related to the past. By that I mean I was not now thinking about the death of LeNormand, and the horror of his body burning in that chair under the round, gray dome of the observatory. Instead, it seemed to me that whatever it was I dreaded lay in the future. There was something less than final about LeNormand’s death anyhow. Even then I was sure that it would not be solved by the police, at least until they discovered the motive for it. I wondered if Mrs. LeNormand knew the motive. If she did, apparently she had not confided it to the police, for they, to judge by the papers, were making no headway at all.

  Well, it was plain that she was coming to New York, for unless that was so, I knew that Jerry wouldn’t have brought up the matter of Grace, and her function as a civilizing influence on Mrs. LeNormand. For an instant I let my mind play with the probable progress of that experiment, and the ultimate complete annihilation of poor Grace’s lightly gay efforts (most of her efforts were lightly gay, but generally they were effective) to make a silk purse out of . . . out of what? Out of the most beautiful woman in the world. Grace, I considered, would be definitely fighting out of her class and would not be able to accomplish anything. How wrong my imagination was in this respect I was not to find out till later.

  Jerry came in from the kitchen.

  “Listen,” I said to him, “let’s quit this beating around the bush. There’s no point in it. When is Mrs. LeNormand coming to New York?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I started to say “Jesus!” in surprise, and then choked it off. The surprise lasted only a fraction of a second, but the cold inner conviction of alarm stayed with me all night. It was too soon. It was too swift. It had passed out of the realm of things that are odd and unpleasant into a sphere where they are so odd that their cumulative effect is terrifying.

  7. TRIFLES MAKE THE SUM

  ALWAYS before, when I have thought back to the weeks between Selena LeNormand’s coming to New York and Jerry’s marriage to her, it has seemed to me that nothing important happened in them. And yet the small things might have added up to much more than I made of them at the time. I think now that my psychological state blinded me to a good deal that a more sensible man would have noticed and added together.

  Jerry was a man in love. He was certain that Selena was the only woman in the world, and looking at her magnificent beauty it was not hard to understand why he thought so. There are undoubtedly a number of more valid reasons for loving a woman than her beauty, but I have never heard of a beautiful woman who went through life unloved by any man. If I had not formed a deep dislike of her, tinged somehow with fear, at that first meeting, I am sure I should have been in love with Selena myself. As it was there were times, particularly after Grace had taken the clothes question in hand, when it stopped my breath to look at her.

  From the very start it was obvious that she was attracted by Jerry. When I saw them together I could never be sure that she loved him, but remembering the change that came into her face when she first saw him, in LeNormand’s house in Collegeville, I never doubted his power to affect her deeply in some way that was not at all clear to me. I don’t believe there was a single minute from the beginning when she did not intend to marry him.

  One of my reasons was that she never paid the slightest attention to any other man. Judging her by other women, as I used to do in those days, I considered she must be in love with him. Now I think that she intended to marry Jerry for two reasons. The first was that he could give her something that no other living man could. When they were together she depended on him as though she were an alien and Jerry a fellow countryman of hers. That was natural enough when you remember that Jerry had been almost the only friend of LeNormand. Though it sounds absurd to put it so melodramatically, her second reason must have been that she was afraid not to marry him. He was the best alternative which presented itself to her, and he gave her, I now believe, more understanding than anyone else could have. And in that fact lay her chief danger and his.

  Of course, I am being clearer and more definite about the relationship between them now than I was at the time. The weeks when their romance, if you could call it that, was developing were miserable ones for me. It was impossible for me to like Selena, and Jerry knew that. The fact made relations between us awkward and uncomfortable. Yet it was not a fact that either of us could refer to openly. I had to put up some appearance of pleasure in his happiness, and it was a strain. Part of the time I felt like a hypocrite. Our two immediate families were the only people, I thought, who guessed what was going on, and I could not talk to them because I would seem selfish and ungracious if I confided my misgivings about Selena. Many times I decided to go and talk the whole thing over with Grace, but there was the question of my loyalty to Jerry.

  My solution to the quandary I was in was not the wisest one in the world. I spent all the time I could eating, drinking (a good deal of that), working, and sleeping. In every way I could I tried to conceal how unhappy I was and put up a presentable front. Inwardly, my solution was to think as little as possible. The result was that between alcohol and a self-induced obtuseness to events I managed to overlook the actual meaning of several episodes.

&n
bsp; The first of them happened a few days after Selena LeNormand came to town. As Jerry requested, I had explained the problem to Grace. Grace is an acute person, in her way, and when I talked to her beforehand about the situation and what she was supposed to do, I think she fathomed my feelings, and I know she was prepared for something out of the ordinary.

  Jerry and I had gone round to the latest decorator’s delight in which Grace and Fred were living. The walls of the living room were some of them leaf green, and others a dull, twilight sort of blue. The furniture was upholstered in dull silver-colored cloth, and there was one of those Brancusi streamline things in an alcove at one end of the room, indirectly lighted, so that it gave you the feeling of an evening star. The place was magnificent, and exactly like a stage set. We both goggled at it; they’d only moved in a month or so before, and though we were used to Grace’s apartments, this one was a stronger dose than usual.

  “Well, darling,” I said to her, “this is positively one of your nobler efforts.”

  She smiled at me, and said, “Yes, isn’t it rather sweet? I’ve always loved these colors and meant to have a room in them someday.”

  Jerry was surveying the place with a look of amused interest; his eye lit on the Brancusi thing and he smiled briefly, then sat down tentatively at one end of the big sofa. Grace saw his glance.

  “I do hope you approve, Jeremiah,” she said in the tone of a woman who is talking at the bridge table to cover up a finesse she intends to try.

  He nodded at the wall niche. “That thing there is good. I like it.”

  Grace was taken aback. I could see that she had hoped to be able to tease him with it. To find him approving the most extreme item of a décor carried to the far edge of extremity puzzled her. But she rallied nobly. “I knew you would, my precious.”