The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  Jerry dismissed it with his highest praise. “It’s almost pure mathematics.”

  Grace sat down somewhat abruptly at the other end of the sofa, lit a cigarette—mercifully not one of her special, imported ones— and said, “Your friend telephoned a few minutes ago. She has a lovely voice.”

  Jerry said, “Hasn’t she?” in a noncommittal tone.

  Grace gave him her quick smile and crossed her legs. “Poor Fred had to go out tonight. They’re doing something or other at the Brook Club.”

  “Probably drinking again,” I suggested. Grace and Jerry let the remark go.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I think we can get along without him for one night.”

  I saw that she did not mean to let Jerry off easily. She had deliberately got Fred out of the way for the occasion, but she meant him to know it and appreciate the fact.

  Jerry landed one of his rare quick lefts to the chin. “Thank you,” he said.

  I laughed, and Grace gave me a little snoot of mock irritation.

  “She said she was on her way,” Grace went on.

  Jerry said, nervously, “This is very good of you.”

  “Nonsense,” said Grace. “I’m complimented, my pet, really. Two tributes to my taste, from you, in the same week!” She waved her cigarette toward the Brancusi. “But, of course—” and she grew quite serious, for her—“I am not altogether comfortable about this, Jerry my lad.”

  He looked at her calmly. “I know,” he said. “You have scruples. You think maybe you ought to tell Dad.”

  Grace looked genuinely shocked: “Heavens, no. Not that. But”— and she sighed delicately and so perfectly that I couldn’t tell whether she meant it or no—“I don’t approve of getting serious about life, and matrimony, and the opposite sex, at your tender age. I did, and I know now that I should have waited and played around a few more years.”

  Jerry said doggedly, “I’ve thought about all that.”

  “And you’re determined to be unreasonable?” Grace cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “Yes,” he said firmly.

  “Very well,” she told him. “Very well. I shall do my part—that is, if it’s possible. Now tell me something about your young woman, Jerry. Bark’s so hopeless at describing people.”

  I had been at pains to give Grace a detailed picture of Selena, but not an altogether flattering one. Something of my personal bias had shone through, and Grace, like a conscientious workman, wanted to get the specifications direct from the drafting room.

  The doorbell rang exactly then, and Grace got up at once to answer it. Jerry, sitting on the sofa, began to rub his hands together and stare at the pearl-gray carpet. I got up, uncertainly, and put my hands in my pockets. After a moment Jerry rose too, and moved toward the foyer. We could hear Grace’s light, gay voice saying things like “My dear, it’s so nice to meet you,” and the quiet, perfect modulation of Selena’s voice answering.

  They came into the room, and as I saw Selena again, the prickle went down my spine. She was tall—a whole head taller than Grace, and she moved down the room toward us with the long, free stride of an Italian hill-village woman. I looked at her face, wondering why I could not like her and if there would be anything in her expression that I could get hold of and put a name to in my own mind. There was nothing, or almost nothing. It seemed to me that her mouth was deliberately curved into a smile and that her eyes were wary. At any rate, she took in the room with one instant glance, but it had no visible effect on her.

  This time she was wearing a black evening dress, and the white-silver of her arms and shoulders and throat was unforgettable. But the dress itself was hopeless. I saw Grace purse up her lips momentarily when she looked at it. For one thing it was cheap, and a little too short for her. Then, more than anything else, it was vulgar. Glittering black sequins which were too large, and all wrong anyway. The line in front was too extreme, and at no place did the thing really fit her. Worst of all, there was a sort of girdle around the waist made to imitate braided gold and fastened in front with a large buckle containing a sizable fragment of ruby glass, which, if it had been what it pretended to be, would have been worth a young fortune.

  This time I noticed something about her hands. The fingers were long, and round, and gave the impression of tremendous force and strength. They were lovely, but aside from being scrupulously clean, they were quite uncared for. The nails were untinted, and short— not even polished.

  We sat down, and Grace smiled at all of us, reassuringly. Jerry and I were covertly staring at Selena, though I suspect with very different expressions, and Grace was looking at Jerry almost as though she did not trust herself to join us in an inspection of Selena.

  “This is a very interesting room,” Selena said. Her tone conveyed to me that she meant the words literally. The room interested her.

  “I’m so glad you like it.”

  “Grace,” I said, somewhat heavy-footedly, “is a good bit of an interior decorator. She takes a fresh apartment every year, just for the fun of trying a new stunt with it.” I can remember still how inane my own voice sounded as I delivered myself of that conversational gem.

  To my surprise, Selena turned to me and said, “New things are always an adventure.”

  Grace started, and looked pleasantly surprised, but Selena’s next comment aborted whatever hope she may have been feeling.

  She had turned and was looking at the Brancusi. A good twenty feet from where we were sitting. It glowed there in its niche. A cylinder of perfectly symmetrical polished brass, tapered at each end to a point. “Ah!” Selena’s voice was coolly regretful. “What a pity it isn’t perfect.”

  Jerry and Grace were floundering. “Why—” said Grace, and “What is—” said Jerry, simultaneously.

  I thought this was the best chance I was likely to have, and I leapt at it. “If it were perfect,” I said to her quickly, “it would not be beautiful.” The thing looked flawlessly symmetrical to me, I’ll admit, but I had to find out what she would do when attacked.

  Jerry scowled a little and looked as if he did not like what I had said, but Selena turned to me with something that I thought was real interest.

  “Then you think it is beautiful,” she said in the tone of someone making an incontrovertible observation.

  Grace laughed easily, and probably sincerely, stood up, and beckoned to me. “Bark and I will go fix some drinks. I need him to get the ice out of the Frigidaire; this one is a very stubborn case.” It was flat, not at all up to Grace’s standard, but it had to serve. We left the room to Selena and Jerry.

  Once in the pantry, Grace leaned against the dish cupboard, stared at me, and said, “How old is that woman?”

  It was something that had not occurred to me before. I ran over her image in my mind. She was obviously young. How old were the Greek girls in the frieze of the Parthenon? “Oh,” I hazarded a guess, “around twenty, I suppose.”

  “You think so?” I could see that I had surprised her. “You don’t like her enough to be charitable,” she said with a grin, “but I should have guessed she was at least thirty-five.”

  Thirty-five! I couldn’t believe it for a minute, but Grace was damnably shrewd about other women. While I melted the cubes out of a couple of trays of ice I reviewed Selena, again, mentally. Grace was watching me with an expression of bright interest on her face.

  “You can’t be right,” I said finally. “There isn’t a line on her face.”

  Grace nodded. “No, my lamb. But the eyes.”

  “What about her eyes?”

  “Well,” said Grace slowly, “they aren’t the eyes of a girl who’s just lost her husband in a dreadful sort of—accident. They aren’t the eyes of a girl at all, really.”

  “All right,” I conceded. “They aren’t the eyes of a girl.”

  “There you go again,” said Grace. “I can’t imagine how I came to have such a stuffy child. Your father was rather sweet, you know.”

  The ice finally and reluc
tantly separated itself from the last tray. As I tossed the cubes into the bucket with what I hoped was an air of indifference, I said, “You still haven’t told me how her eyes tell you she is thirty-five.”

  Grace shrugged. “You need to have everything so literal. Look into them the next time. They are wise eyes, cool and wise.” She said nothing for a minute, then she laid her arm on my shoulder. “She is not my sort, Bark my angel, but I think she is lovely. I’ll do my best with her, for Jerry’s sake and yours.”

  She always made me cross when she talked like that; it was as much a pose with her, and as little as everything else she said and did. I looked at her hard, and said, “Look here, Grace,” and stopped.

  “I know,” she said lightly, “don’t be difficult. I don’t like her any more than you do, but”—and she looked me in the eye firmly and with a certain twinkle—“we both owe a lot to Jerry, my pet, and I’m going to give him just what he wants. He’s made up his mind anyway.” And she slid through the pantry door with the tray of glasses, leaving me to follow with the ice bucket.

  The rest of the evening passed somehow. I tried to decide whether Selena was as old as Grace thought she was, and couldn’t. The conversation was jerky and unreal; Grace did her best to get it started, but somehow every subject was stillborn. She mentioned Noel Coward’s latest play, but apparently Selena had never heard of it or him. I tried football and books, but neither of them was a subject that Selena appeared to care about in the slightest. If Jerry could have appeared ill at ease, he would have that evening; I knew him well enough to know that he was desperately uncomfortable. He eagerly seconded all Grace’s attempts at small talk, and all three of us drank a good deal in an inconspicuous sort of way. As for Selena, I had wondered what liquor would do to her. She tasted her highball almost curiously at first, without any expression of either pleasure or distaste. Later, after we had had a couple of rounds, she drank about half her first glass. A moment later she set it down on the table and looked at it with a fleeting expression that seemed to me at the time to have been surprise or wonder, and never touched her drink again for the entire evening.

  Grace was really superb. She led the talk around to the question of the winter styles with all the finesse of a children’s photographer arranging a difficult grouping. She asked Selena what she thought, of the new something-or-other hats.

  Selena thought a moment. “I don’t think,” she said finally, “that I have noticed them.”

  “But, my dear,” said Grace instantly, “You simply must. They’re so absolutely right for you. Do let me take you round to my man. He makes all my hats for me. Designs them individually.”

  Jerry struck in quickly. “You know, I think Grace is right. They’d be stunning on you.”

  Selena looked at him quickly, and there was something in her look that was, if not warm, at least eager. Then she turned to Grace. “That is very kind of you, Mrs. Mallard. I’d like to have you help me, if you would. I am afraid I’ve not been paying the proper attention to clothes.”

  There was nothing to say in the face of a remark like that. Jerry colored a little around the collar, and I looked hard across the room and tried to keep my face impassive. Grace was not apparently affected by it, but what she said next was, I think, designed to draw a little blood.

  “Of course not,” she said sympathetically; “you haven’t any reason to. But when you’re my age, my dear—”

  Selena studied her for a moment; I half expected her to ask Grace just what her age was, and began metaphorically reaching for my hat. Instead, she smiled, and said, “You must excuse me. I am afraid I am not accustomed—” and then stopped suddenly. It was the first time I had heard her utter an incomplete sentence, and the effect was somehow pleasing. I felt a little less appalled by her than ever before.

  Grace softened instantly, and made immediate talk about trifles, and the evening wore along. Before we left, the women arranged to meet next day, and I realized that Selena was as good as made over. Once Grace got started on her, she would never stop till the job was finished. Jerry, I could see, was pleased that the covert purpose of the evening was advancing so satisfactorily, and he shot a glance of gratitude at Grace. But he was obviously anxious, once the appointment had been made, to leave, and we went before ten o’clock.

  The three of us came to a halt at the front door of Grace’s apartment house.

  “I’ll take Selena home,” he said to me. “You don’t need to bother, and thanks a lot, Bark. Grace is one of my favorites, and I wanted Selena to meet her.”

  “That’s all right,” I said awkwardly, and then, “I’ll leave the light on in the living room, and the door unlocked.” I turned to Selena; she was standing at the curb in the electric twilight of a New York street at night, straight, tall, and beautiful, so that it made my throat ache to look at her, and I hated her and was afraid of her,

  “Good night, Mrs. LeNormand,” I said.

  I meant to add that I’d be seeing her, or something to take the curse off the moment, but I couldn’t say anything more. She looked at me, and I felt that everything I was thinking and feeling must show in headlines on my face.

  She gave me her hand. It was cool and very strong. “Good night, Mr. Jones. We’ll see each other again soon. Your mother is very kind; I’m sure that she will be able to help me a great deal.”

  A taxi swooped in to the curb, and she and Jerry got into it. The red taillight dwindled down the empty street. I stood on the curb and thought about her last remark. She had certainly gone right to the heart of the evening’s purpose with a directness that was disconcerting.

  “You see,” I told Dr. Lister, “these are little things. Perhaps they have no meaning.”

  He poured us each another glass of sherry, the bottle was beginning to look empty, but neither of us felt any reaction to the wine. Drinking it was a formality. A thing that gentlemen did together. Perhaps it blunted the strangeness of our talk together and made it easier to go on. I raised my glass and sipped slowly.

  “What you are telling me,” he answered thoughtfully, “includes many things that I have always wanted to know. Neither of us can be sure just what is important.”

  “We have talked all the big things over so often—LeNormand’s death, and Jerry’s marriage, and Selena. The answer must lie, if we can find it at all, in the small incidents, the overtones.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. Go ahead, if you are not too tired.”

  I wasn’t tired. I was long past that point. But I was afraid. Already some dim idea of the sort of story I had to tell was taking shape in my mind, and what I could distinguish of it was beyond the edge of reason.

  The transformation in Selena during the next two weeks was astonishing. It was plain that she was thrusting the past resolutely behind her, that she did not intend to wear mourning either literally or figuratively. The fact that she was willing to go everywhere with Jerry so soon after LeNormand’s death surprised me, though I was more embarrassed on Jerry’s account than critical of her for it. As for Grace, she made no comments, at least to me, but she remade Selena from the skin out, and it was amazing to watch that beauty come to light day by day; always before, I had been violently conscious of Selena’s clothes, but now you never noticed what she had on. Just looking at what she was took all your eyes. Grace’s innovations had another curious effect. She had taken Selena to her own hairdresser, and he had done something to her hair which was masterly in its way. Lipstick and a manicure, too, subtly changed her. There were other things. I have mentioned the long, free stride with which she walked. Gradually it shortened, and though it lost no grace, her walk became less conspicuously different from other women’s. At first she had never used a gesture when she spoke, but imperceptibly she began to accompany some of the things she said with a motion of the hand or a turn of her superb head. Watching her, one evening, I realized that there was something familiar about her new gestures, and in a moment it came to me that they were Grace’s, f
lawlessly imitated and employed at just the same moments. Even the way she walked . . .

  My original feeling that Selena was a statue come to life gradually dissolved. I no longer thought about her as some disturbing sort of Galatea, and though my deep distrust of her never disappeared I found myself talking to her more, and more as I would to any other woman, and thinking about her indeed, not as a woman, but as the girl Jerry was going to marry.

  By that time there was no pretense about it between the two of us. He never made a formal announcement to me; the nearest he ever came to it was once when we discussed what would be the earliest advisable date. When, as sometimes happened, I went out with them of an evening, I fell into the easy habit of making joking, more or less concealed, references to their getting married. Doing so made me feel, to myself, a pretty good sport about the whole thing, and while Jerry took all my remarks at their face value, there was at least one time when Selena, after one of them, looked at me gravely and said, “You are a generous person, Bark.” I had the grace to feel ashamed of myself.

  One night, early in December, the three of us were to go to the theater. It was one of those occasional balmy days at the outset of the New York winter when the weather is more like May than December, and it is almost too warm to wear a coat. We had two or three cocktails at the apartment—that is, Jerry and I did while Selena ate some of the canapés. After that first highball at Grace’s I never saw her take another drink.

  When we went down to the street we decided to walk a few blocks before taking a cab. The night was bland, and we sauntered along, talking, past the brownstone and brick fronts of the houses. I felt quite happy. All at once a girl came down the stoop of a house as we were passing, and turned up the street ahead of us. What followed was trivial, but somehow it disturbed me deeply and, as well as any one thing, it illustrates the quality in Selena that froze my occasional efforts to like her.

  The girl was sixteen or so, I suppose, and she had on a party dress and high-heeled slippers, and an evening cape that was obviously new. Jerry and I watched her, idly, and the same observation must have reached us almost simultaneously. Plainly, our predecessor had on her first “grown-up” party dress and slippers. She walked along with the most careful dignity, looking neither to right nor to left. Everything in the carriage of her head, the formality of her walk, the care with which she put one silver slipper down in front of the other proclaimed that she was feeling not only thoroughly mature; but a lady, or more likely, a movie queen. As we came to a darker stretch of the sidewalk, her promenade suddenly stopped. She skipped over to the curbing and began to walk along it, balancing herself with her arms and almost running along the edge in quick, uneven steps. Then she crossed the sidewalk, half running, and darted up the step of another house. We could hear the radio playing dance music inside.